[TSOY] The Standard Family

[Isbo]

That xp estimate is right around what I pulled in this session--and I haven't even burned a key yet, although I'm starting to think hard about one or two.  There were a few conflcts this session that nailed two or more keys at once--my struggle to get Pa Standard to take his son, Nahum, hunting pinged both my key of the manipulator and my key of masochism (maybe family, too, although I can't remember) when Pa brought down the pain.  And the avalanche, whew, that was good stuff--bloodied, broken (masochism), and put myself in danger for Annie (Guardian).

And I, for one, was waiting for some kind of strange twist--I didn't know what it was going to be, but I did not feel like Jason 'pulled a fast one.'  He had given us a number of clues that there were strange goings on (exotic swords, jeweled harnesses for men, indians talking about 'haunted mountains'...).

--Ian

[Jason Morningstar]

I always imagine a little cash register sound when keys get hit, and that avalanche was like Black Thursday - people were really raking it in during that scene.  It was great!

[Jason Morningstar]

Also, Ricky, your group's mileage will definitely vary - look up Tony LB's TSOY game AP reports to see a wildly different progression of XP. 

[Jason Morningstar]

Session three last night.  It went well - I threw in one key scene (Pa Standard getting semi-eaten by a 20-meter-long Wonambi naracoortensis constrictor snake that was sacred to the locals) but otherwise just had a sheet with bangs for each character.  I managed to hit about half of those and it was enough. 

Three of the characters have fairly complex love relationships blooming and one (aunt Hettie) is set on the path of the missionary - she convinced the locals not to ritually kill and eat the hearts of some captives, but to instead show mercy and free them.  The locals have had some contact with "Outlanders" and a few are already Christians of a sort, so wheels are definitely in motion on the faith tip.  That will definitely be interesting.  Two of the love relationships are pushing hard for the player characters to "go native", and Nahum, the weak milksop son, is toughening up and buying in whole-hog, preparing to marry Lady Uha, a scheming and powerful combination of high priestess and temple prostitute.  That'll end in tears, I suspect.  There was a very satisfying BDTP conflict between Hettie, who is a manipulator and Sway master, and Ladu Uha, over Nahum's fate.  It went down to the wire but, with Nahum's help, Lady Uha broke Hettie (Isbo, with the Key of the Masochist, was delighted) and claimed the boy for her own nefarious purposes. 

My only real concern right now is Pa Standard, who is being played as an obdurate old man, set in his opinions and ways.  His player roundly rejects any connection to the local people and hasn't formed any relationships with his family members beyond taking responsibility for keeping them generally safe.  It makes it hard to present interesting situations for him.  Everybody else is just psycho GM gravy, with built-in conflicts and lots of interesting angles to work with. 

[Jason Morningstar]

Also noteworthy - this session was, for us, an XP explosion - several people hit mutliple five point keys and topped out around 25 XP for the night.  Robo, playing Nahum, burned two Keys and bought up others.  Isbo, playing Hettie, took her Sway to Grand Master.  I fear her righteous transcendence!

Having just finished a slower-paced, year-long TSOY game, I have to say that I like this intense, short-run format a whole lot better.   We'll wrap up in five sessions total, maybe six.

[Isbo]

This is my first time playing TSOY and so far what impresses me most in terms of 'tips for doing it right' is patience.  I cannot emphasize how much cooler the game has been, story-wise, because players have only burned keys when they *really* felt driven to do so based upon the drama of the game.  We have all had 'temptations' to burn them a little earlier, but waiting for just the right moment just takes the game to another level.  Examples:

Zeke, former Cavalry man in the West with a real dislike of Indians, has the chance to burn the key of intolerance when Hettie talks him down from violence against recalcitrant indian guides.  He doesn't, but instead burns the key when he falls in love with a princess he rescues from a giant bear. 

