(Last Chronicles of Erdor) Players "refusing" Director Stance for tragedy

[baron samedi]

Hello fellow Forgeites!

Last night, three players and I made our first playest session of the 3rd edition rules of my game "The Last Chronicles of Erdor". The game is about morality plays, making harsh choices and bearing the weight of the tragedy that results from these choices. The collective wisdom of the Forge and its many designers was enlightning in designing its 3rd edition system.

I'll post an actual game play summary when the game is out, since it would be purposeless right now with not much reference to compare with. However I did experience a few problematic issues, regarding Director stance in essence, for which I'd like counselling.

This post has 4 parts :
1) Game premise summary;
2) Game system summary;
3) What actually happened in play;
4) The problem I need counseling for.

A WORD ABOUT THE GAME'S PREMISE
The game is set in the last days of an alien dreamworld of horrific beauty as the Endtimes are coming to destroy the world. Players take the role of divinely-anointed prophets leading tribes to mete judgement on the people. The game is not about winning: the Judges have such a great power they can win anything.  The game is about the willingness to accept the consequences of Tragedy, as a consequence of rulership decisions to aggravate in order to win a stake. Since players lead tribes, play angle is more similar to the "Civilization" computer game than "Everquest". "With ultimate power comes ultimate responsiblity" would summarize the theme.

A WORD ABOUT THE GAME'S SYSTEM
The game is "Narrativist", rules-light and very stylized, much like My Life With Master by Paul Czege is. It involves much Director stance for players and focuses on generating tragedy as a result of choice through difficult moral dilemmas.

Essentially, the game system goes like this:
1) Players are defined only by 10 dice as Traits, nothing else,  in fashion inspired from Over the Edge. A Trait is a sentence that says something signifiant a character: e.g. "His name is the Judge of Colours", "He made a pact with the terrible southern god He Who Waits". (These were actual PC traits).
2) Both sides of a challenge set a stake. These stakes are negotiated to be equivalent in gravity before the challenge is began.
3) Essentially, the challenges are resolved by bidding Trait dice in a Drama Pool. The highest Drama Pool wins the challenge.
4) The Drama Pools are added together and the results determine Tragedy at 7 levels. Tragedy goes through various stages from Grief to Suffering to Abomination to Oblivion. At Oblivion, when Tragedy points reach 120, reality collapses and this section of the world is utterly destroyed by "the Shattering" of the dream.

Reality is oneiric and players can affect it by challenges, creating NPCs, renaming places and changing their natures, etc. They have absolute power to change anything they want by challenging reality, but everything as a price measured in Tragedy.

Think "fairy tales" as the Grimm brothers told them, not Disney: beauty and horror, bloodshed and pain, extremely cruel punishments and extreme innocence. Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas might give an idea of the tone: e.g. the Pumpkin Kin can transform the nature of Christmas, but he risks being destroyed as well as Halloween as a result.

OUR ACTUAL PLAY PROBLEM ABOUT DIRECTOR STANCE
Narration rights are less GM-centric than usual. Players have by default Director stance, and can dictate almost anything to happen and the GM must accept it or call a challenge. Since the world is dream-like, many challenges are against reality itself, like making events happen or naming people thus giving them identity and purpose.

Essentially, play was great fun, players enjoyed it a lot and after much jest in early play we were deep in it when things really got dramatic with a father confessing the horrors he brought on his community by hiding his twin sons rather than have them killed by law. (Like Moses sent on the Nile as in the book of Exodus, but the sons come back and ask for their father's blood as their ensuing lives were a misery, e.g. "You should have killed us!")

During play, we encountered a difficulty having to do with Director stance. Despite some confusion, players welcomed the concept and played along with great enthusiasm. Many challenges against reality resulted, mostly renaming NPCs when nick-naming them and changing their personalities as a result (e.g. the Favoured Concubine and her Jealous Twin Sister (their actual names) became the "Females Who Break the Peace", thus growing even more troublesome and nagging.)

When it came to actually deciding how the outcome of Tragedy affects their PCS or the world at large, players were often uneasy to decide how to narrate the Tragedy inflicted on them and innocents.

