[Acts of Evil] - Scene Framing Shennanigans

[Darcy Burgess]

Over the February 20th weekend, six gamers from Ottawa, Detroit and Toronto converged on an unsuspecting suite hotel in Toronto to consume sushi and to playtest Paul Czege's Acts of Evil. Previous to the weekend, we generated & selected starting Terrenes (we ended up with pre-great purge Stalinist Russia, the drug-soaked world of 70s Rock Stars and the antediluvian city of Jericho during the reign of king Cadmus; we cast aside Victorian England and Egypt during the reign of the Pharaohs.) We generated our Occultists via email.

There were a number of irregularities about this playtest as compared to a more traditional setup. However, the greatest of these differences was undoubtedly its duration. We played for what must have been 10+ hours, with breaks for lunch and dinner. During the post-game feedback session, Paul revealed that the session's duration was difficult for him – he had only prepared a given amount of situation for each Terrene, and he had chewed through it by approximately the 2/3 mark.

None of this is surprising (nor does it require "fixing" – I can't see a marathon session worth designing around.) However, it got me to thinking about a specific frustration I had during play. The current iteration of Acts of Evil empowers the GM to frame a scene more or less as he likes; the only real restraint is that the GM should frame a scene that he thinks will be interesting to the Occultist. It is the Player's responsibility to explore that scene from within the Occultist's shoes. This combination of GM & player duties is a direct rebuttal to an observed style of play from an earlier rules-set (those rules tended to engender non-productive competitive play.)

Here's the problem: in any given scene, my mind's racing ahead to the next scene! I'm coming up with cool ideas for stuff I'd like to do with my character. This spontaneous idea-generation clashes very powerfully with the GM-as-sole-scene-framer paradigm.

I feel almost as strongly as I do about revising the ligature rules that the scene framing rules need retooling. The thought that pops to mind as I type is to allow the players to frame the occasional scene as a creative outlet. By all means, keep the GM-framed 'exploratory' scenes in the game! However, there needs to be a balance between GM-framed and Player-framed scenes.

Here's a thought: Player-mandated scenes can only occur with NPCs with existing Purpose. Furthermore, the scene framing must either: 1. establish/drive towards a Soul's Desire or 2. antagonize an existing Soul's Desire.

Hmmm...
Darcy

[Paul Czege]

Hey Darcy,

Player framing of scenes is pretty much out of scope for Acts of Evil. (The one small exception is the rules for Afflicting, but if I can figure out how to make Afflicting work without player scene framing I'll eliminate it entirely from the game.)

How might play of Acts of Evil deliver what you need if it can't be via scene framing?

Paul

[Darcy Burgess]

Hey Paul,

Well, if I can't frame the occasional scene for myself, you'll need some sort of a check valve for the players' creative energy.  Otherwise, you'll end up with the cock-blocking behaviour that I exhibited in the scene where Vyascheslav attempted to recruit me into the conspiracy to extract Rasputin.

Hmmm...

What if the players have the authority to introduce/requisition individual NPCs into the situation you present?

In my case, I would have been all over Vyascheslav's proposal like flies on shit if the following conversation had played out:

Paul: "So, Molotov's trying to get you to go to Siberia with him to lure Rasputin out of a bear cave."
Darcy: "Hmmm.  I'm not at all interested.  However, if you could put Olga into the equation -- maybe as an obstacle? -- I'm in."
Paul: "Who's Olga?"
Darcy: "Oh.  She's the girl that I just sicked Molotov's NKVD goons on, or tried to."
Paul: "You mean the one that you used as a Ligature with the 70's Rock Scene?"
Darcy: "That's the one."

See...while Molotov was trying to get me to go to Siberia, I was much more interested in trying to seduce Olga into my little cult.  That's the kind of "exploring from within the occultist's shoes" that I was interested in at that point in time.

Cheers,
D

[Eero Tuovinen]

Is there an up-to-date text for the game somewhere? I'd be interested in checking it out. No real opportunity to play this spring, though, what with my own projects going full blast.

I like GM-only scene framing. Makes the issue considerably cleaner. Are individual scenes supposed to have strong continuity, or should the players orient themselves to take each scene essentially as separate vignettes?

[Paul Czege]

Eero, my working text is currently a mess of inscrutable deletions, changes, and marginalia on the ashcan text of almost two years ago, probably understandable only by me. I will do a full rewrite before asking anyone to look it over.

Darcy, what I mean by how do I "deliver what you need" is how do I get you from playing the game with an author mindset to playing from a character discovery/exploration mindset? How do I get you to relax and enjoy your occult powers and the serendipity of the circumstances you find yourself in?

Paul

[Ron Edwards]

Hey Paul,

Why not the Trollbabe rule which is also implicit in Sorcerer? Any player can request or suggest a scene (in the brute sense of starting time and place, not in terms of content once it starts), but the GM and only the GM has authority over opening and closing scenes.

