Influence of Soap on my actual playing in other games

Hi there,

Last night we played another session of Orkworld, and having done two rounds of Soap with these players, I had an idea during play.

Background: all the PCs were in "Place A" and dealing with horrible/bad stuff there. That set of events was parallel to and had causal effects on "Place B," where some other orks from their household were dealing with other, related horrible/bad stuff.

Basically, I ran all of Place A in isolation, and that resulted in a specific impact on events at Place B. I then turned it over to the players to decide what happened at Place B, from start to finish (before, during, and after any effects from Place A).

The players were familiar with all the NPCs involved, and interestingly enough, the two Big Villains were (for the latter half of the scene) in Place B. They'd done the really hard heroic stuff at Place A, providing the "turning point" for crucial events, but all the story-fallout was over in Place B.

As I said, I turned it over to them entirely. This wasn't like the Theatrix option in which they were allowed to PLAY those other characters; this was utter and complete authorship in the third person. Each player offered some thoughts on "what happens" and we talked about it, suturing here and there, to arrive at what did happen. The PC orks, of course, learned about all this when they returned from Place A.

It went very well. It was especially fun because no human and no ork ever really quite understood the other group's take on the situation. (E.g. the orks never did grasp how painful it was for the humans to acknowledge the murder of a son by a father; to them, it was just bad old murder.) The players knew, now, exactly everyone's take on the situation - in jargon terms, the relationship map had been revealed. They were able to craft a climax that was very satisfying, as it incorporated the heroic efforts of their own characters at Place A and brought ALL of the scenario to a conclusion.

I liked it a lot. I'd be interested to know what my players thought of it (on reflection, I mean; they liked it at the time). And I'm pretty sure that Soap made it possible for us.

Best,
Ron