[Shock]

[Morte]

Framing Final Conflicts

P31 "Intents cannot settle the Story Goals of a player unless one scene has already passed and the Antagonist player has decided that it is the proper stage of the story to do so"
P42 "there must be only one result that yields a positive result to the story goal"

I read this as implying that:

(a)   The antagonist player says it's time for a conflict that resolves the story goal, because they're low on credits or it just feels right. Before that happens, the protagonist player can't state an intent resolving their story goal.

(b)   In a conflict that might resolve the story goal, one and only one player must declare an intent that positively resolves it. Question: does the rule against mutually exclusive intents imply that the other player may not state an intent that negatively resolves it?

(c)   If a player succeeds on an intent that resolves the story goal, the story ends.

(d)   If the intent(s) which resolve(s) the story goal could fail, leaving the story goal unresolved for now. Question: does the story end inconclusively now, or will there be another scene in the next rotation that tries to resolve it again (with the antagonist really low on credits)?

Am I on the right wavelength here?

[Morte]

Well, that's all the questions I had after the first session. The next game is due in just under two weeks.

If anybody can clarify all the things I asked about in the preceding posts, I'd be most grateful.

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

Morte, I don't have time just now to read this thoroughly, but I'm really excited to do so soon.

I didn't want you to think I'd forgotten you!

[Morte]

Joshua, thanks for looking.

We played again on Sunday and managed to get the mechanics working a lot more smoothly. I'm not sure if we were playing as intended, but it was working quite well...

I'll go over the mechanical stuff first, and then say a bit about the game.

I went through a list of "rules clarifications" of at the start of the session. These were things where I'd changed my conception of the rules after playing a session and re-reading the book.

1.   The antagonist player is playing the antagonist, an entity in the game world. They are not temporary GM with GM powers, they're just a character. They can do things the antagonist could reasonably do: if they're a peaceful civilian opposition group the player can't say "the navy launch a nuclear missile at Edinburgh" out of nowhere.

2.   We should use a broader definition of "mutually exclusive" for intents. The intents should not only be literally possible in the same universe, but the antagonist's intent should not make the protagonist's success irrelevant. Or, "no using your d10s to do the job of d4s".

3.   Anyone can propose minutiae, but if anyone objects then they only stand if at least one other player supports them. [I knew about this at the first session. I just, um, forgot it.]

4.   Minutiae can be events in the game world; they don't have to be persistent setting details that were true before the session started.

5.   The antagonist player announces that it's time to include intents that resolve story goals. Either player can state the actual resolving intent when the time comes. The protagonist player might suggest that it's time, but the antagonist player decides.

6.   Escalation only happens if the *tagonist d10/d4 combination hits the fulcrum. Audience dice don't kick off escalation if they move the result to the fulcrum (they have to move it past the fulcrum to come into play).

I proposed one house rule to tackle the "Mexican Standoff" I raised earlier, which was accepted: The protagonist player chooses who states their intent first. Whoever goes second is responsible for avoiding a mutually exclusive intent. So as protagonist player you can go first and have free rein, or you can wait to see what the antagonist player is doing before choosing your intent but accept possible limitations.

I expressed a wish: The audience shouldn't use their minutiae d4 to change conflict outcomes just because they can ("I won my roll, now I can exercise my power!"), they should consider whether changing the outcome is actually a good thing.

Finally, I offered to act as a rules-bot and occasionally say "no that's not allowed". Never have I seen a group of gamers agree to anything so fast, except possibly that it was a good time to order lunch.


When the rubber met the road, I thought it all worked out pretty well.

-   Antagonist players stuck to things they could reasonably do, and we didn't get silly stuff happening. We did graduate from nuking Edinburgh to nuking a whole planet from orbit, but this time it was a subverted warship that did it and it made perfectly good sense.

-   The broader definition of "mutually exclusive" made *tagonist players roll d4s, unlike the first session. Antagonist players mostly framed intent to create drama in the game world which would spotlight the issues, or to set things up for the following scene.

-   Minutiae went from being a frequent pain to a working game element. We rejected a few, maybe one in five to one in ten. The tactical minutiae vanished. I made a point of reading out every new minutia and getting everybody to say an explicit yes or no (last session people were just writing stuff and shoving it on the pile, to trip the unwary later).

-   There was far less escalation. It didn't get to be a chore, more an occasional surprise.

-   The "who goes first" house rule for intents worked well.

