[Primitive] The Order of the Big Stick

[Adam Dray]

Yesterday, I had a little cook-out for some of my friends this weekend. SarahScott was back in town (she moved away to New Orleans), and she and Lisa and Mike joined me and my wife for some hot dogs and chat for 4-5 hours. Around 4 PM, Steph had to head off to a writer's group and I planned to run a game. I'd suggested Primitive and everyone seemed okay with that. Another friend, Brandon, finished his fire department shift and got there around 5 or so, and we started.

They're all pretty experienced role-players. Mike's mostly played D&D (variety of versions). Lisa has played a lot of D&D (variety of versions), run Shadowrun, and played Dogs and a couple other indie games. Brandon and SarahScott have less tabletop experience than the others. I'm not sure what all Brandon has played -- probably some D&D, definitely a game of Roach with me and a Verge playtest with me. SarahScott has played D&D 3E, D20 Star Wars, Dogs, Verge, and probably some other things. All of them play on the very Sim, fantasy MUSH that I run (FiranMUX). We all play World of Warcraft, too -- sometimes even together.

I had re-read the rules the night before. There's really not much to them. I created a one-page, two-column reference sheet with the basics of Tribe/PC creation, conflict and combat resolution, and gaining and spending facets (XP). While I was outside finding suitable sticks to measure movement, they found my reference sheet copies and were already reading them. We sat in my comfortable living room and played on a middle-sized coffee table.

Before play, I had dumped out a decorative glass jar of seashells I collected in my youth and paired them up for tokens (instead of rocks). Primitive encourages each player to have a matching pair of tokens -- one to serve as a "miniature" on the crude battle map, the other to serve as an initiative marker. I dug out 7-8 pairs shells and stones and shark's teeth, usually with one large and one small, perfect. At the table, I explained how the dice worked. I explained the Tribal Pool and how it would be used for character creation and extra dice during play.


Tribe Creation

For four players, I set out 4x5-1 = 19 dice on the table and asked them if they wanted to create any Tribe Qualities. (I can't remember what they're called. Qualities? Skills?) They decided that they all had big sticks. I took 3 dice from the Tribal Pool. Though I'd explained that the skills were generally of the form, "I have..." or "I can..." or "I will..." or "I know..." they dropped the extra words and never wrote them down, as far as I know. In any case, they started scribbling their skills on the top or back of the reference hand-out. Again, I never said to do that, but I was enjoying watching them figure things out on their own.

I reminded them that they could divvy up the Tribal Pool to create their characters however they wanted. Without any discussion, they seemed to agree to split it evenly. They did discuss leaving some dice in there for bonus dice during play.

SarahScott seemed lost. She understood the task, but not the motivation. "What is the point of this game?" It was curious, not accusatory. Sensing that she meant "the point, like Dogs has a point," I told her that it didn't really have a point like Dogs, as far as I knew, but that it was more, "be cave-people, face problems, and solve them -- all while struggling to communicate without language." She was struggling with character creation, because she didn't know what kind of skills to write down, because she didn't understand what they'd be doing or, more importantly, why. More explanation, eventually she just shrugged and dropped it. Maybe she'll read this and clarify.

I can't remember all the skills they took but here are a few. Brandon could make fire, and knew the secret of the wheel. Mike knew how to make weapons and could run very fast. SarahScott knew how to make boats and... something else (can't recall). Lisa could talk with animals and knew how to heal. I think they each had two skills. So of the 19 Tribal dice, 3 were used on a Tribe Skill and 8 were used on individual skills, leaving 8 in the Tribal Pool for play.

Then they chose their Aspects (dividing 5 points each between Civil and Savage). Brandon went 5 Savage, 0 Civil. The rest split theirs closely: Mike and Lisa split 3 Civil, 2 Savage. SarahScott split 2 Civil, 3 Savage.

