Universalis - A twisted farce.

[Trevis Martin]

Yesterday, two of our group were extraordinarily late for our game due to a miscommunication about an event that they had.  We were waiting to play our game of Donjon.  When it got to the point where we thought they probably weren't coming, we broke out Universalis.

I was the only one who had read the book and did my best to explain it as we went along. In the tenet phase every one was...um, tenative at first.  I proposed the up to 25 coin refresh to start things off.  We started by establishing Verne style victorian science fiction, Set in the rings of saturn, comedic tone, had to end with Earth's moon exploding.  Space pirates.  Gaseous aliens warring with human colonists.  An illicit love affair between one of the aliens and the pirate king's daughter.

Our two errant players showed up and we went ahead and delt them in (though I think now we should have, perhaps, given them less coins. B/c they had enourmous ecenomic impact on the end of the tenet phase, and they were both interested int eh stroy being ridiculous)  Anyway the challenges started happening during setup once a transvestite pirate capitain who had a sentient cockroach advisor had been defined.  Even so the game got pretty silly.  (At one point I laughed so hard I got dizzy.)  Still the experience did show why challenging was important.  

We went through about two scenes and about three challenges.  Two of the challenges happened simultaneously and we weren't sure what to do.   There was a conflict between a pirate and the pirate princess, simultaneouly there was a conflict between a cabin boy and the princesses alien lover in the same scene.  Both the princess and the lover were controlled by one player and the conflicting ones were owned by two other players.  We decided to resolve each conflict seperately and the second conflict ended up being moot after the resoution of the first.  We poughed ahead (amidst lots of giggles).

The second major conflict was a colony sherrif riding through a battle between steam powered war machines and the saturn aliens.  He was suddenly opposed by a sentient guard wall.  This challenge escalated out of control (I believe it was 15 or 16 dice I ended up rolling for the sherrif.)  I ended up getting a bunch o coins out of it.  

A question that came up for me in both challenges was when a challenge is resolved it is noted that the winner narrates using victory coins and then the looser narrates.  I was wondering about interruption in this case.  The rules state you can be interrupted at any time except during framing (incuding during a conflict?)  I guess I don't understand the distinction on the winner's coins.  The rules state that the winner can spend some on narration (though not a required amount) and keep the rest if they choose, but if they are interrupted is the narration of the conflict's resolution still limited to the winning coins?  I guess?

I can say that I personally would have preferred a game that was less silly than this one came to be (but now I know to challenge and to set stuff early.)  Several players were fairly agressive about pushing their story agenda and I definately got the sense of intense Gamist behavior.

Even so, it was very much fun and everyone agreed that they would like play it again, even to continue the story we had going.  

Thanks guys, for a great game.

regards,

Trevis

(edit:  As a side note, we deliberately had a tenet established that there was one Monty Python reference allowed  per scene.  Anything beyond that would be fined)

[Bob McNamee]

I personally wouldn't allow anyone to Interrupt the spending of winner and loser Coins from a Complication resolution... the Scene can't continue until after the Complication is resolved.

But thats just me... I'd Challenge the heck out of any Interruption.

[Valamir]

Hey Trevis, glad to hear you had fun with the game.

In my experience most games that hand over the reigns of control to players tend towards the silly initially.  I expect this is because in exercizing such power for the first time players can be nervous about doing it "right" or looking foolish if they get overly dramatic, so the best protection against this is to be silly.  In a traditional RPG if you get all emotional or melodramatic or what not, you have the defense of "I was just playing my character and reacting to what the GM gave me".  In a game like Uni you have no such defense, so if you're narrating a heartfelt love scene...you're actually doing it on your own...which can be somewhat intimidating depending on the group.

Generally after a couple of games, the tone starts to level out to whatever is natural for a given group.  One thing you can do with tenets is to set parameters for sillyness which make it easier (cheaper) to challenge when people cross the line.


I will not that in your description above you use Challenges in places where I think you mean Complications.  Challenges are when you spend Coins to outvote someone doing something you don't like.  Complications are when dice get rolled.

