[Mountain Witch] IRC playtest, 1st scene

[timfire]

For the last month or so I've been trying to run a playtest of the Mountain Witch over IRC with the indie-netgaming folks. Scheduling keeps being an issue, so sessions have been rather sporadic.

I was originally suppose to have more players, but I ended with only two players besides myself. Though I believe you really need more players to do the Trust system justice, I didn't want to have to cancel the game, so I proceeded anyway.

We've had 3 full, though short (1.5-2 hr), sessions so far. The first session was character creation. That went well.

The first character was Shin Noroka, a snake zodiac, with the abilities of empathy, break bones, and heal bones.
The second character was Oto Agemako, a rat zodiac, with the abilities of perfect memory, the ability to warm himself and start small flames, and a sword whose reflection shows things for what they ruly are (meaning when you look at the reflection on the sword).

Two points of interest here is first that the players wanted their Fates randomly assigned to them. So far I've always given players the option of choosing their Fate, but so far everyone has wanted them randomly assigned. I wonder if this is just because the game is new, I wonder if players would be more apt to choose their Fate the second time around?

Second, the players wanted to choose their zodiacs. That was a first for me. Both of them seemed to choose their zodiacs based on the personality descriptions, as far as I could tell the zodiac relationships weren't a factor. (Their zodiacs ended up being neutral towards each other.)

The second session we played the first scene. The characters had to pass through a rocky valley on their way towards the fortress. They encountered and fought a couple of tengu. This session was mostly the players feeling out the system.  The players aided each other... once I think. One of the players also bought narration rights to a conflict once, which ended up causing a bit of controversy. A tengu was trying to escape, and Oto's player failed the roll. Shin's player bought the narration rights.

At this point, I made an impromtu ruling that a player who has bought narration rights could change the intent of the characters involved in the conflict. Shin's player decided to change things so that the tengu was really leading Oto into a trap, which snared Oto.

See, I had been playing with a fairly strict interpretion of character intent, which didn't leave much wiggle room for narrating players. Because of this, I thought the narration option was kinda weak, so I wanted to see how things worked with the new ruling.

This ended up bothering Oto's player, partly because he didn't like how his character got trapped, but he also thought that narration in general was too tight, he thought there should be more wiggle room in narration. He thought narrating players shouldn't be able to change intent, but that there should be more wiggle room in general.

That was mostly it. There was also some discussion about how rules worked, which should be expected.

The third session we played half-way through the second scene, but I'll save discussing that until after we finish the scene.