The Reformation in Surt

[Lee Short]

Thinking about http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=12545">The Azeel Campaign and some others like it that I've run, brought to mind the following campaign.  I picked this example because I can very vividly remember the inspiration for it, and how the setup went.  

I had just watched the movie Elizabeth and said to myself "wouldn't it be cool to run a game set in a similar situation?"  My vision included lots of hairy intrigue, religious strife, moral dilemmas, political negotiation, etc.  I thought to myself "so many cool places for this game to go; I just have to try it."  Despite my general gaming philosophy of "coolness is found in unexpected places," I often get motivated to start games by a vision of where they might go.  But I'm usually pretty cool with wherever they end up going, and very reluctant to step out of Internal Causality mode to enforce my original vision.  I will do that if I have to some of the time; some of the time it would break the game for me and I'd rather just quit.  OTOH, sometimes I will start a game without the expectation of strict Internal Causality, and stepping out is less of a problem then.  Go figure.  

Back to The Inquisition.  I rounded up a group of 5 players.  I briefed them on the background.  The character instructions I gave them were this:  the party needed to be tied together somehow, they all needed to be on the same side of the religious divide, they all needed to be of appropriate social status that they would be seen as minor players in the religious strife (and attendant civil wars).  At this point the Situation was still quite vague; I would wait until the PCs were finished before filling it in any further.  

The PCs they decided on were:
 -- one player played a travelling merchant who was a mage
 -- one player played a freelance bodyguard, quite competent
 -- one player played a priestess
 -- two players decided to play nobles displaced by civil wars, currently working as mercenaries.  They were from neighboring border regions of the same country.  

We decided that the best way to tie the party together was the travelling merchant, and we decided that everyone had known him for at least few years, and everyone but the priestess had worked for him for varying lengths of time.  As the characters were generated, most of the players didn't discuss their ethics & outlooks much, either with the other players or with me.  But these items certainly surfaced during play.  

That's where everything stood when I began to fill in details of Situation.  I decided that a powerful noble patron of the priestess' monastery needed a politically important package delivered.  He contracted with the travelling merchant to have the merchant deliver it to a contact.  This was arranged for a big trade fair held in a different country (the closest thing to a neutral country in the present situation).  However, this meeting was not to be pulled off successfully -- the contact was being trailed by assassins, who were instructed to kill both the contact and whoever he was meeting (as soon as he attempted to meet someone).  Additionally, while at the trade fair, a local merchant who was known to all of the PCs would be assassinated.  Here the Floating Clue technique would be used to make sure that the PCs were the first to arrive at the scene, and give them some clues about who had done it and why.  Finally, one of the dispossessed nobles would be approached by his mortal enemy -- a member of the family who took his family's land in the civil war.  This opponent was to play nice and pretend to make up, in an attempt to lure the PC and his (elder) brothers into an ambush.  

I picked these plots out based on what I thought would make for interesting political challenges, largely.    Another important criterion was that they not be dead ends, plotwise -- that they have the potential to lead to further adventures, if the PCs chose to pursue them.  That's very important to successfully running a game in my style.   I also wanted them to be true to the world and to engage the characters (and players?) on an emotional level, and to cater to what I knew of the players' preferences.  For example, of the two players with dispossessed nobles, I knew that one of them dug political negotiation and the other just hated it.  So I gave one of them a situation just ripe for political negotiation, and not the other.  

Actual play was resolved much as in The Azeel Campaign.  Internal Cause was notably broken for the Floating Clue about the friendly merchant's murder.   From what I could tell, the players focused on the challenge aspects of the game.  Exactly why, I couldn't say with any confidence.  Competition with the other players was only in evidence from one of the players.  Social and self-esteem for a job well done certainly was for most or all of them.  Was that the whole of their reward for engaging the challenge?  I couldn't say, and I don't think that the answer would be the same from player to player.  Nonetheless, I think the fact that they were all engaged with the challenge of the situation made the game very coherent.  

Now, the game was veering towards addressing some Premises when it fell apart -- it just never quite got there.  

How does this fit into GNS?

FWIW, there were no formal mechanics for politics.  It was all "what Lee thinks would happen here."    