-   Audience players showed some restraint with their d4s, and the stories seemed better for it.

-   I didn't have much to do as rules-bot, but when I did I thought it was quite important. There was a moment when one protagonist player stated an intent that turned the whole setting on its head. It would have left the other three players saying "my story goal is now irrelevant." I ruled it out, on the grounds that it somehow broke the rules about affecting protagonists that weren't in the scene.

I'm still confused about intents that resolve story goals, as per the "Framing Final Conflicts" post above. I'd appreciate a precise clarification on that.


Incidentally what I think the Shock needs as a game book is a session transcript for a *tagonist player pair playing through a whole game according to the rules. That's not a fictionalised version of the events in game, and not cherry-picking of key moments, but an example of what people actually say at the table when playing Shock as intended and how one thing leads to another. The margin text in the vacuumorph game is unfocussed (it's physically scattered and flicking between multiple protagonists with weird names gets confusing).

I find the text and example in the book rather abstract, it says a lot about the game but it often leaves me wondering "so what do players actually say at the table to get this done?" I think I got a better idea of how to do the whole "roll for narration rights" style of gaming in Shock from reading PTA (which you mention as a mechanical progenitor).

Later I'll post a bit about our game, and come at it from a "how to have a fun game" perspective rather than "what are the mechanics?"

[Morte]

OK, the session. I have a bunch of scribbles in a notebook here and I'm going to try to reconstruct the session start from them.

We started out throwing issues into the ring, and I think the first we got were "mental health", "humanity's right to survive" (possibly prompted by a recent Star Trek game where we investigated an extinct race and decided that they were so wet they deserved to be extinct), and "what will you pay to get what you want?" (hi there Mr Edwards). And we tried to think of a shock that would throw them into relief, and a setting grown from that shock which would make them hot topics, and we failed to do so in the two minutes or so we threw at it. [Here, I suspect, is the crux of what it takes to have a red hot Shock game; but more of that later...]

Since we were having a hard time getting the individually interesting elements to gel, I threw in a coherent set I'd prepared earlier, an emulation of "Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex". I had issues "definition of the soul", "employer/government intrusion into the personal sphere", "abuse of position in politics", and the shock was "cyberbrains for many and cyborg bodies for some". It was generally seen as a workable set, but nobody except me was really hot for it.

Next Richard (who graduated in "War Studies" or something along those lines) suggested using Shock to play a historical game, where the shock could be something like machine guns or blitzkrieg warfare. I thought there might be mileage in that, but I really wanted to get Shock working as a science fiction game before taking it off road.

Next, back to square one. We got some stuff we liked, but couldn't tie it into a game/setting concept. The issues were "solipsism" and "the individual vs the collective" and the proto-shock was "something like 'choices of reality'". Everybody was pretty interested in the issues and shock, but we failed to wrap them in a game setting.

So, some more stuff flew, and some of the issues I saw go past were "the right to interfere in other cultures", "group action in an anarchy" and "corruption due to power". Hang on, I thought, they're all issues in Iain Banks Culture books. There's a readymade combination that works, using issues we're interested in. And the setting will be familiar to everybody, so we can just get into it. So I suggested that, and everybody seemed happy. We went with those issues, and the shock was written as "post-scarcity society". Looking back, that's only part of it – I should really have made it "The Culture" or have included extra shocks like "mixed parahuman/AI society" and "anarchy with cooperative elements".

Mark and I were trading starship names, *tagonists were coming together, and I wrote down a few salient minutiae to nail down some key points in this setting we were all familiar with. Then I discovered that Greg and Richard hadn't read any Banks books (I thought this was impossible for British gamers). Whilst Richard had heard a bit about The Culture, Greg was wondering what the hell we were talking about. So, we gave them a quick overview. And it seemed to me (I haven't checked with him) that Greg basically didn't believe this society could exist. He kept asking how it was governed, or implying that it couldn't function without government, and his first protagonist concept directly contradicted some minutiae. I thought this cognitive dissonance probably constituted pay dirt, since it would engage him in the game, and I hid my smile as he made a new protagonist who was trying to institute a formal government in the setting. He ended up with an excellent character, and got right into the heart of the issues.

Here are the starting minutiae:

This is a far-future post-scarcity society in the style of Ian M Banks's "The Culture". It's a decentralised semi-anarchy but groups within the setting cooperate towards common goals. Many of these efforts have become standing arrangements. The people outside the groups are generally OK with what they do, or they'd leave the society. The society may grant certain members authority and voluntarily submit to them, e.g. appointing an admiral to command a fleet.

