Uni Light?.... Unisynthesis?

[ejh]

I'm trying to think about directions I could jump from Universalis...  I like the game and have had some success playing it but it seems to operate at a fairly dense level of granularity, which can be, I dunno, a little much sometimes.  All that accounting!  All those details!

Has anybody seen other GMless games than Uni?  How did they work?  

I vaguely remember seeing one called "Ohne" online a while back but I cannot find it anymore.

I would really like to see something with Synthesis-like rules but GMless like Uni... but it's very difficult to go GMless, because you lose that wonderful catch-all rules factor, "The GM's Judgement."

Uni uses the Economy of Coins to replace the GM's Judgement, but I'm wondering if anyone knows of, or can think of, other options.  Maybe at some point in the history of Uni there were other methods?

I don't mean to diss Uni here.  I love it.  I annoy all my friends by bugging them to play it.  :)  But I'm trying to think of other options/directions/possibilities...

(hope this is topical here, would welcome guideance as to where it could go if it isn't)

[Andrew Martin]

Has anybody seen other GMless games than Uni?  How did they work?

There's Baron Munchausen which was available from Hogshead Games.

There's Ian's Collaborative Roleplaying at: http://www.collaborativeroleplay.org/ and I believe there's a play report in the Actual Play forum on this site.

There's my Token system on my site (which is due for a rewrite to incorporated latest play test stuff). And there's Cherry Blossoms (in progress) which will be GM-less and Fudge compatible.

[ejh]

Thank you, Andrew.  I couldn't find anything called 'Tokens' on your website though -- is that the same as 'Accord'?

I ended up finding the Ohne author's email address and getting a copy of the base rules from him.  They're very simple.

I'm interested to see how much you drew from Chris Kubiasek's _Interactive Toolkit_ in some of your games.  I really like ITK, and one of my favorite gaming experiences in recent memory was inspired by it.  It was a play-by-email game where I outlined nothing more than a basic genre description to the players, and made all the rest of the setting up based on the characters they made.  It was intensely cool, mainly because as GM I made very little up myself but instead leveraged, extended, and intermingled the various players' contributions, to create the plot.  Unfortunately, it ended up collapsing under the weight of, well, my lack of skill at running a PBeM game with lots of players who don't post at the same intervals....

Come to think of it, I liked that game for the same reason that I like Universalis: the fact that it didn't feel like it was a bunch of players who were guests in the GM's universe, but more like group collaboration universe-building.  The fact that I laid out so very little of the setting beforehand meant that it really did belong to the players as much as me.  It was strange how much of a charge I *as the GM* got out of the greater *player* power.

Very similar to how I've enjoyed Universalis because I love seeing what my *friends* come up with for worlds and concepts.

As for Munchausen, I've read it but I don't think I could ever keep up the pose of an 18th(?) century nobleman long enough to feel I'd played it well.  Besides that, well, there's something that Universalis has that other highly narrative/collaborative-storytelling games don't --

It has some sort of mechanic for representing reality *besides* narrative.

That is, in Universalis, there is something that represents the reality of your story: it's the set of components that have been created so far, with their Traits.  Plus the record fo the game.

That's something that is pretty cool.  One of the unique things about traditional roleplaying games is that their rules mechanics were not *just* a way to drive the story, they were also in effect a notational device for describing entities in the world.

A cool thing about Uni is that it continues this representational quality.  Entities are represented in terms of their "story weight" but they are represented nonetheless.

That's something you won't find exactly in something like Munchausen.  There's just story.  The characters are just themselves -- or whatever the story says they are.

As for the "Collaborative Roleplay" stuff, thanks for pointing me to that!  The description of the Wraiths game was very interesting.  I had happened upon the page before and tried to read "Ergo" and clawed my eyes out before getting past the introduction.  :-)   Not the world's most compellingly written game.   And Wraiths I hadn't looked into because the genre didn't sound that interesting to me, but the Actual Play example sure was fun to read about.

I might have to give "Collaborative Roleplay" another look....

[Andrew Martin]

Thank you, Andrew.  I couldn't find anything called 'Tokens' on your website though -- is that the same as 'Accord'?

That's bad of me! It's there but can't be linked to. Here's the direct address: http://valley.150m.com/Games/Token.html. Sorry about that. I'll fix that up. Accord is also intended to be GM-less but doesn't really encourage this.

I'm interested to see how much you drew from Chris Kubiasek's _Interactive Toolkit_ in some of your games.  I really like ITK, and one of my favorite gaming experiences in recent memory was inspired by it.

I was inspired by Kubiasek's Interactive Toolkit!

As for Munchausen, I've read it but I don't think I could ever keep up the pose of an 18th(?) century nobleman long enough to feel I'd played it well.

I used the system in Baron Munchausen as inspiration for Token.

That's something you won't find exactly in something like Munchausen.  There's just story.  The characters are just themselves -- or whatever the story says they are.

There's a similar feeling, I believe in Zac's Shadows.

[ejh]

Thanks!  This is very interesting, as is the "Matrix Game" which you referenced in one of your other games.  I'll have to try this.

[Mike Holmes]

One of the unique things about traditional roleplaying games is that their rules mechanics were not *just* a way to drive the story, they were also in effect a notational device for describing entities in the world.

Agreed. To me there's just something comforting about knowing that the fictional world is noted in an arbitrary manner. Probably why the Marvel Superheores RPG Who's Who actually enhanced my comic reading. I like knowing that Spiderman is stronger than Wolverine, and by how much.

