Indie net-gaming IRC Heroquest

[Tony Irwin]

I had the chance to sit in on Mike Holmes' IRC Heroquest Thursday night game last week and enjoyed it. Thanks to Mike and to all the players for the chance to watch them play.

I enjoyed watching the bangs or events that Mike had prepared getting played out. My favourite was when a representative of a wronged village (or something) walks up to the party, points at one of their companions, and says "I want that one". The poor companion gets killed as punishment for past crimes and the party are totally cool with it (and even kind of glad to see their companion get what they think he deserves)

"I want that one", what a great bang!

Mike, from what I could pick up you had a long list of bangs/events and were throwing them out more or less in numerical order. Do you have any posts here detailing how you prepare for the IRC game?

Tony

[Vaxalon]

You have to keep in mind, Tony... we're currently in the climax that we've been playing towards for literally DOZENS of sessions.  There are threads being drawn in from a long, long history... so the play you saw was a little unusual.

[Tony Irwin]

Oh, no complaints! I enjoyed it. Sadly the time zone thing means I can't watch again.

[Vaxalon]

There's a nearly complete set of logs posted.  You don't see the OOC banter, and we mostly use it as record to inform play, but some people like to read such things.

[Mike Holmes]

Heh, like Fred says, the numbering isn't a normal part of things. It stems from the fact the the group is, at the moment, in the middle of an actual heroquest. Heroquests are arranged as a group of stations that are often numbered for organization's sake. But, in fact, more events will usually happen in a heroquest than just the stations. For this one, since, as Fred says, it's the climax to more than sixty sessions of play, I'm using it as an opportunity to wrap up every lose thread that I can find. Meaning that things are coming in all over the place in addition to the stations.

When I was preparing these events, I came up with this huge list of things that I wanted to happen. At first I was going to leave it so that the events could happen whenever during the quest as I felt they would be cool to happen in play. The problem was that there were so many, that I knew that I would miss the opportunities to spring many of them at the appropriate times. Moreover, some seemed to be predicated on others happening after others, or simply would be better if that were the case.

So I took the list of stations and just expanded it out into a numbered list of events. I'm not bound to the list...I've already gone off the schedule quite a bit. But so far it's helped organize the 45 events that I have in mind to happen. Not only am I playing loose with the chronology, but I've added a couple of things to the list, deleted a couple, and altered more than half of them in the process of presenting them. So it's really just a notional skelleton for what I'm presenting.

That said, it's going pretty well. One of the reasons that I wanted to be particularly well organized for this, in addition to the fact that it's climactic, is the fact that we're sorta on a schedule to get the heroquest done before the player playing the main character in the quest has to take a break from play. In fact, it's looking like we're going to insert a supplementary session to get it all in on time at this point. Having the list of events has meant that I could measure this more empirically. So that's been good too.

Otherwise...in another situation, I might not have been so rigorous. I don't think that it's been problematic at all so far. But I like to be looser in general.

Anyhow, not all of the events on the list of 45 are bangs, per se. Hence why I'm saying events and not bangs here. I'd say that perhaps two thirds are bangs. Which is a ton of bangs - 30 or so - to throw into just three or so sessions of play. But, again, climactic.

Normal preparation for play...well, I don't have to do a ton. I keep a list of about three bangs fresh for every character - and in fact, often neglect some characters. Between play not needing any bangs, players pushing play themselves, or things coming up in interaction that are bangs anyhow, I often don't have to use the bangs. So normal prep is a breeze. I just erase used or now irrellevant bangs, and write a few more. The standard Ron Edwards method per the Art Deco Melodrama example for Sorcerer.

How do you make a bang? Look at some of the things that have gotten a response in play so far in terms of what seems to interest the player with respects to his character (or even other people's characters). Come up with two of these things. Then figure out how to bring these interests into conflict. For example, I think the bang you're mentioning is where I had the Rhiani Warriors ask Egani where Archelaus was (though I could be wrong). The player had his character, Egani, simply relate the location of Archelaus' lair.

