[Bliss Stage] Jury-rigged ANIMa in the outback

[Eero Tuovinen]

So, I've been slowly going through games published last year. One of the crop was Shock: Social Science Fiction, which has found great response from a selective clientele, my teenage crowd in Upper Savo included. Which is strange, as they're the typical illiterate teenagers whose closest encounter with classical scifi is Battlestar Galactica. But anyway, while playing Shock: in January, the discussion drifted to other science fiction games, and eventually to Bliss Stage, the game in development by Ben Lehman. A couple of the youngsters got all hot and bothered by the idea of a NGE-like roleplaying game, and they've been bugging me about it ever since.

One thing leads to another, so I ended up requesting Ben for the latest draft of the rules to see whether the game happened to be in a playable state. (Ben's development schedule had coincided with my own projects all through 2006 enough for me to lose contact with the project.) This being indeed the case, I proceeded to study the rules with the intent of playing the game with the teens at a night gathering they had at the end of the winter vacation. This was yesterday, and here follows my experiences and notes from the game. The rules seem to be well on their way to being publishable, so really, for the most part it worked rather well.

Set-up:

Me and three other males, all pretty experienced with indie games. Ages between 17 and 19, I understand. One had brought Polaris and MLwM to the session with the idea of playing one of them, for instance. I'd played extensively with two of the three previously, and had some good discussion with the third, so we were rather comfortable with each other. One of the teens I'd describe as otaku, with extensive interest in all things anime. One was pretty unfamiliar with the genre Bliss Stage references, as well, so we had a pretty wide range in that regard. We began play after a couple of short boardgames left a lull moment in the action, drafting the group out of a larger set, the rest of which continued with the boardgames (actually moving on to Mexican Standoff after a bit, I understand).

Bliss Stage has a definite situation set-up that precedes any group customization, so I started by explaining that. Before the game I'd shown the prospective players some material from the game and explained conscisely what it was about, so the basic gist was familiar: we'd be playing heroic teenage pilots of giant robots fighting against an alien invasion, bolstered by the loves and loyalties of life among a desperate guerrilla band.

Now, a bit I've learned from playing games like Dogs in the Vineyard, Polaris and Nine Worlds is that if your game has an elaborate setting, that's something you shouldn't just take for granted, you need to give some real tools for the necessary exposition phase where one player is giving the run-down for others, so we can get to playing. I'm never going to create one of these without very explicit instructions in this regard, such is the bother of trying to get a game going when we could be playing something that doesn't require that exposition in the first place. Bliss Stage didn't seem to have anything special in mind here, so I chose to start by simply reading aloud the timeline: at this moment, on the evening of 9th of March 2007, the Bliss Stage hits Earth, felling nearly all adult humans. A year later, and the infrastructure has fallen apart... and so on, until at year seven, a small band of guerrilla fighters - led by an authority figure who managed to fell an invasion drone - has scavenged the necessary technology for sending individual pilots into the dreamworld where they are able to project ANIMa, powerful machines that are capable of fighting the elusive and incomprehensible foe.

This exposition-via-timeline seemed to get the basic setting across in a reasonably short time, so we were ready to go in that regard. However, we also needed to do some setting definition before beginning chargen: where is the resistance, what do the aliens look like, how does the ANIMa technology work and so on. As the book recommends playing in a familiar setting, we opted for setting the game in the Iisalmi area of Upper Savo, an agricultural zone dotted with small towns of couple thousand residents, centering on the city of Iisalmi which itself clocks in at around 22 000 people, and that's counting the surrounding farmlands up to 20 clicks to all directions. So not exactly metropolitan area.

A point was made about the effects of winter on the blissed out adults. We acknowledged the fact that Ben might not realize that pretty much everybody would die of cold during the first few weeks instead of lingering on like they might do in a more temperate environment. We ended up deciding that while several hundred might have been dragged into centralized locations like hospitals by the children, the great majority of Finns would have died outright when heating shut down, need for food or not. The other option would have been to presume that the Bliss protects from cold and wild animals like it does from need of food, but that didn't suit the aesthetic, it seems.