That way Darcy can say "How about?" and you can feel a little less one-man heat late in play, without giving up the crucial GM-only role.

Best, Ron

[Paul Czege]

Hey Ron,

Can you give some examples of what you consider acceptable permutations of "the brute sense of starting time and place, not in terms of content once it starts"? Is, "how about a scene with Alexei (a player's character) and Olga (a previously seen NPC) before she leaves for the ballet" acceptable?

Paul

[Valamir]

Having been in a couple early playtests I'm glad to see this still being worked on.

Paul, can you share some of the design choices behind the no-player-scene-framing hard line approach?

My instinct says that an occult leader is like a spider in the midst of his web...the puppeteer pulling the strings of other people's destinies...the master mind driving towards his cosmic scheme.  All of that is delusion but its a powerful delusion, I think.  For the player to feel like an occult master mind, don't they have to at least be able to pretend that they're in the driver's seat sometimes?  And isn't the easiest way to give the player some of that feeling to allow them to frame some scenes...aha...at last my grand plan is coming to fruition?

[Paul Czege]

Hey Darcy,

Back when the Michigan contingent played EPICS, a game that aims to be about initially sketchy characters getting defined through play, we saw players chewing past or ignoring situations and NPCs (that in retrospect they would say were interesting), in an effort to move quickly to something else, in an effort to find specific storylines and themes for their characters.

What I realized as the problem was players not having actually created sketchy charaters. They had created fleshed out characters, with some embedded themes, and then pared them back to the limited requirements of chargen.

Is this what you did?

I admit that my prep wasn't well suited to the aristocracy vs. Stalinism interest that you had clearly baked into your character, but even so, would you have played differently if you'd been starting with a genuinely sketchy character?

Paul

[Paul Czege]

Hey Ralph,

(Yeah, I can't get the damn thing out of my head.)

What if the game isn't about proactive "spider in the web" characters with grand plans. What if it's about power, and pain, and living and reacting in the moment, and not about long term plans at all?

How do I get players out of the planning mindset? My advice to "live in the moment and express your curiousity from a position of confidence in your power" hasn't been equal to the task.

Paul

[Eero Tuovinen]

I found in our campaign that the way to work with long-term planning is to allow the characters to make their plans, but frame scenes according to the rules anyway. So a character might be big on corrupting the Council of Trent, but the next scene happens in modern Ukraine. WTF? Nothing prevents us from providing a brief segue - the character already completed his plans in Trent, or this is a flashback/forward, or whatever. And the GM could frame back into Trent later if he felt like it - and most importantly, if there were some important NPCs there. We didn't find any great difficulty in playing like this, it just added to the fantastic, disjointed wibe of the game.

Of course, I don't know if that sort of logic works if you remove the scene framing constraints and just allow the GM to frame whatever he wants. Then it becomes more of a GM control issue, as he runs over the Trent plan with his fascist jackboot. From this viewpoint I wouldn't mind having some sort of mechanical support for the GM who needs to determine whether the next scene continues a given story, say, or jumps onto something else. Could be literally that - some resource constraint or dice roll or something determines whether the current story continues or whether the GM needs to jump into something else for the next scene.

[Valamir]

Well, I'm not sure that the way to make the game about one thing is to block and deny everything else.

I think more of a bait and switch strategy would be more effective.  I think in that scenario people would accept your advice as making the switch palatable and the bait would allow them to get their creative juice on.  Even in movies where the movie isn't "about" a thing...if the audience expects to see that thing, its shown just long enough to establish it before moving on.

[Paul Czege]

Hey Ralph,

"I think in that scenario people would accept your advice as making the switch palatable and the bait would allow them to get their creative juice on.  Even in movies where the movie isn't "about" a thing...if the audience expects to see that thing, its shown just long enough to establish it before moving on."

I'm not following. What advice? Eero's design advice? Some advice from the hypothetical Acts of Evil GM to his players? My advice to players to "live in the moment and express your curiousity from a position of confidence in your power"? If so, what's the bait?

You're responding to me? Or to Eero?

Paul

[Valamir]

Sorry, yes, your advice to "live in the moment".  I think players are thinking one thing when they hear occult leaders...cults...cultists...and you have to let them play in that space a bit before guiding them elsewhere...to get it out of their system so to speak.

When I hear "power, and pain, and living and reacting in the moment" I get nothing.  No ideas bounce at at me, no characters bounce out at me, no archetypes come to mind,   no scene ideas pop into my head.  I don't yet know how to BE that character.

When I hear "cult leaders inflicting pain on innocent victims to pursue their occult studies"  I get lots of stuff.  I get characters, I get scenes, I get images and visions. 

I think there's probably a need to let players indulge in what they see for awhile.

[Darcy Burgess]

Hi Paul,

Crap.  Get the 'flu and everyone has an opinion.

I will be back to this thread ASAP -- both to answer your 2 pending questions (2!) and to comment on Ron and Ralph's points.

Sorry,
D