[Bliss Stage] Drunking, the Finnish national sport

[Eero Tuovinen]

My experiments with Bliss Stage by Ben Lehman continue. Last Saturday we did chargen with me + four eager pilots, of which two were with me in our one-shot test run the week before. One of the others is a highly competent male indie gamer who just finished high school, the other is a year younger, female with some experience playing Mountain Witch and MLwM. A rather strong team, I would say, even if the latter girl tends towards shyness in short term. Very happy with it, I'm hoping to take the game through the six or so sessions I estimate we have left.

A tiniest bit about the particulars of the fiction, ask more if you want it:

Location: The city of Kuopio in Northern Savo, the capital of the county. The resistance cell has formed around a steady source of electricity near the local bio-fuel testing facilities, which make it possible to run electronic equipment in great quantities, at least occasionally. The countryside around Kuopio (not a large city by any means) is mostly grey and swathed in defeatism, but a bunch of teenagers in town have taken it upon themselves to support the gasping internet root network locally, egged on by their internet peers from the beginning. We figure that this is a phenomenon that's happening here and there all over the world, to the extent that the teens have even done some routine maintenance on the cabling, at least where it hasn't broken down under the sea or otherwise in difficult places.

Authority Figure: Linus Torvalds, an online presence. I fully intend to bring him to the resistance in person later on, but for now it's entertaining enough to have him only communicate by web chat. The resistance is almost completely virtual, as the presence of the guerrilla cell is only accounted for by the fact that most of its members were swept away by Linus in lengthy chat sessions, convinced that they have to help the distant computer genius rebuild and resist the invasion.

Technology: As always, we were a bit stumped by the difficulty if basing a mecha game in the Finnish countryside. Even shamanistic rites garnered some support, such was our stumpedness. The only kind of tech that is plentiful here is information technology, so that's what we have: the alien "dream world" is actually virtual space layered over the Earth by the alien wifi network (hubbed by hovering droids above the clouds, unknown by the teens), which the computer-savvy youngsters can hope to access with their high-end computer tech now and then. The core of the group is formed by the anchors, who are traditional hackers. Kinda like Matrix.

Hopes: To protect themselves from Bliss. (That one has appeared both times, now; at least one of the players feels that this is the most paramount of the problems facing humans, that they can't hope to live much longer than a score of years before succumbing to Bliss.) To find out what the invaders are and want. To strike a painful blow against the invaders. (With full understanding that most of the game will, consequently, be spent by simply researching how to act against the invasion in a meaningful manner.)

Anyway, today we played the first session of the game. Two and a half hours, several interludes and one mission in the middle. The name of the thread comes from the first interlude: Sipi, one of the players, framed his own pilot, the pilot's girlfriend (an anchor) and his little sister (another pilot) in preparation for a rowdy party, celebrating the sister's birthday. Reko, Sipi's pilot, had traded immense amounts of hard liquor from a 20+ year old group member for the party. Piia, Reko's girlfriend, did ask him to go easy on the drinks; while Reko himself was 17 years old, his sister Nanna was just turning what, 13. Not exactly heavy drinking age, even in Finland.

So that's what we had, and we went with it! Later on Reko and another group member Niko got into a fight over the liquor, messing up the party and rising their intimacy to four. The next day was spent hung over and ill by most, except for Jukka and Martti, the two other pilots; Jukka wanted to go find a present for Nanna from downtown, but Martti had secreted a "tankard" of the liquor he stole from Reko, which he enticed Jukka to finish with him.

All of this became very current when the mission was declared: the two boys came to the briefing drunk, which disqualified them then and there. As Reko was keen to prove himself and Nanna is so young, the mission fell on Reko. Afterwards, the alcohol theme continued: while Reko was on mission Martti had confessed that he got the liquor from Reko, who had himself drank heavily the night before. Doubts were cast on Reko's mission, intimating that the slight problems of the overall pretty successful mission were caused by his hangover. In any case, he had severely failed as a role-model for the younger kids, encouraging drinking and downplaying the consequences. One broken relationship later Reko promised at his girlfriend's insistence to stop drinking, at which point we adjourned the session. It's obvious that the adventures with booze are not done, of course.

