[S/Lw/m] Anthological Questions and Observations

[Ben Lehman]

Hi! David and I have done a couple of rounds of S/lay at this point, with it looks like a few more to go. A rules question and a thematic question are cropping up, though.

1) What does having two wounds do? Do I get two dice at the start of the match if David has two wounds? Or do I just get one die, but it's harder to heal.

1a) My interpretation of the wound healing thing is that, if a wound heals in the fiction, it heals. Additionally, if you make it a goal, then it *must* heal if you accomplish the goal. Is that basically correct?

2) So David has a lover that he seems to like an awful lot. He's taken her with him twice now. Given that I'm supposed to convince him to settle down, it seems my primary obstacle is finding them a place that they can settle down. The problem is that most of the locations are ... well ... pretty shitty living places. Can we interpret "settle down with the Lover" as "in the place this adventure occurs" or more loosely?

3) Would it be appropriate to change some of the location descriptions as needed? Like, last night, Edmund the Black (my guy), who is a tyrant, conquered the City of Rats with the help of Alissandra, Queen of Thieves, and brought it under his law. It seems like it might make sense to tweak the description slightly, after that.

Also, some stuff we've learned:

1) Having the Lover and the Monster be the same is fine, but it makes matches go really quickly.

2) Having the Lover and the Goal be the same is problematic. At least, in our first game, the Goal was "The Blessing of Kings" and the Lover was the priestess who could give it, and it ended up being pretty awkward in terms of "how do I take action towards the goal without just getting it?" To be fair, it was our first session, and we were definitely still shaking out the rules.

3) It's okay for the Goal to show up right away. We've been doing a thing where we push the Goal off into the post-match game, but I'm tempted to start the next game with Mored (David's guy) having his Goal already in hand.

We're having a really good time with the game. S/Lay has become my go-to "let's play a game!" game.

yrs--
--Ben

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Ben,

Yay! That's great feedback to receive.

1) What does having two wounds do? Do I get two dice at the start of the match if David has two wounds? Or do I just get one die, but it's harder to heal.

1a) My interpretation of the wound healing thing is that, if a wound heals in the fiction, it heals. Additionally, if you make it a goal, then it *must* heal if you accomplish the goal. Is that basically correct?

That's a generous interpretation. I treat more wounds as more dice, and I also see the only way to heal a wound of this kind to be naming recovery as a Goal. That's distinct from Color-wounds received via narration and recovered from via Good Dice in a given adventure (like the ones Gregor inflicts on Joe's character Heraldo with sadistic frequency in [S/Lay w/Me] The Tome of Mechanical Wonders).

Hey, I just thought of another way to heal. I think the rules don't state whether a sustained wound from adventure A can be healed with Good Dice in adventure B. Thinking about it now for the first time, I can't see any reason why not. However, I do think that if you wanted to recover from the A-adventure wound and the newly-inflicted B-adventure wound (assuming it's there, as it typically is) would require buying that outcome twice, i.e., using four Good Dice.

But I don't see that a wound (again, of this kind, meaning sustained via not buying its recovery with Good Dice) can simply be healed as a narrated event during the ordinary course of Goes.

2) So David has a lover that he seems to like an awful lot. He's taken her with him twice now. Given that I'm supposed to convince him to settle down, it seems my primary obstacle is finding them a place that they can settle down. The problem is that most of the locations are ... well ... pretty shitty living places. Can we interpret "settle down with the Lover" as "in the place this adventure occurs" or more loosely?

I think "in the place this adventure occurs" is perfectly all right. Then again, nothing forces you to make one of the named locations actually shitty to live in, despite its name. The Jeweled Swamp may have enclaves which are not fetid at all; in fact, one might interpret the "Jeweled" and the "lovely" as referring to these portions, entirely distinct from the fetid part.

3) Would it be appropriate to change some of the location descriptions as needed? Like, last night, Edmund the Black (my guy), who is a tyrant, conquered the City of Rats with the help of Alissandra, Queen of Thieves, and brought it under his law. It seems like it might make sense to tweak the description slightly, after that.

Depends. Do the thieves still pay taxes? If so, then the description can stay as it is.

However, I can certainly see possible outcomes in which locations will indeed change profoundly. (I've played "the last remaining shrine of the first god" a couple of times with different players and very different concepts for the location, but unsurprisingly, each adventure resulted in radical changes to every imaginable detail of that setting description.) In that case, here are some options. First, keep the location and alter the description; my main advice here is not to be too detailed but to stay at the same level/intrigue/generality as the original. Second, simply remove the location from the list, interpreting the events that occurred there as "what was there to be done and now it's over"; in practice, this is what Tim and I have been doing without thinking about it much. Third, allow for new locations to be added much in the same way as inventing your own starting phrase for the adventurer. I'm not especially favorable toward that third option, especially from the outset of play, but I don't see any point to writing it off entirely over the long term.

My take on the Lover and the Monster combination is that it can either go really fast or really slow (in a good way, lots of drama). The key issue lies with the "I" player, in terms of how often the character in question acts Monstrously. Playing him or her primarily as the Lover is perfectly OK, and if interacting with that character tends (in a particular adventure) to divert the adventurer from his or her Goal, a lot of play can proceed without dice accumulating. So there's kind of a dance between Monster and Goal oriented Goes in which the Lover-role for that character plays a huge part, but the Lover dice not so much except as a kick-start. The dance can itself turn out to be either fast or slow.

I agree with your point about the Lover and the Goal being the same, but only potentially. Tim was able to make this extremely tricky for me in our Crystal Palace story, in which the Goal was to gain high rank at the Court and the Lover was the Queen, basically through putting the Lover into extreme danger from the Monster, and making it hard to fight the Monster without endangering the Lover myself! So there are some ways to make such a situation viable.

It's okay for the Goal to show up right away. We've been doing a thing where we push the Goal off into the post-match game, but I'm tempted to start the next game with Mored (David's guy) having his Goal already in hand.

This is one of the most fun dials during play, for me. Upon learning the adventurer's Goal, I more-or-less make a decision right there whether I want to "play" it in an active way or not. If not, then I basically play the Monster, Lover, and whoever else without any reference to the Goal and let it be whatever and wherever (and show up whenever) the other player wants. I still have no particular idea of what the Orb of Marsdan was supposed to do, in Tim Koppang's first adventure for Typin ([S/lay W/Me] The Lion, the Wretch, and the Woman ). If so, then I provide a lot of identity and context for the Goal via any number of characters' input or effects of dealing with it. In Maura's first adventure, concerning the last shrine to the first god and also concerning what can best described as the Word of God as the Goal ([S/Lay w/Me] The back-story and earliest playtesting) ... well, it's kind of hard not to commit to that as a profound element of play from the outset.

"Leave it to you" and "I seize it from the start" are extreme opposites, but every possible nuanced shared-interaction between them is available too. So that's why it's a dial. So far, every 'setting' for its values has worked really well for me.

Best, Ron