Soap- netgamers- In the gritty city

[Bob McNamee]

The indie netgamers just finished our Soap game.
The players were me (Bob McNamee), Nathan (Paganini), and Chris Edwards? (Chris E). We played for about 5 nights of sessions.
( The transcripts etc are available on the yahoo indie netgamer group area.)

I'm getting beeped so I'll write about gameplay later...

The short version is that we enjoyed it, the Sentence format makes a great structure to use for Chat or PBEM play, but we almost never used the plot Token rules, and the once that we did was when my sentence violated Chris's characters secret.

Gotta go,

[Bob McNamee]

Ok, Our game revolved around the exploits of ...

Ethan Ballard (mine) a stylish rich dude who owns the Platinum Palace, an upscale strip club.
Goal: Wants to get Kyle Simms to burn down the Palace for insurance money

Laslo Gaines (chris)
Shady owner of an adult entertainment store called Velvet Pain.  Laslo is a former Marine...He normally conducts his business at a nightclub called The Countess.
Goal:Wants to get Ethan Ballard to help him establish a very upscale call-girl service

and
Kyle Simms (nathan)
Kyle Simms owns a shady tattoo parlour in Downtown. He's a grungy dude who wears lots of metal black leather and likes to date Goth chicks.
Goal: Score with a Goth

There's more to them, but that's a quick look..

[Bob McNamee]

Play started in a Poker game.
We invented a side character or two...
Characters split to head to their main haunts, and the real action got started.
This included Laslo getting hit on the head with a pipe( and warned away from Ballard) by someone as he headed to the Countess.

We seemed comfortable adding in side characters and calling scenes that manipulated other characters.
My personal favorite was the scene where Sammy (Laslo's henchman) goes up and takes out some unknown figure with a sucker punch knee to the kidneys, dumps him in his trunk... only to have it revealed in the next scene that it's Kyle... who kicks the backseat down ... and takes out Sammy with the tire iron in the trunk... then ends up flying through the windshield as the out of control car hit a Power pole! (putting Nathan out for a couple of turns, supposedly dead)

We had to interpret the rules as to weather we could gain Plot tokens for using our characters attributes in scenes that they weren't present in. We decided that the rules seemed to be saying we got points in scenes where we 'spotlit' our character using a trait, but that Plot points for revealing Secrets was good anytime...creating scenes around the other characters is its own reward.

I'm not sure about the others, but I had a good pile of Plot tokens at the end 35 or so...
Perhaps we didn't get into the spirit of the Soap game... we only used the Plot point Bidding process once. When my "What" narration violated part of Laslo's secret... I didn't try to win it bidding 4...he countered with 10 so I conceded.

This didn't occur until the last round of scenes or so... perhaps Soap isn't the best game for a bunch of players who like Universalis! I guess we weren't competitive enough!

The Soap "Sentence" format really works well for the Chat format (and PBEM). You start with a Where: (location), add the What:(action), finish with the Words:(dialog).
We did notice that the "What:" of a scene kept creeping down into the "Words:" of a scene...we discussed this and decided that it was still a "What:" even if it drifted down into the "Words:". I suspect this comes from a more novelist writerly bent, rather than screen writer.

Well this is getting long,

[Bob McNamee]

Correction on the Yahoo group

indie-netgaming  

is the correct name of the group

[C. Edwards]

What can I say?  This was my first experience with it but I can definitely say that I love SOAP.  The format works well with IRC and the game exhibits some of my favorite elements, such as:

-character development through play (a character starts off with only a  very basic background, a goal, and a secret.)

-equal parts character immersion and metagame (for me at least, Bob and Nathan might have different opinions.)

-a certain level of strategic thinking is required (this goes back to the metagame element, like a game of free-form chess where one wins through force of will and ingenuity.)

I thoroughly enjoyed playing SOAP, and it has nothing do with the fact that I won. ;)  As much as anyone can win in SOAP anyways, which basically is "To crush your enemies, have them driven before you and hear the lamentation of their women."  All in all, I think all three of us had a good time.

-Chris

[Bob McNamee]

You won?
I thought I won...
(I wanted to put Ethan in a situation to get punished, or achieve his ends...with no grey areas)
but ultimately your secret drove the main action and finale, while mine drove the counteraction, with Kyle the poor pawn in the middle!

I loved how things came together...really, the dangling plot threads and unrelated scenes pretty much all dovetailed in!

I still wonder about the Prisoner...

...I wonder if he is behind the Genius plastic surgery of Ethan