Indie-netgaming Monday - The Pool: Banana Republic

[Paganini]

Tonight we played the second - and final - session of the Banana Republic game that we started on Monday. The game's already mentioned a bit in another thread, but I thought I'd go ahead and post a full report in a thread of it's own. Transcripts of both sessions have been posted to the Indie-netgaming list.

In spite of a bit of slowness imposed by real life interferences, and some bad rolls at the beginning, the game went really well. :)


General Info

In the first place, the nature of this game was somewhat experimental. Here's the background from my intro post on the indie-netgaming list:

"My object with this game is to create an experience in which the players not only drive the plot through the actions of their characters, but actively create and develop it via their own scene by scene narrations using director stance. When I say create and develop, I really mean it. I want to sit down with the players and start the discussion with what setting they want to play in, and what premise they want the game to be about."

This preperatory discussion took place on the list. Bob McNamee mentioned a pirate game or a game set in a banana republic. Mike Holmes jumped on this idea and wrote up a great character with a huge story map. Unfortunately, Mike wasn't able to make either of the games, but we went ahead and used a lot of his material anyway. Thanks Mike! :)

(If you read the transcripts, you'll notice that Mike's character - Generallissimo Ferdinand Grenada - is often strangely and ostentatiously absent. :)

The setting for the game was the Republica de las Bananas, and was more or less Junta with the Pool. (So my players tell me, I haven't played Junta.)


Philosophy

An initial problem with an uber-Narrative game like this stands out pretty clearly. A Narrative game needs to have certain properties, like an identifiable climax, exposition, development, and a tying up of loose ends. How can this be accomplished if the game progresses linearly with each player taking the story in his own direction, which might not match what the other players are doing?

The answer that immediately struck me has to do with a Forge thread about foreshadowing (I think it was, anyway). Ron said something along the lines of the people who refuse to watch the movie Titanic based on the claim that they "already know how it ends" (i.e., the boat sinks) are missing the point. It's not the final event that's the ultimate point, but how that event is reached, and what the characters do along the way.

With that in mind, it seemed like a great way to run this sort of game is the way someone else suggested in a different thread: play through the climax first, with no explanation and no background. Then do a flashback, with each scene moving towards the climax in some way. Once the flashback is over (we've caught up with where we started) play out the final scene(s) to tie up any loose ends. (I gave each player a freebie MoV to take care of any NPCs and looses ends. Only Tim used his - Bob and JB didn't have anyone left allive to tie up. :)

This will allow the players to completely control the plot through their narrations, while still maintaining narrative drive and structure.

In retrospect, this worked very, very well. Tim summed it up with "Awesome. I love this game." In general, everyone seemed to really appreciate the structure. It had some interesting side effects.

The game opens with a nuclear device going off. Since the opening scene is the final scene in the game, no one is too worried about keeping their characters alive. In fact, JB's character was Doomed - intended to die in the first scene, right from the start. It was a strange reversal to see all the players (almost) competeing to be the first to kill off their characters.

Knowing the ending added a great deal of pacing and drive to the rest of the game. Every scene we were trying to do *something* that would point towards the eventual resolution.

The hardest thing, mainly due to Mike's gargantuan story map (it makes daytime soaps look simple), was trying to keep everyone straight: remembering who knew what, who was shacking up with who, etc. was pretty tricky. There were times when we'd stop and go "Okay, now my character knows about this, but not about this. And we no this will happen, because we established it in the first (future) scene." It made the game seem very focused, as though each scene was a building block being placed in a construction.


The Characters

The players ended up being JB Bell, Tim Denee, and Bob McNamee. One of the cool touches of the game is that JB knows some Spanish (seems he was raised in New Mexico), which brought some really great flavor.


