[Universalis] And the war raged on...

[Christopher Weeks]

Four of us from IndieMN (Steve, Larry, Shane and I) met yesterday and played Uni.  We were an hour late getting started and I explained the rules from the two-page handout on the Ramshead site.  With a few hiccups in my explanation, everyone grokked the rules pretty quickly, I think.  

We played through tenet phase and four scenes in four hours.  This seemed really slow to me, compared to past experiences.  There was a tremendous about of negotiating and pseudo-Challenge so that everyone was on the same page.  We entered the first scene with nine tenets and three more were created during play.  Here they are:

a)because we were short on tokens (or thought so at first, we only start with 20)
1) The game takes place during the Vietnam war.
2) We'll use a multi-time story line. *
3) In 2005, the war rages on (and on and on and on...).
4) Scenes set in 1968 or 2005 will both count as 'present.'
5) Nixon is still president.
6) Game will follow a CIA agent on permanent(?) assignment to Vietnam.
7) Something dark turned up in the jungle, reanimating fallen soldiers.
8) This 'reanimation' is true life, not some kind of zombie.
9) Protagonists transform from 'everymen' to persons of power because of actions taken that they have come to regret.
<game start>
10) Reanimation ritual details will not be narrated.
11) Traits can be marked "(future)" and only apply to the '05 timeframe.
12) Vital essence can be extracted from the risen

I don't know about you, but I dig this.  And I got the idea that the other players also thought that we'd created a pretty cool setting.  Sadly, I don't think any of them want to play Uni again.  After tenets -- even after working out the details of narrating the first scene, things went slow and the other players kept noting that they like the way Capes resolves conflict better.  Unfortunately I don't think I agree, but we're going to give Capes some more thorough stretch-testing.

Scene 1
A squad of American soldiers is ambushed and shot up.  The three unwounded drag/carry the one dead and one badly shot up through the jungle and stumble on a Secluded Village populated by a Unique Ancient Ethnic Group who are Xenophobic and know a Ritual Of Ressurection.  Even though they're xenophobic, these Soldiers Are First White People to be seen.  (Later, the sad little village was Firebombed In '78.)  So the dead soldiers are locked (locked?) in one hut and the living ones in another.

At this point, three of the soldiers were just color.  Steve had detailed Alex Wells and John Truman -- only the ones who were badly wounded.  Kinda cool!  He also created the soldier master component.  So I brought in one of the living soldiers, Melvin Huss to wake screaming from a nightmare as Alex woke up from being dead.

I passed to Steve who had nothing and it went around the table like that.  I thought it was kind of weird, but after a little while, I realized that they were right.  The scene ended like that.

Scene 2
Our second scene was set in 2005.  the three soldiers who were named in the scene before were given one or more future-only traits (Washington Office, Senator, Friend in CIA does my security, President of the Association for Life, etc.).  It was fun seeing how we were going to make them movers and shakers.  It's set in John's office and there are pieces of CNN talking about the war in the background.  John and Melvin make a mysterious call to Wells saying that "it's starting!"  Wells isn't ready and complains about budget, etc.  Steve introduces the Association For Life as a component and taking control of Huss instructs Senator Truman "don't let Wells weasel out, this is the most important thing since the crucifixion."

At this point we haven't yet had a Complication, so I introduce one.  The President's Office has tried to surveil the senator's.  It turns out that Truman has better security due to a really sucky roll.  :-)

Scene 3
I frame this back in the village, some time after our first scene, but not too long.  Alex, having woken up, raises a ruckus (where I pass it to Steve) and is visited by the creepy shaman.  The shaman smiles at him, goes back to his hut and prepares for canibalistic rites.  (Now it's Larry's turn and he details that the shaman wears white and a funny hat and he introduces tenet 11 then passes.  So Shane goes on with) The headman comes to the shaman and tells him he can't have the whiteman.  He's brought guards and there's a Complication.  Shane (and I) win.  As a result: the headman prophesied the destruction of the village if the shaman eats the foreigners, the villagers are whispering that the whites are gods, and the headman abandons the village to become a hermit in the hills.  In the other hut, Huss explains his dream and says "the serpent came to me."  (It's back to me so I just narrate that) Alex releases the others into the village and that John woke up.

Scene 4
(I have almost no notes on this.)
It's 1979 (paid for as future -- I think that all time between '68 and '05 are future for this game) and Mike Johnson (one of the previously color soldiers) unloads a crate with his dead wife from a ship in a Vietnam port.  He and Gabe and some native guides are taking her to the sight of that village so that he can bring her back to life.