Nahum has the opportunity to burn the key of impotence when his sisterly cousin Annie is in dire need of aid when raiders have her cornered and are about to drag her off.  She throws the gun to him, pleading for him to step up.  He doesn't burn the key, but instead panics.  Which gives Annie the opportunity to burn her key fo fraternity with Nahum in the most painfully story-rich way (which she has had some chances to do earlier, with Nahum's previous inability to step up)--"I've helped you your entire life and this one time when I needed your help more than anything else...".  Later, growing more and more enamored with the courtesan Uha, he burns the key of impotence and steps up to show off for her his newfound manliness. 

I have been thinking I would burn the key of religion, get Hettie a little more cozy with the locals.  Nothing quite seems right for it though, so I bide my time.  After losing Nahum to Uha, though, I not only don't burn the Key of Religion, but burn a whole other batch (family and manipulator) so that Hettie can step up and really bring the Truth to these misguided locals.

[Jason Morningstar]

We had our fourth of five sessions last night. 

Of interest - I barely prepped at all, since each of the characters had some pretty powerful motivations.  I really had no idea how things would turn out or who the players would side with in the larger conflict I had established earlier between the mountain and the valley people, or what form that would ultimately take.  I had no idea what the fate of their mysteriously vanished father/grandfather Nehemiah was.  They provided what we needed as a group and we had a great time.  I think this was the busiest Key-burning session yet, and everyone ws really raking in the XP and transforming their characters. 

I particularly love the complex web of relationships in this game.  For example:

Ku, humiliated by:
Zeke, who loves:
Sakaa, who is promised to:
Ku, who is hated by:
Junior Powles, who loves:
Annie, who loves:
Ku.

And I amped it up even further by getting Sakaa to convince Zeke's impressionable nephew Nahum to try to assassinate Ku.  It was like a Mexican telenovela on Mars.

The pace we're playing at means that some of the intricacy will get hand-waved, unfortunately - there's just not enough hours to explore every relationship to its logical conclusion.  As a GM I feel overburdened with a dense cast of characters at this point, and they won't all get their moment in the sun.  Looking back on my notes, I had 17 speaking NPCs.  Damn:

Jefferson "Soapy" Smith, Wanatooxa, Clyde Wellington-Tombs, T. Elbert Clemmons, "Red" Betty McNelly, Thakur of the Pakuginga, Robert "King" Kelly-Standard, Boots Kelly-Standard, Lord Takopa, Princess Aza, Princess Josa Standard, Paul Standard, Lady Sakaa Takopa, Croucher Chupun, Love-Taker Uha, Dampener Ku, Junior Powles.

[Jason Morningstar]

We finished this mini-campaign last night and the final session was a little lackluster.  I'm not entirely sure why.  I'd prepped with bangs for each of the players, and they had all shared ideas of what they'd like to see happen.  All of them got at least some of what they specifically wanted for final resolution of their characters.  Keys were burned, characters changed at the same pace as the rest of the run.  A few things that didn't go so well:

I re-introduced a key villain (Soapy Smith) last week, and the players promptly dominated and abused him, rendering him pretty impotent.  They did the same thing to other potential adversaries, tying people up and throwing them in holes.  It made it hard to present any sort of external challenge.  When I asked them about this mid-session, the consensus was that they wanted a Big Bad villain.  So there was a disconnect here. 

I was taken aback at the abuse all my NPCs were in for last night - there was a surprising amount of torturing, shoving, slapping, hair pulling, putting guns in their faces, pistol-whipping, and so forth.  I'm not sure where that came from.  I made it very clear from the outset of the session that I had no stake in the outcome and any choice they made was fair game - they just made some mean-spirited choices that I didn't really enjoy as a participant.

There was a key showdown between a PC and an NPC, sort of the set piece finale for the PC.  He was slightly over-matched in a sword duel, it would have been a nail-biter.  The player burned a key, took the Secret of Imbuement, and turned his sword into a +3 harm weapon against his opponent.  He killed his enemy in two strokes.  It was a little anticlimactic and we all regretted it.

Two characters transcended in the first hour of play, and the players held the event in reserve until it made sense later in the session.  I think this sapped some of the fun out, since it should be a big deal and it really wasn't by the time it came around.

