Our first game

[dragon_of_colour]

Hello all,
Tried out Uni for the first time last weekend. Our first game was really a hit-and-miss affair, but we had fun and hammered out the rules between us. We had four players and a great time was had. Here follows a transcript of the game, for your amusement:

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Universalis Game One
This is the write up of our first Universalis game. Please bear in mind that none of us were entirely sure of the rules when we did this but it was lots of hilarious fun anyway.

Universalis: Game 1
Tenets:

* Magic over technology
* Pirates
* Female supremacy
* Hereditary curses (sins of the father)
* Post-apocalyptic society
* Only women have magic
* No horror
* Underground male rebellion movement


Scene one:
The scene opens with a teenage female named Katie in the brig of a pirate ship. She is slightly injured. There is a commotion outside the brig. It is her father fighting with the two pirates guarding the door. While trying to break through them he yells, "I must speak with my daughter!"
To which Katie replies, "Leave me alone you fiend!"

Scene Two
It is one hour later upon the pirate ship and Katie and the pirates are dead, killed by Katie's dad who now appears happy. He has escaped the battle surprisingly unscathed and is surrounded by a crackling blue aura, which could be a possible spell. He had been sent by Katie's mother to kill her. The spell or enchantment surrounding him is freeing him from his wife's dominance over him. He removes an amulet from around Katie's neck and runs up onto the deck. It is sunset and there are dead pirates scattered all over the deck. A thick fog is rapidly moving towards the ship, engulfing it.
***Fade to Black***

Scene Three
It is midnight and in a stone mansion, somewhere in the land, there is a table of unhappy women listening patiently to their fat leader read from a tome. Their leader is Katie's mother and she is reading from the ship's log, which she magically summoned to her. Opposite the leader at the table is a beautiful blonde named Angelica who is wearing an amulet similar to Katie's.
The log is a details account of the underground male movement. Mother informs the group of Katie's death and that she ordered it as Katie was a spy, betraying them to the male rebels. Around the table, the woman exchange looks of relief.
Angelica leaps to her feet and yells, "Our leader is wrong and is leading us astray! We should remove her from the council!"
Mother casts a lightening bolt spell at Angelica and Angelica explodes. "Anyone else share her view?" Mother taunts the group.
The other women sit in motionless silence while Mother reads on.

Scene Four
A month later deep in the bowels of the earth, the dwarf smiths have forged an amulet, which is more powerful than the others. The dwarf master smith put the amulet around the neck of a man and it imbues the man with magical powers. The man is physically more powerful and radiates power, which illuminates the underground hall showing the dead females hanging on the walls. The master smith orders, "Prepare a place for us on the surface."

Scene Five
In a candle lit tent one week later Katie's mother, Hera, and the dwarf friend have a meeting. They are there to negotiate peace and harmony between their rival groups. She refuses his terms and he shrugs and leaves. She calls her guards to seize him. Two female guards rush into the tent and cast a spell as he pulls out two pistols. The spell freezes him in place before he can shoot them. He channels their power and freezes them in place along with Hera. More guards run in to aid Hera.
The dwarf friend launches into a speech detailing how woman aligned themselves with the lesser gods and destroyed the world with their powers and how men have now come to know the one true god and are working by his grace. Hera laughs at this and disappears in a puff of smoke. In frustration and surprise the dwarf friend kills the two frozen guards blowing the candles out in the process. The other guards see this as an opportunity it attack him but this proves to be a mistake. With the strength of twenty men and night vision, the dwarf friend kills the guards in a whirlwind attack.

Scene Six
Hera is standing in her bedroom visibly drained after the teleport. She wonders how her guards fared and thinks about the dwarf friend. Where did he get his powers? Where did he get his amulet?
[The dwarf friend is named Grimstone and is forced to fight for the course despite everything following his father's curse of failure to overthrow the women]
There is a knock on the door to Hera's bedroom and Katie's father enters. Hera is visibly upset with him
"You have failed me!" She screams, "I will give you one more chance to redeem yourself."
He leaps at her, attacking her with the dagger he had concealed behind his back. With her dying breath she curses him by turning him into a woman.

Closing Scene
Through the window a pirate ship is visible in the bay. On the deck of the ship is Katie looking through a telescope.
***Fade to black***

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Hmmm... how can Katie still be alive!? Is that a Part 2 in the making?
Just goes to show what kind of whacked up plot lines can come out of Uni...
Thanks Yvette for the writeup.

[Valamir]

Whacked up?...this was awesome.  I can't wait to see the next installment.

The father killing his own daughter right at the beginning.  Dead women hanging from the walls of the cavern.  Completely twisted and deviant, but totally grooving.

You obviously edited the content down alot.  What specifically seemed hit or miss for you?