[Adam Dray]

First Scene

Using the seashell theme and queuing off Lisa's boat thing, I described their oceanside cliff caves, their island tribe of 50, and how lately the monsters in the sea had made it impossible to fish, and how a tyrannosaurus rex had been ravaging the jungle and eating the prey they usually hunt. The tribe had been as large as 150 and now it was greatly diminished, and the chief wanted their best warriors to go fight the t.rex. I went into character then, remembering that I probably shouldn't be "dialogging," and pointed to the three warriors, shrugged, and pointed to Lisa in a sort of "yeah, and you, too" way. That immediately set her off as the runt of the litter. I had thought that Mike had given more points to Savage or I'd have done that to him, too.

Re-explaining the mission in cavespeak was harder. I made a giant gnashing mouth sign with my arms (fingers as teeth) to signify the t.rex. I made stabby motions with my index finger and clubbing motions with my fist. I pointed to tell them to go. I really wish I hadn't dialogged before this because I think it served as an easy bridge for the language.


Second Scene

They headed into the jungle with no plan at all. Eventually, Lisa mimed frustration and confusion. The group stopped and tried to talk out a plan. Mike pointed at Lisa and made a series of signs indicating that they use Lisa for bait. Our (RL) kitten happened to be lying on the arm of the couch next to Lisa, and Mike pointed to it and offered it as bait. Lisa -- framing back to RL (at least I think so) -- pet the kitten and said something cute like, "Leave the kitty alone!" I pulled the cat into the fiction as a monkey, wrote "Monkey" on an index card and gave it to Lisa. They bickered for a while about whether to use the monkey as bait or not.

Brandon, Savage 5, got "bored" and clubbed the monkey. We rolled dice and he wounded it and (I ruled) knocked it unconscious. He took the monkey and Lisa pouted. She said she would walk off into the jungle without them. After a while, she decided to go back because she didn't like being alone (and I fell into my "don't split up the party, so passive-aggressively threaten the lone player" D&D habits). We rolled some dice to see if she could find them, because Brandon and Mike said they'd left without her. She failed her Civil roll. Eventually, the other three went looking for her, rolled well, and found her.


Third Scene

They traipsed around the jungle more. I was waiting for anyone to suggest a plan and was content to let them explore the dice system and run into some mini-encounters I had set up for later. They decided to climb a tree to look for a big dinosaur. Brandon failed a roll and fell and took a Wound. Didn't try again. SarahScott tried and climbed up above the leaves.

I told them that through the mist between the levels of the canopy, they could see what appeared to be a giant dinosaur head, miles off. They all ran full speed in that direction. When they arrived, they interacted with a giant, clawed dinosaur foot covered with moss. They built a fire around it. Nothing. SarahScott climbed to the top of it, and found that it was made entirely of stone.

She climbed down and tried to explain this to the others without words. After several failed attempts, she figured out that the combination of two-arm-jaw-rawr and err!-frozen-still got the message across, but some of the players weren't sure if that meant that it was a real t.rex that was turned to stone or if it was a statue or what.

It was getting dark, so they made fire and slept. They tried out a couple symbols for fire, and only one stuck: blowing on your fingers frantically as if you'd burned yourself. I loved that their language was becoming defined by incompetence.

At some point, I told them they were hungry. They hunted a boar and killed it. It was a quick, one-round combat and I don't think the boar got a chance to attack them.

I had forgotten to explain facets and advancement and hurriedly explained the rules. I gave them each 2 facets, figuring that they'd probably rolled two 6's up to that point.


Fourth Scene

In the morning, they went exploring again. SarahScott said she was looking for any kind of stone-ified animals. Maybe it was a basilisk.

I told them that the found a creek with some human-looking foot prints. They followed for a while and then I asked Mike, "What do you find?" He was shocked by this, but I warned the group that I'd be asking them to help from time to time. He announced that they'd found a cave (he could have said, "The damned t.rex!" but didn't).