The society comprises advanced parahumans (self-modifying with nanotech etc), drones of roughly the same capability, and enormously advanced AI minds.

There are other societies, friendly and not so friendly. Two persistent institutions are Contact (the diplomatic corps) and Special Circumstances (the sharp end of the intelligence community).

The society are interstellar do-gooders, they help/interfere with their less advanced neighbours. There is a fashion within Contact/SC for doing this with the minimum possible resources, to show off how clever you are, and that sometimes backfires.

There is mass media. There are influential commentators and bloggers.

Then we made protagonists (described later).

For Praxis we went with Observation/Intrusion and Matter/Information. They seemed like reasonable scales for the protagonists to choose on, and they didn't have the redundancy that we saw as a problem in our first session.

Everybody chose antagonists. I think this second time around there was more effort to create "somebody who can nudge me (the player) towards my story goal" rather than "an enemy". We were choosing them to set up cooperative storytelling, and that worked.

So, with no further ado, here's the shape of the game:

Joel (me): playing the General Contact Unit (big starship) Nice Young Jewish Boy.
Issue: the right to interfere in other cultures.
Praxis: Observation/Intrusion 5 and Matter/Information 8.
Links: "the respect of my peers" and "belief in self-determination".
Story Goal: To end the "game" attitude to C/SC operations and instil cautious professionalism.
Antagonist: The Optimal Engineering Club, a group of cowboy C/SC types who like to interfere in primitive societies without doing their homework, played by...

Richard: playing Chester D Wilmott III, an influential insider in the non-governmental adhocracy.
Issue: Corruption due to power.
Praxis: Observation/Intrusion 4 and Matter/Information 8.
Links: "faith in libertarianism" and "position in 'government'".
Story Goal: To defeat the corruption he believes exists in the system.
Antagonist: A much-loved libertarian politician, who has had 99% of his suggestions accepted by the society, played by...

Mark: playing the brain of the Command Offensive Unit (serious warship) Just Another Tuesday.
Issue: Corruption due to power.
Praxis: Observation/Intrusion 8 and Matter/Information 5.
Links: the ship's human captain and its referring authority 'zero'
Story Goal: To become corrupted by power.
Antagonist: A sentient virus infecting his mind and trying to take control, played by...

Greg: Sebastian Valmont, blogger, proponent of introducing formal constitutional government.
Issue: The necessity for group action in an anarchy.
Praxis: Observation/Intrusion 5 and Matter/Information 4
Links: popular with all two of his supporters, press rentaquote
Story Goal: To form a government.
Antagonist: The anarchists as a political class, played by Joel (at the top).


So, we played. I didn't take notes, but here's what I remember...

My turns: The Nice Young Jewish Boy abandoned its social call on the Wild Grrrl orbital (the relationship wasn't going anywhere) and set out to monitor a primitive planet where the civil war was threatening to turn extinction-grade. It noted signs of interference, the sort of interference Special Circumstances get up to, only it wasn't working too well and there was no official operation on record. Yes, the Optimal Engineering Club were mucking about again. So, it tried to get them brought to heel. It failed (damn dice), and they messed up the planet some more. Using the fallout from their fresh screw up, it tried again and eventually made it thanks to some link risking and a bit of help from the audience. The poor bastards on the planet suffered, but it should happen a lot less in future.

I can't remember anything at all about Richard's protagonist. I think I was too busy recovering from my turns when he came along; I had a hard time even playing audience.

I don't remember Marc's turns so well, he was diagonally across the table and I wasn't involved in them. But AFAIR: The Just Another Tuesday was hanging around some planet, that had presumably done something to offend the Culture, and the viral voice in its head told it to nuke the place from orbit. A few dice later, it did. There was some sort of struggle for control aboard, which ended up with the ship as an enemy of its own crew. Pretty soon everybody else thought Just Another Tuesday was batshit (it got dubbed "Ruby Tuesday" for the blood on its hands); and the rest of the galaxy thought the Culture had turned into murdering loonies. Eventually the Tuesday fled a bloodhunt by a bunch of other ships. It was thoroughly corrupt and its story goal resolved.