As for your question, Bob's right.  There is no interruption during the narration of a Complication.  Spending the bonus Coins is outside of the normal turn order.  Normal turn order goes clockwise around the table, Complication narration goes from winners to losers in order of most bonus coins.  Therefor the normal interruption rules don't apply.  If that isn't clear in the rules, I should have made it more so.

The benefit to winning the Complication, is that you get to go first and thus establish Facts about the resolution of the situation which the loser is then constrained by when its his turn to narrate.


Allowing people to join mid game like that is actually one of the strengths of Uni.  I would recommend starting them with a number of Coins equal to the average of the other players or a median amount to avoid math.  I personally would have lobbied for starting them with an amount equal to the lowest player, but that's just the way I am ;-)

Please let us know how your next game works out.

[Trevis Martin]

Ralph, Bob, thanks for you comments.

I was indeed referring to complications rather than challenges.  I just checked the complication section of my book and though it does say that committed components cannot be taken over, it does not note either in the Complication section or the Turn structure chapter whether interruptions are permitted.  If interruptions are not permitted once a complication is engaged then you would not have the multi-complication problem that arose in that instance because the player introduced the second complication by interrupting the process of the first.   That does clear that up.

Another glitch we ran into was during tenet phase was a component was created of 'sentient cockroach,' and another component was created of 'Pirate King's daughter' (which gained some traits on subsequent turns)  Later in the tenant phase the same player who had introduced the sentient cockroach (and put some traits into it on subsequent terms) proposed a tenant that the cockroach WAS the Pirate king's daughter.  We weren't sure what to do here.  The players opposed to the idea were the ones who had started the game and we were considerably low on coins at that point, and we had given the other two full coin loads.   The argument was raised that since both components were established seperately that they could not be, at this point, combined.   There was no tenant to the effect that the pirates were human or not yet.

I mention the coin thing, only because those of us low on coins were (as I interpret) considerably annoyed by this proposal.  I think there was a logical case to make  that the components were seperate but I can't ignore my bias stemming from the situation.  We ended up voting as social contract.  All players except the one who proposed the combination agreed with the idea that the components could not be combined.

And lastly I will note that in my next game of Uni I will take notes on index cards because it seems they would be easier to organize into groups.

Any thoughts there?

regards

Trevis

[Bob McNamee]

You resolved the Cockroach - Pirate daughter Challenge in the negotiation phase of Challenge resolution. Great!

Of course, if the other guy really wanted to push it, and take the Challenge into bidding...he might have gotten his way.

Which doesn't do any good, if all the rest of you go...game over..

[Mike Holmes]

Allowing interruptions in the course of narration of Complication outcome isn't neccessarily a bad thing. It does make things more twisted potentially, but it's not impossible. Consider that if someone interrupts that you can interrupt right back. In essence, the "losing" player is just cancelling out some of each player's winnings. Something that the winning player can do explicitly. I don't think that's a bad thing neccessarily.

The question of starting complications during complication resolution is related to the arguments about doing nested complications. Originally, in early playtest versions, this was allowed implicitly. That is, in the middle of a Complication you could start another to handle some detail. For example, if we're fighting, I could introduce a complication about characters trying to get through a door to help me. If I win that complication, then I can use the Coins generated by the result to help with the original complication.

Doing this, you have to use a LIFO stacking method. That is, Last In, First Out. You resolve the most recently declared complication, and then go back to the next most recently declared when that's done. Meaning that you have to hold entire die pools in suspense while the "sub-complication" is completed. The reason we decided to take this out of the regular rules is that it's very complex in play to keep track of this, and not at all intuitive in play.

That said, I encourage all practiced players to Gimmick in the possiblity of nested complications once they really know what they're doing. Often entire sessions end up being one very long complication with many different nesting drill downs for detail. It's intense in it's own way.

In that case, then it becomes evident that one can call for a Complication during their narration of success or failure (and in fact, it's not banned by the normal rules, IIRC). All you have to do is to remember to come back to the original players narrations after you finish with the new complication. For ease, some groups prefer just to say that a successful interruption of the normal process simply results in that cycle being broken and a new one established. Much like Interruptions do with the normal round the table cycle of play. Just make this clear in any Gimmicks that you do include (or in interperetations of the rulebook that come out that way).

Mike