JB played Josue, a doomed rebel with the traits:

Idealistic revolutionary +1
Popular hero +2
Impatient +1
Tactics +1
Relation within power structure +1
Doomed to die for his beliefs +2
Communist allies +1


Tim played Alejandro Ramirez, a tobacco king with the following traits:

Hates El Presidente and his regime (+2)
Old friend and advisor to El Presidente (+1)
Cold rivalry with Juan Santos (+1)
Rebel benefactor (+1)
The son he never had, Jose Cocina (+1)
Easy-going manner (+1)


Bob played Salvador Geraldo, owner of the BBC Uno (Banana Broadcasting Corporation, if you were wondering). Salvador's traits were:

Pawn of the Internal Security Minister +2
Enemy of Dissidents and Pirates +1
Available to highest bidder +1
Secretly loves Feray Ferrino +1
Drinker +1
Greedy +1


Of course there were tons of NPCs, but the main one, of course, was:

El Presidente Antonio Perdomo - the "elected for life" president of the Republica de las Bananas. His traits were:

Aged Charismatic Leader
Executor of Cunning Political Machinations
Self-styled Connoisseur of Quality

The plot-twists in the game were absolutely evil. JB's doomed rebel spent pretty much the entire game trying to avoid / stop the nuclear detonation, only to set it off by accident in the next to final scene. Bob's wacked out sexual deviant murdered his boyfriends lover, about an hour before being toasted by the nuke. Tim's tobacco king was close friends with El Presidente the man, while hating El Presidente's regime. His signal flare triggered the chain of events that caused Josue to set off the nuke. Wonderful irony. And of course we had Canadian double agents, and Russian tripple agents, and naval battles (sort of).

All in all, the game ended up feeling like a really low budget B movie, complete with disjointed scenes and wierd timing (flashbacks, acceleration, etc.) Which was exactly what it needed to be. :)


The System

James V. West's the Pool, with it's Monologues of Victory, seemed
like a nice fit for this (and I'd been wanting to try it out anyway). For the purposes of the game, full director stance was available to all players when making MoVs, with the proviso that nothing could be done to or with another player's character without the permission of that character's player.

It worked very very well. After the first couple of scenes, I stopped trying to narrate something every time a roll failed. Instead, I had the next guy in line make a roll, so that I would only narrate when everyone had failed.

Of course, this wasn't a hard and fast rule. Sometimes it didn't make sense for one or another of the characters to be involved in a scene, so I did take the narrations in those instance.

I ran the "rule of 3" version of the Pool that's been discussed on the message board. Basically, any time the GM gives dice, he choose the number from 1 to 3. This includes gift dice for rolls, and reward dice for successes.

The guys weren't rolling very well (Bob's bad luck seems to be contagious), so I was pretty generous with the dice. I needed to be... at one point JB (I think it was) rolled 9 dice, and got only one 1, on the very last die. :)

The nature of this game made it so that I was rooting for the players to make rolls. "Yeah, cool! Bob made his roll, so I don't have to narrate this scene! Woohoo!" or "All right, let's see what cool stuff Tim comes up with this time!" rather than "darn, he made it again, there goes my director power.'


Impressions

The thing I found strange during this game was the urge to take control. I kept getting this feeling that I wasn't doing enough, that the players were going to be unhappy if I didn't "drive the game." I had to keep reminding myself that such was the whole point - players drive the game, with the GM stepping in to fill up holes or move things along. It was a strange feeling.

Anyway, I think that about covers it. Anyone have any comments, questions, or additions?

[Bob McNamee]

It was great!

The convoluted relationships...with foreign (to me) names made it easy to mess up who was who (or accidentally invent a new name for your boyfriend...).

It also might have paralyzed the game a bit sometimes because it got complicated deciding who should do what, when and such.

I never felt like you should have been doing a lot more narrating Nathan, although when I rolled a MOV on the time scale immediately after the time of my initial MOV I was fairly out of ideas. (I have thought of several others cool things since, but oh well...save 'em for another game...

Perhaps: Banana Republic II: New Cabana - Chaos of the Post Presidente Republica... the super powers have ended their cold wars... el Presidente is gone... the International Community is always looking for another 3rd world people to exploit... and stability means big money!  Can you put the right puppet on the throne, placate the UN inspectors and ensure a pamper place for yourself pulling the strings?

Just a thought....
Bob McNamee

[Zak Arntson]

Wow. So much great stuff. I am now really interested in running a live game where the first scene played is the final chronological climax. Thanks for the post.

How do you think the game was altered by its being through the net? (What interface did you use?)

How much of the backstory did you use in play vs. how much was written?

[Paganini]

Hey Zak!