They got to the spot of the village to find that it was firebombed the year before.  As they're milling about the spot, they were attacked and had to run off.  Johnson falls, shot dead and the others have to run off, leaving the dead Mr. and Mrs Johnson.  The old shaman came and dragged the bodies off to his stronghold in the hills where he taunts the newly risen Mike.  There is a Complication to get free and whack the creepy old shaman, and despite my having the upper hand (on the side of the shaman) Mike got free, scuffled for a bit, fell onto the shaman -- pushing him down on an ancient altar and stabing him in the neck.  The shaman's blood pooled in a depression and was carried down the mountain in four tiny little blood rivulet-tracks that were made in ancient times to enable the fulfillment of some prophecy.  

To orchestrate the end of that scene, we went back and forth, sharing narrative power some.  We knew that we wanted the scene to cause the spread of the reanimation which was previously a local phenomenon.  I'm wondering now if we didn't collaborate too much.  I think that Uni works better if you play your cards a little closer to your vest, but I'm not at sure if that's true.

Anway, I hope that the other three will post about their impressions since the game wasn't really a big hit.  Hopefully they'll have ruminated on why.

[Grover]

First impressions:
I really like world building
I'm not so fond of how narration works
I'm really not fond of conflicts

If I were to play more, I think I might get a better handle on what to do with narration and conflicts.  In the first scene, I spent coins to establish things that, in retrospect, I didn't really care about, and left things undefined that I did care about.  In the third scene, I spent a bunch of coins to set up a conflict, which I then failed to trigger.

I think the thing that threw us is that Uni turns happen over a longer time-scale than Capes.  In Capes, turns go by quickly, and rarely involve a significant change to the SIS, and there's plenty of opportunity in the game to push against contributions you don't like.  In Uni, turns do involve significant changes to the SIS, and the only mechanic to fight against something you don't like is the challenge mechanic, which we used extensively.  (Assuming here that Capes isn't being played disfunctionally, and people aren't abusing free narration)

I'd be up for trying it again - I think our previous experience with Capes gave us expectations which made us use the system in a way that didn't really work (or me at least :).  

Steve

[Larry L.]

"We were running an hour late" translates to "Larry overslept."

It's worth pointing out that Scene One took much longer to play than the write-up would suggest. Also, Tenet 11 was your addition, Chris.

I think perhaps we were being too cooperative, making sure our additions jived with the acceptance of the others. There were a number of times when I was all ready to bust out with a Complication, but I actually only had a problem with one little detail in someone's narration so we just negotiated a settlement instead.

I'm interested in playing Uni again, but not until I've had a chance to read the rulebook. I'm not quite at a level of comfort with the "strategy" of the game. It was pretty much, "Here's what I want to narrate... how do I use the system to accomplish that, Chris?"

It was fun trying to develop the secret mystery without exposing a pat explaination for it. The idea was that Soviet scientists, mystery cults, whatnot would all claim to have figured out the secret of the risen. I think our story was getting a little too epic to resolve in three hours.

I'm not sure if setting a dual 1975/2005 "present" was a good idea, mechanically, since there was some confusion over what to consider scenes in the intervening years.

I don't think you mention we played at the FLGS. I don't think this had any impact on the gameplay, but it's probably worth noting. I was strongly tempted to harrangue the miniatures-painting grognards for historical facts about Vietnam.

[Christopher Weeks]

Yeah...tenet 11 was mine...maybe it was 10 that you introduced at the same time?

Another way that the venue might matter is that there were times when the mini-painters (who reserve that space once per month) were really, really loud.  I can't think of any pointed adverse affects, but it was annoying.

Steve's comment about the expectations of Uni based on Capes is really interesting.  I was fully experienced with Uni before playing Capes and the rest of you played Capes several times before playing Uni.  I wonder if that has anything to do with my seeming difficulty taking full advantage of the Capes tactics.

[Sydney Freedberg]

As a Capes player who's dying to try Universalis, I am really eager to hear more thoughts of folks from this group on just how the two are different -- as crystalized in examples of Actual Play, of course.

[Grover]

Well, here's my example - I bid to get the opening scene, introduced a couple of soldiers and an ambush, which I only loosely specified.  My intentions at that time were:
1) Several of the soldiers would be wounded/die
2) The Viet Cong ambush was a small force with only 1 or 2 people
3) The squad would pull back, leaving the obviously dead behind them
4) Everyone killed in the ambush would rise again
But I didn't establish all that.  In retrospect, I think that my Capes reflexes were saying 'ok - I've put an Event: Ambush conflict out there, now I need to let everyone else have a turn before I resolve it'.  Now that I have more familiarity with the Uni rules, I think I wouldn't have defined the soldiers individually at all (because I didn't really care about who they were exactly) which is something that I spent 9 coins doing.  I could have used those 9 coins to much better effect nailing down the things I wanted to see established, which I didn't do, because I had this Capes reflex which was saying you can't establish a conflict and resolve it all at once.