They made fire, found some more sticks and light them on fire (torches). Brandon started trying to roll for everything, including getting his stick to light. I told him that it wasn't a suitable challenge but, in retrospect, I should have let him roll it as a Civil check to see if he invented the torch. Brandon wanted to engage the dice system as much as possible to earn facets to improve his character.

They entered the cave with their torches. They smelled meat. I told them it was the smell of human meat. "Ohh! Ohh!" grunted Mike excitedly, apparently hungry. "No, human meat..." I reiterated. Mike grunted in disgust, "Ohh."

Round a corner, they spotted a pair of people from another tribe. They had mud-slick hair, black-striped faces, and white bone pierced through their noses. With little discussion, group consensus was to kill them. We rolled initiative and tried to figure out how to arrange the marker stones. I let the lowest roll place a stone first (doesn't matter where!). Second lowest then decided to go before or after the first. Third got to place before the first, after the last, or between them. And so on, till everyone had placed. I'd rolled one initiative roll for the two "enemies" and placed them as well. I think some of them were adding skills (like Brandon's "I can run fast") to their initiative rolls. I think he had a 12 but it didn't dawn on me then.

Brandon acted first, charging into the cave (long move) all the way up to the two bad dudes. One of the enemy made two attacks on Brandon, hitting at least once. The other one charged halfway up to the party (medium move) and threw his stick (which, I noted, was much smaller than the sticks of the Big Stick tribe). He missed and I mimed his realization that he'd just thrown his weapon.

The other three moved in (medium move, I think) and hit him. I think he went down to 1 life / hit point / whatever immediately. (Aside: What ARE those things called? I think they're Wounds, but that confused the player when I called them that. Wounds are bad. They don't want Wounds. It's counter-intuitive to "lose a Wound" when you're damaged but gain one when healed.)


Intermission

We agreed that rerolling initiative was a pain. We just kept the initiative from last round.

There was some general player discussion about opposed rolls. See, I'd been rolling the GM dice instead of giving them to the players. Maybe that was a bad idea. The rules say:
1) Agree on the stakes (what happens if the player succeeds or fails.
2) GM decides if it's a Civil or Savage conflict (let's say it's Civil for the sake of example),
3) The player and GM have different colored dice.
4) The player gets 1d6 + Civil (if it's Civil). The player gets +1d6 for each skill he can bring in.
5) The GM gets 1d6 + Savage (if it's a Civil conflict). The GM gets +1d6 for every complication the GM can invent ("it's dark: +1d6").
6) The player rolls ALL the dice.
7) If the player dice (summed) + Civil is greater than the GM dice (summed) + Savage, the player succeeds. If they tie, reroll. If the GM dice are greater, the player fails.

Now, I thought that I was doing the players a favor by rolling the GM dice in step 6. I eventually scribbled down a cheat sheet with the four players' names and their Civil and Savage scores and could handle the GM half of the roll pretty quickly. It seems odd to me to have the GM sitting there, not rolling dice, and making the player do two lookups, two separate sums, and a comparison.  It's a lot to hold in your head.

I probably should have played the game as written before modding it. Bad designer habit, but this one rule just annoyed me, so I changed it. I did make sure to remind players when 6's came up on any dice (theirs or mine) for facets.


Back to Fourth Scene

Back to the action. Brandon was still first in initiative order, and he whacked his guy and damaged him again. Then I said that the other, weaponless bad guy ran as fast as he could out of the cave. The players suggested that it was a dark cave and he was torchless, so I made him make a Savage roll. He succeeded and moved a long distance. At this point, as long as he could make those rolls, the tribe could never hit him (a long move means you get no other action).  Once he was out of the cave, he wouldn't even need to roll to run. One of the players suggested that, if they made a certain roll, it meant that they could catch up with him. I agreed that it was possible, they succeeded, and I let that player switch initiative order with the running guy.

Brandon killed his foe. Mike, with better initiative position, attacked the running guy twice and wounded him. Next round was similar, and they finished him off.

