(Path of Journeys) Sandbox and Litterbox

[Doplegager]

A little Background
I'm doing revisions of the Path of Journeys, one of the Ashcan Front games from 2007. The original impetus for the game was a combination of A) frustrations with how my motivations/desires were undermining my creative efficacy and B) my way of coming to terms with a religious title I'd recently been appointed to in my local community (May King for a local neopagan group with a semi-active population of about 150-175; picture prom king but with religious pretensions and plenty of opportunities to be subjected to the delusions of others... not to mention your own delusions). It's taken about two years, but I think my understanding of both A and B have matured enough that I feel confident of being able to go back and make a solid revision. I'm jazzed about trying to get it ready for an actual finished release.

I've been running two weekly games with short story-arcs to try out some mechanical tweaks with moderate success- enough that most sessions have ended with players excited about their characters (awesome!) and the story (sweet!), and talking about how they hope to run the story for a long time.

The Game Last Night: Social Level
The problems tonight began on a purely social level. The last story arc had 9 players and we'd split the group in two, each playing on different nights (fortunately, my other playtest group had just disbanded when the alpha player and his wife moved out of state, so I was still only going to be leading two sessions a week). During the first fifteen minutes, the alpha player in this group made reference to how this was the 'B' group, and his girlfriend made reference to how they'd been considering not coming tonight. This set the tone fairly quickly, and I immediately knew the playtest would be lost if I wasn't able to manipulate the social level (I refuse to get players to grudgingly play something, but I'm not above easing them into something they would have otherwise dismissed).

I wasn't able to. It was total social failure.

The Game Last Night: Actual Play
Because the primary concern of PoJ is to deal with questions of motivations and responsibility, the thematic qualities have been far more important than any kind of definitive setting ("here are the ingredients for setting and conflict- add your preferred spices"). Each new game I've ran has started with everyone sitting around and creating the setting, which plays an important part in the mechanics of the game. The inherent antagonism in the social dynamics quickly mucked up the development process, and were spiced with complaints about how it wasn't DnD  (at one point I decided the only way I could save the evening was to print off some DnD character sheets, which prompted complaints that they were 3.5 instead of 4.0).

I spent some time trudging through it- I'd been planning on using the system to create an analog of DnD with a standard fantasy trope setting and related conflicts for this group anyway, so I was hoping things would smooth out as we entered familiar territories. Not so much. We got through the first part of character creation, but stalled in character motivations (another red flag for me was when the lesbian player made a character with the motivation "I want penis" and then said "Man, I *already* hate my character!"... only partially in jest). As expected from the antagonism in the social dynamics, the vast creative freedom presented was used by the group to meet their needs- which largely revolved around expressing discontent.

I stopped the recorder at an hour and ten minutes and told the group "Look, this just isn't working. We're not in a mindset to play tonight and I need to focus my creative energies on developing this system- I'm not in a place where I can run a d20 game right now. This game isn't meeting your needs as players, so we're going to call it an evening. It's early enough you guys can go catch a movie or something."

The Lesson for the Night
It wouldn't have helped tonight, considering the social dynamics, but one of the things that the game expressed was that I should develop some pre-packaged conflicts and settings. A significant part of a cohesive game is having creative buy-in from the players. I've been lucky enough with the other groups that they've trusted me enough from the beginning and buy-in hasn't been a problem. In last night's situation, wariness of the creative buy-in was an exacerbating factor in the social antagonism, but I can imagine groups where the wariness of the buy-in motivates social antagonism. I need to be better prepared for this and have some strong introductory samples.

This was particularly poignant since I've seen the players in last night's group enjoy sessions that were very close to the kind of session that I'm trying to model with PoJ, but system wariness helped fuel the social antagonism which in turn disrupted the creative process that the system is built on; the mechanical sandbox turned into a litterbox.

Will limiting the creative process cause the social antagonism to go away, or remove the system wariness? Nah. Worst case scenario, it'll just cover up the discontent and no one will be satisfied. Best case scenario, though, it'll keep the process from being a vicious cycle (i.e. disruption of creative process proves validity of system wariness, rinse and repeat). Strong samples will also make it a little clearer what kind of creative buy-in is being asked, and how the buy-in is expressed in the mechanics, which will either undermine system wariness or validate it.