Postscript:  The game fell apart because the ties holding the party together proved too fragile.  For reasons I don't understand, the party split into 2 groups.  Then the travelling merchant character did some things that really pissed off his allies (to the point of hiring assassins), and he was killed.  At that point, there wasn't much in-character reason for the PCs to stay together.  I could have rigged something up, but it would have broken Internal Cause in a way that would have required continual "don't look too closely at that."  That would have broken the game for me.  So I just pulled the plug.  Looking back at the game, I could have probably fast-forwarded the game a year or so and come up with something that worked.  I kind of wish that I had, as I think the game had real promise.  In fact, just thinking about it makes me want to try it again when I get the time.

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

Lee, I have a suggestion: that play never falls apart because of the characters, or because of anything else imaginary and fictional.

As long as this thread is explicitly about GNS, maybe it would be good to review these terms which (with apologies to Marco, who hates'em) are associated with discussing play in CA terms.

Fun = we really like it, and if we stop it's because we like stopping it here

Coherence = shared-CA, maybe not 100% identical per person, but certainly characterizable at the group level and reinforced socially as such

[note: coherence includes the possibilities of hybrid-CAs and similar]

Now, I am not going to say that Coherence guarantees fun (e.g. someone might really hate to lose in certain Gamist contexts, hence Coherent play of this sort ain't fun for him), nor am I going to say that fun relies on Coherence on a 1:1 basis.

However, I definitely suggest that Coherence is very often central to having fun, and that losing Coherence offers a real chance for diminishing fun. Notice: "often" and "chance," both of which admit to exceptions.

So we cannot discuss "was it G, N, or S" for this game. It fell apart. Perhaps incoherence was involved ("lack of coherence"). If so, then we could talk about the different CA-priorities and how they weren't cohering (there I go again, using that word) into a real CA for everyone to glom onto and contribute to. But I dunno if that was really the case, because I wasn't there.

You suggest that play was very coherent because they all seemed to rise to the Challenge aspect and Step On Up ... but you're forgetting someone. You. Your interest in play seemed to have nothing to do with this. In fact, you were the one who killed it, right? You had to be the guy who kept making it all plausible (that they were together, that the Clue would be where they found it, etc), and that sounds kind of exhausting to me. Especially since Step On Up tends to require escalating Challenges.

Now, I'm not saying this is what actually happened. I wasn't there. But it does seem clear to me in your account that "coherence" wasn't happening when you get taken into account as a group member too.

Best,
Ron

[DannyK]

This brings up a really interesting subject for me, figuring out CA in mid-stream.  What if Lee were running that political campaign right now and suddenly got the GNS religion and wanted to determine the CA (or each person's CA)?  And if he determined that the game was, in fact, incoherent (everybody's got a different CA), is there anything he can do about it to increase coherence, or is he stuck running an incoherent (though possibly enjoyable) game?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Danny,

Coherence per se is not a goal of play. Fun is the goal of play.

Seems to me that a person involved in a fun game ought to be concerned with CA only if it seems, to him or her, that such a concern might be a way to have more fun.

Best,
Ron

[Lee Short]

Lee, I have a suggestion: that play never falls apart because of the characters, or because of anything else imaginary and fictional.

You're right.  I phrased it that way, because I was really intending that to be a lesson learned bit, largely aimed at those who play in a similar style.  

You suggest that play was very coherent because they all seemed to rise to the Challenge aspect and Step On Up ... but you're forgetting someone. You. Your interest in play seemed to have nothing to do with this. In fact, you were the one who killed it, right? You had to be the guy who kept making it all plausible (that they were together, that the Clue would be where they found it, etc), and that sounds kind of exhausting to me. Especially since Step On Up tends to require escalating Challenges.

Now, I'm not saying this is what actually happened. I wasn't there. But it does seem clear to me in your account that "coherence" wasn't happening when you get taken into account as a group member too.

First let me note that it wasn't an executive GM decision that picked out what the element of party cohesion would be.  That was a joint decision, though I think not all of the players were present when we decided that.  I neglected to ask the players for ideas about how to rebuild the PCs into a party; looking back, that's something I should have done.   The onus wasn't intended to be entirely on me; I just got flustered and forgot this.  

-------

I think this game was at least as coherent as The Azeel Campaign.  Actually, more so -- it seems to me that the game was largely front-loaded gamism.  One of my major goals in designing the campaign was to facilitate challenge for the players.  A key objective was to set up the game so that wherever the game went, it couldn't help but keep giving the players political challenges, all the while maintaining internal cause.   I was trying to set it up so that making it all plausible would not actually be work during the course of play.  That sounds like a tough design req, and it is.  But it can be done.  

