[Ganakagok]When Morning Comes

[Bill_White]

So I've been working on  Ganakagok, where people play tribal hunters on a fantastical iceberg-island as a thousand year long night comes to its end.   I'm pretty satisfied with how the game runs during the run-up to the Dawn, and in playtesting this seems to work pretty well.  The thing that I'm concerned about is when morning comes.  I want the final phase of the game to be a narration-heavy event where players "read" the fates of things they care about and "reveal" secrets and surprises by interpreting tarot-like cards (something they'll have been doing the entire game, but now in a much broader and more empowered kind of way).  

In any event, I've sketched out a system where players allocate a game-mechanical currency derived from the outcomes of character action either to immediate "Gifts" that enhance character actions or to a more deferred "Fortune" that can then be used to influence the final fate of things in the game.  It's more complicated than that, however:  Gifts help the character preserve his immediate identity and requite his hopes, and Fortune can similarly be used on behalf of the character, and in a much more powerful way.  So the trade-offs involved aren't immediately obvious, I don't think.

What happens when morning comes is still sketchy, in other words; I'm interested in any thoughts folks might have on whether the complexity of what's involved may be too off-putting---should I ditch part or all of this process in order to simplify it?  Change the mechanics in another way?

I haven't playtested the new Morning rules at all, let me note:  right now they're just a worksheet or two at the end of the rules.

Bill

[Andrew Morris]

Bill, I'm glad to see you're still working on Ganakagok. That said, I'm not sure what, specifically, you want comments on. Just the dawn phase mechanics? Or mechanics as a whole? Or just Gifts, Fortune, and dawn?

[Bill_White]

Andrew -- Sorry  I wasn't clear; I'm amenable to comments about anything that seems to warrant comment, but the thing I'm least sure about is how the mechanics of the Morning will work.  What I'd like to accomplish is to make the sort of "what happens next" speculation that we did when we played in an informal way -- "I suppose this guy goes home and becomes an elder of the tribe" -- a more formal part of the game, and the centerpiece of the end-stage of play.  So I guess my question is:  does what's presented here , admittedly in a sketchy way, seem like it could do that in an interesting or engaging way?  Or do you see something problematic about it?

That said, your experience with what you liked about earlier versions clearly authorizes you to speak to other things that, having changed, strike you as worse in this version than in previous ones.

Thanks,

Bill

[TonyLB]

Is this end-game meant to provide an arena for people to make climactic statements about the message they've brought to the game so far (as MLwM's "Kill the Master" phase does) or to provide a reinterpretation of the meaning of the message they've already concluded (like MLwM's Epilogue phase does)?

[Bill_White]

Is this end-game meant to provide an arena for people to make climactic statements about the message they've brought to the game so far (as MLwM's "Kill the Master" phase does) or to provide a reinterpretation of the meaning of the message they've already concluded (like MLwM's Epilogue phase does)?

What a nicely incisive question!  The answer is the latter.  The climax should occur during the (one game-turn long) Dawn, with the Morning acting as a kind of epilogue.  This suggests to me that I've muddled things, so that the revelation of secrets and mysteries connected to the fate and future of the world should be handled by somehow having character action during the Dawn turn resolve those questions, so that the Morning is reserved just for describing individual character fates.

[Mike Holmes]

That sounds very elegant, but what kind of mechanics are you thinking? Have any ideas at all? Perhaps they should relate to the normal mechanics, making some statement about how the character lives their life from day to day saying something about where things are going? Just a thought.

Mike

[Bill_White]

That sounds very elegant, but what kind of mechanics are you thinking? Have any ideas at all? Perhaps they should relate to the normal mechanics, making some statement about how the character lives their life from day to day saying something about where things are going? Just a thought.

I've been thinking quite a bit about the mechanics, and I know I want to simplify.  My initial thought was that I wanted players to identify things their characters care about, and that I wanted those things to be at stake or in play during the Dawn turn.