[dragon_of_colour]

Hi Valamir, thanks for the praise!
It was hit-and-miss in that we were still very much working out the rules, particularly the differences between challenges and complications. The particular questions escape me now, but next session (this saturday) I'll write them down and then post them....
Wait, I think I remember one question:
If during a player's turn, another player pays a coin to interrupt him, does the turn pass permanently to the player that interrupted him?
Thanks again...

[Valamir]

If during a player's turn, another player pays a coin to interrupt him, does the turn pass permanently to the player that interrupted him?

Yes, if player D Interrupts player A, then the turn...lock stock and barrel...is now player D's.  Players B and C get skipped over, and the turn does not bounce back to player A when player D is done (it proceeds to player E).  

Of course, anyone can do the same thing to player D...so his turn isn't "permanent" in that sense.  Nor does the normal default clockwise turn order get altered in anyway.  i.e. an interruption does not reshuffle player postions at the table or anything like that.

[dragon_of_colour]

Thanks for the help...
Another one we looked for in the book but probably missed:
If a player wins coins as the result of a complication, are those coins for use solely in narrating the result of the complication, or can they be spent at any point later in the scene?

[Valamir]

Any Coins you don't use in the narration of the Complication can be added to your Wealth and used as normal thereafter.

For reference purposes, thats at the top of page 70.

Please feel free to keep throwing out whatever questions you come up with.  Should we do a 2nd edition at some distant point in the future, these questions all help indicate what sections need to be more clear...or at least easier to find.

[Mike Holmes]

Some people find it distasteful that one can garner a whole pile of Coins from a complication, and then pocket them all without much if any narration. Bo McNamee proposed a simple solution in a Gimmick which states that a player has to spend half of his winnings, as a minimum, in describing the resolution of any Complication.

In play, I've rarely seen this be something that needed changing, but it's an interesting option in any case.

Mike

[Bob McNamee]

That's Bob McNamee Gimmick...not Bo
(unless I have another Evil Twin TM...but then this isn't SOAP)


Cool sounding game! Twisted in a good way. The transformation to a woman at the end is priceless (cool what a single Coin can do, as long asa it isn't Challenged, eh?)

Fun stuff,

[Brian Leybourne]

If a player wins coins as the result of a complication, are those coins for use solely in narrating the result of the complication, or can they be spent at any point later in the scene?

Actually, this question seems to come up a lot (or at least I have seen it asked quite a few times). Maybe if you guys do a 2nd edition that needs to be strongly reinforced.

Brian (Rabbiting on even though I don't actually have the book yet...)

[Mike Holmes]

The thing is that it is pretty well laid out. For example, not only is it in the rules very explicitly, but it's on the play aids, and the like, IIRC ("The winning player spends as many Coins as he likes from his winnings...". The problem is that it's counterintuitive. Players feel that if they get Coins as the result of a Complication, that this means they must have some bearing on the conflict in question and be spent on them. A lot of Universalis play is rather intuitive, so players are often thrown when something like this comes along. Basically, this is one of those rules that you have to "learn" rather than intuiting them as you go.

What they're missing is that the random method gives a number of Coins that we selected to make it attractive to play the Complication mini-game. Being random, often the player gets way too many Coins. It actually becomes difficult to spend them all well. So all we do it leave it up to the player how many he thinks is sensible. This works well, but is a very hidden part of the design. The only way to make it explicit is to talk about it in terms of design. Which is something that we decided that we wanted to avoid in the main text (the original version of the game that had a lot of theory in it was twice as long).

So, maybe a little more emphasis can be added in the text. But I think mostly this is a learning issue. Some rules just have to be done a few times before they settle in. After about the third Complication done right, players learn that Complications are a profit making enterprise, and realize that this means that they can pocket some of the proceeds if they desire.

Mike

[dragon_of_colour]

Players feel that if they get Coins as the result of a Complication, that this means they must have some bearing on the conflict in question and be spent on them.

IIRC this was the exact interpretation that one of my players had, hence the question.

Would like some input from my players into this thread though. We're playing our second game this saturday night. I'm not sure if we'll continue with this storyline, although turning it into some kind of ongoing series is attractive, and at least having had our first game, we can come to the second one with some ideas on where we want to take it from here. Laying bricks on a foundation, as it were.

[Mike Holmes]

If you do want to ever complete a story, then one of two things has to happen. Either you have to stick with the one that you're running through now, or you have to agree that the first session was a learning game, and that the next will have an earnest attempt to complete it. If you just drift into the next session without this discussion, it may happen that you'll get another abortive start. Groups that do this for their first few games seem to never get the satisfaction of completing a story. Which is a shame, really.

If you don't want to commit to indefinite play, choose a number of sessions up front - even one, potentially - in which to conclude the story. This can give a lot of focus (though it has potential downsides as well).

Mike