The worst case happend when Tragedy reached 64 during the final challenge (Wounding) but a single point under the Defilement level of Tragedy which they wanted to avoid greatly. The game defined system the consequences of Wounding as:

1) The losing side of the challenge is grievously harmed, forfeiting all Trait dice (except the Opening Die) for the duration of the Psalm. Furthermore, each one of them must change 1D's worth of his Traits to represent the scarring from the challenge.
2) The winning side of the challenge is lightly harmed, forfeiting 1D in Trait dice for the duration of the Psalm.
3) Somewhere near, innocents bleed as something important, but beautiful and beloved is destroyed and will be forever forgotten.

The NPCs lost and the players won narration rights to conclude the scene. Actually narrating how their characters were lightly harmed, and ESPECIALLY how innocents bleeded. To be honest, while assigning dice losses was casual, the *narration* of these losses by the players was... well much insignificant. Players seemed to find counter-natural to decide how Tragedy should affect them. Moreso, they were VERY reluctant to say "these people suffer in this fashion...", knowing this Tragedy was a result of their choice of actions. Their choices tended to be very mild and unsequential because of this disconfort.

Essentially, I had to enforce Tragedy on innocents by saying a lot "this isn't tragedy, it's benign" or "innocent blood MUST be shed at Wounding level", and thus suggested something to end a prolonged hesitation. Since a player had erased his "tribe Trait" in play for self-sacrifice (i.e. "He leads the Tribe Who Seeks His of Peace of Mind'), this tribe made of totally devouted and weaponless worshippers, I suggested strongly that the Tragedy in element 3) above would be about his weaponless tribespeople being killed as they swarm into the conflict, calling for people to stop violence and getting massacred for this. Having no alternative to propose, the player whose tribe was concerned accepted half-heartedly.

Later on, when another was to mete judgement on another NPC (tribal leader), he wanted to have him take care of the town's orphans for neglecting his sons. I mentioned the player that the only orphans in town were the children of the other judge's tribespeople whose parents got massacred in the previous conflict. He accepted the idea and worked it into his narration, but it was clear that the judge who had sacrificed the said parents was morally unconfortable with accepting this (whose very concept was based on his callousness)

Globally, I was lending Director Stance for players for narrating consequences but it didn't work out too well when it came to narrating *unpleasant things that outcame from their actions*. I think they'd rather have had the GM decide but I afraid that would deresponsibilize the players from embracing the consequences their character's actions if I did so. I'm not sure what to think about this, and if I should change the official game rules about who narrates Tragedy as a result.

THE QUESTIONS
1- Who should have narration powers over the Tragedy that befalls on innocents?
2- Should narration of Tragedy be the GM's prerogative and Director Stance not be used for this?
3- If players should have Narration rights on their own Tragedy and that of innocents, on how to support that players accept the role of choosing themselves the tragic consequences of their actions?
4- Is it simply a question of a natural guilt reaction from the player at being reminded one's evils (he's more moral than his character of course!)? If so, could experience resolve this denyal of self-inflicted Tragedy with time for the majority of players?

Thanks for your advice!

Erick

[Adam Dray]

Wow, great report! I totally want to play this game.

Did you ask the players after the game why they seemed hesitant to narrate unpleasant consequences? If so, what did they say? I really want to know what reasons they give. It could be that they didn't know how to do it. Or perhaps they felt like they were being punished and were resisting it. As it's a Nar game, I think you want the Tragedy and all the description of the Tragedy to be the reward for the players. Would you consider adding a mechanic that allowed one player to narrate a tragedy and gave each other player some small ability to reward the narrating player if he did well?

It might be a bigger problem than that, though. It could be that the players are not invested in the Tragedy; they're invested in the survival. Really, it sounds like this game needs them to be invested in both.

Lemme see if I can answer your questions directly.

1- Who should have narration powers over the Tragedy that befalls on innocents?

If you can't somehow make the players invest in the Tragedy, you probably should let the GM own narration here. That way, you can escalate, escalate, escalate and push the players hard. That's just my gut feel though.


2- Should narration of Tragedy be the GM's prerogative and Director Stance not be used for this?

When you say, "Players have by default Director stance, and can dictate almost anything to happen and the GM must accept it or call a challenge," how is this enforced in the rules? Narrational authority and stance seem to be two totally different things to me. On one hand, you have stance, which is just how a player relates to his character. On the other hand, you have authority, which can mean a bunch of different things, but all of them are about who has the right at any given time to add certain content to the fiction. You might want to read Ron's discussion of the four types of authority in Silent Railroading and the Intersection of Scenario Prep & Player Authorship.