The mission itself went well, now that we began with a solo mission and had an anchor who'd played the game before. I found our virtual reality dream world rather intriguing, there were plenty of excellent color and rules to the place. My favourite was the conceit that the anchors control the virtual world by 3D-modeling the environment; Linus had warned the group that going outside the premodeled environment would be very hazardous, so of course we pushed the first mission to the point where Reko had to break the rules and go outside the neat boxes drawn by the anchor-programmers.

The topic of the mission was acid rain: strange colors and sounds from the clouds were interpreted by Linus as a part of a global pattern: for several years now the largest cities of the world had suffered from regular rains of extremely acidic, poisonous waters. Such was the severity of these rains that many skyscrapers in most of those cities had crumbled, causing much destruction on their way down. Meanwhile, the colors and sounds from the clouds. The theory fielded by Linus (garnered from some distant expert connection of his) was that the invaders caused the rains by creating the acid clouds in distant places, determined by the weather patterns. The cloud would only drop its lethal cargo several days later when it would come to its destination. (Incidentally, this also implies that the invaders have the processing power to predit global weather in an exact manner even weeks beforehand.) Linus outright said that he didn't trust the resistance to actually stop whatever was happening above the clouds, but that he wanted reconnaissance data from which to plan further missions.

So yeah, I like the information war stylings here. I'll leave excess details off this time, and leave off instead with a couple of questions:
1) What's the table of follow-up scene correlation to Bliss like? I don't think I've seen that. We could have spun off an infinite amount of scenes from the liquor debacle, so those rules are apparently needed.
2) Do pilots have identical relationships to each other? We played it by having them be asymmetrical, which could cause situations like one side failing while another is still going strong, and so on.

Notes:
- Without some kind of turn order play follows naturally upon story threads. This practically means that one character tends to hog all scenes. I'll implement something next time.
- It's still really, really difficult to keep out of other people's characters, at least for me. I'm constantly speaking for this character or that, and often remember only at the end of the scene that I shouldn't. Perhaps it would help if other players were more keen upon their character rights.

Hmm... that's that, for now. I'll write more later, perhaps after our next session next week. Have to go sleepppp....

[Eero Tuovinen]

We finally got in another session of our campaign last Saturday - first I was too busy with work to play, and then there was a plague in the area, felling the weak teenagers. So overall we've had several weeks of downtime between the second session and the third. I like how robust and determined my play has become lately, however; we managed to ramp up the campaign without much difficulty, and will be continuing again tomorrow. Hopefully we'll get the weekly rhythm established again.

Interlude structure

Saturday's game followed the pretty solid pattern enforced by the rules - a couple of interludes, a mission and a couple more interludes. I think I'm pretty prepared to give a verdict on one question: how should the number of interludes be controlled in Bliss Stage? My idea is that while the rules do not actually say anything about game sessions, a session will de facto enforce a structure for the game. Consider:
1) You have to start the session before you get to play. The natural way to start, as we all know, is to recap some of the latter events from the last session. The natural continuation from there is to go into a couple of interlude scenes. So you want a couple of interludes when the session starts.
2) You as the GM have to stop the interludes at some point and initiate a mission. That's what the game is about, after all. The mission takes considerable time, an important chunk of the session. It's dramatic, and a high point of play.
3) After the mission you might consider ending the game session, but that's not really an option: you want to get in a juicy interlude or two that concern themselves with the consequences of the mission that just ended. Leaving that stuff completely to the next session would just be no good. So that's another couple of interludes right there.
4) You might want to continue the session into another mission, but I don't. At least thus far our sessions have taken 2-3 hours with one mission and around half a dozen interludes, and that's pretty fine for us. And if we did another mission, we'd have to do more interludes before it to foreshadow it and let the excitement go down after the last one. After the mission we'd have to have more interludes to show the fallout from that mission... it's effectively another session back-to-back if we do another mission.

So that's how the game seems to run, at least for us. The conclusion is obvious: instead of counting how many interludes a given character gets between missions, you need to know how many interludes to do before the mission of the session, and how many to do afterwards. I suggest that roughly one interlude per pilot per session (or perhaps one in phase 1 and one in phase 3, using my above outline) might work fine; we've been doing two, but that might be too much considering the resource system.

I don't even particularly think that the rules would need to put in any strong limits on the interludes: it's enough to draw attention to the fact that you'll want to fit in interludes at the beginning and end of the session, with a mission in the middle. The appropriate number of interludes will be then determined by dramatic experiment, I think: at least in our case, we've been following the drama, and generally it hasn't led us into too few or too many interludes.