Now, this is actually horribly subtle. If you've been watching closely, you'll realize a few things about what happened. First, Egani had just seen Archelaus near the crossing ritual site. So he knew that Archelaus wasn't home. So he was, in a way, sending them off on a wild goose chase. But, more importantly, Egani is somewhat psychopathic. That is he definitely has what we refer to as his own local version of the truth of things that he feels is just his perspective. From Egani's POV, he probably thinks that he was answering their question truthfully (they asked "Where he could be found" and normally he can be found there, or somesuch), but, also, that it might be accurate in it's own way - I mean they might eventually capture Archelaus there. But why would he do that? Archelaus is his friend. Well, Egani also happens to think that Archelaus has done nothing wrong, and can't see why others think he has. And he feels that nobody else could reasonably feel that Archelaus has done wrong things. Despite the fact that most people have this laundry list of things that they feel that Archelaus has done or attempted that they feel are quite criminal acts. If Egani were more sane, then he might say something like, "You just don't understand what Archelaus was trying to do." That would be only mildly deluded. Instead he says, "It's not a problem, since he hasn't done anything wrong, then you can't possibly think that he has."

I mean, we get the Egani narration, about two sentences or so, and there's all of this unbelievably deep subtext under it. So complex that at the moment it happens that all you can do is just shake your head and wonder if the guy playing Egani is sane either. ;-)

Now, I say all of the above, to make a precise point. The event in question may not have been a bang, technically. That is, if I had thought about it long enough, I might have figured out that this is what Egani would do. More to the point, I can't really say for sure whether the player in question felt as though he got to make some decision there. Or if this response was just "Par for the course" for Egani. Heck, for all I know, I'm imagining most of the subtext above, and am the only one who saw any of it as that complex. That is, even with all of the subtext and such, I agonize as to whether or not the player felt he was creating anything new as a response to the situation. Or whether the other players felt any suspense there.

Well, agonize is probably overstatement. I think that the event, if not technically a bang, was at least a bit entertaining, if only for the fact that the subtext about was entertaining itself, in my opinion. So, good enough, I suppose. I don't stress over whether every event I intend as a bang ends up working as one. I just move on to the next one.

But in terms of quality, this is where I examine my past play to try to determine how I could do better next time. Was there some way I could have "spiked" this situation to make it more of a bang? Some way I could have brought the stakes into more stark relief?

In any case, I wasn't too worried with this one. The overall theme with Egani is that he's got his own truth trying to live amongst a people (the Rhiani) who are, themselves, somewhat crazy when it comes to the subject of honesty - it's a capital offense in some cases to tell falsehoods. I think that eventually this is going to come to a head. Well, because I'm going to make it come to a head. :-)

So, since I've got that planned, any such "fizzled" bangs are good build up for later bangs of the same sort.

That's something that I've been experimenting with. In Edwardsian terms I'm probably not spiking bangs near hard enough, and not driving to obtain the results of certain premises that have developed in play. I should be bearing down on them with all that I have. But part of the design of the game was to allow these things to develop over very long periods of play. Which means addressing them only sorta half-heartedly as you go along, waiting for the climax far off. Half-heartedly is wrong...less intensely, and less completely. Leaving the issue open a bit more. This means that the outcomes of these bangs aren't quite as powerful, but hopefully that they'll all lend weight to when the issues actually are all resolved in the end.

This is potentially quite problematic, I realize, and I've been playing with fire, I admit. That is, I know for certain that I've hit the same issue too often for some players. What happens is that you get a "Oh, that again" feeling, and the character simply reiterates their committement to the same side of the issue that they did last time. For instance, Okhfels is a guy who values his independence, and doesn't want to join with the Rhiani tribe as a memeber. But I've hit him over and over with new temptations to join. At first pretty weak stuff, which established which side he was on. But then later, I tried to subtly escalate the incentives to join the Rhiani. Even going so far as to threaten that which I think is most important to Okhfels (more importantly to his player) which is his love affair with Isadora.

Though the differences have been subtle, I've tried to keep it a little fresh each time I introduced this sort of bang. Not sure exactly how successful I've been. I think it's been a mixed bag. But I think that the method overall has been pretty valid.

I think that this has been somewhat neccessary to maintain the sort of play that I've been aiming for, which I've described before as Soap Opera style (or, maybe more appropriately horse opera, given the setting elements). The idea being to allow characters to flow in and out of play, and for things to completely resolve only after a long, long, time. This last is an exception to the actual soap opera style in that I never intended for it to go indefinitely. Though I think that one could do that, and that, if one did, that the methods that I'm developing might be important.

There is, on the other hand, another theoretical approach. Which is that one could be resolving themes constantly and starting up more as one goes. To some extend that's happened in this game, too. But I'm not sure how practical it really is. Though I'd sure like to see somebody try. It may simply be that I just don't do well on driving to conclusions to themes.

Anyhow, I hope this is illuminating.

Mike

[Tony Irwin]

This is really interesting, and useful, to me. Thanks for taking the time to write it all out Mike. And thanks again to you and everyone in the group for letting me eavesdrop on the game.

Tony