3- If players should have Narration rights on their own Tragedy and that of innocents, on how to support that players accept the role of choosing themselves the tragic consequences of their actions?

I'm not sure what the question is there. I do think that either 1) you should either let the players narrate Tragedy which affects them (as in, it's their privilege to narrate these terrible consequences, and it's "fun" in the sense of rewarding emotion comes from it), or 2) you should give that power to the GM to drive home the power of the consequences. I pretty strongly believe that #1 will generate the better game, but it requires that the game ties Tragedy into the reward cycle.


4- Is it simply a question of a natural guilt reaction from the player at being reminded one's evils (he's more moral than his character of course!)? If so, could experience resolve this denyal of self-inflicted Tragedy with time for the majority of players?

I cannot answer these questions. Talk to your players and find out. =)

What in the game setup or prep or play remind the players that the Tragedy is the coolest part of the game, and not some awful monster to be destroyed?

[Sovem]

I agree with Adam, this game sounds awesome and I'm curious if your players gave explanations. Not sure what to add without knowing how they felt or more about the system.

[baron samedi]

Well, basically the players told me they felt much *confused*. This was their first experience with "Narrativist" games and they did gave their best with an open mind. It was very fun, perhaps a bit too light at start but it got deeper during play.

They didn't tell me they disliked Tragedy, I think they appreciated it. I don't think they saw it as punishment either because all of them deliberately used the Self-scrifice rule a lot during the last challenge: sacrificing 1 die trait for the rest of the session to cancel 1 die's worth of Tragedy. One even cancelled permanently a Trait to double the effect, knowing they wouldn't have mechanical gains in this context! I think the hesitation for casting tragedy on themselves is simply lack of familiarity.

But...When I asked them to think of something that would harm *innocents*, they were loath to it quite a bit. It seems they disliked to think how to suggest "tragic events" falling on innocents, knowing it was their character's fault. I'm very harsh in this game : players have absolute power and can destroy anything, but pay the price in Tragedy - the innocents suffer a lot.

Words didn't come out, but I could see their brains squirling hard. Moral scruples? Lack of familiarity with Narrativism?

They did put out  a splendid effort: one of them told me first he didn't understand how a system could promote tragedy and I was relieved when afterwards he told me it did. But I think it was hard for them putting words on their impressions....

Perhaps you might better understand the point by checking the Tragedy table). The rules are simple: bit D6 in turn till one yields or runs out of dice. Then add all dice and check Tragedy...

Thanks for input!

Erick

_______________________________________
Tragedy
When the challenge ends, the total value of both Drama Pools is added to determine the level of Tragedy among seven degrees: Grief, Suffering, Wounding, Corruption, Hecatomb, Abomination and Oblivion.

Grief
When Tragedy reaches 30 or more, the following occurs:
• The losing side of the challenge is lightly harmed, forfeiting 1D in Trait dice for the duration of the Psalm.
• Somewhere near, innocents grieve as something small, but beautiful and beloved, is destroyed and will be forever forgotten.

Suffering
When Tragedy reaches 45 or more, the following occurs:
• The losing side of the challenge is harshly harmed, forfeiting 2D in Trait dice for the duration of the Psalm.
• Somewhere near, innocents suffer as something significant, beautiful and beloved is destroyed and will be forever forgotten.

Wounding
When Tragedy reaches 60 or more, the following occurs:
• The losing side of the challenge is grievously harmed, forfeiting all Trait dice (except the Opening Die) for the duration of the Psalm. Furthermore, each one of them must change 1D's worth of his Traits to represent the scarring from the challenge.
• The winning side of the challenge is lightly harmed, forfeiting 1D in Trait dice for the duration of the Psalm.
• Somewhere near, innocents bleed as something important, but beautiful and beloved is destroyed and will be forever forgotten.

Defilement
When Tragedy reaches 75 or more, the following occurs:
• The losing side of the challenge is utterly incapacitated, deprived of all Trait dice (except the Opening Die) for the duration of the Psalm, and suffers the loss of one permanent die (1D) in Trait dice.
• Among the winners, the character central to the challenge becomes a Vortex. The rest of the winning side of the challenge is harshly harmed, forfeiting 2D in Trait dice for the duration of the Psalm.
• Somewhere near, a great many innocents die as something crucial, beautiful and beloved is destroyed and will be forever forgotten.
• Among the Innocents wounded by the Tragedy, one becomes his Scapegoat. Because his bonding was forged by the Judge's actions, this Scapegoat is always a Judge's loved one, friend, blood relative or disciple. He becomes a Moderate character (cf. XXX, p.XXX), whose name reflects the immense hatred he bears the Judge-Witch.