They "looted the bodies" (their words, but tongue in cheek). They were not forestalled even when I told them that other than a club and bone nose jewelry, the only place they could stash loot was in their loinclothes. There was some fun, lewd discussion in and out of character. Some of it from one of the women surprised me (not because she's a woman, but because it was not typical for her).

In the back of the cave, they found a small stone dinosaur carving. I was planting more plot seeds. They pantomimed and grunted a bit and wondered if it was a baby dinosaur that had been turned to stone. Brandon decided to cut off the ears of the fallen enemy and make a necklace of them. There was some grotesquerie on his part and we mostly tried to gloss over it. Lisa helped him figure out how to use the sharp nose-bones to cut the ears off. Then Brandon realized they had nothing to use as a necklace. I think he just held onto the ears.

Throughout the game, the grunting and gesturing was intentionally exaggerated and humorous much of the time.


Fifth Scene

I brought them to a lake. Across the lake, they could see the t.rex rampaging the jungle. I was trying hard to hit their skills and wanted to give SarahScott a chance to do some boat-fu. She made a "soggy" raft (my words, and she vehemently disagreed, so I backed off). They camped and ate, but it wasn't important. The next day, the group used their hands and big sticks to row and pole across the lake.


Sixth Scene

They scouted some more and found t.rex tracks! After a failed tracking roll (Lisa led them in the wrong direction), they reversed and trailed the beast. They found the entrails and bones of things the predator had killed. Some of them found pointy rib bones and fastened them to the head of their sticks. I think Lisa thought of it, and succeeded at a Civil roll to do it. Some others followed her example. Brandon tried to use animal guts to make a necklace. He failed a roll and I told him that he had a "necklace" of smelly intestines. The others had fun miming how much he smelled and they decided that, if Brandon's character had a name-gesture, it was that. None of this discouraged Brandon from making a smelly-poo-intestines-and-ears necklace to wear.

The tracks eventually led to a ravine. In the ravine were some deerlike animals drinking at a brook. On the other side of the ravine was the t.rex, about to pounce down on them.

With a very little "discussion," they mimed jumping on the t.rex. They waited for it to pounce the deer, then they leapt down into the ravine onto the dinosaur's back! I made them make rolls (I think Savage on account of the sheer physicality of it) with a couple extra dice on the GM's side and they all succeeded. I think some of them used 1 Tribal die for help.

We rolled initiative and I assigned some stats for the t.rex. The rules give no help for this!  At first, I had it at Savage 6, Civil 0, because it was a huge beast, but I remembered describing how it was sneaking up on the deer, so I made it 4/2. I gave it 7 life or wounds or whatever. I gave the t.rex skills like "I have big teeth," "I will eat you," and "I can run very fast."

They fought! There was lots of big-stick pounding. The t.rex's first action was to try to fling two of them off and it succeeded, causing one wound to both SarahScott and Mike. In retrospect, it should have been able to fling them but not wound them in the same action, but they were falling 20-30 feet so it seemed a natural consequence. None of the players disagreed with the stakes, in any case, but they might just be used to GM-is-final play or something. It tried to gnash at them a few times and failed. They killed it in three rounds.

I think that was a let-down. In retrospect, I probably should have given it like 15-20 life, 7 Savage, 2 Civil, and a couple more skills. It was supposed to be this big, mean boss monster. When I statted it though, I thought it would be challenging. Just my inexperience with the game showing, plus the game's complete lack of help in this regard.

I asked the players if they wanted to end on that note, or if they wanted to play on. A little hesitantly, they agreed that they wanted to stop but that they wanted to go back to the tribe chief first to end the story.


Seventh and Last Scene

They all wanted t.rex teeth, which they bashed out of its mouth with their clubs. Brandon decided he wanted the whole damned head. Without tools to cut it off, he vowed to chew it off with his teeth, even if it took him two weeks. Okay... Lisa saved the day with a Civil roll: she invented an axe using her club and a big dinosaur tooth. She chopped the head off for them and they dragged it back to the chief.

