[Polaris] Three is a breeze

[JC]

heya

just thought I should let y'all know that I played Polaris for the first time, through IRC, and that it went very very well, even though there were only three of us

we just collapsed Full Moon and New Moon into plain Moon, like it said in the book, and never looked back

in fact, it went so well, that I'm curious why it's emphasized so much in the book that four players is by far the better option

maybe three just worked so well because of IRC, which is slower than face-to-face

any thoughts?

[cydmab]

We've been using 3 for our VOIP (Voice over IP - Skype specifically) game regularly (we played with 4 tabletop previously). One person suggested that it should run BETTER with 3 on VOIP because one lacks visual cues to prevent people from talking over each other, but I haven't had a chance to test 4 person VOIP. So I can only compare 4 person TT to 3 person VOIP and 3 person TT. The only serious issue I've noticed from going to 4 down to 3 is that we also went from 3 characters down to 2. 3 players, 2 protagonists results in one person not being moon at all (turned out to be me) which I found a little bit of a drag (I have to be "on" every scene). I've tried to get the 3rd player to make a 3rd protagonist, but he's just not interested in being a heart. With 4 players one can be a bit more creative and flexible with number of protagonists and dividing up roles.

As far as pooling moons, one of the 3 of us has been observing that there's alot of conflict statements and action scenes, and not as many "just talking" scenes. We've speculated that may be in part because there's only one moon. With two moons have more people interested in chatting, since more people that can't resort to conflict. But there are alot of other possible explanations as well.

(We did do one game 3 person IRC. It went so-so; I had a hard time explaining the rules to the third player. I don't think he quite grokked the idea of how to handle the heart role - I didn't explain it well over text, I couldn't tell he wasn't grokking it until too late. I'm not sure text chat was the best way to explain the rules and differences from traditional rpgs. It may have just been I was still new at explaining the rules however)

-William Leblanc

[Ben Lehman]

Glad that it's working out for you!

You have to understand that the text was written by a different guy -- a guy I call "Ben in 2005 --" who for some reason was obsessed with the particulars of the four person structure. I can't really fathom why. These days, I love three player Polaris, really just as much or more than four player.

yrs--
--Ben