The Pool: Clockpunk adventure recap

[Kenway]

This is just a Pool campaign recap.


The Pool:  Clockpunk adventure

   The players were traditional AD&D and Marvel Super Heroes-raised gamers, so they not surprisignly played The Pool mostly AD&D-like.
   When they used some of the Pool's narrative potential, I gave them a couple extra Dice as a reward to try to motivate them further.

Setting:
-18th century Europe, Vienna I think
-"Clockpunk."  A world of automata, like an Umberto Eco book one of the players mentioned- the name of which I can't remember right now.

Characters:  a train engineer, barkeep, librarian, musician

The adventure:
   The adventure started in an absinthe bar owned by one of the pcs.
   They spotted one of their buddies (NPC) in the corner of the bar.  When they went over to him, he keeled over dead.  And everyone in the bar thought it was one of the PC's fault.  He tried to clear himself but ended up making himself look more guilty.  Another PC successfully pretended to apprehend him and closed down the bar for the day.
   The PCs weren't as proactive with the plot as I hoped and only really MOV'ed very small scenes.  I made up a pseudo-vampire/ "Brotherhood of the Wolf"-ish plot.

One interesting campaign idea:
   Characters who take absinthe and have adventures in their imagination!

[James V. West]

Kenway

Cool. I think giving out the motivational dice was a nice way to, well, motivate.

Questions:

1) Do you think that the players really grasped the idea of Director Stance narration in the end? Do you feel they might still be a little unclear about it?

2) Did the players understand that Traits could truly be anything, or were their Trats mainly ability/skill type stuff?

[Kenway]

>Traits
   Yeah, they were mostly abilities/skills.
   I had each player leave 1-2 Traits undefined (still paid for with Pool Dice) so we could tie the characters closer to the setting as it became better defined during the game session.  We never got around to it though.
   The PCs quickly figured out that gambling 6+ Dice at a time basically guaranteed success.  We kinda got into a %100 success rut there.  To spice things up, inspired by the Inspectres rules, I eventually said that a "success" was overall good, but had to have a couple twists/bad stuff happen indirectly that the rest of the players could help narrate.
   This led to one funny scene: in the countryside, a PC listened for birds and succeeded, and the twist was that the flock of birds decided to attack the party.
   I guess we may try an Antipool variation.

>Director stance
   Overall, I think the main "problem" was that the players expected me (the GM) to have a specific preplanned plot in mind.
   Next game session, instead of GM'ing, I'll try being a player and lead by example.