The Next Step
For my next explicitly introductory session of PoJ, I'm going to take an iconic setting or two for players to choose from and make several characters, then chop them up into their base components and let players make their characters ala carte style by cherry picking motivations, skills, and traits. Hopefully this will give enough freedom to be engaging but give enough structure that players can be eased into system familiarity (instead of being stuck in system wariness).

Also, it makes me want to be snarky and make a partial parody, partial fun time sub-game called "The Path of Killing Things and Taking Their Stuff."

[Adam Dray]

Wow, ouch. How do you know these people?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Ram!

Oy, veh. And people objected years ago when we arrived at the idea, here, that everything about role-playing functionality is a subset of social functionality among the people involved.

I stopped the recorder at an hour and ten minutes and told the group "Look, this just isn't working. We're not in a mindset to play tonight and I need to focus my creative energies on developing this system- I'm not in a place where I can run a d20 game right now. This game isn't meeting your needs as players, so we're going to call it an evening. It's early enough you guys can go catch a movie or something."

That may be the single smartest playtesting decision I think I've seen described here.

Your thoughts about examples are lucid and interesting, especially as you acknowledge that no design or presentation can possibly solve basic toxic social dynamics. That's an important insight because I've seen many game designs veer over to the unproductive goal of placating and coaxing people who are not actually the original target audience (defined as "people juiced by whatever it was that juiced the designer at the most productive point"). The designer can imagine, or has encountered, a certain number of people who don't get it, don't like it, or never bothered to try, and he or she struggles harder and harder, with more and more text, to convince and enthuse those people - rather than developing the prose to enthuse those who need no convincing.

That leads me to pose the question, who then is the target audience for the game? Based on your post alone, which granted was not written toward that topic, I can infer that successful play so far has been among people who trusted you as a person. I do not consider that to be a limitation; it seems to me that people I do not trust socially are those I don't play with, and even in a get-together with people I don't know well, I work with provisional trust (which occasionally turns out to be unjustified, but usually it's the right call).

All of that is a humpbacked way of saying, let's take the basic trust as a given, and talk about what the game text can provide which excites enough interest for people who are capable of such trust to place their time commitment and social commitment into creating stuff using this instrument. And since no game text can do that "for anyone," who will it be for?

I can use myself as a single example, anyway. The Path of Journeys knocks me out for a number of reasons. (1) The May Court is a remarkably useful iconographic summary of consequential social roles. It's not an "attitude" or psychological thing, nor is it metaphysical in the sense of the Tarot. Most importantly, it is dynamic - the profiles do not shut down decision-making during role-playing, but rather charge it up. (2) The "path" of character transformation is not a one-way ticket to betterness but rather a moral issue of its own; the increased effectiveness combined with the decreased human nuance means a player must think about whether he or she wants the character to improve. (3) The mechanics of losing conflicts, upon the dice of Essential Skills, translates into a kind of raw brutality for the in-game consequences which I really enjoy seeing in play, for physical, social, and psychological effects alike.

It seems to me that examples absolutely demonstrating each of these would bring many folks otherwise disinclined to try "one more damned game in design" right over that hump.

The Next Step

For my next explicitly introductory session of PoJ, I'm going to take an iconic setting or two for players to choose from and make several characters, then chop them up into their base components and let players make their characters ala carte style by cherry picking motivations, skills, and traits. Hopefully this will give enough freedom to be engaging but give enough structure that players can be eased into system familiarity (instead of being stuck in system wariness).

I did this with some success in early demos of Sorcerer, and I think it will work well with The Path of Journeys. Such play definitely doesn't showcase the game as a whole, though, which is something I decided to live with in those demos. However, here's a thought on what kind of introductory information can really ramp up the potential for successful play with first-timers.

Most radically, I suggest border communities with characters scattered all across the border. The more I play The Path of Journeys, the more I like the application that the May Court is neither a designated within-setting group, nor necessarily even an allied group at all. I've been enjoying play in which player-characters may be found on all sides (and all perspectives within a side) of an in-setting conflict, and in which their decisions and conflict outcomes change the circumstances for everyone else's conflicts. The settings we've been using are usually borders, i.e., communities defined by the meeting and interaction of social institutions, and in which widely-believed stereotypes of Them and Us are not validated.