Steve

[Larry L.]

I'm coming around to the opinion that Capes vs. Universalis is an apples-to-oranges comparison. Sure, they're both GM-less, but they seem to emphasize different play agendas. Uni is about crafting a story; it treats entries into the SIS with a kind of sacredness. Capes is more Step On Up free-for-all. I'll see how this assessment holds up as I get a better handle on Uni.

I can't imagine this narrative could have emerged from any other system. The story seemed to carry a lot of weight, where it could have easily turned into cheesy zombie smackdown. On the down side, I found it hard to invest in any particular character.

[Valamir]

If I were to play more, I think I might get a better handle on what to do with narration and conflicts.  In the first scene, I spent coins to establish things that, in retrospect, I didn't really care about, and left things undefined that I did care about.  In the third scene, I spent a bunch of coins to set up a conflict, which I then failed to trigger.

Yup.  That's a key thing to note.  

As a player in Uni, I expect to take several different postures during a game.  Call them Commentator, Complicator, and Driver.  I play the Commentator when I don't have a clear sense of direction of where I want the story to go, or when someone else does and I want to play off of where they're taking it.  As Commentator I add details, spruce things up, kibbitz about what would be cool, add some colorful characters, and begin accumulating tools.

Tools are things that can be used in the future to poke and prod at the story.  They could be characters, traits, other events.  Things that basically represent me, little by little, attaching strings to things that can be tugged on later.  A feature of Uni is to recognize that you don't OWN those tools, they are all communal property, so a key to play when creating them is to create them in such a way that no matter what player winds up using them, they get used largely (though rarely entirely) to prod things in the direction you want.

Complicator is another posture I'll use.  In Uni you can narrate anything you want right up through resolving the whole climax of the story if you have enough Coins.  As Complicator I make sure that no one person gets to do things that easily.  This is generally a plus for everyone because usually the narrator doesn't want things that easily either.  As Larry noted being too cooperative can be a mistake.  Often times a player will set up group A in opposition to group B BECAUSE they want someone to take Control of group B and make a Complication out of it.  "Generously" allowing them to simply narrate the conflict out doesn't do anyone any good.  

My goal as Complicator is to make sure there is a good opportunity for a Complication in very nearly every scene.  This is where putting on your GM hat helps alot.  As GMs we are all used to thinking in terms of "ok, the PCs are doing X...how will each of my NPCs react to that...will they help, will they oppose, etc. etc."  In Uni the idea is to see what the scene framer is setting up for the scene and then start to think along those same lines.  Given what the framer is doing...what would the other characters in the story be doing about it...what would as-yet-undefined characters be doing about it.  Who would be interested in seeing the characters the framing player is Controling fail at whatever they are doing.  If there are some existing characters bring them in...or create new ones.  

Look for opportunities to create Complications out of things.  Grover notes that the Challenge mechanic is the only way to fight against something you don't like.  Actually, I would argue that the Complication mechanic is even better.  Its the scalpel, Challenge is the axe.  You can do an awful lot of shaping of the story by what and when you decide to Complicate and how you spend the Coins.

Also creating Complications generates Coins for the participants.  The economy of a Complication is such that if you're inventing the Complication out of whole cloth you'll break even if you lose (1 Coin buys 1 die earns 1 Coin) or do only slightly better if you win (1 Coin buys 1 die earns 1.5 Coins on average).  This is where the idea of Tools come in and how you can be the one pulling the strings, even when you're not in Control.  See the way to make Complications into a big money maker is to NOT spend any Coins (or not many) on the Complication, but get the dice for free (1 Trait gives 1 die earns 1 or 1.5 Coins).  So if I want to nudge the story one way...I can create a few Traits around that.  Then...no matter who winds up in Control of those Components, when a Complication starts they're going to draw on those Traits for the free dice...thereby moving the story in the direction I wanted (largely) for me.


And finally the posture I'll take is Driver.  In almost every game I've played there comes a time when I'll just click and say "whoa...I KNOW how this story needs to go.  THIS will be SOOOO cool".  It might just be part of a scene or it might be the ultimate climax of the story...but at that point...I jump into the Driver seat and start really spending Coins to get things to where I want them.  If I played Commentor right I've strewn a bunch of Tools around to leverage, and hopefully other players playing Commentator have done the same so I can grab a handful of existing strings in my hand (visions of puppet master) and start making them dance.  If I played Complicator right I've got a nice stock pile of Coins ready and waiting for me to burn them.  Stomp on the accelerator, spend the Coins like they're going out of style, and get that "thing", whatever it was, that I really wanted.