Our interludes

The last mission had been about the toxic acid clouds forming above the city of Kuopio. Our interludes at the beginning of the second session established more of the internet-based society in the setting: there was international worry among the web-enabled over the acid rains that had horribly devastated large population centers. Nobody knew whether the rains happened all over the globe (who in the Brazilian rainforests would have a web connection to tell us, after all...), but there was a kind of activist/alarmist movement going among the industrial world teens who were going to great difficulty to compare data about the clouds and to figure out what to do about them.

We had some social scenes as well: Jukka, a pilot who had messed up the last mission by coming in drunk to the mission briefing, showed his secret hobby of collecting old arcade and video games to one of the anchor girls, Heidi. It was strongly implicated that such a hobby might be frowned upon: electricity is a weapon and glue for the international society for these youngsters, and what's worse, the dream world in our setting is understood as some kind of virtual reality game. So messing about with old video games could be considered to be in bad taste, especially by anybody who hadn't had any computer schooling.

A definite point about the rules: I found it somewhat annoying to play with the distributed characters, again. I've had somewhat similar feelings in Polaris, but less so, as there I'm clearly another player. Here I'm the GM, but I feel very hampered by the fact that I have no NPCs or anything to show things during the interludes. For example, I had this idea that the next mission could perhaps be a renegade thing undertaken due to the provocation of this older teenager who chafes under the control of Linus, the authority figure. But the character in question wasn't mine to play, so I had to explain my idea to the player in question to get it into play. In the end I ended up playing the character in question during the crucial scene anyway, as the pilot character of the player was in the scene as well.

I don't really know if I have a point in this complaining about character control, but in practice we seem to have a bad tendency to forget the character assignations or outright ignore them. We were more diligent in this session about asking other players if it was OK to use their characters in the ways we were doing, but the fact still remains that we (and by we I mean me more than the others) were in the habit of using whatever character was suitable for a situation, rather than limiting our input to the characters that were specifically assigned to us.

I don't know what to do about this set of phenomenons yet, too vague at this point... I might recommend either doing the character assignation at a later stage than character creation (as I've suggested earlier), or perhaps including some method for switching around character assigments. It might be wise to simply say that players are allowed to give characters to others on a permanent basis: we have a couple of characters in the group who are embroiled in social relationships with other characters of the same player, and some characters where another player has much more interest and passion for the character than the one playing it: both situations result in unnecessary stumbling which could be removed if players could simply recognize and acknowledge the facts of authorship and give characters to others when the fact is that the other player can use the character much better and more naturally.

The mission

We're getting smoother in actual play. As I wrote earlier, our group consists of four pilots and me as the GM. Two of the pilot players are dramatically proactive and play-supporting, with plenty of forge-style experience. One has plenty of experience as well, but is much more insular by nature. Making good progress, though, and quite able to carry his weight, although he generally never grabs agressively at narrative opportunity. The last player is perhaps the most challenging on the group: she has gentle instincts for this kind of drama, but she's also shy and passive, mostly content to observe. I hope that when she gets a mission scene in the next session, that'll tie her own pilot character more strongly into the game.

The mission itself went rather well in fictional terms - we had a solid basis for how the dream world should look and work from the first mission, so there was less work in that regard. The mission ended up being about a reckless offensive against the acid clouds - although Linus had forbidden proactive entanglement at this time, he's just a voice in the internet, so Petra, this passionate & powerhungry girl put together a group to "save the innocents from acid rain" as she put it. She quite ruthlessly chose her own younger brother to pilot the mission, but Reko, the hero of the last mission, insisted on another pilot as well, so Jukka was drafted as well. The anchors were Heikki and Heidi from the two other players, so all four were engaged with a job in the mission.

The mission structure had four pretty obvious objectives, which either pilot could complete. Having two pilots wasn't particularly difficult this time, but two anchors was challenging: as one of the anchor players was a naturally active guy, and the other was this shy girl I mentioned above, the end result was perhaps that there was practically just one anchor. I don't know off-hand what to do about this or whether anything should be done - the distinction between the anchor duties of two different anchor characters is a fine one, and it's quite easy slide into having one anchor dominate the job.