Greg's turns: Greg stated goals which steadily built up his blogger protagonist's influence in the setting. It was all fairly low key PR stuff, but he worked in events from the crazy things going on around the other characters to flesh out his in-character arguments. So it came over as a logical drift of popular opinion in the setting. Then, all of a sudden, he stopped salami slicing and went for it. I figured at the speed he was going he'd go for a set of mandatory checks and balances next, or maybe some sort of electronic democracy, but he went for a full on government with a single appointed leader. What's more he made the leader a charismatic figure from Marc's story. And my six credits failed to stop him on the second attempt (link risking), so he got it. This worked rather well as a cap to the game – after all the shocking stuff that had gone on, there was a groundswell of public support for a constitutional volte face. It was rather neat that it came on the very last turn.


OK, that's what happened. Tomorrow I'll ruminate/pontificate a bit.

[Morte]

So, how to build a better session of Shock?

I think the key is to get a set of issues that interest the players, and to make them come up in play. You get them to come up in play by choosing a shock that somehow throws them into the light, and preferably undermines the players' assumptions about them. And you build a setting around that shock. You want to end up with a setting where the issues can't be approached the way they are in our world, so that players will have to examine them from the ground up.

The challenge in a tabletop game session is to do all of that in a coherent fashion, using finite creativity and time. You need every player to have a strong interest/opinion for at least one issue, you need a shock that throws new light on every single issue, and you need to grow a setting out of the shock. As we've played, it's a matter of looking for synergies between shocks/issues and juggling until they snap together, then making like a science fiction writer to grow the results into a concrete setting. This is hard to do well. I suspect one gets better with practice, like playing in a band (groan).

Looking back, I think we gave up too easily during this part of the game. For example, our fourth effort with issues "solipsism" and "the individual vs the collective" and the proto-shock "choices of reality" had the makings of cracking science fiction. But we abandoned it inside a minute, when a setting didn't just drop out of the sky. This was my fault; I was conscious that we were 90 minutes into the meet and hadn't got anything to play yet. If I had the time again, I'd spend the half hour to make it work.

Actually time was no factor – once we started play I think we got through the story in an hour or so. This session went faster with the new mechanical clarity, and AFAIR we all resolved our story goals on scene three of a possible four or five (of which more later).

I have a few thoughts on how to make a better job of this:
-   Make sure there each player has an issue they really care about.
-   Make sure the game world will put all the issues in a new light.
-   Spend the time to do it right. It will pay off. Since set up is as interesting as play in this game, it's not like it's a chore to get the set up honed.
-   Don't obsess about making the shocks + issues add up to exactly the number of players. Obsess about getting a set that fit together.
-   Having more than one shock doesn't seem to be the end of the world either.

I had a few other ideas which were rejected one way or another, but they might be worth chewing over. One was that coherent issue/shock/setting combinations (ISSCs) tend to come from a single vision, so perhaps we might take turns to pre-make an ISSC and have everyone play it. We could also have a couple of games per session this way, by having somebody do half an hour of prep for each ISSC. That foundered on the grounds that (a) it's not likely to include an issue that sparks for each player and (b) half the group think that choosing ISSCs at the table is the best part of the session and they don't want to lose it.

Now I think it might be worth taking the ideas that proved popular but not immediately workable at a session, chew them over between games to get the outline of a gameable ISSC, and bring them back to the next session to try again. A bit of email pitching between sessions wouldn't hurt, and it would also give people more time to think up good *tagonists.

One thing I would like to see in the book is an explanation of how the group put it all together in that vacuumorph game – what prompted the intuitive leap from issues to shock, and how did the setting grow out of that? How much did they discard before they settled on what they played?

-

Creating *tagonists is like a smaller version of ISSC creation. You need them to work as a combination that's going to throw your issue into relief. Again, it's worth spending time on this to get good characters. We pretty much came up with characters in the time it took to give one or two sentence descriptions of them. It would be better to spend a few minutes, and perhaps chew them over with the other players. It might help to have some idea about your protagonist while building the setting – I know I wrote minutiae into the setting to make mine a relevant character, and I would have chosen a different protagonist if those minutiae had been rejected.

And choose an antagonist who can really throw your protagonist a curve or two. If they are custom built to steer you to your story goal and nothing else, you'll end up with a complicated form of short story writing instead of a game.

-

Ownership never came up in our second session. We never needed a ruling. It probably helped that we were in a predefined setting.

-

It was a short session; we got to the pub at noon and finished at 3:30 including lunch. We could have thrown in some new *tagonists and maybe a shock, then gone again in our setting as it now stood. I never thought to suggest it.

