[Universalis] my first game

[Rimke]

A few weeks ago Wilco, Rachèl, Brian and I came together to play a game of Universalis. We had met eachother on a Dutch RPG site and didn’t know eachother in real life, except for Wilco and Rachèl who are married to eachother. We are going to play a campaign type of RPG (and to my delight the others were eager to play White Wolf’s Changeling with me as Storyteller), but Universalis seemed the perfect game for a “getting to know eachother session”.
Brian and I were new to Universalis, Rachèl and Wilco had played a few games but they were still a bit shaky with the rules.

The first part of the game in which you make the world and the rules for the story went smooth, everybody had lots of ideas. We had gnomes who live in toadstools in our story and lots of tokens were spend to describe exactly what they looked like, height, clothes, pointy hats, etc. This grew a bit tedious when we started to do this for other creatures as well, so we decided that every creature looked like a typical fairy tale creature of that type would look, unless somebody spend a token and declared an aspect that was different. That rule worked pretty well I think. Then we started act 1.

We played 3 acts and then Brian had to go home so we couldn’t finish the story. I will not bother you with the whole story but instead point out a few things I noticed during play.

*** Wilco, Rachèl and I were doing a part of the story while Brian on his own did another part with his own characters in it. Those two storylines almost never intersected, although they both had to do with the hat of the king of the gnomes that was missing.

*** Brian used his tokens mostly to make his characters really strong. When he created a detective for example he paid a token to make him good at stealth and one to make him good at spotting things etc. The rest of us used our tokens mainly to buy existing characters from eachother and only added traits to a character if they were really important to the story.

*** Side characters often needed a lot of explaining, especially when they were created later in the story. That often resulted in an investment of many tokens in them. They were in game terms often “stronger” than the main characters who had little traits and tokens invested in them. There was also another reason why the main character needed less explaining, he was a gnome and we had established a big part of how gnomes lived and what they looked like in the creation part of the game.

*** I told a much bigger part of the story than the others. I easily won the right to start 2 of the 3 acts we played , including the first. I deliberately lost the bidding for the 2nd act. Wilco and Rachèl usually only told a few lines every turn and almost never did things that effected the plot in a major way. They were great at setting up scenes but almost never resolved them.  They tended to end their turn when they came at a point in the story were a decision about where to go with it had to be made. I was the only one with an idea at the start (so I won the bidding for the first act) but it was very vague. But because Brian was doing his own thing and Wilco and Rachèl left all big decisions to me I could pretty much do everything I wanted and though I had a bit trouble at the start it got easier as the story progressed since I had an idea were I wanted to go with it. I realised later that for Wilco and Rachèl it was probably the other way round. Rachèl remarked when we quit (without finishing the story): ‘I have no idea how we can bring this story to a good ending’ For me this was no issue at all, I had plenty of ideas and every turn I got more.

*** We had very little conflicts in the game. A typical turn would be that the player bought the characters he wanted to do something with, played a scene and then the next player would do the same. Because every player almost always “owned” all the characters of his scene those characters could not come in conflict with eachother.

The game was fun, everybody had a good time. But I think the game was not without flaws, so maybe you guys can help me to make sure it’ll be even better next time.
I hope you can give your opinion on these points, especially the last two.
I am pretty sure we did not use the rules as they were intended in the conflict case, but I do not know what exactly we did wrong.

[Valamir]

This grew a bit tedious when we started to do this for other creatures as well, so we decided that every creature looked like a typical fairy tale creature of that type would look, unless somebody spend a token and declared an aspect that was different. That rule worked pretty well I think. Then we started act 1.

Absolutely an excellent Rules Gimmick.  If you just decided that amongst yourselves it works just fine.  If someone actually paid a Coin to "make that the rule" than you did it 100% perfectly.

*** Wilco, Rachèl and I were doing a part of the story while Brian on his own did another part with his own characters in it. Those two storylines almost never intersected, although they both had to do with the hat of the king of the gnomes that was missing.

There's nothing inherently wrong about telling seperate story-lines at the same time.  There's also nothing inherently wrong in players being more interested in one of the lines vs. the other, and there's no absolute need for the story lines to intersect.  But the PLAYERS should be intersecting.  If the situation was one where Brian was essentially playing by himself while the rest of you were playing with each other, that's certainly not ideal.

