Elfs

[xiombarg]

Okay, I ran Elfs tonight -- it was f*ck-around night. We had:

* James, playing a poser-cool Gential Elf named "Jesus Christ"
* Emily, playing a perky Oral Elf named "Elfinaea" or something like that
* Frank, playing a wise-ass Oral Elf named "Asshole"
* Russ, playing a snobbish Gential Elf named "Otter"

I ran the sample scenario. It went... medium well. The high point was after Jesus Christ blew a roll (0 successes) while having carnal relations with the chief's daughter, so she finished first and pulled off him... and in response, he brutally slew her (three successes) in anger and frustration. The fun part was when, despite his Low Cunning being zero at that moment, he did the best Low Cunning move in the game. See, "Asshole" was watching, so Jesus kicked him in the nuts (making him scream) and ran, leaving Asshole behind to explain a corpse (3 successes)...

The players had a tough time grokking the Dumb Luck system, tho the Low Cunning system caught on pretty quick. They always wanted to do too much or too little with the Dumb Luck system -- either trying to grab too much authorial control ("I hit one guy and he hits another guy, domino-syle") or too little. I used the examples from the book and made up my own, and it didn't seem to help. The best use of Dumb Luck was where Otter found a magic item by slipping on ice and bumping his head against a secret chamber (that's what the player wanted), while the character was attempting to look cool on the ice (which, since he only got 2 successes, he failed to do).

Commentary was varied. Despite one of the best moments in the game coming from him, James didn't like the fact that he didn't seem to be successful as often as he'd like, especially once he lost Spunk in combat. Emily complained it reqired too much creativity in combat, when she's better elsewhere, tho I thought that might have been my fault for not doing more social stuff with the tribe. (I really blanked. On the flipside, the players didn't sem interested in interacting with the tribe at all.) Both James and Emily thought they lost Spunk too quikly, leading to the feeling they got during our infamous Pool game. (I also think these players were less hip to the Toon-style "failure is funny too" idea that Elfs seems to engender.) Russ liked it because he got to do the sort of things he'd never do in D&D -- he grabbed the pipe while invisible (the magic item he found was a Ring of Invisibility), and left the party holding the bag with an angry mob of barbarians until he thought to toke the pipe. Frank seemed to enjoy it okay, though he had the toughest time coming up with ideas.

I think some of the problems had less to do with the system and more to do with how I ran it -- it was perhaps more combat-heavy than it should have been. However, I think that the Dumb Luck system, which is the coolest part of the game, could use more 'splaining, and/or some expansion -- the players wanted more authorial control. Also, I tried to make the failures funny, but the players didn't get into the spirit there very much, and that's something to watch out for. IF you don't think your players will find failure is funny, you may need to suggest the more twinkish techinques for character creation, things that everyone thought of but didn't try, like Spunk 1 and Low Cunning 8, which I believe is perfectly in the spirit of the game, but no one did because they didn't want to seem TOO much of a twink.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Kirt,

I've found Elfs to fly best when the GM is very committed to the open, vicious, completely unapologetic skewering of old school play. Even "I want my character to succeed a lot" has to get chucked; protagonism in Elfs is a matter of resolving situations in a satisfying manner, not a matter of coolly succeeding in announced tasks.

The Dumb Luck mechanic is indeed the key, and most of your statements about (a) what players didn't find fun and (b) didn't understand seem integrated to me. In other words, if they don't grasp the "what the player wants" from that mechanic, then "what the player wants" isn't going to be a priority of play - the priority will remain with the old-school "my guy succeeds a lot," which is ... well, not likely to happen.

(For those of you who aren't familiar with Elfs, suffice to say that one's character may fail his or her intended action badly whereas the player succeeds brilliantly.)

Anyway, you can yip-yap about mechanics all day and most people will tune out and wait until you mention something about "hitting" before tuning in again. My call is instead to emphasize the outrageous and frankly in-your-eye unfair satire of D&D that is Elfs.

The best way to do that, in my experience, is exactly what I wrote in the prep section - the NPCs, the NPCs, the NPCs. Get into the NPCs and their problems: gnoll guards at the gate? They're bitchin' about pay cuts. Ogre assassin? Oh, his achin' hemorrhoids. Villagers? They insist on "fooling" you with painfully-slow card tricks. And, look, that's exactly where you say you fell down. Your heart wasn't into making D&D look stupid via your role-playing of the NPCs - hence, no Elfs.

One customer wrote to say that he thought the satire was too pointed and unfair. He got the idea from my reply that I agreed with him, and nothing could be further from the truth. Elfs is an angry game, and the humor is there to make my anger accessible and entertaining. Tap into that and you'll be well on your way.

Best,
Ron