-

Setting Praxis fulcra is a biggie. It was often observed that the antagonist is rather unlikely to stop somebody who is working the powerful side of a 3/8 fulcrum. When that happened, antagonist players tended to just treat it as a lost cause and worry more about their own intent, using one d4 as a spoiler. There was considerable support for bringing the limits in to 4/7. It was also suggested that we might try to be a bit stricter about selecting praxis options to match our intent/narration, since there were some rather stretched tactical word associations going on.

-

We did a bit of gaming, as well as storytelling, and people had fun with it. Mark played to lose on a deliberately unimportant conflict, then risked a link and played to lose again, building up features for later ("strength through adversity") and creating story for his protagonist. That was cool. I tried it a round or two later and it was working nicely until I accidentally resolved my story goal. I think a group will get better at doing this stuff and having fun with it as they play.

-

Speaking of resolving story goals, this is now my one big grey area with the game mechanics.

First, I'm not 100% sure what the rules are (see previous posts). In this session, with me not being clear on the rules, I just said the one thing I was sure of from the book: the antagonist player decides when it's OK to resolve story goals. And by implication, the protagonist player can say "Is it OK for me to try to positively resolve my goal in this scene?" And they can say yes or no to that.

Second, I'm not sure whether the "no mutually exclusive intents" rule makes it impossible to have a climactic final conflict where everything is on the line, where the protagonist can play "to win, or lose it all", i.e. whether you can have positive and negative resolutions in play in the same conflict.

Third, I'm not sure how to tell when it's a good idea for the antagonist to put resolution on the table, and when it's a good idea for them to say "no" if the protagonist player asks them to OK it.

In all four strands, the story ended with the protagonist player asking for permission to try to positively resolve their goal, and the antagonist player saying yes. Then the protagonist player threw dice and link risks at the conflict until they got what they wanted, while the antagonist was constrained to a relatively limp response by the "mutually exclusive" rule. Looking back, the game might have had more spice if the antagonist players had gone for the throat a bit and stated goals that negatively resolved the protagonist's goal as soon as it was permitted and appropriate. That would certainly have got a few more d4s flowing... I think most of us pretty much forgot that it was an option for the antagonist to end the story.

-

All in all, the second session was more sensible than the first. It played more as a "let's work together to build some stories" and less as "let's have a fight with each other via a game where you roll for narration rights". It created better science fiction – last time we nuked Edinburgh and it was silly, this time we nuked a whole planet but it made sense (and turned my stomach).

There's no getting away from the fact that it was also a milder, perhaps blander game. I like it this way, I thought the last game was overblown and this one was more the tone I like, but I think some of the group like things overblown. I also think we can turn up the heat by choosing emotive issues, choosing and playing antagonists more effectively, and getting to the bottom of the story goal resolution rules.

-

By the way, a thing I particularly admire about Shock as a system is that it manages to keep everybody involved all the time. After we finished, Greg asked a few questions about what we wanted from an upcoming game he's GMing (Three Musketeers using 7th Sea). One of the questions he asked was how do we feel about splitting the party? I said I'm OK with it provided I'm not sat around doing nothing for most of the game – I want it to be rare, or to have some way to get involved (OOC if necessary) when it happens. And Shock, which we'd just played, does that superbly.

-

OK, I'm out. My suggestions for Shock 2.0:

1.   Put a substantial transcript of play in the book, showing what the players actually say and do when the game is running as intended. Not fiction, not abstract/meta stuff, the nitty gritty. Include game set up and some examples of escalation and link risking. Or release it as an MP3.
2.   Split the book into a tight rules explanation, which tries really hard not to assume any prior knowledge of story games, then "how to have a fun game" advice. I don't want to mine twenty pages to get at five pages of mechanics, and I want to understand the mechanics before I'm advised on how to make the most of them.
3.   Lose that vacuumorph fiction, it's cool but it's not clear. Cool is for your website, the book is for people who've already paid and want a practical teaching tool that explains how to play the game. Use well known sci-fi tropes that will be familiar to most readers in your examples, so that the only thing readers have to work to understand is the game mechanics.
4.   Include advice on choosing building from issues into a shock/setting that will make for good gaming.
5.   Beef up the advice on choosing praxis scales that will be mechanically and topically interesting in play.

Thanks Joshua, for the game which has been fun (if frustrating at times) and a big eye opener for me.

