[KueiCon] Falling Leaves

[Bankuei]

Hi folks,

First- Wow.  What a brutally simple and elegant game.

I got to play this with Albert & William, and our game quickly turned into something worthy of rivalling the brutal tragedy of Polaris.  It was very interesting to watch each of our play strategies in the game and how it all turned out.  Albert generally tried to load positive consequences to his samurai, I tried to spiral into doom, doom, doom, and William held a nice middle ground.  Though- in the end, I think all of our characters were fucked beyond belief at the end of it.

My samurai was a messenger for the Emperor, and had to choose between delivering the message on time, or saving some peasants from bandits.  I cut the begging wretch down right in front of me to continue on with my duty- even though Albert loaded that one of the consequences would be the souls of the peasants haunting me for eternity.  With that as our starting scene, it pretty much set the tone.  By the end of the game, I slew everyone I loved and died as the rebellion burned my ancestral home.

This is the kind of game that generates consequences like,

"The next time I draw my sword, it will betray me."
"She will love him, and not you."
"I rush the emperor, get impaled on spears, take off his head, and collapse upon the throne."

Like Ben's experience, we found that it was really important to write down some of the consequences, since they came quickly and heavy through each scene.  We also used the outside of the circle to hold that information.  If there's anything I think is really important- it's figuring out where to set stakes using consequences.  Pretty much we all slammed the big red button of DOOM right away, and I could see how you might want to start lighter and then work up to soul-damnation and destroying the empire.  I can't say there was a boring moment in it- it was definitely intense from beginning to end.

I hope to play a lot more of this!

Chris

[William Burke]

This was a spectacular game, both in terms of this particular play, and in terms of the game itself.

Like Ben's experience, we found that it was really important to write down some of the consequences, since they came quickly and heavy through each scene.  We also used the outside of the circle to hold that information.

I'll go further -- I think the outside of the circle on your sheet is the obvious best place to put the consequences, and that writing it somewhere else wouldn't be as good.

When I got home I ran a half hour of Falling Leaves for my girlfriend, who is not always into roleplaying games, but really liked this one.  (Well, she hates samurai, so we ran it with robots.  It works basically the same way, though.)  I think this is a great game precisely because of its bite-size quality -- it's easy to teach people (even if they don't play roleplaying games), it's not too long, and you can stop playing without too much pain, and pick it up later if you get the oppportunity.

I'd also pay for this.

[Albert of Feh]

The strategy that I took was basically to branch my options. One of my setups was "You have been ordered to set fire to the the pleasure quarters where your love Kyoko works as a geisha", along with a condition for not doing it. I stipulated that if I did it, I could sneak Kyoko out before I set the fire and could take her to live with me. Now I have three options:

1) Not do my duty, not burn the pleasure quarters (with the original consequence)
2) Burn the pleasure quarters (doing my duty), take Kyoko with me (amended with an additional consequence in the next breath)
3) Burn the pleasure quarters, leave Kyoko to die. (with the originally implicit consequence of losing my love)

Naturally, option 2 was the topic of the opponent's next breath. In the end, I had three or four courses of action, each of which had been introduced with a positive consequence, and had only one or two negative consequences.

At first, I was a bit worried that I was compromising the spirit of the game with this tactic. After all, the other players were making these decisions between two options, each of which had three or four consequences attached, and I was getting off relatively light. After a bit of thought, though, I think that my decisions weren't necessarily easier to make. Each path had its own set of rewards and penalties to be weighed against all other options, and it was still hard to decide which one I could live with most.

That's one of the best parts of this game: finishing the last breath of a scene and seeing the main player look like he's just been hit by a train because the decision is just that hard.

[TheTris]

Firstly thanks for playtesting this guys, I'm really glad you enjoyed it.

I also really dug the look on the main player's face when the seventh breath hit just right.  Also I nearly choked when some of those decisions were made.