The rest of the defining ideas were pretty much derived from the necessity of molding the game concept to fit the realities of life here in the boonies: the resistance would base its operations on a set of trucks, which would retain some maneuverability in the thick forestry road network of the area and reduce the necessity of defensive fortifications to practically nothing. Power supply in Upper Savo after the crash would be based on the plentiful wood supply (and rudimentary wood gasifiers, to the extent that motive power or electricity would be needed). There would be no statists in the group, the rules-mandated twelve people would be more than enough trouble to feed and keep comfortable. The ANIMa technology would be actual technology, represented by scavenged medical sensors suites and Beowulf clusters of the plentiful home computer hardware left around after the crash. "Brain-wave frequency modulation" was the technobabble of the day, used to justify the premise.

The unlikeliness of military scifi set in our home environs out of the way, we moved to specifying the guerrilla group. The leader would have to be an adult authority figure who's kept himself awake forcibly through the seven years of darkness, so he couldn't be any old bum. We settled - with a good amount of irony - on the nigh-legendary Upper Savo statesman, parliamentary member since 1987, Doctor in Social Sciences and minister of defense <

All characters had a very high intimacy with Heidi the anchor, with scores of 4, 5 and 5. The exact implications of this were left for later, but the significance was noted.

In other words, the relationship allocation process didn't create very much notable fictional content, although the priorization process itself was interesting, and it seemed to me that the players were forming some initial impressions of the secondary characters, even if most of those were not clear enough to get verbalized or noted upon. Perhaps it was simple information overload, as we created so many characters all at once.

And what was the group supposed to be doing? The next step was to set up two (number of pilots minus one) Hopes, which would be the concern of the missions set for the guerrilla group, to be resolved at the end of the game. We dropped a couple of initial ideas and settled on "May the young be saved from the Bliss" and "What are the aliens?". In other words, not so much all-out aggression, but more like information war.

The set-up phase all told took slightly below a couple of hours, I think. It was considered an interesting and satisfying endeavour in itself by the group, being that the end-result was a concrete and suitably framed piece of fictional organization. Had I had the choice I'd have left the actual play to another session, but as we were in effectively convention environment, there'd be no guarantees of a second session; therefore we continued, as I narrate in the next post...

Note 1: The rules don't mention starting Bliss, but I seemed to remember from some previous version that it would be equal to starting age, so that's what we used. Doesn't matter that much for a single session of play.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Mission:<

<
• Destroy the drone by surprise.
• Bring back any evidence, if possible.
• Protect the locals from coming to harm.
• You couldn't just wish yourself around the dream world; the motorcycle got stuck in the terrain when a short-cut was tried, which razzled the characters who didn't even realize that something so mundane could be a problem. Seppo of course had a map of the route via roads, which one of the anchors could relay to the pilots.
<
• The reason for the sadness soon became apparent: the drone in the middle of town was not just standing iddle, it was feeding on the scurrying population of dreamers, picking them daintily with long dream tentacles from all over town. These two player-initiated facts settled much of the tone of the meeting between the aliens and the humans...
• Niko, the most experienced of the bunch, went totally solo and started rescuing the blissed souls into his tank. The futility was derided by his sister Anna, who acted as his anchor. Niko managed to take two of the souls with him in withdrawal, leaving the other pilots to face the drone.
• Reino made short work of the drone itself with one solid blow of his dream-hammer, shattering one of the spindly legs that kept the creature afloat; however, he was stuck under the falling main body, leaving Joonas to liberate him.
• Meanwhile Niko was surprised by the vicious nature of the souls he took with him on the trip back to base; they did not communicate nor sit calmly in his tank; rather, they came at him and started bashing him with their solid masks, making a wet thudding sound. This being the only sound in the dream thus far, pretty scary. This caused Niko to drive his tank out of the road, stranding him.
• Niko did, however, manage to subdue the two souls forcibly, dragging them back to base on foot over the dreamscape.
• Johanna, who anchored Reino, decided to pull the plug on his mission, leaving Joonas alone to defeat the yellow mat of tentacles that crawled out of the drone and threatened to grow to cover the whole dreamscape. Joonas managed it, but only barely, getting his black armor demolished in the process. He also took some yellow stuff to his bike's saddlepacks for further investigation, returning to base safely.