[newsalor]

Escalation Woes

First up, I made a mistake by letting the audience dice throw a conflict into escalation – rereading the book, it should only be if a *tagonists' initial d10/d4 pair hits the fulcrum. So we turned what should be roughly 20% escalation into more like 40%. And with a group of people who are prone to getting over the top in the first place (I will never forget Richard saying "I throw the moon at her" playing There Is No Spoon), this could got pretty wild. And when things got wild people tended to forget all the shock/issue stuff, so I feel it was counterproductive. One conflict got escalated three times, and on the third time the *tagonist players looked at each other and agreed to quietly ignore it and toll again.

Apart from correcting my mistake I'm wondering about suggesting to the group that a given conflict can only be escalated once. If you hit the praxis again, reroll the dice involved. But maybe we should try it the way the rules say first.

IMHO both the official Shock 1.1. escalation/fulcrum -rule and your addition are redundant.

You and your fellow players are supposed to make your choices based on what you think is cool. So if all your friends agree that escalation is massively fun and that they like those kinds of stories, then limiting their options won't make the game more fun for them.

The conflict resolutions have all kinds of nifty doodads attached, but essentially it's a kinda voting / bidding mechanism that's supposed to produce a compromise that rocks all of your boats. Trust the market! If you guys like certain kinds of outcomes, then I guess everyone will be placing their votes to ensure that you get the maximum enjoyment out of the game.

[Nocker]

Hello,
I'm new to the great Shock Universe. Excuse my under-average english, I'm french.

I read this thread all along, and found it really interesting. Particularly the questions Morte rose.
On the most part of them, I have my own opinion and I know what I would do if I organize a Shock game about them. Others seem either too abstract to me to have a clear view or I can't make my mind about them.

But for all of hir questions, I know I'd love hear about what thinks Joshua of them.

Joshua, you say in March 09 2008 that you didn't have the time to answer, but ever since, you haven't come up with our interrogations, so that Morte get to build hir own solutions, when it was possible.

Im' trying to ressurect that topic in the hope of getting answers to all interrogations I share with Morte and add some of my own.

If it helps, I'll give a résumé of each questions (but maybe some get lost in the process, so excuse me) :

My questions
a) In a scene, how many players can play their Protagonist ? Only one ? Any number ? And what if a conflict involves more than one *Tagonist ? The example shows Thorium and Phosphorus being in conflict together, but what if Father was also involved ?

b) If players come up with, say, 4 Issues, and the 4 Protagonists happens to adress only 2 of them (by pair), how to use - if they are to be use - the remaining Issues ? Do they have an impact ? If they don't, won't the players who own each one feel pulled aside ? Because, each player should own at least one Shock or Issue, but it's possible to have multiple Protagonists that adress one Issue.

c) What is the goal of having an Owner if everything must pass the Boo/Cheer test to be accepted ? And in a Boo/Cheer test for a Minutia, who get the priority between the players that don't want it, and the players that are enthusiastic about it ?

Go for Morte's questions

1) We want to know how far does the Intents need to be non-exclusive. Morte made hir own conclusion about that, but it's interesting to know your point of view. And further, I'd like to add : what if an Intent makes irrelevant a *Tagonist's previously won Intent, that is, an Intent zie won on a previous scene ?

2) For the priority of the declaration of the Intents, what is the rule ? Is the set of rules Morte came up with is satisfying (Protagonist decide who says first hir Intent, then the second has the responsability to state an Intent that is non-exclusive, and then each can change hir Intent once, after hearing the other's) ? What did you use, in your games ?

3) As stated Morte, the Story Goal resolution rules are a bit confusing. First, I can't understand what you mean on the page 42, saying "there must be only one result that yields a positive result to the Story Goal". Do this forbid a final conflict with both *Tagonists has an opposed Intent. For example "The robots destroy the tape, and make the truth hidden forever" versus "I put the tape in the player and reveal all the conspiration to the citizens" is possible ?

4) What happens if both *Tagonists fail their Intent in the final scene ? It seems that the Story Goal can't be accomplished, or will be very weakly accomplished. Is it re-played in the next scene ? Don't this artificially lengthen the story ?

5) To what extend a Minutia can be persistent ? Can it be a short event that change only the outcome of the current scene ? Can it be a thing that makes irrelevant a previously stated Minutia ? Can it be a thing that affects the Links of a *Tagonist, or hir Features ?

6) Corollary, are all declarations and explications of the Audience (particularly those who support a d4 or explain an escalation) necessarily Minutiae ? Or only the elements that explain the setting can be Minutiae ?

