[Primitive] Dreamation 07

[Kevin Allen Jr]

On Friday in the 8:pm Slot I ran a game of Primitive for 6 wonderful players, who I had never played the game with before.  They had also never played the game before (makes me wonder if anyone has outside of games with my participation). So we started with going over the rules. It had been a while and I mucked somethings up, but over all people figured out how to play very quickly (always good) and we were underway.

I'm not going  to spot by spot detail all that happened, rather i will simply bullet the things that most interested me about the game, and things that i would like to do differantly.

•I have wanted to run the game "hard core" in the past and have shied away from it. This time I guess i had my wits about me and asked everyone before we began if they wanted to play "the hardcore" version. They looked around a little bit warily, but happily complied. So i cleared the table, flipped the thing over and rolled it into the corner. Then we played on the floor. It was really cool.

• Everyone took to the not talking and grunting and pointing thing really well.

• There were victory yells that got everyone in the room staring at us. Sorry to have disturbed anyone else (but secretly it's the best advertising possible, everyone in the room looks over and wonders "man what are they playing!"

•This particular scenario starts with a small number of weaker, smaller, sick cavemen washing up on shore (still alive). The players discover them and then need to decide what to do about them. When i wrote the scenario i figured the group would either decide to kill them (protect the territory) or try to talk to them (understand where they came from). I have run this particular scenario 3 times now and without fail the groups have always done the same thing. They argue about what to do (either kill or communicate) but then they all settle on simply enslaving the hapless neandertals. Every time. After fire the first thing people want to invent is slavery. I am completely facinated by this anthropological discovery.

• This was not my best work. I had had a long day in the office and essentially as soon as i got to the con i had to start playing this. I wish i had had some decompression time, as it would have made for a bit more spirited Gming. The play group split up pretty early on and i didn't handle it as well as i would have liked. In the end the players decided to nomadically move on away from the mystery at the heart of the game, (rather than explore it). This kind of ended the game a little prematurely, and resolved with a sort of unsatisfying ending.  I wonder if the players of the game feel the same way (if any of you are out there please weigh in, and critique strongly, i take negative reviews well so you don't have to hold back).

QUESTIONS:
If players seem to abandon the story for "in-game reasons" leaving dangling endings, that don't really resolve in a traditional climax, is that unsatisfying? How can players be wrangled back into story if they willfully decline to particpate in it (should they be)?

[Kevin Allen Jr]

To my horror I have cut and pasted the Un-spell/grammer checked version of that post. Sorry for inflicting my horrific typing upon you all.

[Jason Morningstar]

Hi Kevin, and thanks for the bellowing that caused my fellow SotC players to jump out of their chairs periodically. 

I'm no CaveMaster, having only played once, but I don't see a practical way to enforce some sort of continuity.  If the session is unfocused, that says interesting things in a different but no less valid way than a more traditional, straightforward session does. 

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

I agree with Jason. Primitive is such a Rorschach-y game that I think one must accept whatever emerges from the group dynamic. No amount of Cavemastering in the sense of guiding or "fixing" things seems called for (although obviously good scene-framing, role-playing, fun & management are important CM tasks).

Primitive will indeed be played by me and many others. It and carry are currently at the top of my "must do soon" list.

Best, Ron

[bluegargantua]

Hi Kevin,

  This is Tom, the caveman who flipped the raft in order to kill off the first outsider.

•This particular scenario starts with a small number of weaker, smaller, sick cavemen washing up on shore (still alive). The players discover them and then need to decide what to do about them. When i wrote the scenario i figured the group would either decide to kill them (protect the territory) or try to talk to them (understand where they came from). I have run this particular scenario 3 times now and without fail the groups have always done the same thing. They argue about what to do (either kill or communicate) but then they all settle on simply enslaving the hapless neandertals. Every time. After fire the first thing people want to invent is slavery. I am completely facinated by this anthropological discovery.

• This was not my best work. I had had a long day in the office and essentially as soon as i got to the con i had to start playing this. I wish i had had some decompression time, as it would have made for a bit more spirited Gming. The play group split up pretty early on and i didn't handle it as well as i would have liked. In the end the players decided to nomadically move on away from the mystery at the heart of the game, (rather than explore it). This kind of ended the game a little prematurely, and resolved with a sort of unsatisfying ending.  I wonder if the players of the game feel the same way (if any of you are out there please weigh in, and critique strongly, i take negative reviews well so you don't have to hold back).

QUESTIONS:
If players seem to abandon the story for "in-game reasons" leaving dangling endings, that don't really resolve in a traditional climax, is that unsatisfying? How can players be wrangled back into story if they willfully decline to particpate in it (should they be)?

  It was a fun game.  I think the answers to all of your questions above are bound up in two of the game's mechanics:

• The "No Talking" rule
• Civility vs. Savagery is the core of your character

  First off, the No Talking rule means that there's only so much discussion you can have about any issue.  The most complex thing we ever did was the elk hunt at the beginning and that took awhile.  After that, we had some spirited one-on-one discussions (do we let the guy onto the raft? do we go out to the island?), but we couldn't really have any large group discussions about anything.  This isn't necessarily a problem or a benefit, it's just the way that the game is structured.

  The Civility vs. Savagery thing means that you generally either see yourself as clever monkey or a brutish ape.  You want to engineer situations where your "better half" can be employed.  Two of us (me and axe guy) went completely into the Savage while Dro (and Jeff?) went heavy into the Civility.  So there was immediately this disconnect between members of the tribe depending on their preferred method of dealing with things.  If you think of yourself as a Savage, your first instinct is to kill/destroy anything that looks like trouble.  If you think of yourself as Civil, you strive for something more nuanced.  Again, it's not necessarily a problem or a benefit, it's just the way the game makes you think of things.

  All of this means that slavery is the natural intersection between killing off the outsiders (savagery) or letting them live (civility).  It also helped to break people up into smaller units partially because it would be easier to come to an agreement on what to do next -- fewer people to talk to and you'd probably pair up with someone aligned to your way of thinking.  It also explains a great deal about our resolution.  When freaky unnatural things happen, investigation is probably going to be difficult for a large group of people and simply fleeing the area (or finding some other form of resolution) is going to be the easiest to get everyone to sign off on.  In this case, the two people who went to the island were still very curious about it, but not so curious they were willing to go back.

  I don't think I'd sweat it too much.  It's a fun game and as long as there's an interesting situation to get people going, they'll work within the constraints to find the best solution for that particular group.  If you're really worried about it, running the game with a smaller number of people would probably make a lot of these issues less annoying.

later
Tom
   

[Nathan P.]

Hey man,

I'm still waiting on playing/running the game, and will definitly pay attention to the stuff you brought up when I do. But it seems to me that "a satisfying ending" may not be as...necessary?...in Primitive, because the focus of play is so heavily on the language development thing and the civility/savagery thing. Dangling plot threads seem like they would be almost necessitated by the fact that you have to spend a good deal of time figuring out how to communicate.

If you're interested, shoot me the scenario writeup, if any, via email and I'll do that when I run the game. We can compare notes!