Mechanically, there were some relationship disconnects, and Joonas suffered as high as three points of Trauma before the end. He also broke his anchor connection to Heidi in his last roll. Niko also broke a relationship with somebody, I think; overall these were not considered that serious losses at this point, as the relationships themselves were just numbers on paper. Joonas had Bliss 23 at the end of the mission from his broken relationship, Niko 25 from some dice and a broken relationship, while Reino had just 17, the amount he began the game with.

Note 1: the dramatic flow from relationship damage suffered on mission to actual events in the real world related to those relationships is not touched upon in the rules text in any way. This would have been a major question mark for us, had we had time for doing a scene between Joonas and Heidi, whose relationship was at 5 intimacy (implying sexuality) before being broken. What would the loss mean? After thinking about this a bit, I've come to the conclusion that any changes in relationships caused by missions should be inexplainable and scary in the fiction as well: a character whose relationship you break on mission just simply doesn't remember you, or hates you, for some reason nobody else can understand, but everybody knows is because of the psychic presence of the aliens. So nobody can particularly help you two, and even explaining what happened to the person who was damaged in this manner doesn't bring the relationship back; he or she can't help not remembering you, after all. So yeah, partial amnesia and alien-implant memories is my solution, clumsy though it may be: what says the author, and what will the game say to instruct on this?

Note 2: Put in some instructions for the first mission, or even a ready-to-play mission. I thought I was acting reasonably, but in hindsight we'd have had much more coherent play and specifically, much more definite content if we did three separate missions instead of playing all at once. Also, should consider some anchor precedence rules for combined missions, perhaps: you could simply say that any pilots on the same mission have to be anchored by the same anchor, therefore removing the fiddliness of having two players present with near-equal moment-to-moment scene framing privileges.

Note 3: As I think I intimated in some email discussion, it's not a given that the game would be played as a mecha game at all with these rules. Perhaps this is fine, or perhaps there should be some clear setting exposition about the nature of the ANIMa technology, about how it specifically creates giant robots, not just anything. Depends on the style you're going for, I guess.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Interludes:

[Eero Tuovinen]

Pondering:

So yeah, that's my Bliss Stage experience. At the time it felt confusing at times, but in hindsight it went pretty well, with the players giving two thumbs up for the idea of Ben publishing this one and coming to visit us on the occasion to present it here in person. (A not-so-subtle hint, that.) Meanwhile, some more general comments and thoughts inspired by play:

The dream metaphor: I specifically asked the players after the mission but before the interludes what they thought about the whole dream thing with slightly chaotic and unexpected surroundings. The question was very specifically because I myself felt that it deducts a bit from the whole mecha experience; the parts I like best about NGE, for example, are the ones that emphasize the scale and human effort that goes into building the things. The dream level makes all this rather arbitrary. And now that I think about it, my own mecha game Age of the Warlords (development age equal to Bliss Stage: completion percentage magnitudes lower; it's obvious which one of me and Ben can design) is exactly about the industro-social side of the whole mecha idea, so perhaps I shouldn't be bitching about it here. Especially as all the players gave their approval to the concept, which makes the setting distinctive among mecha stories. Still, there was confusion with the whole idea of what the dream zone is and how it affects the real world and all such vague and murky tugging from different players that wouldn't get in the way if the setting was kept more conventional and easy to grasp. The otaku player I mention above agreed to this sentiment to a degree, and we discussed playing the game with real mecha instead of flies of fancy; at least he thought that removing the dream zone wouldn't break anything in the rules, as mecha pilots in a dramatic anime are dependant on their relationships for their will and calmness in the middle of the fight anyway.

Hmm... actually, my thoughts are starting wandering after writing the long session description. I think I'll come back to this later. Perhaps some pertinent questions to jog my thoughts into gear? I thought I had something to say about the design itself as well. No idea if it was useful, though.

[Ben Lehman]

Eero -- Thanks so much for posting this!

I have questions.

1) How did the Reino end up with no bliss gain from the mission?  Did he just not ever have a roll?  Did he get insanely lucky and roll no (-) results?  Did he opt to place his (-) results into active categories to avoid Bliss gain?

2) You seem definitely mixed about your experience (I can think of a few reasons, but we'll get to those in a second.)  What made it seem bad at the time and what makes it seem better in hindsight?