7) Do the d4 of the Audience can trigger an escalation, or is an escalation triggered only when a *Tagonist's d10 minus/plus the other's d4 equals the Fulcra ?

Why don't have less Issues (so that more Protagonist will adress each) and one or two more Shocks, will this make the game less interesting, or less structured ? Why this choice of numerous Issues and only one Shock ?

9) What are the criterias to decide when an Antagonist player should declare the final scene ? What do you think is the better moment for the resolution, in general ?


Thanks for all your answers, Joshua. Your game is fantastic !!!

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

Bonjour, Nocker. Let's see if we can get these straightened out.

My questions
a) In a scene, how many players can play their Protagonist ? Only one ? Any number ? And what if a conflict involves more than one *Tagonist ? The example shows Thorium and Phosphorus being in conflict together, but what if Father was also involved ?

Only one person plays each Protagonist. Sometimes, more than one person will play an Antagonist.

More than on *Tagonist can be in a scene, sure. Here's what you do: you do the same thing you usually do!

• If Phosphorus and Father are both played by me, I'm rolling dice for Father. Nothing meaningful is going to happen to Phosphorus; he's Minutia for me as Antagonist to play against Vincent playing Thorium.
• If Thorium is played by me and Father is played by Ben, then we roll dice and declare Praxis against whoever we're declaring it against. So if Father and Phosphorus are both opposing Thorium, everyone declares their Praxis, then you figure out who's succeeded and who's failed as normal. This part isn't in the rules and it should be considered experimental, as I've never seen it come up in play: you can declare a different Praxis for different opponents within the conflict. My only concern is the amount of stuff you have to keep in your head while dice are rolling and changing.

b) If players come up with, say, 4 Issues, and the 4 Protagonists happens to adress only 2 of them (by pair), how to use - if they are to be use - the remaining Issues ? Do they have an impact ? If they don't, won't the players who own each one feel pulled aside ? Because, each player should own at least one Shock or Issue, but it's possible to have multiple Protagonists that adress one Issue.

They can still be used as Minutiæ. The players' authority remains. This definitely happens sometimes. I haven't noticed people getting upset about it. There's plenty to do in the game itself.

c) What is the goal of having an Owner if everything must pass the Boo/Cheer test to be accepted ? And in a Boo/Cheer test for a Minutia, who get the priority between the players that don't want it, and the players that are enthusiastic about it ?

The "Boo/Cheer" rule doesn't apply to Owned things. Enthusiastic players always take priority. That's an important rule in Shock: actually, and is one of those "personal perspective leaking into design" things.

1) We want to know how far does the Intents need to be non-exclusive. Morte made hir own conclusion about that, but it's interesting to know your point of view. And further, I'd like to add : what if an Intent makes irrelevant a *Tagonist's previously won Intent, that is, an Intent zie won on a previous scene ?

Intents can't contradict each other. They are orthogonal. If it's possible for them to both succeed, both fail, or for each to succeed while the other fails, it's cool. You can certainly fuck up someone else's success. The game's all about that.

2) For the priority of the declaration of the Intents, what is the rule ? Is the set of rules Morte came up with is satisfying (Protagonist decide who says first hir Intent, then the second has the responsability to state an Intent that is non-exclusive, and then each can change hir Intent once, after hearing the other's) ? What did you use, in your games ?

You can't change your Intent once it's said. Protag goes first. On rare occasion, I've bent that rule because an Antag player couldn't keep it in his pants, but that's the rule. This puts the Protag at a disadvantage because the job of the Antag is to twist. It's to ask, "Do you want that enough if.... this is the consequence?"

3) As stated Morte, the Story Goal resolution rules are a bit confusing. First, I can't understand what you mean on the page 42, saying "there must be only one result that yields a positive result to the Story Goal". Do this forbid a final conflict with both *Tagonists has an opposed Intent. For example "The robots destroy the tape, and make the truth hidden forever" versus "I put the tape in the player and reveal all the conspiration to the citizens" is possible ?

Of course. You can never have opposed Intents. The hairiness gets into play, though, when the Story Goal can be satisfied with either player. So, hypothetically:

• Story Goal: To make my daughter, Absa, President of the station.
• Antoine's (the Protag's) intent: to gain the support of the AI.
• Aïyb's (the Antag's) intent: to rouse support of the people of the station against Absa.