Back to the game.  I was actually having a lot of fun with where the game was going.  The players' addressing the challenge was fun for me.  The character's death did not change that; it actually added to it, as a way of showing that the challenge was for real.  If it had been any other character, the game would have continued rolling along.  It seems to me it would have been gamist in the same kind of way that the second half of The Azeel Campaign was narrativist -- at least, to the degree that the players were all operating in the same mode.  

What ended up making the game un-fun for me was not that the players were addressing the challenge, not even that they were addressing challenge to the detriment of internal causality.  The problem was that internal causality had to be broken for social reasons -- the desire to have a single set of PCs loosely tied into a party, rather than have 2 completely different groups of PCs who never met up or communicated.  I didn't want to run 2-games-in-1, and I didn't want to break internal causality to merge the PCs back into a single party.  I don't see how this ties into GNS at all; it seems more Social Contract to me.

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

I get it! This is exactly why I liked Tunnels & Trolls so much - the explicitly gleeful approach to the necessary assumptions of dungeon crawl play. Of course everything you could possibly buy is in the nearby town! Of course you're a band of adventurers who risk life and limb together! And so on. Acknowledging the humor of it all took the heat off of me to consider how it could possibly make sense.

Anyway, much experience has shown me that this medium is not going to work well in discussing whether there was a Creative Agenda issue or not. All I was after is the notion that whatever busted up play, it wasn't about what the characters were or wanted in any "this caused it" sense. Combined with that is the notion that identify-this-CA discussion doesn't apply well to play which falls apart. So that's all good.

Here's what I'm most interested in:

... I think the game had real promise. In fact, just thinking about it makes me want to try it again when I get the time.

Can you tell more about the sorta basic role-playing information? What game system was being used, or with what mods? What kind of characters, and what's an especially neat thing they did, as you experienced it in play?

Best,
Ron

[Lee Short]

... I think the game had real promise. In fact, just thinking about it makes me want to try it again when I get the time.

Can you tell more about the sorta basic role-playing information? What game system was being used, or with what mods? What kind of characters, and what's an especially neat thing they did, as you experienced it in play?

I'll have to do this quickly, as I've got to get ready to leave on vacation tomorrow.  

The system was a homebrewish merging of FUDGE and Harnmaster...sort of picking the skill list & magic system from Harnmaster and using the FUDGE resolution system, with finer grain on the skills (ratings of 1-15 or so).   I'm thinking of using Burning Wheel this time.   But that's largely incidental to what I really liked about the game.  

In the big picture, what I liked about the game was the atmosphere...I'm a sucker for Renaissance intrigue.  It facilitated tense, high stakes stuff without relying on combat to make it so.  Not that I mind a bit of combat now and then, but I want other parts of the game to be tense too.  Things like deciding who to help, or which problem to tackle, or which opportunity to pursue -- these all became pressing questions, for which you could never have quite enough information.  That's really what made me jazzed on the game.    

The only good samples-of-play that I can think of will require more time than I've got right now.

[John Kim]

I was actually having a lot of fun with where the game was going.  The players' addressing the challenge was fun for me.  The character's death did not change that; it actually added to it, as a way of showing that the challenge was for real.  If it had been any other character, the game would have continued rolling along.  It seems to me it would have been gamist in the same kind of way that the second half of The Azeel Campaign was narrativist -- at least, to the degree that the players were all operating in the same mode.  

What ended up making the game un-fun for me was not that the players were addressing the challenge, not even that they were addressing challenge to the detriment of internal causality.  The problem was that internal causality had to be broken for social reasons -- the desire to have a single set of PCs loosely tied into a party, rather than have 2 completely different groups of PCs who never met up or communicated.  I didn't want to run 2-games-in-1, and I didn't want to break internal causality to merge the PCs back into a single party.  I don't see how this ties into GNS at all; it seems more Social Contract to me.

I have a few more questions.  (1) How long did the game go?  (2) How was it decided to fold the campaign, and how did the players react?  (3) How did you come up with adventures?  Would you say that the challenges were largely determined by you, with the players then determining how well they did against those tasks?  

The focus here is on centralization, as I'm pondering about how well 3D Model would work for this.  So I'm curious to look at centrality of authorship.