3) I'm totally fascinated that you ended up with a sympathetic Authority Figure, given that I set up the game to make them pretty despicable human beings.  Was this an intentional move on your part, was it from the whole group, or was it just emergent from play?  Can you talk a little bit more about it in general?

Okay, here's some rules stuffs, not a big deal, but for next time:

1) Every interlude scene has a mechanical result.  "No result" is simply not an option.

2) When I play the game, I totally talk about the pre-existing relationships while the pilots assign their starting relationships.  The intimacy and trust numbers, particularly the intimacy numbers, are cues for the present state of the relationship.  Apparently that didn't come across in the text as-is.  I'll make a point of mentioning it.

3) I've got some color bits about the setting if you want to use them next time.  It includes, as it happens (I wrote it before I read this) the idea that the dream world bubbles over into the physical world from time-to-time, answering your dream complaints.  The intent in the text (and I know this isn't clear) is that the dreamworld is just as real and concrete as our world -- it just obeys a different and stranger set of laws.  Your ANIMa aren't from your imagination, they're physical things assembled in a physical world from your very real non-physical emotional bonds.

This is, as it turns out, pretty damned important to the metaphor.  If it was a game about the power of imagination instead of the power of love, I would have written the ANIMa rules very differently.

yrs--
--Ben

[Eero Tuovinen]

1) How did the Reino end up with no bliss gain from the mission?  Did he just not ever have a roll?  Did he get insanely lucky and roll no (-) results?  Did he opt to place his (-) results into active categories to avoid Bliss gain?

Let's see... ah, I took the character sheets home yesterday. Well, he did definitely roll several times, let's see what I wrote... Oh, it seems that he did actually gain one or two points. The final amount was 17, but I do remember that the character was 15 or 16 years old, don't remember which. So actually there was a point or two of Bliss.

But it is a fact that the players did their best to avoid Bliss, most of the time reasonably successfully, due to pretty nice die rolls. Their natural priority was definitely the mission objective, I think that they never chose to delay in succeeding. The lowest priority, it seems to me, was with the nightmare category; they were willing to get hurt to avoid damaging their relationships. I might be misremembering, but I think that at least one of them even opted to damage a relationship rather than taking Bliss.

2) You seem definitely mixed about your experience (I can think of a few reasons, but we'll get to those in a second.)  What made it seem bad at the time and what makes it seem better in hindsight?

Eh, I might sound more negative than I intented, that happens to me when writing long session descriptions. The play was fun! We're apparently going to play more next Saturday, albeit with a slightly different, cross-gendered group. I asked the boys to try for a longer run of 2-3 sessions at least, so we might manage to play the game through this time.

The low point of the session for me was the vague distribution of description tasks during the mission, definitely. I'm sure that this was mostly because I chose a mechanically too ambitious first mission, but the repercussions were severe: nobody had a strong handle on the setting of the dreamworld, players were slow to get into playing two characters simultaneously (definitely something that should be reserved for black belt play), I refused to take the lead myself to avoid sliding into standard GMing setup, and the result was plenty of murk and uncertainty while starting the mission. I'm pretty sure that I'm going to avoid the awkwardness when playing the next time, though.

Other than that, pretty much everything worked well. The group creation was simply fun, interludes were natural to set up and so on. If a problem is to be perceived, it's perhaps that the extraordinary amount of color we slathered upon the concept of guerrilla war in Upper Savo does not feed directly into the relationship map in this game (as I wrote above, we still didn't have too much relationship data at the end, almost only what was generated during the mission) - we've discussed it earlier how you should take a long, hard look into the apocalyptic sensibilities and recommendations the game provides in the fiction and set-up questions, so I'll pass on that now.

3) I'm totally fascinated that you ended up with a sympathetic Authority Figure, given that I set up the game to make them pretty despicable human beings.  Was this an intentional move on your part, was it from the whole group, or was it just emergent from play?  Can you talk a little bit more about it in general?