This is fine as a normal set of Intents, but they only resolve the Story Goal in certain win/lose configurations. Like, if Antoine wins and Aïyb loses, obviously things went OK. What if Antoine wins and Aïyb wins, also? What if they both lose? The Story Goal has to be resolvable by only one Intent. It's really just a matter of stating it clearly. If it's not clear by the time everyone states Intents, make it clear whose dice are settling the matter before you roll. That's all.

4) What happens if both *Tagonists fail their Intent in the final scene ? It seems that the Story Goal can't be accomplished, or will be very weakly accomplished. Is it re-played in the next scene ? Don't this artificially lengthen the story ?

Nope. No do-overs! That means that Intents were not stated strongly enough. Somehow, you got to this point without having the final choices mean anything. This is a question that will only come up hypothetically.

5) To what extend a Minutia can be persistent ? Can it be a short event that change only the outcome of the current scene ? Can it be a thing that makes irrelevant a previously stated Minutia ? Can it be a thing that affects the Links of a *Tagonist, or hir Features ?

Minutiæ can be momentary, absolutely. "A micrometoroid goes through the windscreen!" It can make previous Minutiæ irrelevant but it can't make them untrue. Things change. Links and Features are Owned by the Protagonist, so they have to be OK with it.

6) Corollary, are all declarations and explications of the Audience (particularly those who support a d4 or explain an escalation) necessarily Minutiae ? Or only the elements that explain the setting can be Minutiae ?

They are implicit Minutiæ, yes.

7) Do the d4 of the Audience can trigger an escalation, or is an escalation triggered only when a *Tagonist's d10 minus/plus the other's d4 equals the Fulcra ?

The Audience is usually the reason Escalation happens.

Why don't have less Issues (so that more Protagonist will adress each) and one or two more Shocks, will this make the game less interesting, or less structured ? Why this choice of numerous Issues and only one Shock ?

Lots of Shocks, if they haven't grown together organically, just make a Crazy Future Land with angels, superpowers, and star travel. However, if you grow them together from story to story, they fit thematically. If you were to very carefully choose a single Issue, then carefully choose Shocks that work well together, it should work fine. But too many of both makes a sort of idea salad, when what you want is more like carefully arranged sushi.

9) What are the criterias to decide when an Antagonist player should declare the final scene ? What do you think is the better moment for the resolution, in general ?

The Antagonist has enough Credits to last three or, at most, four scenes. Sometimes, the ending of a particular Protagonist's story happens in scene 2. That's fine. The best moment for resolution is when it's very clear what the choice will be that the player will have to make: do I escape from the Apes, or will it have been Earth all along? Do I save the last ecology of Earth, or do I live to experience it?

[Nocker]

Okay, all your answers are clear and satisfy me. All but one. Isn't it a pretty score ?

I definetly did't understand the first answer, on the number of *Tagonists in a scene and multi*Tagonist conflicts.
Also, I suspect I haven't made enough explicit the first part, because you seem to miss my point.

So :
First, imagine a table (G = gamer, P = Protag, A = Antag) : G1 is playing P1 and A3, G2 is playing P2 and A1, G3 is playing P3 and A2.

Must a scene place only one Protag at a time in the center of the story ? Are the others only Minutiae, or can they be also Protags ? If not, this means that the classic "PJ group" is totally impossible in a Shock game. No Protags can ally or confront in a scene ?

Secondly, you seem to have written an auxiliary rule that enables the multi-*Tagonists conflict. But I couldn't understand what do you meant with your Who Art in Heaven example. May you retry to explain me this modification ?

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

Must a scene place only one Protag at a time in the center of the story ?

At the center, yes. Other characters can be there, of course.

Are the others only Minutiae, or can they be also Protags ?

If there's a conflict between one Protag and another, that's OK. Note that it messes with the Antag's Credits and will tend to make the Protag get hosed by the end.

It's a game about alienation, you dig.

If not, this means that the classic "PJ group" is totally impossible in a Shock game. No Protags can ally or confront in a scene ?

They can ally, of course. There are no restrictions in this regard on the actions of characters. The dice they get to add are the (very powerful, I might add) Minutia dice.

But if it's not their scene, by definition, they're not at the center of it.

[Nocker]

Oh my !

You clarified all that was obscured in my head. Now I can play with great pleasure at your game.

Thanks a lot, and again congratulation. Your game isn't only the best Social Science Fiction RPG, but the best Story-focused RPG.

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

Wow! Thanks!