I told them that I had planned some other encounters for them with the bone-nose cannibal people. I said that there were a few dozen of them around the ravine watching, but (since we were gonna stop), they were terrified of the people who could kill such a terrible beast. The players seemed visibly proud of this. I said that they were the statue-carvers as well, and if we'd played on they could have encountered an tribe of people who were angry about their god being killed.

Back at their home caves, they were greeted as heroes -- even Lisa, the runt. The chief made a point of gesturing how proud he was of them, especially Lisa. He gifted them all with seashells and -- I think Brandon or SarahScott thought of this -- bigger sticks. It was then that they decided that they were The Order of the Big Stick.

I think we played for four hours, including the 30-40 minutes for Tribe creation.


Summary

It was fun but broken. SarahScott especially felt that I was "just making it all up as I went," and she didn't mean the plot; she meant the rules. The lack of an opposed roll made certain things really feel weird. There was some player surprise that "You can't wound someone when it isn't your turn [in combat]?" When I had the NPCs doing stuff to them, they wanted to take a GM role and add complication dice (I let them). There was at least one instance in which they wanted to give themselves bonus dice for a mitigating factor that played in their favor but, at least by my reading, the rules do not allow that. I didn't let them do that, because I wanted to see how it played (answer: oddly).

The game contains zero support for the GM. There are rules for character generation, conflict resolution, special rules for combat, and some rules for advancement. That's it. There's little or no GM advice. There are no rules for creating encounters or monsters. There's no direct support at all for setting at all, really. So I found myself deciding that the two tribesmen had 4 life each and 3/2 Savage/Civil split and no skills to use. I found myself deciding that the t.rex had 7 life, 4/2 Savage/Civil, and 3-4 skills. And I frequently made bad decisions from inexperience with Primitive, despite decades of GMing experience. Sure, I can run Primitive better the next time, but the four players said, essentially, "It was okay fun but I wouldn't want to play it again."

They liked the language stuff. SarahScott suggested a caveman Dogs in the Vineyard mash-up using Dogs rules but set in caveman times and prohibiting in-character talking. (I escalate to grunting! *laugh*)

The players thought the game must have been intended for less Savage play, and more Civil play -- like trying to solve social problems and invent stuff and help the tribe. SarahScott said it wasn't "good for dungeon crawls." I'd come to the table with very little ready in the way of prepped adventure and sorta clued off their skills and attitudes and stuff as best I could. To me, "We have big sticks" meant "let's hit stuff." I see no reason the game shouldn't have made that more fun.

I think they disliked the undirectedness of play. I'll take some of the blame for that as GM, too. It was a bit railroady. I know the rules say "for experienced gamers," but to me that seems a cop-out. I'm an experienced gamer and that game should have been more fun for us.

[Nev the Deranged]

I'm about to run a game at a local games day. I'm interested in the quick-reference sheet you wrote up (that's a habit of mine as well). Any chance I could get a copy?

Primitive, as I understand it, is built along slightly more traditional GM-Authority lines, at least as far as the plot goes. Certainly you can let your players explore and discover, but some idea of where things are going don't hurt. I plan to have a mixture of pre-planned events and winging-it in my game.

I am going to run it strictly as-written, though, with no mods. Not sure how much the mods you made affected how it came out, but it sounds like maybe player expectations didn't quite synch up to the game either.

I don't think NPCs are intended to be statted out as characters, just "adversity dice" the GM throws at the players. I will be using different colors of dice for Civility, Savagery, and GM-Adversity; so hopefully that will make it a bit clearer what's going on.

I'm glad someone else posted about playing the game, though!  Thanks!

D.

[Eric J. Boyd]

Adam,

Thanks for writing up your experience. I have some of the same concerns about Primitive's lack of GM support and clearly describing how combat and opposing NPCs are supposed to work. I posted about it over on SG here and Kevin confirmed that NPCs are supposed to be statted out, although I totally see the validity of Nev's approach given the lack of clarity in the text.

