Concrete advise about framing scenes

[CPXB]

Universalis is currently my favorite game, but I clicked with it unusually well.  I've played a fair bit of it with a fair number of people -- doing tonight a one-shot with a couple of the people in my group -- and in discussing Universalis we talked about scenes.  In particular, I seemed to come up with scenes much faster and do much meatier scenes than the rest of the people in the group.  Or in virtually any group I've played the game with.  We asked ourselves why is happening.

I told them what I did.  I thought of an end point I wanted to work towards and I worked towards it.  They weren't doing that; almost none of the people I've played Universalis with did that.  They instead tried to think of "where the story would go from here" given what had already occurred rather than saying where they wanted the story to end up and justifying what happened previously to fit their view of the end.  After I told them that they started to do it and it was, like, WOW!  1000% change.  It was pretty dramatic.

Anyway, that's my concrete tip for helping people create scenes which, in my experience, is the hardest part for most people playing Universalis.  

Does anyone else have any other advise?

And, as an added note, I think it might be really useful for this information to find its way into subsequent printings of Universalis or on the website, at the bare minimum.  I mean, IME, the biggest reason more people don't really dig playing Universalis instead of just using it to figure out campaign settings or whatever is that they can't come up with scene ideas.

[Tony Irwin]

Hey Chris, what kind of effect did that have on the game? Did you find there were more challenges or more closely fought conflicts?

Tony

[CPXB]

Tony, well, thinking about it, the players were more confident and comfortable asserting themselves because they knew where they were going.  So, yeah, it did make the complications better.  Players would be, like, "Ah, ha!  I know what this squamous, spiny psuedo-orthopodal creature is!  It tries to take over your mind!"

It also made the players more likely to interrupt.  Which I thought was just great.  Hitherto, the players had sorta thought interrupting was disturbing someone else's play -- but they seemed to better understand that everyone's plan is sorta in, well, a kind of friendly competition.  No one's plans had precedence over anyone else's plans.

I hope that answers your question.  ;)

[Mike Holmes]

I think that's great advice in general. I think it falls under the general advice of being assertive, and trying to make the story what you want. Which we've tried to make a big deal out of - I think your simple statement really might have the potential to get people thinking in the right direction.

But, definitely, there is no "should" in terms of where the story should go, only where you want the story to go. If it takes visualizing an endpoint, then that's what it takes.

Thanks,
Mike

[Tony Irwin]

Tony, well, thinking about it, the players were more confident and comfortable asserting themselves because they knew where they were going.  So, yeah, it did make the complications better.  Players would be, like, "Ah, ha!  I know what this squamous, spiny psuedo-orthopodal creature is!  It tries to take over your mind!"

It also made the players more likely to interrupt.  Which I thought was just great.  Hitherto, the players had sorta thought interrupting was disturbing someone else's play -- but they seemed to better understand that everyone's plan is sorta in, well, a kind of friendly competition.  No one's plans had precedence over anyone else's plans.

I hope that answers your question.  ;)

Yeah it does! That all sounds really cool, maybe I should try emphasising that the next time I play. I've noticed also that people are less likely to get involved in a scene if the person framing it doesn't have strong ideas about where to take it. Like if you start off a scene and then kind of just leave it open for contributions, nobody is really interested. But if someone's pretty confident about what's happening next, then suddenly everyone else starts diving in. Strange isn't it, how a little bit of (I love the way you put it) friendly competition actually makes the game better. When I first started playing Universalis player vs player conflict made me really nervous.

[OnyxFlame]

I'd imagine that if you know where you're trying to go, you tend to put more concrete details in your scenes. This gives the other players more things to use and spark ideas off of, thus better participation.

Or at least so it seems to me without having recieved the book yet.

[CPXB]

Yeah it does! That all sounds really cool, maybe I should try emphasising that the next time I play. I've noticed also that people are less likely to get involved in a scene if the person framing it doesn't have strong ideas about where to take it. Like if you start off a scene and then kind of just leave it open for contributions, nobody is really interested. But if someone's pretty confident about what's happening next, then suddenly everyone else starts diving in. Strange isn't it, how a little bit of (I love the way you put it) friendly competition actually makes the game better. When I first started playing Universalis player vs player conflict made me really nervous.