Hecatomb
When Tragedy reaches 90 or more, the following occurs:
• The degree of Shattering rises by one level (e.g. from XXX to XXX).
• Among the loosers, the central character becomes a Scapegoat, bonded to the winner of the challenge who is now his Vortex. The rest of the losing side of the challenge dies, through violence or suicide.
• Among the winners, the character central to the challenge becomes a Vortex. The rest of the winning side of the challenge is grievously harmed, forfeiting all Trait dice (except the Opening Die) for the duration of the Psalm. Furthermore, each one of them must change one die's worth among his Traits to represent the scarring from the challenge.
• Somewhere near, scores of innocents are massacred as but all but a single thing that is beautiful and beloved is destroyed and will be forever forgotten.

Abomination
When Tragedy reaches 105 or more, the following occurs:
• The degree of Shattering rises by two levels (e.g. from XXX to XXX).
• The central character among the losers becomes a Vortex, bonded to the winner of the challenge who is now his Scapegoat. The others among the losing side of the challenge die through violence or suicide.
• Among the winners, the character central to the challenge becomes a Scapegoat. The rest of the winning side of the challenge are utterly incapacitated, deprived of all Trait dice (except the Opening Die) for the duration of the Psalm, and suffer the loss of one permanent die (1D) in Trait dice.
• Somewhere near, all innocents are tortured and butchered. The Law of Innocence shatters. All things beautiful and beloved that were ever theirs are forever destroyed and forgotten.

Oblivion
When Tragedy reaches 120 or more, the following occurs:
• The degree of Shattering reaches Annihilation.
• Both losing and winning sides are annihilated as oneiric reality collapses.
• The world itself is consumed by the void as the Mist of the Beginning raises and engulfs everything in the vicinity as the Shattering reaches the Vessel of the Veil. When it lifts, there is but nothing. Everything that ever was there, including the Judges and their tribes, is forever destroyed and forgotten.
 _______________________________________
(c) Erick N. Bouchard 2006.

[Adam Dray]

Did you do anything to set your players' expectations regarding the kind of game this is? You knew it was a Narrativist game and what that meant for social contract, exploration, and techniques, but did they? If you weren't all on the same page, it's possible they weren't playing Narrativistly or whatever, and things falldowngoboom then.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Because I do think it's relevant to your game design, I'm going to hammer at a particular jargon term.

When you keep saying Narrativist, do you really mean that, or do you mean narrational? Because what I'm mainly seeing in your description is the latter. The game relies a lot on who is allowed to speak when. That's a cool thing and narration is "not for nothing," as they say in Boston, I think, but Narrativism is something else. You can have a game in which only the GM is allowed to describe things, and it can be a big ol' Narrativist play situation. And you know what, I see that in your posts too, but not enough to make me absolutely sure you're aiming at it.

The reason this is relevant is this: if you want to figure out stuff about how to make this narration thing work better, and in particular narrating about what, then I have some key threads about "authority" to point you to that will make a huge difference. But if you want Narrativism in the way it's really defined, then this discussion needs to be about something totally different, namely the reward system.

I'm stalled in this discussion until you help me out a bit with this crucial distinction.

Best, Ron

[baron samedi]

Ron,

I'm very glad you're interested to help me straigthen my ideas out! It's an honour!

Three things:

1) English isn't my first language; I understand it decently but some subtleties are lost on me especially regarding semantics. In French, we don't have these two distinctions. I tend to get lost when GNS theory goes too deply in nuances. So a few questions above make me a bit confused: It's partly linguistic, partly the fact that I'm "result-oriented", not "philosophy oriented".

2) To avoid *jargon*, I'll try answering your questions I my words. I'm trying to invite players to do what playright Berthold Brecht called *distanciation effect* : I suggest to players this: "You are not your character. You do not say "I" but "He". You are telling a story for which this character is a vehicle. Do not identify yourself to this character. Do not wish him good, wish him to tell a story of tragedy that is meaningful. Use it to tell a story like a movie director uses his actors." If I could make an analogy, I'm trying to suggest a playstyle similar to Paul Czege's excellent MY LIFE WITH MASTER. I presume in this game nobody identifies with the tortured minion but emjoys the show he creates as he opposes his master. See what I mean? I'm trying to evoke tragedy like in Greek classic plays, e.g. Oedipus. You know he's gonna bed his mother, learn the horrid truth and gauge his eyes out and suffer martyr at the hand of furies. In my game, the player should welcome such a fate because it creates a good story. Yet I saw in actual play reflexes to protect the character from harm, lessen his pain... I'd want the opposite. I'll attempt a try at Forge jargon (forgive me if I'm wrong): I want to "kill the avatarist instinct" in game play. You are not your character, embrace his moral suffering would be my motto.