As a side point, for fans of the show The Wire, I quite enjoyably applied the May Court idea to the main characters as follows (note: first season only):
Jimmy McNulty = Sorcerer, Kima Greggs = May Queen, Stringer Bell = Magistrate, Lester Freamon = Courtier, D'Angelo Barksdale = Priest, Wallace = Fool, Bubbles = Advocate, and arguably Lt. Daniels and Avon Barksdale are competing for the status of May King over all of them.

For those just following along, I raise this point not only for fanboyish fun, but also to point out that half of the characters I mentioned are cops from various places in the cop hierarchy, and half are the gang (better "mafia") members from up and down their hierarchy.

If not anything quite so radical, the fact that the entire game is predicated upon a community in crisis should still be introduced front and center to anyone even beginning to think about playing this game. It'd be great to see examples of such things.

Best, Ron

[Doplegager]

Social Component and System Wariness

Wow, ouch. How do you know these people?

Eh. Don't get me wrong. When the folks left, everyone was amiable as you could be despite the inherent tension and awkwardness of the situation. When I say antagonism, it's not so much that claws and teeth were being bared- I wouldn't have let it go on nearly as long as it did. It was more like the kind of antagonism where everyone is explicitly wanting to get along and no one is consciously out to get anyone, but they just can't help but have their frustrations slip out. There were a lot of factors going on... in the end analysis, I consider it a no-fault situation.

It didn't do much in terms of testing out system mechanics, but it was an interesting playtest in the way it brought out flaws in presentation. So, not a win in the traditional sense, but useful all the same.

That leads me to pose the question, who then is the target audience for the game? Based on your post alone, which granted was not written toward that topic, I can infer that successful play so far has been among people who trusted you as a person.

Yeah. I think the heart of the above quote boils down to A) being forced to acknowledge that the "vast creative freedom presented was used by the group to meet their needs- which largely revolved around expressing discontent", B) exploring system wariness' role in disrupting the creative process, and C) the application of introductory characters and situations to reduce system wariness' role in the cycle. Well, and D) announcing that it'd be fun to parody my own game as an expression of frustration.

I did this with some success in early demos of Sorcerer, and I think it will work well with The Path of Journeys. Such play definitely doesn't showcase the game as a whole, though, which is something I decided to live with in those demos.

Yeah... part of what made this process enough of a thumper to warrant externalization was that the system, in its current working form, holds the development of setting as being nearly sacrosanct (even though the community has no direct mechanical reflection, it emerges from the foundations of the characters). Using semi-standardized situations to sell a system, when one of the selling points is arguably the process of individualizing the setting to reflect the conflicts the group is wanting to explore, is a very counter-intuitive approach.

But, hell, I'm pretty sure I can live with it too. It'll take some tweaking to find a balance between concrete imagery and creative engagement, but I'm fully confident I'll be able to pull it off (with, maybe, a couple flops along the way).

Design Agenda- Mechanics

That leads me to pose the question, who then is the target audience for the game?

Hmm. I'll get to this more fully in a bit. It's a question that deserves more time and space than I can give at the moment (well, sure, eventually it won't take much space at all, after I've boiled it down to a single evocative sentence with all due pizzazz. But I'll probably need an explorative essay first. When I was working on my last small press project, I wrote a 20 or so page document explaining it. Then I wrote a 16 page document. Then an 8 page one. Then I made one that was 4 pages, two of which were cute pictures. Guess which one we distributed to sponsoring businesses...)

1) The May Court is a remarkably useful iconographic summary of consequential social roles. It's not an "attitude" or psychological thing, nor is it metaphysical in the sense of the Tarot. Most importantly, it is dynamic - the profiles do not shut down decision-making during role-playing, but rather charge it up. (2) The "path" of character transformation is not a one-way ticket to betterness but rather a moral issue of its own; the increased effectiveness combined with the decreased human nuance means a player must think about whether he or she wants the character to improve. (3) The mechanics of losing conflicts, upon the dice of Essential Skills, translates into a kind of raw brutality for the in-game consequences which I really enjoy seeing in play, for physical, social, and psychological effects alike.

Ha- every time I read something like this, I start wondering what I might lose with my tinkering. Right now, the biggest change in the dynamics is in motivations. One of the things I really, really wanted to get into the first version, but completely failed at, was the idea that it was just as easy for a rank 5 motivation to be a result of how badly you wanted or needed something as it was for rank 5 to mean it was something you did even though you felt conflicted about it.  The experiment I'll be playtesting this Sunday is a motivation structure of "(X/Y) Motivation", where X (the active rank) is the rank you use when the character is being proactive or when things are going the character's way; when the locus of control is internal. Y (the passive rank) is the rank you use when the character is being prompted into action or when things are going against the character; when the locus of control is external.