I really want to like the game, but I'm waiting for the Record of Threats supplement before trying it out.

Cheers,

Eric

[Nev the Deranged]

Hm. Thanks for that link, Eric. I'll check that out before I run my game.

Kevin ran a game for us back when he released the game at GenCon, and it was pretty cool. But then, naturally, there was a lot more in his head than is in the book.

[Adam Dray]

I posted my Primitive rules summary as a PDF.

[Adam Dray]

Wrong url. It's actually here.

[Nev the Deranged]

Excellent. I'll check it out. Thanks! I'll be sure to post AP from my game early next month.

[Nev the Deranged]

Adam, I notice that like me, you have used Savagery for combat initiative rather than Civility, as is defined in the book. Was that by mistake, or did you have a particular reason?

Personally, I noticed that all the special actions in the game were based in Civility, and that it seemed like Savagery got short shrift. Plus, the argument that instinct should rule initiative makes sense to me.

The only other thing I see that I'm not sure on is that you appear to let your players speak and write OOCly? How did that work out for you? I don't plan on allowing my players to speak, except to me, for the duration of the game. And frankly, I'll be trying to keep GM/player spoken communications brief and rare as well. But I'm interested in how allowing OOC chat affected your game.

Thanks a lot for linking to your quick-ref sheet! I will be putting a very similar one together, and it was useful to see how you arranged things.

D.

[Adam Dray]

Oops! I made a mistake about initiative, that's all.

I used Savage for some special actions during our game, like diving onto the back of the beast. If someone had tried to move something very heavy, I'd have called for a Savage roll.

The rules, as far as I understood them, let players talk all they want out-of-character. It worked fine. I only once reminded a player that they shouldn't be saying what they were saying, and it was borderline. The meta conversation was most of the fun, really, because we were joking and talking about what was happening.

[Nev the Deranged]

The rules, as far as I understood them, let players talk all they want out-of-character. It worked fine. I only once reminded a player that they shouldn't be saying what they were saying, and it was borderline. The meta conversation was most of the fun, really, because we were joking and talking about what was happening.

Hm. Interesting. I'll have to read through it again. Even so, I think I may stick with prohibiting OOC chatter at all, just to see how that works out.

Thanks for your replies!

[Kevin Allen Jr]

hey folks,

Sorry it's taken me a while to get to posting on this, i only noticed
it a few days ago, and i've been thinking about what i can add to the
conversation.

Adam, i'm sorry the game didn't sing for you. It sounds like you
pretty much did everything by the book (and the stuff you changed
really isn't a big deal).

You're absolutly right, the GM support sucks. Record of Threats: a
primitive suppliment is coming out at this years gen con its a book of
setting material, scenarios, items, monsters, npc and just general
advice for GMs regaurding how the game works.

The game definitly does better with exploration/discovery than romper
stomper combat, your player is right in the "this wouldn't do a
dungeon crawl" point.

Yeah the players are supposed to do all the rolling and calculating. I
hate math, i don't like keeping track of numbers in games, and yet i
made a game where you have to do a little math. I dissagree with you
that it's too much for the players to do, but if you were having less
fun with it, rolling the other half as the GM is a fine fix for it. I
like the notion of games where all the GM does is story tell.
Storyfirst in my book.

I generally just use the first initiative roll also, and don't re-roll
everytime. It doesn't really matter all that much either way though.

I don't think savagry gets the short shrift. I've generally found that
both sides get pretty equal play. What did you find, Adam?

I love the cannibles. I would have loved to see more with the dino
statues, thats pretty jinky.

Sorry you didn't get more out of the experiance. I hope it wasn't a
total wash for you, and you get more fun play out of future things i
produce (or even out of primitive again in the future). Primitive is
my firstborn and i love it dearly. I continue to play it, and will
continue to play it. I will continue to support and suppliment it as
long as i keep haveing new ideas for it, and as long as i get VERY
useful feedback (like this really thurough AP). Thanks for playing,
thanks for making the game better.