This was the first session where I felt some frustration with TSOY, because I wasn't able to provide any challenge for the amped-up characters.  They were working toward a unified purpose for the first time, and it felt like four DitV Dogs all beating on a guy.  All the excitement of the previous four sessions had emerged from players with perpendicular and incompatible goals. 

There were good moments, too - quite a few actually.  One of my favorites - Zeke shot and killed the sacred cave bear of the Ja'at, and Hettie sawed the thing's head off, using that as a weapon against them as she converted the Ja'at en masse to Christianity. 

[Isbo]

Let me start out with what I liked.  As Hettie's player, the whole cave bear thing was fantastic--I was pleased as punch that I was able to transcend at that moment rather than earlier.  The scene just sticks in my head: Hettie emerging from the burning Ja'at meeting hall, glowing volcanic rock littering the field, their sacred cave bear's head held above her head, as they emerge, shaken from their caves.  Hettie throws down the head and starts preaching the new world order--and orates the crap out of it (6 successes against their 0; all + dice for me, all - dice for them; that was visually pleasing in itself).  That was dice and story joining together in a pleasing way for me.

I also was very satisfied to have the moment with Annie (Hettie's daughter) at the gate back to the real world, telling Annie she belonged out in the real world, that she was going to be fine, that she had a great head on her shoulders, but that Hettie herself had a sacred duty in the crazy frazetta world.

Now, that said, I also accidentally sucked the wind right out the session's sails with my scene and I feel a little bad for that.  With Hettie and her christian soldiers climbing up the mountain, it made sense for everyone who was leaving the valley to leave, and those who weren't to stay.  Which meant my exit also meant the exit of Annie and Nahum.  I think that forced Arley's player's hand--he had been hoping to take a rich share of the Apijani gold, but with Hettie all holy and Zeke wanting to set up house in the valley with his Apijani princess, that just wasn't going to happen.

I think the flat elements of the session can partly (not entirely) be tied to the story--Zeke and Hettie dominated the last session because they had built up stories that firmly tied them to the valley.  The other characters had some conflicts to play out, but none were quite as 'integral' to the world. 

This was complicated, I think, by the fact that the *players* didn't necessarily want to get in the way of Zeke and Hettie's plans because they didn't have any strong story stakes.  Arley was probably an extreme of this--he really only had one big goal left (get gold!) and, while he could have brought down the sway to force other relatives to stick it out with him, that felt artificial.

The large supporting cast worked against us in this regard, too.  Most of the really juicy conflicts of the early sessions were between family members, with supporting cast entering primarily as elements of those conflicts.  I think the last two sessions saw the family conflicts settling down, which left the last session largely to be the players playing out the denouement of those now settled family conflicts.  I think the new npc's made that easier, keeping the family focused on external conflicts and players reacting more to them than to each other.  It also made it easier to move the spotlight off of NPC's with which we did have real juicy conflicts (like Soapy) so that there was less build-up around them.

Mechanically, I wonder if it might not make sense to force players to spend a certain portion of their current XP total within a session, especially when playing these intense, fast advancing short run games.  One thing that happened with Nahum is that he had so much XP laying around that he could go hog-wild crazy with advances and secrets before fighting Dampener Ku.  It is a little difficult for the story guide to prep an encounter when a character can become grandmaster competent, with a +3 harm weapon and a larger vigor pool, in the blink of an eye when, mere seconds ago, he was a not-so-vigorous adept with his uncle's old cavalry sabre. 

Heck, it might even make sense to provide a hard limit to the number of named NPC's in a session, so that there is a clear place to transfer conflict to once the inter-player stuff has started to work itself out.  Maybe allow for other named NPC's to enter into the session when another is clearly removed for story reasons.

[Jason Morningstar]

Thanks for your thoughts, Isbo.  It was *much* harder to run than, say, session three, because of the external focus.  I kept thinking "what's he doing?  What's she doing?  When's he coming back?"  At one point (when Junior Powles brought back Soapy Smith at gunpoint) I was faced with the ridiculous situation of having to have a conversation between two NPCs (I managed to avoid it, and if I had been forced to I would have pawned off Junior on one of you guys, but it was a dumb situation).  So a take-away for me is to sharply limit NPCs in number.