[Universalis] A mind-bending New Year's Eve

[Sean]

So I finally played Universalis with a group of people I've played with twice before (once 3e, once my Narrativist Fantasy Homebrew With No Name - one other lifelong diehard besides me, one occasional role-player who doesn't really like it that much (enjoys the 'great moments' but no tolerance for delay), one bright-eyed newbie) as a New Year's Eve entertainment. It's a totally mind-bending experience! The attitudes you have to bring to the table to play well are subtly different than those required either of a player or a GM. I would pay cash money to watch a really experienced and accomplished group of Universalis players go at it. There is a skill to playing this game which a group would have to develop I think to gain full enjoyment of it. As a tool it's most suited to facilitating Narrativism, but I don't think the game itself does much to help you direct those narratives, which is why player skill and especially the group dynamic seems so fundamental and so important to develop.

Every role-playing group should sit down to a session or two of Universalis at some point during its existence. The group may or may not take to their original tenets and may or may not finish, but even just going through the start phase and playing a few scenes is very useful as a tool for reflecting on the process of role-playing and for finding out what interests different people in the group.

Other random thoughts:

1) Can you introduce new Tenets after you're in the scene framing, particularly Rules Gimmicks? We wound up introducing lots of character components right away and decided first of all that it was a drag to pay a coin for interrupting dialogue, then that it was a drag to pay for dialogue at all. We just let people slip into dialogue with characters they Controlled whenever they felt like it by scene 2.

2) One of the players introduced "Opportunities for Bloodletting" as a Tenet in the opening phase. I for whatever reason couldn't understand whether that was a Social Contract tenet or a Story Element. I wonder if that line is always completely clear.

3) Our game's first tenet was Science Fiction. It wound up involving time-traveling pirates on a 'battle of the planets' style naval vessel flying through Orange (the time-travel dimension) and outer space, with me stipulating no lasers/rayguns (so we got flash bombs and rail guns instead introduced in play). Our opening scene saw us crash-landed on a world of snow and ice, soon to be assaulted by the cyborg Yeti servants of a shadowy Immortal.

4) The only explicit social contract element introduced by these players was "No pop culture references in character names." Later he rued that we should have gotten rid of pop culture references altogether. Thought this was a good way to avoid getting goofy in general - why limit yourself to Monty Python? It helped us out in any case.

5) We got to one dice conflict. Using conflict as a mechanism to generate big piles of coins is cool and all, but it definitely felt more 'traditional RPG' than any other part of the game (not that that's wrong or bad or anything else in itself - this is Joe Platemail posting here remember). I did wonder though whether anyone had just jettisoned all this and let people pay the Importance of a component plus one to destroy it unless someone challenged. Why do we need dice for this? Why don't the normal mechanics of the game work for adjudicating conflict as well as anything? Why does the person who successfully gambles and wins when attempting to destroy stuff already in the game also get to take over the screen for ten minutes describing in minute detail everything that happened in the process of that destruction?


Edit: With numbers 1 and 5, I can see how both of these things are really group-dependent. We all were into dialogue, so it was a hassle for us to pay for dialogue, but in another group there might be scene hogs who tended to take up a majority of the time with dialogue. Paying a coin for this would then make sense as a way of letting different people focus on the parts they liked for equal costs. As far as the dice conflict goes, though, I'm less sure. Maybe the idea of the big coin payout is that conflict is good and by having the big pile you give people incentive to seek out conflict? I think people who understand this game at all will seek out conflict without such an incentive. It just felt really gamey, that part. I think I'd make it Karma all the way down, if I were playing the thing regularly, but perhaps someone will enlighten me as to why that's less desirable (or what the circumstantial factors are).

[Trevis Martin]

On number 1, yes you can.  The rule is noted on p 7.  

This rule remains true for the entire game, so that at any time during the game a Player can spend 1 Coin to propose 1 Tenet (and no more than one)  on his turn.

See the example on page 12 of the book.  Albert establishes a Rules Gimmick Tenet after the conclusion of another players scene.  You can do tenets at any time (unless of course you have  tenet that says you can't)

2)  The line isn't always completely clear, and its acceptable to ask for a clarification.  But as long as everyone understands what the proposer means by the tenet, it probably doesn't make much difference.

4.) I'll have to remember that one for my own games.

5.) I assume you mean a complication here.  You actually don't need to do a complication to injure a component.  A complication only happens between components that are controlled by different players.  Solution?  Take control of both componenets in the conflict and narrate how you will.  Of course, someone might object but that's what coins are for.  :)

A frequent tenet in the few Uni games I've been involved in is that Dialogue is free.  Works for us.

The main thing about complications is that its a way to generate more coins.  With the standard refresh of 5 at the end of a scene you may be spending far more coins in a scene that you are earning back.  Doing a complication is a way for both sides to earn more coins to keep on going.
So yes, the coin payout is an incentive for people to seek conflict because it gives them more influence (coins) to spend later.  (They don't all have to be spent on the conflict.)  Want less complications as such?  Probably the best thing to do might be to raise the amount of coins that a scene refresh creates.  If everyone is wealthy then there is less incentive to complicate.