This approach loses some of the "human v iconic" qualities and the rigid grammatical structure breaks down, but I think it opens the characters up to be intensely dynamic. My Sun group has a lot of transhumanist v. nature components and is set in the ghost-filled ruins of an Atlantis analog (what caused the destruction of the civilization and how does it tie into these themes?).  The characters I'm most looking forward to seeing in play are Elysia, orphaned niece of the group leader, "(3/1) I want to survive", "(1/1) I want to preserve nature", and "(2/4) I want to be a normal girl" and Avalon, a genetically engineered and cybernetically enhanced angelic entity (somewhere between Data from Star Trek and Dr. Manhattan) designed by the group leader , "(1/1) I need to survive", "(2/2) I need to assert authority", and "(5/1) I need to discover new frontiers"

I look at those two numbers in each motivation, and all of a sudden a nuanced and complex relationship starts to unfold.

Design Agenda- Setting

The more I play The Path of Journeys, the more I like the application that the May Court is neither a designated within-setting group, nor necessarily even an allied group at all. I've been enjoying play in which player-characters may be found on all sides (and all perspectives within a side) of an in-setting conflict, and in which their decisions and conflict outcomes change the circumstances for everyone else's conflicts. The settings we've been using are usually borders, i.e., communities defined by the meeting and interaction of social institutions, and in which widely-believed stereotypes of Them and Us are not validated.

That's entirely fitting- I'm glad you brought it up explicitly. Part of the reason for the May Court is that it's tied with the symbolic qualities of Spring, which dance around the processes of self-discovery and self-invention. It's the time when the youth begin defining who they are, what they care about, and what they do. That the setting should be a continued reflection of that theme is a natural extension... and one I hadn't consciously thought of previously... spring heroes for communities in their spring phase makes sense. Spring heroes in a summer, fall, or winter community are all possible, but would have a different feel- it'd be less about growth and discovery and more about the role of growth and discovery in relation to something else.

Actually, the three biggest elements I've been meditating on for the past two years have been A) the role of community and how individuals interact with it, B) the role of antagonism and how it instigates and is instigated by imbalances, and C) the continuing development of the seasons. I plan on keeping the focus on spring, but playing around with the passage of seasons is high on the list of themes to integrate (especially since I find myself beginning to see the cusp of entering my summer phase not too many years away).

Snarkiness

I've decided I am going to develop a parody. I've been having too much fun thinking about it.

[Paul Czege]

Hey Ram,

The more I play The Path of Journeys, the more I like the application that the May Court is neither a designated within-setting group, nor necessarily even an allied group at all. I've been enjoying play in which player-characters may be found on all sides (and all perspectives within a side) of an in-setting conflict, and in which their decisions and conflict outcomes change the circumstances for everyone else's conflicts. The settings we've been using are usually borders, i.e., communities defined by the meeting and interaction of social institutions, and in which widely-believed stereotypes of Them and Us are not validated.

That's entirely fitting- I'm glad you brought it up explicitly. Part of the reason for the May Court is that it's tied with the symbolic qualities of Spring, which dance around the processes of self-discovery and self-invention. It's the time when the youth begin defining who they are, what they care about, and what they do. That the setting should be a continued reflection of that theme is a natural extension... and one I hadn't consciously thought of previously... spring heroes for communities in their spring phase makes sense. Spring heroes in a summer, fall, or winter community are all possible, but would have a different feel- it'd be less about growth and discovery and more about the role of growth and discovery in relation to something else.

I have to say, the border communities thing doesn't grab me at all, not the way the ashcan text's focus on "growth communities" does. In a border community of folks who may or may not be allies the narrative that's produced is one in which maybe characters find a shared purpose and maybe society is advanced. They struggle to find their identities outside the context of community purpose. That's not fantasy. That's reality. I work in that reality from 9:00 to 5:00 every weekday. (Is Paul Czege going to save the publishing business from death at the hands of clueless executives on one hand and and free content providers on the other? Who are his allies? Whose teachings have his interests at heart? Blech.) I want the Sons of Liberty, not Hill Street Blues. Maybe the Sons of Liberty advance society, and maybe they don't, but a group of characters who maybe don't ever find a shared purpose is one too many maybe for me. I already have that in spades.