Some things I'd be looking to do in a game where a player was playing solataire:
1) Create a scene and Introduce "Brian's" characters and story line.  The idea here would be to get Brian to get interested in what I was doing with "his" characters and participate with me in a scene.  This might also help with the Complication issue below.
2) On my turn in one of his scenes, Take Over one of his characters, or Introduce a new one.  Same as #1 only in reverse.  This could also be used to develop points of intersection if such is desired.

*** Brian used his tokens mostly to make his characters really strong. When he created a detective for example he paid a token to make him good at stealth and one to make him good at spotting things etc. The rest of us used our tokens mainly to buy existing characters from eachother and only added traits to a character if they were really important to the story.

How did this impact your relative Wealth?  In theory if he's spending more Coins than you on Traits but there aren't any Complications to generate new Coins from those Traits, he should wind up being much poorer than you before too long.

Some ideas:
Traits serve only 3 purposes in the game: 1) Importance which impacts how expensive it is to write a Component out of the story, 2) Guidelines for how to play the Component, providing added leverage in Challenges when not played in-line, and 3) to get dice in Complications.  #3 is by far the most important use for Traits in the game.  If you buy alot of Traits its a sensible strategy to drive towards alot of Complications that Draw upon those Traits for extra dice and hense extra Coins.  They are a motivation to create Complications.  Mentioning this might help with the Complication issue as well.

Trait parity is an important concept.  For the most part it will self balance if characters are interacting with each other.  If Brian spends alot of Coins to buy Traits you can initiate a Complication with Brian's characters where those Traits are not very applicable (leveling the field) and then use your Coins win the Complication, generate bonus Coins and purchase Traits for your own characters.

Alternatively, set up a Complication where YOU Control the character Brian spent all of those Coins on, and use one of Brian's high Trait characters that he spent alot of Coins on to make money for YOU.  That sends the message that its self defeating to buy a character with Traits disproportionately out of scale with everyone else...because you're basically making money for others.

Example:  Brian has High Trait character A doing stuff in a scene by himself to Moderate Trait character B.  You spend a Coin to Take Over character A in the middle of "doing stuff to B" (or when B is doing stuff to A). You now Control A, Brian Controls B...its an automatic Complication and you're in Control of the character with the most Traits...which generate alot of free Bonus Coins for you...for which you didn't have to pay anything.  You can then save some of them and use them to buy Traits for Low Trait character C as desired.

Breaking the habit of thinking of "these characters as mine" and "those characters as yours" is the biggest leap to take to get to successfull Uni play.  Just because you spend a bunch of Coins on a character, doesn't make the character yours and therefor doesn't increase your power as a player (in fact, if done carelessly it can lessen your own power as a player).  Thus, the motivation becomes to buy Traits that "feel important for the story" not to "make my guys strong".

*** Side characters often needed a lot of explaining, especially when they were created later in the story. That often resulted in an investment of many tokens in them. They were in game terms often "stronger" than the main characters who had little traits and tokens invested in them. There was also another reason why the main character needed less explaining, he was a gnome and we had established a big part of how gnomes lived and what they looked like in the creation part of the game.

Don't forget to use the "color" rules.  If you have a few sentences to say just to get everyone thinking the same way, not ALL of that necessarily needs to be paid for as "Fact".

Also don't forget about Master Components.  Did you se up "Gnomes" as a Master Component with a bunch of dice invested in the qualities of "Gnomeness".  If so then any character identified as being a "Gnome" (a Sub Component) has access to all of those Dice in a Complication. 

Its also perfectly ok to say "Hey B is supposed to be As side kick...yet you're trying to give B enough Coins to make him have a higher Importance than A...is that sensible?" as the first part of a Negotiation.  Alternatively "Hey, A is supposed to be this all fired super hero guy...yet he only has 3 Traits...maybe you need to give him a few more appropriate Traits before narrating him doing all this amazing stuff?"  Using the Negotiation and, if necessary, Bidding portions of the Challenge rules can be a very effective way of organically during play setting standards for Trait levels.