It seems that pretty much the only choice for recording consequences is in the space outside the circle on the sheets.  Consider that official erratta :-)

For me the most important issue at the moment is whether you can, and how you should (if you want to) avoid slamming the big red button of DOOM!  I really enjoyed the fall of an empire story we ended up writing, but I'm pretty sure there are some intense personal stories that can be told on a less apocalyptic scale, and I really want the game to be able to provide them.

Given how consequences are set, is player consensus enough to achieve this?  I believe it is.  I'm by no means certain though.  What do you guys think, based on your play of the game?

[Bankuei]

Hi,

I think player consensus is sufficient to handle pacing, though you may want to give some soft advice on it.  It's definitely a critical factor about making the stakes big enough to be interesting, but not so big that nothing that follows can really compete.  Obviously, "Empire go boom!" might just be exciting on one level while, "Your wife is sleeping with another" is exciting on another level.  Figuring out which kinds of escalation are going to work for which players, and under what scene conditions- that's some great play right there.

I'm very interested to see what happens with play where folks build up characters for a significant amount of time, generating around 7 or more statements in their circle and what kind of play that takes to get there.

Chris

[TheTris]

Yeah, that goes beyond what I had originally envisioned as how the game would play.  It depends how much players decide their characters will follow duty, of course, but that would be a long fall, and your character would end up a broken shell - almost unable to face opposition because of the weight of his past deeds on his shoulders.

I want to see this too.

Tris

[Sydney Freedberg]

The strategy that I took was basically to branch my options [e.g.]:

1) Not do my duty, not burn the pleasure quarters (with the original consequence)
2) Burn the pleasure quarters (doing my duty), take Kyoko with me (amended with an additional consequence in the next breath)
3) Burn the pleasure quarters, leave Kyoko to die. (with the originally implicit consequence of losing my love)

Interesting - this approach turns the game into a Drama-based cousin of Vincent Baker's Otherkind (Vincent has a revised and streamlined version somewhere, but I can't find it right now), where you trade off multiple bad outcomes. It does strike me as a big change to the original version's stark binary choices: Whether that's a good change or a dilution I'm not sure.

[William Burke]

For me the most important issue at the moment is whether you can, and how you should (if you want to) avoid slamming the big red button of DOOM!  I really enjoyed the fall of an empire story we ended up writing, but I'm pretty sure there are some intense personal stories that can be told on a less apocalyptic scale, and I really want the game to be able to provide them.

Given how consequences are set, is player consensus enough to achieve this?  I believe it is.  I'm by no means certain though.  What do you guys think, based on your play of the game?

I think it worked just fine, actually.  Two of us had reasonably epic, empire-destroying-rebuilding-etc stories, and one of us (Albert) had a plotline that was almost completely personal, revolving around his love for the geisha.  It's all about your starting statement, the consquences you define for yourself and the choice you make in each scene -- which is another way of saying that the game provides plenty of opportunities to stick up flags for the other players to pick up on.

The one question I had from my playtest, which I personally think could be profitably addressed in the text, is what exactly duty means to a samurai.  Obviously, at first, duty is to obey your lord no matter what, but, for example, my character had a consequence of "If I refuse [to offer my barbarian army to be slaughtered], I will slay the Emperor and take over" -- and if he hadn't rolled a 6 on two dice, he would have done so.  Once I'm the Emperor, what's my duty?  Similarly, what happens if you're thrown out of Japan and no longer have a lord?

[TheTris]

Good point!

I need to make it explicit in the rules that the game continues while you are samurai.  When you no longer follow that path, that's endgame for your character.  You don't have the same motivators that push you into conflicts of duty vs other stuff.

Incidentally, I was discussing the idea of using robots instead of samurai for people who really don't get samurai (which is a cool idea), and thought that the game might also work (although obviously the thematic elements in the mechanics wouldn't be as strong) for Robots (Obey the modified "A robot should obey all orders from a human"), Geisha (Obey the mama-san, and the Geisha code), Cult Members (Obey the tenants of the cult and your charismatic leader) AND Girls from certain cultures, especially those with parents who emigrated to another country (Obey your father, and his wishes concerning your future career and husband).

Just in case people really don't like Samurai.