Hope that helps,

Trevis

[Sean]

Thanks for the thoughts, Trevis. Your point about seizing Control of both components is an interesting one and fits with a lot of other things about the game. I still wonder about the whole Complications sub-system a little in terms of the other stuff that's going on and what seemed like the overall design direction of the game, but I'm only drawing on one session's experience. I guess I was interested in what people felt Complications really added to the whole experience of playing Universalis.

In terms of Uni play, whether something's a Social Contract issue or a Story Element probably isn't that important. I'm a Big Model-head, though, and so the reason I brought it up was that these seem to fall into separate parts of the model and I was wondering whether there was any insight to be gained by exploring such ambiguities at the theory level.

Possibly it's just the same as issues which come up with Color. Saying, "this game will have this Color element" doesn't in a sense say anything at all; but at the social contract level it's expected that some players will at certain points bring in that kind of Color. So 'weak' story elements effectively create what J.S. Mill would have called an imperfect obligation at the social contract level, to bring those elements in, even though there isn't any real rule that says "at point x you will do y", and even though the element in question doesn't establish something in the way that saying something about Setting or Character or establishing a 'strong' convention like 'no lasers or rayguns' does. That's my preliminary shot at an analysis, that it's really a Story Element but oee whose rather nebulous character highlights an implicit premise of Uni's default (not explicit) social contract, 'we're making this story together and are jointly responsible for maintaining its integrity and driving it forward both', by virtue of that very nebulosity.

[Trevis Martin]

In that case Sean, consider that both Rules Gimmicks and Story Elements lie inside social contract.  Remember that the Big model is often visualized as nested boxes with social contract (I think) being the outermost.  In a sense, Story Element and Rules Gimmicks are just specific pieces of Social Contract.  With a Story Element Tenet you are saying on a meta, social contract level, that you want the game to be somewhat about this.

best,

Trevis

[Valamir]

Trevis has covered most points already, so I'll just add a couple ancilliary notes.

The text on social contract and different tenets predates the most recent Big Model discussions and so the language doesn't necessarily map.  My use of the term Social Contract, for instance, is much narrower than the Big Model use.  You are quite correct to note that the different types of Tenet don't really matter to the game.  In fact, distinguishing a Tenet from a Trait from an Event at all (let alone different types of Tenets) is purely for organizational purposes.  Once one grasps the Big Picture of Universalis one realizes that essentially they're all the same concept (something I tried to imply in the Facts section).  

Complications are a key part of Universalis.  They are essential to keeping the game from being just a more elaborate version of "pass the conch".  The key things to remember about Complications are:

1) They are contests between the PLAYERS to see which player gets to decide what happens.  This is subtly and profoundly different from traditional dice mechanics which are contests between the characters.

2) Tieing the dice to Traits rewards using the Component/Character in a manner consistant with its own nature.   It also rewards players for reusing existing elements of the story...revisiting the same locations, interacting with the same characters...because those Traits have already been purchased.

3) They provide a venue for escalating and diversifying conflict.  Its easy to say "Jack escapes from his pursuers", spend the Coin and move on.  But that statement doesn't add many new elements to the story.  By comparison if the escape becomes a Complication between the player controling Jack and the player(s) controlling his pursuers then you'll tend to see alot more ancillary information get added as part of the Complication process.  We might learn that Jack was a collegiant track star, or that the pursuers have GPS devices, or that Jack has friends in the area who will help him, etc.  Those elements (and potentially lots of others) will get introduced because both players are trying to come up with justifications to add more dice to their pool in order to win the Complication.

On the surface, this is pure gamist competition...but what it does in the process is create lots of new hooks to play off of in the future and add lots of colorful flavor to what otherwise would have been a pretty cut and dry event.

[Sean]

Cool discussion. I think everyone understands one another here.

I think that Uni lite might be a good elaborate version of pass the conch, in the sense that it's pure Karma (token investment) which determines when a component meets its fate, and if two players want to fight over that they can, but then the other players gain more relative power to state what happens next. That seems to encourage negotiation/collaboration. Whereas the game as written seems to both encourage and provide a moderating framework for the player competition you describe. That's cool too - I'm just exploring the idea a little bit. The flip side of that though is just the point that Trevis describes, which is that if everyone approves of one player's 'destructive' impulses they can just accede to that player taking control of the components and then they can do as they like with them. So maybe in that sense it's all good.

Anyway, I'd definitely play this game again - I think it's groovy. Thumbs up.

What I'm interested in as far as the Big Model stuff is just the way in which story elements interact with the social contract. If you're playing Talislanta or Tekumel with people who care about setting integrity and you bring in an elf, for instance, that amounts to introducing a setting element which violates the social contract element 'we're going to play in this world more or less the way it's written'. But stuff like 'opportunities for bloodshed' is more complicated. My suggested analogy is that it's an imperfect duty, like Mill said giving charity was: you're never obliged to do the action specified by an imperfect duty in any particular circumstance, but there is a general obligation that you, or members of your group, do it on some occasions, chosen by you/the group. So it's a more subtle interaction between the genre convention/story (setting, color, etc.) element and the social contract than you find in "Let's do Middle Earth" or "no lasers". That's I think where my thought on the mild disconnect in play led me.