*** I told a much bigger part of the story than the others. I easily won the right to start 2 of the 3 acts we played , including the first. I deliberately lost the bidding for the 2nd act. Wilco and Rachèl usually only told a few lines every turn and almost never did things that effected the plot in a major way. They were great at setting up scenes but almost never resolved them.  They tended to end their turn when they came at a point in the story were a decision about where to go with it had to be made. I was the only one with an idea at the start (so I won the bidding for the first act) but it was very vague. But because Brian was doing his own thing and Wilco and Rachèl left all big decisions to me I could pretty much do everything I wanted and though I had a bit trouble at the start it got easier as the story progressed since I had an idea were I wanted to go with it. I realised later that for Wilco and Rachèl it was probably the other way round. Rachèl remarked when we quit (without finishing the story): 'I have no idea how we can bring this story to a good ending' For me this was no issue at all, I had plenty of ideas and every turn I got more.

 

I think I included an essay in one of the text boxes that would be applicable to this issue.  May be worth while to have them read that one.

Universalis does not direct the action towards a specific goal the way Dogs in the Vineyard does?  But some of the "Even Now?", "How about Now?" mentality can be used to good effect.  If they're being laissez faire about the story direction and leaving it to you...rock the boat a little.  "Are you willing to let me control the direction of the story, even now if I do THIS"..."How about NOW?".  You have to be careful, but often you can find something that they do care enough about to "fight you over" (so to speak) and the Challenge and Complication mechanics can start to engage.

You can try a few more unusual things too.  Like:  "I'm spending 1 Coin for a Rules Gimmick, and that Gimmick is that in this scene Wilco will reveal that one of the characters currently in the story is secretly working for the villain".  If its not Challenged than it becomes a Rule and you can Challenge anyone who tries to end the scene before Wilco does that.  Its a little bit aggressive...you're basically using the rules of the game to demand that your fellow player comes up with something...but it can be effective.  Especially if the primary reason why they're not directing the story is if they've been trained that that's the GMs job.

*** We had very little conflicts in the game. A typical turn would be that the player bought the characters he wanted to do something with, played a scene and then the next player would do the same. Because every player almost always "owned" all the characters of his scene those characters could not come in conflict with eachother.

Some of the above items should help kick start the Complications for you.  Don't be too worried about it yet.  There's enough new and novel about Universalis play that its not uncommon for people to want to tool around carefully in low gear in the parking lot before they try racing down the highway.  Once they get a feel for the other systems, Complications start to come naturally.

If they're really just missing opportunities because they're not seeing them, there are a couple of things you can try.  First...lead by example.  Jump in, grab control of a Component and kick off some Complications...not frivolously...you'll want to pick something that will be fun to play out.  Then once they see it in action a few times they should pick it up.

If that doesn't work, another aggressive Rules Gimmick would be "For the duration of this play session there will be no Coin refreshment between scenes."  At that point the only way to get new Coins will be to start Complications, so players will have no choice but to do so.

Sounds like you probably don't need any of the really aggressive options.  But if nothing else they can serve as examples of the kinds of things you can do with a Gimmick.

The game was fun, everybody had a good time. But I think the game was not without flaws, so maybe you guys can help me to make sure it'll be even better next time.

Uni definitely has a learning curve...and a "getting used to a paradigm shift" curve.  But the most common "newbie" thing I see is just totally silly absurd stories the first time out as everyone is a little nervous about exercising real dramatic power.  Sounds like your group was having no problem with that and went straight into interesting story creation...so you're ahead of the curve in that sense.

I hope you can give your opinion on these points, especially the last two.
I am pretty sure we did not use the rules as they were intended in the conflict case, but I do not know what exactly we did wrong.

Did you have any situations that went to dice in a Complication?  If you want to provide detail I'm happy to offer thoughts and suggestions.

[Rimke]

Thank you very much for posting this, I find it extremely helpful!

I usually make a huge mess of my post when I try to include quotes so I'll do without them. I hope you'll bear with me.

***I think part of our problem was that we were strangers to eachother for the most part. That resulted in very "polite" gameplay. Everybody was careful not to offend the others and that maybe caused over cautious playing. Also Brian and I were new to the game so naturally we were careful because of that as well. But I am certainly going to use your tips next game I play, they are excellent ideas.

