[unWritten] Rats

[alejandro]

list]
[li]Intelligent Rats in a (ours) post-human world.
Tribes at war over sustenance & resources.
Did the gods gift this to us or abandon us?
[/li]

Name: Wind
Role: Guardian of High Places
Physical Trait: Agile
Drive: Aspiration; Protect the Others
Drive: Inclination; Run After Mysteries

My protagonist

• Name: Watcher
  Role: Seeker of New Skies (scout)
  Mental Trait: Custodian of Earth and Air (shaman skills)
  Drive: Aspiration; To Find the Answers of our Past
  Drive: Inclination; Being Abandoned, retreat to the depths
  
<
<
<
<
<
<

Cues

<
• Name: Wind
  Role: Guardian of High Places. -1; Blight: I failed my tribe
  Mental Trait: Urban Survival; Blight: I need the stars to navigate.
  Physical Trait: Agile +1; Boon: Valiant Defender; Blight: Fatigued.
  Physical Trait: Crack Shot
  Drive: Aspiration; Protect the Others
  Drive: Inclination; Run After Mysteries
  

My protagonist

<
Tribes at war over sustenance & resources.
Did the gods gift this to us or abandon us?
[/li]
[li][/li]

• Name: Wind
  Role: Guardian of High Places
  Physical Trait: Agile
  Drive: Aspiration; Protect the Others
  Drive: Inclination; Run After Mysteries
  

My protagonist

• Name: Watcher
  Role: Seeker of New Skies (scout)
  Mental Trait: Custodian of Earth and Air (shaman skills)
  Drive: Aspiration; To Find the Answers of our Past
  Drive: Inclination; Being Abandoned, retreat to the depths
  
<
<
<
<
<
<

Cues

<
• Name: Wind
  Role: Guardian of High Places. -1; Blight: I failed my tribe
  Mental Trait: Urban Survival; Blight: I need the stars to navigate.
  Physical Trait: Agile +1; Boon: Valiant Defender; Blight: Fatigued.
  Physical Trait: Crack Shot
  Drive: Aspiration; Protect the Others
  Drive: Inclination; Run After Mysteries
  

My protagonist

<

[Christoph Boeckle]

Your play report is looking good so far! (There's a weird thing happening to your lists' bullets though.)

I'm not sure I understand the reasons you had for choosing one type of scene rather than another, and how adversity was generated. Also, you say that you earned various traits, boons and blights. Who gives them to whom and for what reason?

You don't need to go back over your first post if you can explain that using the follow-up session.

[alejandro]

Thanks!

The game is designed, such that your character is the protagonist of his or her story... Each player gets their own protagonist. So, when you're framing a primary scene you're framing the scene for your own protagonist. If other player's protagonists are in the scene then they, essentially, become secondary characters to your protagonist. Though controlled by their respective players.

Parallel scenes are scenes that allow each player's protagonist, who is in the scene, to be "central" to the scene. Consider the Death Star destruction scenes in both "A New Hope" and "Return of the Jedi." In these scenes you had multiple characters having their own different, yet related, conflicts in one "meta-scene" if you will. So, in a nutshell, a parallel scenes allow multiple protagonists to be focused on and working towards a common goal during a scene while still doing their own thing.

Traits, cues, boons, and blights: Okay, when you start out your protagonist only has a name, a role, and his or her Drive. As the game progresses your protagonist develops more traits and the setting acquires more cues, each of which can be booned or blighted (AKA acquire bonuses and penalties). Who imposes these and which ones you get is determined by the dice that are placed, and how they are placed. When you roll the dice you have 3 things that you need to consider: who gets to narrate, how did you act or react to the conflict, and whether you succeeded in the conflict or not. You roll an amount of dice based on the types of actions you're taking and you place up to 3 of them to determine how each of those 3 things I just listed turn out... Once your dice are placed they indicate whether you create a new trait or not, a new cue or not, or whether you should boon or blight a trait or a cue.

The follow up session will be posted sometime within the week... I hope.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Alex,

I love role-playing games about rats, or in your case, games which happily embrace them as a possibility.

My question is perhaps a little bit abstract: to what extent is your game design about storyboarding, and to what extent can actions taken within a scene carry some element of surprise or genuine, in-the-moment development of what's going on?

The reason I ask is that a great deal of a given scene seems to be established prior to playing it. Is that the case, in your experience?

Best, Ron

[alejandro]

Thanks for the question Ron.

The answer is yes, and no. It depends on who you play with. In fact, it is an issue that has come up within the past few weeks. There are some tweaks that I will be playtesting on the 18th and at Gamex the following weekend.

When I play with one of my groups I get that storyboard feel you're talking about. However, when I play with another group I get scenes that play out more traditionally in that the story comes out more through the scene and not so much in the framing. In either case, you do get surprise or in game moment to moment development, it just isn't consistent yet.

Part of the problem is that you only get one conflict per scene, but I feel that the game works best that way. In fact, I'm not sure there is a better way of doing it in unWritten.

My current fix is: Pick a cue, pick a question, and place your protagonist (i.e. Harry is at his desk or Harry is in front of the convicted/escaped murderer.) The caveat, which I just made up right now, is that the conflict cannot come from the protagonists placement. So, the conflict can't be the desk or the murderer. This idea may or may not work. But, what I think it does is force the game away from A+B=C done, move on. Which is what I think you mean by storyboarding.

Any thoughts?

[Ron Edwards]

I like that idea. It reminds me of Matt Snyder's important repair to his game in design, 44, which also arose out of my concerns for the game.

In that case, he decided that the GM does not play the androids as attacking player-characters or trying to convert them to androids - the idea being that if they wanted that, they'd have done it already. Before that change, the game was composed of repetitve fight scenes and who cares what the androids are or what they want; after that change, it became a horrifying paranoid drama about exactly those things (much better).

In your case, the issue is more general, but it seems like the same issue: let conflicts arise from the interactions within the scene, and not be front-loaded by external elements. The starting points that your list should (as I see it) work like a platform with some intriguing sockets or sprockets, and only in play is the device's actual function and mechanism actually developed. Given the rule you've stated, I think play may well reliably work that way, instead of handing already-whirring mechanisms to people at the outset of the scene.

Best, Ron