Influence of Soap on my actual playing in other games

[Ferry Bazelmans]

As requested by Paul (Czege):

>Have you noticed that playing Soap changes >the techniques a player uses in the more >traditional games you've been playing >recently?

Well, truth be told, I can't find anyone to play it with me. Most of my pals here in the low countries prefer a game of Ad&d to all this goshdarned newfangled weird crap I turn out. ]

But I think it is the other way round. Soap is an expression, or perhaps even a concentration, of my own style of play and most importantly, running a game.

For example, my 2nd Ed. group runs without plot. I give the players more control over the story and then add to what they propose with some elements of my own. While this is not the same as Soap, it is still remarkably similar in that it places trust and power in the hands of those that get hardly any in other more traditional games.

Perhaps it's because at one point I was telling about: "that time my character killed that giant", when in fact it was the GM letting me kill the giant, not me actually killing it. That irked me. The fact that in the end, whatever you do in a roleplaying game is because the GM/DM/whatever allows it. In Soap, everything is your own authoring.

As for the playing style of my fellow gamers...I think I've landed in a more interesting group nowadays. We started up an Arcanum group (small side-show game from WW) with only one person playing anything remotely geared towards actually surviving. That's promising compared to the normal übergoobers I know who try to make the biggest, baddest ex-military guy you can think of. No matter what the setting or genre, Lt. Jack Bullit is there. At least, he is in most of the games I've witnessed.

So I can't really give you any thoughts on other people's styles changing, but I would very much like to experiment with the game like Ron did, to gauge my players' strengths and weaknesses. Hmmmm...perhaps I'll just have to make them play the game. ]

[Ron Edwards]

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