I have a more solid observation from the mission too, however: based on our play thus far it seems to me that the game is rather too easy. Or the players are rolling too well, or I'm not requiring enough mission objectives, or I'm giving too many interludes. In any case, the characters swam through the mission this time rather trivially. One of them took a grand total of one Stress into one relationship. The other managed a point of Trauma as well as some relationship damage - it was quite funny how me made a big deal out of the Trauma point, when he was the first pilot who had suffered any trauma in the campaign. When one trauma had the guy bed-ridden for a day and avoiding open skies afterwards, I wonder what'll happen when the characters get more of the stuff.

Both characters took very little Bliss. Around point or two each, I think. There were plenty of empty dice, and just the right number of positives. Both had around three or so relationships activated. I don't know if this should be harder somehow, but at this pace the game won't be over in five or six sessions. Of course, a lot can change if we manage to put down some characters at some point and I keep the pressure to do missions up... I guess lots depends on the number of interludes. With the damage numbers these characters are racking up it seems to me that around 2-3 interludes between each mission would be more appropriate than the 5-6 we've been doing. Which accords somewhat with the "three interludes per pilot between his missions" number Ben gives in the rules. I guess we should start tracking that number, or accord with it in some other manner; I don't really like having to track interludes for individual pilots when that number doesn't correspond with the dramatic rhythm, so I'd rather track the number of interludes between missions, whoever does them. (Which is the same if you assume that most missions are solo and each character does roughly the same number of missions. Perhaps "four interludes between missions" would be the right rule, to account for the multiple-pilot missions.)

Consequences and underage sex

One interesting parameter of the interlude system is that all scenes have to fit into one of the interlude categories. We've been playing this a posteori: first we play the scene, then we decide which kind it was. If it doesn't fit anywhere, we continue the scene and make it fit. I suspect that it might be better and more natural to do this the other way around: if the players agreed upon the matter of the scene first, they could shoot for it from the beginning, saving everybody's time.

Anyway, our post-mission interludes were greatly affected by the above requirements. For example, we initiated a scene between two pilots and realized at the end that their relationship was actually destroyed. So the scene was transformed into a relationship-reneval scene to accord with the rules. There was not much drama in this: the relationship in question had been destroyed from the beginning, and our reasons for this being so were pretty lukewarm to begin with. So it made sense that the two would have a new start.

However, we were further surprised by the interlude system: when two characters have +4 Intimacy and +5 Trust, and a player calls for a scene between them... the only thing that can happen is sex! This came as a surprise to pretty much everybody when we realized that the relationship would turn intimate right here, right now. This was between Jukka and Heidi at the old arcade hall Jukka had shown her earlier. This was especially funny, as Jukka had just offended Heidi by asking her advice about approaching another girl, Nanna. So Heidi was all "I thought that you liked me!" and going away, when Jukka followed her to apologize and Heidi turned back "Well, are you sure who you like?", grabbing and kissing him right then and there in a bid to change his mind. Apparently that turned into a moment of clumsy passion between the two: we the players were so surprised by what the rules implied that we pretty much drew a veil over the whole event. To be sure, we'll be going back to the implications of this in the next session.

That was a good spot to end the session, so that's what we did. I already knew at that point what the next session would be about: Linus, when he inevitably heard that violent contact had been made with the enemy, requested a full evacuation of the city of Kuopio. Next session will see some crowd scenes and desperate delay action, I imagine. And everybody will be homeless, which will be funny when it spreads that around half of the resistance cell were in on the secret mission.

Conclusions

I still don't know how you're supposed to handle pilot-pilot relationships. Are they really two-sided with different scores for both, or are you supposed to put the same numbers on both sheets and change them in concert?

I suspect that we might have too many interludes, although I'm also having difficulty seeing how missions should be bridged rhythm-wise otherwise. I think I'll try the next session with a rigid structure: we'll have exactly two interludes before the mission and exactly two after it, and that's that. The first interlude will be "follow-up from the last session", the second will be "whatever is most pertinent at the time", the third will be "consequences of the mission" and the fourth again "whatever is most pertinent at the time". We'll see how that flies, and whether it's too few interludes to make for a pleasing narrative.

I'll continue observing how we use the characters in practice. Later on I might want to suggest changing some character ownerships, but for now we'll continue with what we have.