This is yet another reason why I can play Universalis, but not Freeform Tabletop.

Mike

[Valamir]

Hi ejh.
I have absolutely no problem with the topicalness (is that a word...topicity?...whatever) of the thread.  So no problem there.

I would be very interested, however, in hearing the specific circumstances of play you've experienced that led to:

but it seems to operate at a fairly dense level of granularity, which can be, I dunno, a little much sometimes. All that accounting! All those details!

I think it would be a useful topic in its own right to see that perspective, but also we may be able to help you find ways to alleviate some of the more onerous parts for you.

Ralph.

[ejh]

Well, I've tried to introduce several people to the game (1) over email, (2) without them having copies of the rules.

In all cases, the people on the other end of it have been completely overwhelmed and found it quite bewildering.

I guess that could be chalked up to my poor explanatory ability... and to be honest, at least one of those people went on to try a face to face game with me and liked it much better... lots of things that were opaque when I tried to explain them over email were very easy to get face to face.  (The other two people I don't see face to face. :)

As to the granularity issue...  I guess things could be as granular as you want them to be, theoretically.  But many of the examples in the book give the impression that you're going to want to drop a coin on every single noun and adjective you use during the game.

BTW, after looking around for possible alternatives, I've come to the conclusion that --

(1) no other "GMless game" is like Universalis in as much a "creation game" as a "roleplaying game" or "storytelling game," and that's something I really like about Uni....

(2) most of the things I don't like about Uni seem to be inextricably tied to things I like about it that set it apart from everything else.

i.e. the whole coin economy can be kind of overwhelming and tedious, but I don't see any way to do away with it in a game without a referee/GM.  Simple roleplaying games like Fudge and Over the Edge rely heavily on the "GM's judgement."  I don't know how to get that simplistic without the coin economy sitting in for the GM.

The only vague thought I had in that direction was whether it might be possible to decrease granularity by, instead of counting coins one by one, have a dice pool -- so instead of, say, 30 coins, I have 6 dice (or whatever), and my dice pool only goes up and down slowly...  Similarly maybe the stuff in the world could (like in Over the Edge or Synthesis) have Traits which are by default one die each, or... I dunno.  I haven't worked it out and I'm not at all sure in the end it wouldn't end up making things more complicated rather than simpler.

Sorry I haven't gotten more specific, but my more recent Uni attempts have been in-person and on Instant Messenger and so have been more successful. :)  Perhaps my perception of excessive complexity is heavily conditioned by attempts to communicate how to play via an inadequate or too-slow medium (email).

[Valamir]

It can be a little overwhelming at first.  I think its largely because most players aren't used to being handed so much power and potential at once.  Personally I find trying to maintain a spell list as a Wizard in D&D (any edition) to be overwhelming.  One of the guys I played with could create a spell book for a 5th level Wizard without even needing the book, so its all in what you get used to I guess.

When I demo the game I have the most success by going over the basics just very roughly.  I'd mention things like "Challenges" just to say they existed but didn't try to explain how they worked until one happened...same with Complications.  For the first scene or two, I'd go into more detail on how to bid for scenes and what is required to frame a scene, but I'd handle all of the costs.  The player would describe what he wanted to happen and then I'd say "Ok, that would be 1 for the character, 1 for Trait X..." etc.  I'd write the stuff down myself.  Usually, by the time the demo ended they'd caught on and were figuring out their own costs.

I think the trick is to introduce the concepts very modularly.  When I rewrote the rules for the final version I tried to organize them in the order that I'd explain things in the demo.  First was the pregame tenents and such.  Then bidding for scene taking a turn and interrupting and so on.  The one time I tried to teach all of the rules up front and then say "ok, everybody got that, lets start" I had much the same sense of players being overwhelmed as you did.

Let me know if there are some specific issues that came up that we can help out with.  I'm very glad you've kept trying and have been having better success.  I've found the experience gets more powerful the more familiar the players become with the game.

[ejh]

One thing I thought of that might be helpful would be a little more formal examples of what record-keeping might look like.  I don't have my copy of the rules handy, but I don't think there's any example of what a running log of a game might look like.

For someone who's played existing RPGs, the "component cards" wouldn't be that different from "character sheets," but the scene logs are theoretically as important as component cards in Universalis, and they have no precise analog in other RPGs.

I'd love to see some examples of what people's scene logs look like.

[Bob McNamee]

We keep our stuff mostly on index cards.
Later we (I) do a write-up of the narrative for a session (since I liked the way the on-line gaming logs came out).
Here's an example card from the Temple of Bast game we are playing.

Scene index card  (We use different colored index cards for Characters, Locations, Props, Scenes etc.)

Scene 3 (won by Bob)
Time: Concurrent with Scene 2
Location: Herbalist shop(1 coin:Name) down the street from the Temple
Who: “Lo-Set”, “Juba” (added)
                           name:Juba    role: Herbalist    Fat, Healer

Lo-set the Thief Cat, steals Juba's CHARM BRACELET (item). Waits for him to chase after him, then runs out of the shop and down the street toward the Temple of Bast.

A simple Scene... other things to note would be characters who Exit a scene, scene location changes (like moving from the shop to the street), and possibly the elasped time of the scene (if that could be important later). Important to note if the scene was ended with a Fade to Black too.