3) I'll reply more in detail to the above comments of everyone when I get time to think about them more clearly.

Thanks a lot!

Erick

[baron samedi]

Hi everyone,

Regarding this thread's subject, I took the time this weekend to speak with my players and to read most of "Narrativism: Story Now" by Ron Edwards to better understand your questions. My understanding is imperfect, but I'll do my best. (I'd definitely buy the Dummy's Guide to this essay!)

The table above sums up the essentials of the Game System. There's not much beyond this except for specific applications.

I think the core problem lies in these things:

1) Lack of prep time and inexperience.
Two of my players were D&D adepts, one with little experience but D&D - a Casual gamer/Buttkicker according to Robin Law's model; the other I think was more Tactician/Storyteller and adapted better I think to the game's premise, especially in the end.

The third player was my co-designer for the setting; he's not experienced with "indie" games or GNS theory but has a strong Tactician bent (he's got a Master's degree in statistics and intuitively finds "optimal probability points"). His essential issue was being excessively familiar with the setting and thus more invested in colour than drama in my humble opinion, but he did play along quite collaboratively.

As I said, this was a very fun game. I'm just concerned because this playtesting was made to improve my system.

We had only 2 hours to narrate the essentials and create characters. Players wanted very soon to build characters but were at loss when I asked them "write five to ten sentences, then attribute dice to each. That's your character". They'd have liked pre-gen. characters.

2) Like Ron mentioned, I think that my Reward System (in fact the "Punishment System", through the Tragedy table) may be a problem. They were to narrated its consequences themselves, but I had to adjudicate them a bit though I disliked it because they attempted to evade it.  Perhaps the problem comes from the fact that the table of Tragedy denotes negative outcomes (i.e. Trait losses). However, I'm afraid that rewarding

Furthermore, my Tragedy table (above) is also my resolution table. At least the losers of the stake should incurr Trait loss (even temporary) to make their involvement meaningful. Perhaps I shouldn't penalize the winner, but I'm wary that actually rewarding high tragedy
"chaotic evil"

Rewards in this game come from gaining a bonus Trait die when judgement is meted out and executed upon a "Vortex". A Vortex is witch-like, the one at the cause for the evils, though not necessary evil by oneself. Think of Stephen King's CARRIE or the character of Nicole Kidman in THE OTHERS or but also Darth Vader/Anakin in STAR WARS. A Vortex is the eye inside the metaphorical cyclone of wickedness and suffering that results of his actions, however well meaning.

Judgement may be anything. I simply enforce that players must take a formal stand by judging the root cause.

I'd want the Tragedy to be felt as a moral choice for one's stake in relation with consequences. I definitely want to avoid the feeling I am rewarding or punishing the players by hammering my visions of right or wrong. My game clearly specifies the GM's role is to present grey moral dilemmas, escalate intensity and let the players deal with their own questions. All I may do is ask questions, e.g. "What may happen to X if you do that?" "What about Y? Will you judge him or not?") I've done my best to be neutral.

For a clearer example, my actual play session in a nutshell:

_______________________________________________
THE PSALM OF THE BETRAYAL FOR LOVE
A father leaves his twin sons to a hermit witch in the wilds to save them from a cruel law that forces twins to murder each other at adulthood. He tells everyone he killed them so as not to have himself and the children slain. His concubine and her sister hate him, as do the people for killing children (infanticide being the most horrid crime).

Later, the father is now a warlord and calls his sons back to his sides as lieutenants, not telling anyone their true natures (which only they and him know). Their mother and aunt respectively fall in love with the handsome youths. The men rebuke them; the spiteful females accuse publicly the lieutenants of drunking them and bedding them, insulting the warlord. Since not punishing them would cause him to be overthrown, the father banishes his sons though his heart breaks.  In time, the sons raise an army of beasts and intend to kill their father. The power by which the sons command the beasts, i.e. the Shattering, is a form of corruption-based sorcery with which their father unconsciously assists his vengeful sons into destroying him and his community.