The game took place on IRC. I think the most noticeable difference between the net and real life is the speed. In a literary sense, the pacing of the game was great (buildup, plot twists, resolution, etc.) but in chronological sense, it was quite slow. The whole game could probably have been completed in one session of FTF gaming.

However, to me, that's not really a drawback. I feel more comfortable playing games on the net than FTF, because I'm a better writer than I am actor. The skill sets involved are quite different. Also, net-play, IMO, makes for a more interesting and dynamic game in the sense that participants actually have to sit down and type out their contributions, rather than just blurting out the first thing they think of. A certain amount of thought is pre-required for this sort of thing, which tends to make games more focussed and more relevant. IOW, more thought = better game. You should see Bob's Uber-MoV of Doom that opened up the second session. It was absolutely fantastic.

As to backstory, it established the context of the game. We used *all* of it, in the sense that it told us the motivations of the characters, their connections, knowledge, and so on. It's almost a zen concept... reading through the transcript you could say "Gee, there's really no backstory here at all." OTOH, you could also say that the entire game *was* the backstory.

Thought just hit me. I was asuming that by "backstory" you were refering to the story map and setting data that we constructed the week before the game. However, it just ocurred to me that you might be talking about the "flashback" element of the game. In that case, there was no pre-writing. The entire flashback sequence was generated by play, relying only on the story-map and inter-player discussion.

The first (climax) scene I unleashed my first bang - literally - by setting off a nuke. The players really had no idea it was coming, why it happened, or anything, other than the vague indications inherent in the story map. After the climax scene played out, we immediately flashed back a few days to a presidential dinner, in which I unleashed my second bang: El Presidente Perdomo announces that he's marrying a Russian! (It later turns out that the Russian is actually a Canadian double-agent... :)

The time between the dinner and the nuke was a complete blank to begin with. We filled it in scene by scene as we went along.

[J B Bell]

Thanks for the write-up, Pag.

As for the interface:  one feature I asked for (and got) was that non-character chatter be on a separate channel.  I think this is really ideal for irc games and I wish PBEM allowed for it somehow (I suppose you could run two lists).  This way the actual play didn't scroll off while people tried to remember an NPC's name or otherwise struggled with metagame difficulties.

My strong preference is still for F2F gaming, but I did have fun with the interface as it was.  The email prep definitely was a help, too.

--JB

[Paganini]

Yeah, I forgot to mention that. The OOC channel worked very well. I'd actually had the idea during Raven's Otherkind game, but no one was very enthusiastic about it then. When JB mentioned it, my reaction was "Cool! A kindred intellect!" ;)

[Paul Czege]

Hey Nathan,

I ran the "rule of 3" version of the Pool that's been discussed on the message board. Basically, any time the GM gives dice, he choose the number from 1 to 3. This includes gift dice for rolls, and reward dice for successes.

I can't believe I missed conversation about this idea. Can someone give me a link to the thread?

It might be the most nicely constructed modification of the Pool rules I've seen, certainly better than the "get two dice if you forego MOV" rule. Am I reading it right, if a GM decides something is enough of a conflict that it warrants a roll, he gives 1 to 3 dice, and if a player has rolled successfully, the GM tells him how many dice he'll get for his Pool if he foregoes the MOV? And when a player calls for a Trait roll, he goes it without the 1 to 3 dice from the GM?

Paul

[Bob McNamee]

Hey Nathan,

I ran the "rule of 3" version of the Pool that's been discussed on the message board. Basically, any time the GM gives dice, he choose the number from 1 to 3. This includes gift dice for rolls, and reward dice for successes.

I can't believe I missed conversation about this idea. Can someone give me a link to the thread?

It might be the most nicely constructed modification of the Pool rules I've seen, certainly better than the "get two dice if you forego MOV" rule. Am I reading it right, if a GM decides something is enough of a conflict that it warrants a roll, he gives 1 to 3 dice, and if a player has rolled successfully, the GM tells him how many dice he'll get for his Pool if he foregoes the MOV? And when a player calls for a Trait roll, he goes it without the 1 to 3 dice from the GM?

Paul

Hi Paul,

  It took me a while to find where we had discussed this in the threads... Nathan discussed it at the end of this thread...
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2550&start=30

Bob McNamee