[The Pool]

[Latreya Sena]

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

My first and most straightforward answer is that you should prepare a simple but exciting situation for player-characters to encounter. The key is not to improvise the back-story, but to prepare it. If there's been a murder, then you, the GM, know who did it. If there was a war with goblins 100 years ago, you say so; if there wasn't, then you say so. The Pool is actually much more traditional in its preparation requirements than many people initially thought. It's easy to get distracted by the player-narration of conflicts' outcomes and become wrongly fearful that they might interfere with back-story content.

Anyway, my point is that preparing for the Pool requires some solid work from you in terms of immediate setting, your non-player characters who are currently embroiled in something tense and colorful, and opportunities for the player-characters to take action. In other words, what's going on. I recommend that you not prepare in terms of ordered scenes and a planned climax, because they don't work well with this game - in other words, don't prepare what's going to happen after the first couple of scenes of play.

Here some threads which might help. Although a lot of the discussion is more concerned with conflicts and dice, there's a fair amount of stuff about preparation as well.

[The Pool] Dragons and Jasmine (this one contains a number of older links too)
[The Pool] A very satisfying first attempt
[The Pool] Stagefright and questions (a lot like your questions)
Silent railroading and the intersection of scenario prep and player authorship (a big thread, but there's some Pool-specific talk that's relevant to your questions)

I know that's a lot of reading for what is, when all's said, a pretty simple question and answer. There are some really good points in there, though, so I recommend it.

Best, Ron

[Latreya Sena]

quote]If there's been a murder, then you, the GM, know who did it.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Latreya,

I think you'll find the "Silent railroading" thread most relevant to your questions. This is what I was talking about for the difference between what's going on (who killed the guy) vs. what happens (what we do about it). I guess the best way to put it is that authority over how he tells me the truth is not the same thing as authority over what the truth is.

A lot of people think The Pool is like InSpectres, in which players make suggestions about what's going on via the actions and investigations of their characters, and if successful, they actually invent "the mystery" and its solution into existence through play. To repeat: The Pool is not like InSpectres in this way. "Player power" in The Pool does not include co-GMing regarding what is happening external to the characters, in terms of the larger scale of prep. It does have a lot of potential to make things move and change, but it doesn't have any power to alter where things start.

I was thinking about this thread some more and decided to change the way I would approach this conversation.

Latreya, please describe for me exactly how you prepared for the last game you GMed. It'd be good to know what game it was, how well it went, or anything like that, but I'd really like to focus on exactly what information and what planning went into it.

Given that, I know I can help make prepping for The Pool coherent for you.

Best, Ron

[Lance D. Allen]

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~Lance Allen
Wolves Den Publishing
Eternally Incipient Publisher of Mage Blade, ReCoil and Rats in the Walls

[Frank Tarcikowski]

I wrote a bit about my own prep for The Pool. As it's a large bit, I posted in in a seperate thread. Here it is.

- Frank

[Latreya Sena]

[Ron Edwards]

quote]I meant to say; what if the players really docannot<officer<not make the player into a temporary collaborator in preparing the back-story.

It is often hard to describe the impact that a good Monologue of Victory can have on a session. If we are talking about what happens next, then the Monologue can be very important. In a game I played a long time ago, after a winning roll in a social conflict situation, a player narrated that a villain fell in love with her character. That is excellent. It means that I get to play the villain much more complex and fun way from that point on. Note that the player did not narrate that the villain was actually a good guy who was merely misunderstood.

Do you see the difference? To narrate that the villain falls in love, is to move forwards. To narrate that he was never a villain is to move backwards. The former is what the Monologue mechanics in The Pool are for, but not the latter.

To answer my question, you wrote,

Quote

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[Frank Tarcikowski]

[Arturo G.]

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[Frank Tarcikowski]

Well, then maybe it's just me because I tend to find investigation boring anyway.

- Frank

[Latreya Sena]

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and the more usual method:

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Interestingly, with The Pool it is very easy that the players develop unexpected relationships with the NPCs, which may introduce really interesting possibilities and weird decisions when the players discover the facts and who were really those NPCs.always
and the more usual method:

<

Interestingly, with The Pool it is very easy that the players develop unexpected relationships with the NPCs, which may introduce really interesting possibilities and weird decisions when the players discover the facts and who were really those NPCs.always

[Latreya Sena]

P.S. Frank:

Well, then maybe it's just me because I tend to find investigation boring anyway.

Aren't you running a game in the Potterverse? Fair bit of investigation going on in that thar setting! :-)

- Latreya

[Frank Tarcikowski]

I think Harry Potter stories contain a bit of investigation, but they are not about investigtion. Therefore, in a role-playing adaption, investigation is pretty unimportant, at least when I'm running it. It's just a device to make sure the characters get the information they need, and then comes the interesting part: What do they do about it? But I don't want to derail.

- Frank

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Latreya,

First, your easy question. You wrote,

So do you always use settings that already exists?

For me personally, regarding The Pool, almost never. My Dragons & Jasmine game used a fantasy setting, but it was not a fixed and known setting in terms of sources. I was inspired mainly by the works of Lord Dunsany, but did not make any attempt to present or frame it in his terms. The role of dragons in the setting was as far as I know original on my part.

Others have used canonical settings with great success. My favorite example is Paul Czege's game of The Pool, which used the setting from a game that we both liked but had not played, called Sun & Storm. That thread can be found in the early discussions here.

The author of The Pool also wrote The Questing Beast, which uses a fairly drastic modification of the rules with an Arthurian setting, using anthropomorphic animal characters. It's very, very good, but I do think the rules differences are so important that a person should not try to learn the two systems at the same time.

Now for your hard question. I have dedicated perhaps twenty years to an active project to understand how stories may be created via role-playing. It began with an admission on my part that creating a story through play cannot be done by preparing the story first and "running the players through it." That's like making a cake together by presenting everyone with an already-finished or almost-finished cake. Relatively recently, I've used the terms Story Before vs. Story Now to distinguish the two concepts.

I wrote a series of essays to deal with this, and the topic necessarily expanded to cover all the various goals in role-playing, based on some great work done by others. You can find them in the Articles section linked at the top right of this webpage. However, you should understand that these essays are not a textbook for newcomers; they're milestones during the course of a multi-person dialogue and were addressed to the people who were already involved. Regardless, as far as I know, they represent the most developed discussion of "story" in role-playing to date.

If you want to check them out, then the best plan is to start at the end, with the essay called The Provisional Glossary, and reading only the first two pages with the diagram. There are only seven jargon terms to learn. The rest of that essay is not really important in comparison.

There are some other very good, recent works on role-playing, but as far as I can tell they are devoted mainly to the medium in general, and do not address story-creation so much as (to use my terms) SIS-creation.

Best, Ron