When the players' Judges and their tribes come to town, the warlord comes to them, welcomes them as kings and beggs them to execute him for his crimes. He confesses everything. When asked why he shows so great concern for his concubines and sons, he says his conversion to the ENIGMA's faith showed him his evil ways. I was extremely surprised to see the players, all of which were atheists or "christmas-only Christians", react with such grave and respectful intensity to the warlord's conversion (which I thought they'd ridicule or ignore). Perhaps this was because they realized the warlord took the faith of which they are prophets far more seriously than they did themselves. In any case, this was a great RPG moment.

Afterwards, the players interrogated everybody and were looking for the evil witch that had raised the sons. She was long dead. Knowing this was a blow to them since they were "searching for the monster". "What do we do now?" was oftentimes repeated when time came to decide what they actually had to do, especially since I told them "Now you know everything there is to know."

(I leave out the world-specific details, which are quite weird since nobody here was even remotely human and cultures are very alien. The NPCs were all quasi-humanoids called Sky Beasts, crosses between koalas, hulking pandas and feral ape-men from a callous warfare culture. By design they are totally incapable of feeling trust - each species of this world cannot feel a distinct emotion, it's setting related and reflects in the rules by a mandatory Trait.)_______________________________________________

Now for my detailed answers to everyone's questions:

ADAM'S QUESTIONS
1.Did you ask the players after the game why they seemed hesitant to narrate unpleasant consequences? If so, what did they say?

The player I spoke with was the one with D&D-only experience. I've been told by him Tragedy felt as a punishment. I was surprised to hear this because it was not the GM who enforced Tragedy, but simply the table.

2. Would you consider adding a mechanic that allowed one player to narrate a tragedy and gave each other player some small ability to reward the narrating player if he did well?

Based on "game theory" (NOT RPG theory) and the "prisoner's dilemma" in academic economics, players would be likely to be soft on each other I fear, as they were when suggesting Tragic outcomes.
c.f.
Game Theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory
Prisoner's Dilemma
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
(These links my interest you as they relate to reward systems in real life.)

I think I should reserve Tragedy narration for the GM as you suggest. At least for NPCs and Innocents.

3. When you say, "Players have by default Director stance, and can dictate almost anything to happen and the GM must accept it or call a challenge," how is this enforced in the rules?

The rules say: when the players declare something, the GM yields or declares a challenge. Players may state anything that doesn't contradict the cosmological Seven Certitudes (e.g. "The world will be destroyed" is the 4th). They can "create" NPCs by naming innocents. They can do any miracle and even make things appear by "coincidence", such as finding an object or an inn, but this is a challenge against Reality. Rules still must be polished for this but basically a strong miracle is a challenge against a single Trait at 10D with serious aggravation (e.g. minimal dice results of 3 or 5).

For example, the Judges forcibly changed the names of the Favourite Concubine and her Jealous Twin Sister (these were their actual names) for "Females Who Perturb the Peace". As a result, they grew even more annoying, rebellious and a pain while they were initially but angry. (Be careful what you wish for...) The players realized that playing with reality brings consequences, and it never even had much Tragedy as a result.

The rules also enforce how much a NPC will aggravate during a challenge. He will only aggravate very far if his life, his loved ones or "what he cherishes the most" is at stake. A NPC's formal design mandatorily describes "what he cherishes the most". So the only true choice is the players', the GM doesn't choose that much how NPCs act (he simply "interprets the rules").

4.  I pretty strongly believe that #1 (player-decided tragedy) will generate the better game, but it requires that the game ties Tragedy into the reward cycle.

Any suggestions on how I could change the Tragedy table (above) to reflect this? Should I give bonus Trait dice at high Tragedy levels?

Won't it support callousness and counter the game's premise which is about making true choices without the GM enforcing his opinion?

5. What in the game setup or prep or play remind the players that the Tragedy is the coolest part of the game, and not some awful monster to be destroyed?

Well... They did know as a cosmic certitude the world will be destroyed. Perhaps they should have read more.

I think game prep was insufficient. Verbal summary in the bus seems not enough. And for the monster... well there wasn,t any. The "monster" with sorcerous powers was the warlord father who asked to be killed the first time the Judges met him.

6. You knew it was a Narrativist game and what that meant for social contract, exploration, and techniques, but did they?