You should give it a try, definitely!  Like Mike said, it helps to be assertive in Universalis.

But my group was doing that a lot, too -- starting a scene in the most technical of senses (framing it in time and introducing components and all) but then just ending their turn when something ought to have happened to give the scene direction.  In the games I've played it's actually been real common.  And while I'm generally pretty good at coming up with ideas, uh, I've only got so many coins, hehe.  In my earlier games (before I brought up that more people need to direct the play) I was often on the verge of broke while the other players would have 20 or 30 coins.  I just couldn't do all the work.  ;)  But it seems to be getting better, now, and it got real good when I started to encourage them to have an idea where the whole game was going.

I have also noticed that a lot of players get nervous with challenges and even complications, because of the percieved PvP nature of them.  The way I dealt with that is by bring up how the players felt when I challenged them, or put complications towards them -- did they think I was being a poopy-head for making a complication?  Universally they liked the complications, and understood the challenges.  I also would verbally encourage them to do challenges, or even suggest where they might put a challenge.  Also, it helps to remind them that the more challenges there are the more coins they get -- even the losers get coins.  Indeed, the losers of challenges, particularly close ones, often seem to get more coins out of it than the winners, because the winners tend to spend a fair number of them narrating their victories, hehe, and often do so in such a fashion that there's not much to narrate during the defeat without being cheesy.  ;)

[CPXB]

I'd imagine that if you know where you're trying to go, you tend to put more concrete details in your scenes. This gives the other players more things to use and spark ideas off of, thus better participation.

Or at least so it seems to me without having recieved the book yet.

Yes, it does.  

In the X-Files-ish game we played Sunday, when people had in mind where the game was going it was much easier to decide the details.  Thus, instead of the deaths being caused by some secret government program they were instead caused by squamous, pseudo-orthopodal parasites with neurotoxic stings that caused mind control to go on.  ;)

[Adrienne]

I just wanted to chime in as one of the players at the session described here, and also in the ongoing game.  Last night before the regular game resumed, we all took a few minutes to brainstorm about where we wanted the story to go.  Three of the four of us took notes on paper, keeping them secret.  

Once we actually got into play, the difference was really striking for me.  When one of the other players did something, I had an existing framework (albeit tentative) to fit it into, so it was much easier for me to take other people's events and components and run with them.  As part of my pre-session notes, I had jotted down several brief scene ideas.  Later in the evening, although things had diverged from my original plan, I took one of those ideas and inserted it as a mini-scene with some modification.  Without having the idea already, I doubt I'd have thought of it on the spot.  

Anyway, I'm not saying it'll work for everyone, or in every situation, but as one of the players who was previously having trouble, I have to say that sketching out a "master plan" (while remaining flexible) really worked for me this time.

[Mike Holmes]

Hmmm. Another really cool technique. Thanks, Adrienne!

Mike

[CPXB]

Yeah, the writing notes down worked really well for me, too.  It is a technique that I think would help almost any Universalis game.

[Arvid]

Thats pretty interesting - I've always viewed the Challenge mechanism as a kind of "Storytelling free market", guaranteeing that every contested piece of the story ends up costing exactly what its worth. This metaphor goes along nicely with the friendly competition presented in this thread - Perhaps the free market metaphor its a model that could benefit from developing further?

Just tossing thoughts here. :-)

[Valamir]

Actually, the entire game was designed around the idea of being a story free market.  "Coins" were used specifically for their monetary connotations and the engine was specifically designed to provide an opportunity to earn Coins and an opportunity to spend them.  Since (for obvious game play simplicity reasons) the price of all Traits is fixxed at 1 Coin, the Challenge Mechanic actually serves as the price fluctuation to moderate supply and demand.  It also tends to soak alot of excess Coins out of the game as people become willing to bid more on a Challenge if they are sitting on a large horde of Coins.

The economic model was more explicit in earlier draft versions of the game where we had things like "Hostile Take Overs" and "Royalties" and the like in the text.