This seemed pretty natural to me, actually. I've been fascinated by the image of the Authority Figure from ever since you wrote the first draft of the game (like the anchor and the pilot, too; the core of the game is very evocative), and I don't see him as despicable - anybody willing to go crazy from lack of sleep to fight for his way of life is OK in my books, I guess. Perhaps it's philosophical difference, or you haven't written enough about the horrid implications of being the authority figure? How do you find him despicable?

That said, I think that we approached the creation of the Authority Figure by the book - I told the players that he has to be an adult insomniac, with some method for staying awake and a motivation for putting together a resistance cell. I definitely didn't call for any particular personal qualities. I think<

1) Every interlude scene has a mechanical result.  "No result" is simply not an option.

That's fine. So should play then continue until a result is reached, should the players accidentally set up a situation they can't place in any interlude category?

2) When I play the game, I totally talk about the pre-existing relationships while the pilots assign their starting relationships.  The intimacy and trust numbers, particularly the intimacy numbers, are cues for the present state of the relationship.  Apparently that didn't come across in the text as-is.  I'll make a point of mentioning it.

We got the idea here, certainly, we just didn't feel like talking about it while assigning the numbers. The main point of interest was any relationship at Intimacy 5, and blood relations. Mostly we were just trying to make sure that all NPCs get created and everybody gets the correct numbers down. The understanding was definitely that we would be fleshing out the characters and relationships during play. We were doing more than enough speculation about the resistance function of the group, so perhaps the added bother of having to figure out how each character connects with each of the several NPCs didn't seem that palatable at the moment. I don't know if this had anything to do with my character sheet design, either; possible.

I think I wrote something about this already, but I suggest looking into pacing out the group creation the tiniest bit. A step might be to only assing NPCs to players when they're actually used in play. Another idea is that the first mission could happen before all characters are actually created - make the first mission a "practice mission" with just one objective (to find your way to a waypoint and back, for example), played after creating the pilots and anchors, akin to how Dogs takes care of learning the rules. Create the rest of the NPCs only after the first practice mission is over. Might help in making the initial group creation easier.

3) I've got some color bits about the setting if you want to use them next time.  It includes, as it happens (I wrote it before I read this) the idea that the dream world bubbles over into the physical world from time-to-time, answering your dream complaints.  The intent in the text (and I know this isn't clear) is that the dreamworld is just as real and concrete as our world -- it just obeys a different and stranger set of laws.  Your ANIMa aren't from your imagination, they're physical things assembled in a physical world from your very real non-physical emotional bonds.

Sure, send the stuff over. We're apparently playing more next Saturday. I'm sure it'll go well, as I know the rules now and know how tricky the setting can be to explain properly.

[Ben Lehman]

Hmm... My authority figures have been sometimes abusive, bad bosses, unable to take responsibility for their own failures, often drug addicts, threaten violence but can't carry through, and mostly concerned with their own survival.  I guess I just take a dimmer view of adults than you?

As for the distribution of narration, it's supposed to be rather clear from the text, but it does mean that the GM absolutely has to step back during mission scenes and mostly let the Anchor handle stuff.  I have some difficulty doing this myself, for me it's largely because I want to talk over people but I can't.  I'm pretty convinced it's a solid distribution, though.  I'll be more clear on it.

Making it clear that, as the anchor, you are in some ways a "mini-GM" for the mission scene may help.

With respect to interlude scenes, I find that any scene which develops the relationship in a meaningful way will usually fit into one of the categories, while any scene which does not is often Trauma Relief.  There's no need for extended play.  If you're really having trouble, make a call as a GM (go for Stress Relief or Trauma Relief -- they're the broadest categories) and move on.

As for the "intro mission" idea, I don't know if it's possible.  Part of the hinge of the game is that you have all these relationships available for resources at any time.  However, the idea of having some "primer missions" is a really good one, so I'll give it some thought.  In practice, I have a couple of missions which I usually use as starters.

Try starting the game with one interlude scene for each player, next time.

yrs--
--Ben

[Eero Tuovinen]

Starting interludes, check. Trust or Intimacy building, pretty much.

As for the distribution of narration in missions, I agree that it's pretty clear. It's just a ready-made mess if you end up with the same person playing a pilot and an anchor simultaneously in the first mission. I'll just avoid that the next time, and most of the problem will evaporate. It's still difficult to step back as the GM when the players expect guidance, but far from impossible.