I think they did not. These concepts are foreign to my players. These were "classical roleplayers", I'm the odd bit sticking with Forge concepts. Culture clash was probably a phenomenon accentuated by minimal game-prep. Unfortunately we knew we had time available perhaps 24 hours ahead (everyone's got young kids... we play seldom). They came because we're friends, they've played the 2nd edition French version (with a Gamist system) once and they accepted to try something odd.

RON'S QUESTIONS

7. When you keep saying Narrativist, do you really mean that, or do you mean narrational?

After reading your essay "Story Now", I think I could answer this if I understood adequately:

1) My game is designed to support a "Narrativist Creative Agenda". I want players to make though moral choices related to a moral dilemma ("Premise" I think you call it) with total freedom of actions BUT with consequences known ahead (with the Tragedy table). It is not about winning challenges: the Judges' power is almost absolute (they could raze a city and kill everyone easily simply by adding their dice pools together). It is not about exploration of an alien universe. It is about choosing: "What price am I willing to pay to get the thing at stake".

In actual play, the tensest challenge was when the Judges faced the sons and wanted them to forgive their father. We both negotiated stakes:

- the players set "The sons forgive their father".
- I set in return "the Judges kill the father". (THAT one they weren't prepared for!)

There came a time when Tragedy reached 50+ (so Innocents started to die) and the players were unwilling to yield for they deeply wanted not to kill the father. They started committing self-sacrifice, a rule that allowed them to "burn" and loose attribute dice to lower the Tragedy pool.

As GM, I was astonished. Now I wonder if (one at least) of the players did this to prevent *personal* loss. But at least one (the "Tactician/Storyteller") seemed very eager to prevent innocent lives lost. In the end, one player even sacrificed his tribe (a Trait) to win. The players didn't even know the warlord father was the Vortex until the game,s end. Perhaps I should have told them, but I didn,t want to influence their judgement.

So as you can see I think this is not much Gamism. I'd say it's Narrativist because the game focused on the players' choice, not discovering "what it means to see the world end", etc. Is it Simulationnist? Now I'm at lost to see the subtle distinctions with Narrativism.(Understanding subtle nuances of philosophy in a foreign language in a field I know little (e.g. semantics) is hard, please forgive me. I've got an economist's and a cognitive psychologist's training so I understand reward systems quite a lot, but they have different meanings than the way the Forge uses them. My apologies hence for seeming dull-witted.)  ;)

2) I wanted the game to encourage Director Stance to support a "Narrativist Creative Agenda".

In afterthought I think that Director stance may not be appropriate for narratic Tragedy's outcomes. It seems counter-intuitive for one to "punish" oneself e.g. stating for Tragedy "a kite is broken" while the table precisely mentions that "innocents bleed as something they cherish and loved is destroyed and forever forgotten"... Now I think what I did was more refereeing than railroading. I honestly avoided to tell them how to do it, simply reminding them of what was written.

Perhaps the core problem I saw was with using Director Stance to support a "Narrativist Creative Agenda", notwithstanding other problems (lack of prep time, etc.).

3) I simply can't understand the notion of "narrational". It doesn't exist in my language, both terms mean the same thing. However I think you'll understand what I meant by what I wrote above. hence I'll stick with "Narrativist Creative Agenda" since I think this is the right term to describe what I have in mind (e.g. "an assumption about what a story should be about"). I think I had confused Director Stance with Narrativist - I realize it's not that simple.

If I could make a respectful suggestion, Ron: it would definitely have an added value to summarize your deep-thought RPG essays regarding Stances and Creative Agendas, etc., in short summaries in simple language for dimwits such as I to lessen confusion of terms at the Forge. I find your concepts extremely interesting, and they did enlighten me in new ways to give depth to my game, but I find it hard to grasp despite repeated readings.

Honestly, last Tuesday's game was one of the deepest I had in 17 years of play and it was short, unprepared, with unfamiliar players, somewhat ridiculous character concepts and a setting they knew next to nothing of. I was astonished, knowing my fellow designers gave me a strange look when I told them my ideas for "3rd edition". I owe this to Ron's theories and the good people from the Forge. Now if I could actually make my game consistent with this, I'd be a happy man. :D

Everyone, I'd appreciate any hints you could provide me to make better sense of this and make my game consistent with my goals... This was my first (presumably) Narrativist session as GM.

Thanks everyone for your support!

Erick