Paul

[Doplegager]

Group Cohesion

Maybe the Sons of Liberty advance society, and maybe they don't, but a group of characters who maybe don't ever find a shared purpose is one too many maybe for me. I already have that in spades.

In general, I agree. Actually, one of my goals next time I go to a gaming convention is to see how some of the games that rely on characters with parallel stories, as opposed to characters in groups, play out. My Life with Master and my fellow Ashcan Front game, Giants, both seem to talk about this... where gameplay potentially involves individual players advancing individual stories that are woven together thematically and, eventually, by narrative development. I've tried my hand at it, but it feels completely foreign (with one exception, where it happened entirely accidentally). Ha- so, seeing it in play is now one of my life goals.

(Please note I'm not wanting to go into the dynamics of parallel story structure in this particular thread- it just seemed relevant to my response to mention that I'm all thumbs with that narrative format. If Ron has found it to be a supported style of play in the system, it's an emergent property... in which case, it might be relevant to discuss after all. I can see some slight correlations, such as a group that might have a mayor and a chief of police where the fight against inner city crime might follow parallel stories connected thematically and with narrative overlaps. It's weird to think of it like that, though... wow. Actually, I'm going to need to ponder that for awhile.)

All of that said, and correct me if wrong, Ron, but I think that the idea that at least a semi-cohesive community will emerge is a huge part of the creative buy-in for the games he's run. In one of the sample games Ron ran, the advocate frame (an important part of the system design) was a historian looking back on the events. Because an emergent community was explicit in the frame and was the focus of creative buy-in for the players, that's one less 'maybe' on the list.

In my own games, I'm much more a fan of having the players be a cohesive group from the very beginning, albeit one that's not necessarily recognized in any kind of formal way.

Seasons and Communities

Some of the thematic content I'm shuffling around includes focusing on the advancement of seasons (as previously noted). To do a shorthand version: winter relates to the death of the old and the seed of the new, spring relates to growth and internal self-definition, summer relates to external definition and action, fall relates to decay and redefinition, which leads back to winter. In this case, the situations described, where the community in question emerges from the course of gameplay, it's probably close to late winter, early spring. Late winter would be everything up to the point where the community looks at itself and realizes "we have group identity", with spring kicking in with the question of "and what does that mean? what is our identity?" On an individual level, this translates to "I'm a person" and "but who am I becoming?"

For now, though, I'm playing that stuff close to the chest... don't want the introspective parts to get in the way of the active parts.

I have to say, the border communities thing doesn't grab me at all, not the way the ashcan text's focus on "growth communities" does.

I think the important thing with that explicitly is that a border community can be a growth community. It doesn't have to be- a border community could easily fit into any of the seasons mentioned. The thing it has in its favor of being a growth community is it handles the interaction of different and exotic components. If those interactions have settled into regularity, it's moved past spring and into summer. The reason the sample border communities jive with the theme, IMO,  was because they were still in the related season, not because they were border communities per se.

Snarkiness and Playtests

To tie the thread back into the original premise of social dynamics in relation to creative expression, here's a brief update. I hung out with the alpha player twice this week and gave him a copy of this:
http://issuu.com/jackconey/docs/pathofslayingandlooting
(issuu is an awesome service for hosting pdfs, but almost useless unless you either A) view them in full screen mode or B) choose the download option)

Unfortunately, he does seem to have taken the snarkiness as being a little targeted (and he's partially right, in that my relatively low opinion of 4E does sneak in, which is a point of contention between himself and me). The truth, though, is I'm genuinely juiced to have an opportunity to test it out in play. It needs editing, thematic development, and all that jazz, but I think I'd enjoy the game experience. So, whether or not the Tuesday group gives it a shot remains to be seen. But I will play it eventually, dammit! I like to think I've taken the lemons from the experience, chopped them up, and put them on the lip of cups filled with mixed drinks (the lemonade will be when I've made sample scenarios for PoJ).

Would having used this saved the last session? Nah. There'd still have been system wariness and social antagonism, even if the game style was more directly correlated with expressed interest. But when I went to the fellow's apartment the other day, the pamphlet was on his bed, so I've removed lack of familiarity from the equation. Whether that corresponds to decreased system wariness in this case remains to be seen.