[Grey Ranks] The joy of soul-crushing defeat

[GreatWolf]

We gathered again to play Grey Ranks.  (Our last session is here.)  To kick things off on a cheery note, I played a portion of the Radio Lightning broadcast and the appropriate documentary clips from the Warsaw Uprising website.  Hearing the sound of the Stukas screaming from the sky was an appropriate mood setter for the evening.

Then, after an impromptu political discussion, we got down to brass tacks.

Session Two:  Uprising

Chapter 4:  Desperate Street Fighting<Warsaw Uprising<<<<After the mission, Ola returns home to find a bouquet of flowers from Hans and a letter, saying how he could get them out of the city.  So Ola decides to lay plans with Hans to escape Warsaw.  (Goal of Personal scene:   use this opportunity to gather information to help her friends.)  Crystal rolled a d6 and failed.  So she threatened her Thing Held Dear for a d12 and the reroll, which gave her success.  So she did the right thing, although she wrote about her moment of weakness in her journal.

I think< Chapter 5:  The High Water Mark of the Uprising<<Leon is foraging for food while he is out in the city.  He spies a basket of food on a window sill and decides to steal it.  (Goal of Personal Scene:  have the food be from a German, not a Pole.)  Keith rolled a d8 and succeeded.  So Leon makes off with the food, having not compromised his principles.

<needed to win that personal scene.  Otherwise, there was no way to save me from being written out.  Singling me out would have only changed how I went out.  Again, the Grid drives our game choices.

Chapter 6:  German Tanks against Home-made Rifles<

So, Plug and Gigant are heading into German territory.  Gigant is carrying a machine gun that he took from a dead German soldier.  So, when they find a group of German soldiers working on recovering an air-dropped crate, Gigant sets up and opens fire.  I contributed a d10 to the mission pool.  So, sure, Gigant gunned down the Germans.  But he went berserk, shredding the crate into splinters with the machine gun and attracting the attention of a nearby halftrack.

<<<Post Game Reflection

Yeah.  It felt much better this time around.  Jason was right; things do<quite<for missions<Dirty Secrets<think<A word on bleakness<exactly the right scene<Grey Ranks with Session 3:  Disaster.


Postscript:  A Funny Story

[Jason Morningstar]

Hey Seth,

It sounds like you did some homework, looking up the Uprising on the Web.  Was that helpful?  Did it inform your play?  I'm interested in the experience of players approaching the game with no knowledge of the events, or varying knowledge.  Can you comment on this?

[GreatWolf]

Let's see.  Way back when you were first talking about Grey Ranks, I did some reading up on the Uprising.  That's part of what informed my desire to play.  However, I still have internalized only a very little bit, comparable to what you include in the book.

During our first session, I breezed over the history, discussing just enough for people to get a sense of what was up.  In talking after the game, Crystal indicated to me that some more information might be helpful.  So I went back to the Web, mostly to find a timeline.  That's when I stumbled on the Radio Lightning broadcast and realized that a couple of the documentary clips applied directly to our session.

As far as the group goes, I still know the most, but not really all that much.  I think that the big deal is gathering a "look-and-feel" for what is going on and the general animosity.  But, really, the game is about coming of age in a war zone.  It could almost be any war zone, I would think, and still function as a game.

Does that answer your question, Jason?

[Jason Morningstar]

It does, thanks.

[Reithan]

This game sounds very interesting - where can I find more information on it?
I especially like how you explain the grid mechanic.

[Valamir]

I'll let Seth polish off the third AP report for this game, which we finished off this Friday.

I'll just say this:

Jason, this game is a true work of design genius.  As with any game tackling emotionally intense subject manner and relying on fairly open mechanics, it does require a group with a willingness to engage the topic and a certain basic talent with improv; but unlike many improv heavy games this one is not just free form with some transparent "get out of the way" mechanics thrown in.

The Grid is one of the single most incredible RPG innovations I've ever seen.  I can't imagine how it could could have been designed any better.
 
The die distribution on the grid is key.  In order to maintain the higher die sizes you have to continue to win, but the difficulty keeps the pressure up and as the losses mount, the die sizes shrink making further losses and begining to "circle the drain" of Suicidal Depression all but inevitable.

The "outs" in the corners that let you wrap to the other side of the grid keep this death spiral from being pointlessly hopeless, but this requires either the cooperation of the Mission Leader to single you out or taking the leadership role yourself.  And God help you if two players find themselves needing to pop through on the same Chapter.

But having all the border cells wrap would have been a mistake...maybe not a "break the game" mistake, but definitely not as effective.  Choosing to only wrap at the corners was exactly right, even though the grid is square, the piece movement becomes very circular as a result.

The labels at the corner are perfectly identified.  I tried to think if I could come up with a "better" phrase for any of the corners, and nope...not only were they thematically appropriate and tied sensibly to the win / loss combinations, they mapped over darn near perfectly to the fiction we were creating...in both directions.  Meaning the corner labels informed how we played, and how we played matched up eerily well to the movement of the pieces on the grid.

Having a list of setting elements that may be incorporated into each chapter was good.  Tieing different lists to each grid position was positively inspired.  I also would have been sorely tempted to have the elements do something more than just "being there"...like making them manditory or tying them to die selection or some mechanical link.  NOT doing that was the right choice.

Knowing the direction you need to move to both maximize your dice and map out a wrap to avoid that second corner adds a much appreciated strategic element.  Even though it doesn't directly map over to the fiction, it FEELS like a planning session you and your mates might have over a dirty map by dim lantern light planning out a strike against the Nazis and realizing the odds are slim.  A great example of how a mechanic can add enormously to the theme of a game without being a direct sim of anything.


I could come up with a dozen mechanics for bringing emotional content and mental state into the game with some mechanical reinforcement.  I never in a million years would have hit upon this solution.  Rarely does a particular mechanic strike me as being absolutely, flawlessly, perfect at doing what its meant to do in a game.  The Grey Ranks grid is such a mechanic.  Kudos.

[GreatWolf]

Reithan, check out the official website for information, links, and whatnot.

And I totally agree with Ralph.

Final AP is coming real soon now.  Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow.

[Ron Edwards]

Seth, that's a really good point about the chronology. When we played, we didn't pay much attention to that, and the next time, I think I will make a special effort to do so.

Best, Ron

[Jason Morningstar]

Thanks for the praise, Ralph, that means a lot to me. 

I was careful about picking dates with the intention of mentally pacing the game.  Most of the narratives I read were similarly sequenced - you'd get a solid half or more that took place over a single week, with slower sections on either end.  I wanted to emulate that.  In retrospect I probably should have called more attention to this.

It looks like character death didn't cause any problems for you guys in later scenes, but I'm interested in how players of dead characters interacted late in the game - any thoughts on this?

[Paul T]

I just wanted to say...

This AP led me to check out the website for the game, and from there I jumped over to watch the little "demo" that's linked on YouTube. What a brilliant idea! I loved it--a great way to explain, demonstrate, and advertise your game. Great stuff!

(Has anyone else done a video demo?)


Paul

[Ron Edwards]

I believe I may have begun that particular deal with Spione, Paul. Since my current videos on the site are actually from older playtesting, I haven't been talking it up much. I need to get it updated.

Best, Ron