[Nine Worlds] rules for collaboration?

[chris_moore]

My friend Michael and I played Nine Worlds at Gamicon with Matt Snyder last Saturday.  I had a great time playing the game! The story we made together was tight and full of cool moments. 

Two larger points come to mind from this gaming session:

1)  I knew of Nine Worlds before this, but only after playing it did I really, really want to purchase it and play it with my local group.  Now, this could be the fact that I am not very good at visualizing the game from reading the text.  But I fantasize about being able to add notes to the margins of every copy of the game, like "this thing is really cool when you play the game!!", etc.  Does anyone else have that experience?

2)  During our session, as is mentioned in the book, players and GM alike could come up with ideas for scenes.  With Matt (GM) doing most of the scene framing.  It worked very well for us, in my opinion.  There are no solid rules for who gets to come up with a scene / frame a scene, etc, although there are very specific guidelines in the text (and a rule about the conflict winner closing a scene).  What have other Nine Worlds groups done with coming up with scenes, framing them, etc? 

I recommend the game very highly!
chris moore

[Valamir]

What have other Nine Worlds groups done with coming up with scenes, framing them, etc?

I can recommend not holding back on suggesting scene framing opportunities. 

9W is a game that handles intra-character conflict very well.  In fact, in the session I played at GenCon with Matt it was pretty much a free for all with each of us haveing very specific and often mutually exclusive goals which made for lots of alliances of convenience, strange bed fellows, and "the enemy of my enemy" thinking.  It was awesome.

It largely worked, however, because we were pretty open about calling for scenes and announcing in advance that we wanted a scene were person A had the opportunity to confront / betray person B etc.  Traditionally if one player is aiming to back stab another player's character, they play it very close to the vest with secret notes to the GM and the like waiting for the perfect moment to spring the trap and surprise the other players.

9W works much better if you don't play it close to the vest and focus on surprising the characters not the players.  In fact, the only negative feelings I had about our session at GenCon were the couple of occassions where I passed up opportunities for what could have been really great scenes because I was still thinking in terms of harboring secrets.  When I didn't do that, and instead relied on the other players to respond in kind and let the cards sort it out it rocked.

So, encourage players to request scenes EVEN IF requesting a certain scene right then might "give away" part of the player's secret plottings.