***It didn't matter that Brian's characters were stronger than the others because they never had a complication with the weaker characters. Brian could make his characters this strong because he never had to buy control of his characters. Nobody interfered with his storyline so the characters were always in his control. Wilco, Rachèl and I on the other hand always bought control of the characters we wanted to work with every turn, because they were for a big part the same cast.
When we stopped I had very little coins left, Brian had a little more, then came Rachèl and Wilco had really a lot of them. He had been involved in the 2 complications we had in the game. (At least I remember only 2)

***I think we did make a Gnome Class but the traits we added to it were things like: -They live in toadstools, -they wear pointy hats, -they are ruled by a great dictator, -they are ... inches tall.
You can only use traits in a complication that are useful in some way, right? Those traits of the Gnome Class are likely not that useful in most complications. Also our gnome was a main character, but he was a bit of an anti-hero. I even gave him a trait saying he was not very smart I think.

***I will try those things you mentioned to get the other players to tell more of the story next time. But the "rock the boat" thing seems to me like a hard thing to do right and dangerous thing to do as well. I am afraid you might end up with the story taking a direction that the others will fight, but you yourself might not like as well. Our play was very careful, we tried hard to work with eachothers ideas instead of contesting them.

***We had two complications I can remember. One was between Oompf the Gnome and two squirrels. Oompf (controlled by me) was trying to climb a tree to talk to two little elfs (controlled by Rachèl). The two squirrels (controlled by Wilco) were throwing nuts to make him fall down,the elfs tried to help Oompf not to fall.
Oompf and the elfs won and both Wilco and I got some tokens out of it.

The thing is that I didn't really care whether or not Oompf would fall. If he had fallen I'd probably have narrated that he was talking with the elfs at the base of the tree shouting, instead of sitting on a branch and talking in normal voice.  The outcome of the conflict didn't really excite me and it had little effect on the story, apart from generating a few tokens for Wilco and me.

The other complication happened when Brian's fairy-tale-CIA-detective-type-guy tried to steal the Hat of the king of the gnomes out of the pizza restaurant of Mario the dwarf. I had seen this coming, Brian's story was obviously building up to this climax. Brian's turn was after mine so I ended my turn in a way that made it possible for him to narrate the theft easily. (I placed the hat in the window of the restaurant and Mario was off to the kitchen). I did it partly because I thought it would probably be frustrating for Brian if I made things nearly impossible for him, but for the most part I did it because I thought Mario's part was done in the story and it would be an exciting turn in the story if Brian's  guys got the hat. (The hat was the center of our story all what we had told that far had to do with it). It seemed a very good way to merge Brian's storyline with ours.

Brian's sneaky detective guy sneaked through the door at which point Wilco interrupted: "Doesn't the door of the restaurant have a bell on it that rings if someone enters?"  I said "Nah, I think not." But after some discussion we decided that it did have a bell and Wilco initiated the complication. He had a huge amount of tokens to spare so he used some to make the sneaking in task quite difficult. Brian and Wilco rolled, Wilco won so Mario heard the bell of the door ringing and entered the room. I controlled Mario, so Brian and I played a scene where it was established that the detective guy had a dozen of gnome hats that he was willing to trade for the one hat Mario had. (That was the hat of the king, but Mario didn't know that and neither did he care, he was only using the hat to promote his new "gnome pizza with olives".) So they traded hats and the detective guy still had his mission accomplished.

While this complication worked far better than the first one I think, it generated a few things that had not been established before, it did not in the end change much in the overall storyline.

Was I playing too soft? Should I have hold on to the hat so we could have more complications? Maybe I was expecting to much of complications, thinking of other games like My Life with Master where every dice roll has a major influence on the direction the story takes.

*** Our story WAS a silly story. I am sure there are lots of highly dramatic stories waiting to be told about gnomes living in toadstools with smart tiny pet dragons, ruled by a great dictator and dwarfs living in skyscrapers, living in a society where everybody is exactly equal, but to me this world we created sounded more suitable for a comic fairy tale instead of a serious one. (We had established it should be a fairy tale)

But we were all four serious in telling it. Trying our best to tell a cohorent, amusing tale. Personally I don't think a good comic tale is worth less than a serious dramatic one, though maybe it is a little easier to tell. (A comic tale isn't ruined with one bad scene, but a dramatic tale can be easily ruined with a badly timed joke breaking the tension. It will probably work only if you establish in the creation part of the game that the story should be a dramatic one and all players are fully committed to make it so).

Our fairy tale wasn't finished, but I don't think it was a bad story. I rather liked the way it turned out.