octaNe in play

[clehrich]

Hey Alan,

I admit it, I haven't read octaNe yet [sorry, Jared!], but it sounds to me like the pre-prep thing kind of burned you going and coming.

So when we started play, I threw out a whole bunch of elements for the players to start responding too. They responded in unexpected ways - but more to the point, they responded mostly in ways that disengaged them from the elements, rather than building on them.

You threw a bunch of elements initially, and it sounds like what happened as a result was,

players continued to look to me the GM for inciting events.

It sounds like an anti-octaNe dynamic got set up initially, and thereafter the players kept turning to the GM because they were confused by a kind of incoherence.  Sort of sounds like the two games got swapped: with InSpectres, it doesn't hurt to have a pre-generated plot, so long as it's a list of elements and not railroading, obviously.  But with octaNe, where the fun is exploring po-mo trash weirdness, if you get bound up with pre-generated stuff, the players lose that "Zen" thread and start looking for guidance.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

All of this post is premature to my review (almost done), but I think I'll support Alan in some ways by saying that octaNe is not a Narrativist-facilitative game. I'll explain what I think it is in the review.

Given the proclivities of the group in question, which seem to be rapid-fire light Narrativism and similar Gamism (right guys? tell me if I'm wrong), octaNe's Forge-local rep and their familiarity with the aggressively Narrativist InSpectres probably pulled a bait-and-switch on them.

I can't think of a better example of narration and its organization being, itself, neither here-nor-there relative to Narrativist play.

Or to put it another way, it's not the MoV's which make The Pool best suited to Narrativist play.

Best,
Ron

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Given the proclivities of the group in question, which seem to be rapid-fire light Narrativism and similar Gamism (right guys? tell me if I'm wrong), octaNe's Forge-local rep and their familiarity with the aggressively Narrativist InSpectres probably pulled a bait-and-switch on them.

I can't think of a better example of narration and its organization being, itself, neither here-nor-there relative to Narrativist play.

Ron,

You are correct with your first point, and even more correct with your second.

(Someone called Donjon "narrativist D&D" the other day because of player narration. That mix-up's getting old.)

[jdagna]

Given the proclivities of the group in question, which seem to be rapid-fire light Narrativism and similar Gamism (right guys? tell me if I'm wrong), octaNe's Forge-local rep and their familiarity with the aggressively Narrativist InSpectres probably pulled a bait-and-switch on them.

I can't think of a better example of narration and its organization being, itself, neither here-nor-there relative to Narrativist play.

Ron,

You are correct with your first point, and even more correct with your second.

(Someone called Donjon "narrativist D&D" the other day because of player narration. That mix-up's getting old.)

Ron, I think your appraisal of the group is pretty accurate, though I tend toward Sim play myself.  I can get into a Narrative mood for one-shot adventures, but in the long term I always fall back into Sim.  I noticed in your most recent article that you classified Pax Draconis as a High Concept Sim game, which I think fits it perfectly.

Clinton, you might have to pick another term than "narration" to avoid the confusion.  I know I've corrected more than one person on your behalf regarding that.  There are just too many folks who think shared narration=narrativism.