Ideally, every player takes turns swapping in and out of these postures all the time.  Often it will be the Scene Framer who has jumped into the Driver's seat (because framing a scene is REALLY powerful that way), and some other player who (maybe being short of Coins due to a recent stint as Driver themselves) will play Complicator.  The rest will play Commentator for the scene.  Sometimes halfway through a scene a Commentator will get an idea for a Complication or things will Click and they'll Interrupt and start Driving.



The point of this, somewhat excessively long expounding, is to just note that you don't always have to enter every turn loaded for bear.  Its perfectly fine to add a couple of Traits or Create a secondary character and pass.  Its perfectly fine to spend some time reacting to what others are doing by throwing Complications at them.  Complications are designed to be profitable for all sides, so there is no game mechanics disincentive to them.  And its perfectly fine to take charge for a time (for as long as you have the Coins to do it) and really bring your own vision to what's going on.  If you can do a good enough job of that, you'll find another player or two grooving to the same idea and spread the cost around.  So a) you don't need to play Driver ALL the time, and b) you don't need to be accomodating to other's Driving ALL the time.  Shift it up.



As a final note on the Challenges.  There is no rule that says you HAVE to negotiate.  ESPECIALLY if you think the scenes are going very slow because everybody is getting their 2 cents in on everybody elses turn.

Simply say "No, bid or be quiet".  The intent of the the Bidding rule is to say "if you're not willing to back up your position with Coin, then your objection isn't important enough to waste time on".  The intent of the Negotiation rule is to say "sometimes people just have a really great idea they want to share and if the acting player says "wow, that is a neat way to go" then you can get the idea across without going to bidding.

Don't let your turn degenerate into design by committee.  Its your turn.  You are in charge.  If you like their ideas, use 'em.  If not, move on.  If they REALLY want to they can go to Challenge and throw a Coin down, or they can Interrupt and thow a Coin down.  NEVER let them bully you into Negotiating longer than you'd like.  If you're outgunned by consensus that's one thing.  But if its just Mr Peanut Gallery guy trying to take your turn for you...make him pay to play.  Interuptions and Challenges are intentionally inefficient ways to spend Coins.  Players that do that too much will soon find themselves at a relative disadvantage.  BETTER, (and a net Coin generator) is for them to Complicate things...which is how the game works best.


Hopefully that was helpful

[Mike Holmes]

What Ralph said.

But also note that the session doesn't sound like a complete disaster. Like any game it might just take some adjusting to. In fact, you've had less adjusting to do than most. The Capes play probably helped in some ways, and made it more difficult in others.

The point is that hopefully you'll try it again. Even if Ralph hadn't made his comments, I'm pretty sure from what I'm hearing from the players that the second session would be much better.

Mike

[Sydney Freedberg]

creating Complications generates Coins for the participants.........Complications are designed to be profitable for all sides...... Interuptions and Challenges are intentionally inefficient ways to spend Coins.  Players that do that too much will soon find themselves at a relative disadvantage.  BETTER, (and a net Coin generator) is for them to Complicate things...which is how the game works best.

This is the brilliant bit I really want to try out in play. It serves the same purposes as "Inspirations if I win, Story Tokens if I win" in Capes but in a very different way.

I spent coins to establish things that, in retrospect, I didn't really care about, and left things undefined that I did care about.

Likewise, Capes and Universalis have different ways of treating narrative color: What you need to "pay for" (with Coins in Universalis and by winning Conflicts in Capes) and what you can just narrate for free, at the risk somebody else will just narrate it right back out, is a crucial balance in each game, but I suspect somebody versed in one will have to unlearn some habits to do well at the other.

[Valamir]

Yeah.  Capes starts from a largely similar foundation of how to structure a game.  But they have very different central conceits that leads to very different play.

In terms of similiarity of actual events around the table I'd say PTA feels alot closer to Uni play than Capes does.

[Larry L.]

What Ralph talks about as the "Driver" mode, yeah, I think I experienced that in the last scene. It suddenly hit me, that's how everything becomes FUBAR. And I won a Complication with Chris to best the shaman, netting 12 coins, most of which were spent on offing what had become a 9-point character. (Homicide is expensive in Uni!) And then he totally grooved on that, coming up with the cool details about the network of blood channels and all that.

[Trevis Martin]

most of which were spent on offing what had become a 9-point character. (Homicide is expensive in Uni!)

Or you can just be sneaky and add the trait 'Dead.'  Sure he might be resurrected, or you might be leaving a string for that character to have influence down the road, but its less expensive then paying them out.

Trevis

[TonyLB]

That's what happened to Obi-Wan, isn't it?

[Grover]

In our game, adding the trait dead would have been rather less effective than it usually would, as one of the tenets was that people come back from the dead :)

Steve