Explanatory digression:  Essentially, "normal" game-play works like this:  GM frames a scene, player responds, GM prompts until a point of resolution is reached -- you know, where you need to roll the dice -- player rolls, GM describes initial advantage or disadvantage, all players react to modify that initial result using in-game resources that are arguably applicable to the situation, narration rights go to the winner of the roll (the player or the GM), who also gets the initiative in terms of assigning game-mechanical rewards and penalties emerging from the dice and connected thematically to the described outcome.  Repeat until each player has acted, and you've got a complete game-turn.  The "Dawn" is a single turn that comes at the end of the game and is followed by an epilogue-like "Morning" phase.

Each roll of the dice produces "medicine" both for the character and against him.  The one with the most medicine gets the right to narrate the outcome of the character's action.  But those points also get tracked; the medicine each side gets is placed in a pool associated with one of four initial character-defining "characteristics" (identity, change-hope, change-fear, and truth-vision).  During the epilogue, this medicine contributes to a comparison between the character's Fate and the character's Fortune, so that we find out whether, for example, the character's identity as a "close-mouthed craftsman" is ever radically transformed and whether his hope of leading the people to safety is ever fulfilled.

In thinking about it now, I think I'm overcomplicating what needs to happen in order to make the Dawn work as a climax.  From what I've seen, players will do their damnedest to get moving--to leave the village and explore, to figure out what is going on in some way or another.  So they sort of automatically care about what's going to happen to Ganakagok. And the scene framing ability of the GM is a powerful tool to shape conflicts and decision-points for players.  So it may be enough to say that a by-product of action during the Dawn turn should be the resolution of mysteries related to one or more of the following:  the Sun, the Stars, the Ancient Ones, the Ancestors, Ganakagok, the People, and the Village.  Players can pick the ones they care about to "fight" for; ones that don't get picked are either ignored or hand-waved by the GM.

Right now I know that the "resolution" of a specific mystery takes the form of drawing a card from the Ganakagok deck and interpreting it in light of what is already known, in an oracular sort of way.  "Ah, Two Walruses Fighting:  Ganakagok splits into two fragments that shake and roll and slam into one another.  This is a bad omen for the village."

As far as precise mechanics and mechanical trade-offs (i.e., do I hold on to my medicine until Morning to preserve my ability to have a say in my character's final fate, or do I expend it now during the Dawn so as to make sure there's a future for the entire village) are concerned, I'm les sure.  Maybe players can be able to bid medicine from their characteristics to obtain narration rights for a specific entity, or their medicine can be expended to add another die to the pool that's rolled for the action.

Any thoughts anyone has are welcome.

[Mike Holmes]

Well, nobody has a vested interest in a "negative" outcome for the village, right? I'd think that the players should have to pool some medicine at the end in order to beat some threshold, which if not exceeded means that the GM narrates the events castastrophically. This would potentially be cool, because players would have a community responsibility to collect and donate to overcome calamity. But they'd have an incentive to use their medicine for personal use before hand, or to save it to get narration rights.

Basically you have the sort of brinksmanship that you get in a game like Republic of Rome, where the game can win if players are too greedy for themselves. The game balances out personal gain with the community good. Making every expenditure of resources a thematic statement.

Just to be clear, here's an example without precise mechanics:

Player A and Player B are playing. Player A has a need in a predawn turn to spend some medicine in order to save somebody from the village. Does he do so, or keep the medicine in order to use it to save the world later? He chooses to save his friend. Later, in the dawn turn, player A has about half of what player B has. Player B donates about what Player A has, which is half of what they need to keep the dawn from causing the end of the people. A asks B to donate more, so he doesn't have to donate everything he has in order to keep the world safe. B counters that if he'd saved more medicine for the dawn that he wouldn't be in this predicament. If A can't get B to flinch and spend more, then either he'll have to spend all, leaving B with all of the narration rights, or he'll have to allow the world to end. His only leverage is how much he can get A to believe that he's willing to let the world end if he doesn't get his way, and isn't allowed some narration rights. A can threaten the same, of course, that he's willing to allow it to go all down before he's willing to give up his medicine advantage to the other player. In the end, they must reach an agreement (I suggest an actual time limit of like a half an hour), or the points don't get spent, and the GM gets the narration rights to end the world.

Mike