[The Pool] A very satisfying first attempt.

[hanschristianandersen]

(This is my "First attempt at The Pool post".  There are many like it, but this one is mine.)

A few months ago, I was back in California visiting with my friend Yony, and we were swapping "war stories" about our respective gaming experiences.  Yony's girlfriend, Jennifer, was there as well.  I felt bad about the fact that Jennifer, who had never played an RPG before, was de facto excluded from the conversation.  Meahwhile, Yony was hankering for a game, and I wanted an excuse to try The Pool.   Suddenly everything fell into place.

I turn to Jennifer - "Want to give this whole 'roleplaying' thing a try?  I can whip up a two or three hour one-session game, so you can see what it's all about."  She accepted, although her exact words were something along the lines of "I think I'm about to jump off of a very high cliff."

---

We decided that the setting was a mish mash of fantasy material, with The Hobbit and Stardust explicitly called out as influences.

Yony's character was a woodsman and a swordsman who had journeyed out from his native land to investigate the rumors that a dark force was gathering in the west.

Jennifer's character was a young woman on a self-imposed exile from a small town, who was looking for a place to call home.  She was skilled with herblore, and could speak with animals.  Somewhere along the way, a rather large grizzly bear had decided to tag along with her as a travelling companion.

As for play itself... old habits die hard.  Yony was constantly asking "What do I see?" and "I check to make sure nothing is sneaking up behind me," and other such expressions of wariness that might be perfectly suitable in D&D, but that really started to slow down this game.  Interestingly, The Pool very quickly broke him of that habit - I told him "Not really... unless you want to roll your 'Sharp-eyed' Trait and force the issue."  And then he tried it, and got a success, and added to his pool, which prompted me to say "You do indeed see something - a giant spider comes scuttling out of one of the chimneys."  Eventually he figured out that if he wanted something to happen, he could call for a roll, but that the system never ever lets the GM roll dice!  The GM can certainly call for a roll, but that "screwing the players" was impossible under the system - any surprise I sprung could always be overcome by a Monologue Of Victory stating that "I dodge in the nick of time."

Beyond that, though, Yony never quite "got" the Monologue Of Victory.  He never used a MOV to do anything more dramatic than, say, what a critical success would have let him do in GURPS.  This meant that the fight against one of the Spider Baron's cronies (the one that scuttled out of the chimney) took far longer than was really necessary; from where I was sitting, he could have used a MOV to just stab the darn thing and be done with it.  I made a big mistake in not telling him what was an "Acceptable" MOV right off the bat; I was hoping his MOVs would rise to the occasion as the story got going.

Lacking any "gamer habits", Jennifer "got it" almost immediately.  I had mentioned that a wolf was skulking in the woods, watching the fight against the spider.  "What's he thinking?" she asked.  "Roll your Speak with Animals Trait, and you tell me."  One MOV later, Jennifer informed me that the wolf was upset about the Spider Baron's ambitions, and was interested in helping the characters in putting stop to all of this.  However, she added, the wolf didn't know if it could trust us.

(Keep in mind, that this was still within her first half-hour of roleplaying ever.  I felt like pumping my fist in the air and screaming "YESSSS!", but I didn't want to scare the neighbors.)

Later on, in a second fight, she used her "Speak with Animals" trait to scold the grizzly bear into helping with a fight.  (Why?  Because she didn't have much in the way of combat skills, and making the bear fight for her worked just as well.)

Finally, upon discovering that all of the villagers were unconscious thanks to spider venom, she promptly set out in search of the healing herbs that would wake them.  Her: "Can I maybe find some healing herbs in the forest that would help them?"  Me: "I don't know.  You have an Herb-lore Trait, right?  Roll the dice, and you tell me!"  And she did.  One MOV later, she had scrounged the herbs, and had awoken the village blacksmith from his slumber.

Through the end, Yony was still reluctant to claim any level of proactive control over the narrative; though he enjoyed that emerged from the play session, he never really took a hand in any authorship beyond simply adding color.

---

As the GM, I found running The Pool was both easier and more difficult than I expected.  First, the easy part - there was absolutely no tension between making up the narrative and making up the mechanics.  If I had invented those same spiders in D&D, I would have had to consider - how big?  How many Hit Dice?  What poison rating?  Etc. etc.  Here, I just said "There's a giant spider!" and there were no numbers to attach.  And on top of that I never ever had to roll a single die.

I found this tremendously liberating.  No fudging the dice to fit the story, no fudging the stats so that it "works out right".  The spider dies when a MOV says so, or when I decide "enough is enough" and narrate the spider's death myself.

Now, the hard part.  Beyond the usual difficulties of on-the-fly GM-ing (namely that inventing good story elements in real-time is hard work)... when am I allowed to make that spider die?  If the players haven't used a MOV to kill the spider, I can do it myself as part of a "GM-narrates-the-player's-success" action.  But if the players haven't killed it yet, is that because they're enjoying smacking the hapless arachnid around?  In practice, I "killed off" any given obstacle when it felt like we'd spent "enough" time dealing with it.

That's part of a larger question of scene framing - namely, The Pool gives me no guidance there.  And with no prepped material, I not only have to invent new story elements myself, but I have to constantly gauge the mood at the table to judge exactly each of those elements has hit its "expiration date".

All in all, it was well worth the effort, though.  This was probably the tightest single-session I've ever run.

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Epilogue:  By the end of a two-hour session, Jennifer said that she suddenly understands why we talk about our games, about our characters, and our stories.  Furthermore, the next evening, I overheard her gushing about her character's adventures and exploits to another non-gamer friend.  

In a very real sense, this whole post is my own personal Monologue of Victory.

[Paganini]

Wow. That is a *very* cool account.

As far as scene-framing goes, I personally think it's a bad idea to introduce some new thing just to keep the players on their toes, and then kill it off when I think it's boring. Killing off conflicts simplifies things. To keep a game interesting, you need to complicate things. I do come up with crap all the time to keep the players on their toes. If a game seems to be slowing down, I'll just pull some random thing out of my brain and throw it at them.

But if they just keep fighting it and don't kill it, you have to get clever. Make up some twist. Have the spider win, for example. :)

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Boy does this kind of post provide some external confirmation that we're not all wasting our time here.

Here are some quick-quick-quick points and responses.

1. The GM is a player too. Instead of worrying about whether your decisions will entertain the players in a kind of "film director to distant audience" way, think instead of why and how they are getting excited about what they provide, and just get excited yourself about what you'll provide. Interestingly enough, this approach generates more mutual excitement than the former does.

2. I tend to let a single roll actually decide the outcome of the conflict. If they lose against the spider, typically there's no extra roll - the spider wins. What does this mean in a game of this sort? That's something you guys need to work out, although the rules of The Pool are good about not just waxing the characters. But losing the fight really oughta go with losing that dice roll.

(Quick clarifier: both players could be rolling individually. I'm talking about avoiding sequential rolls, not avoiding multi-player rolls, which are just spiff.)

There exists an alternate interpretation of the rules which does not constrain the narrative by the dice outcome, merely assigns the narrator. I consider it to be a problematic form of play.

Again: the dice in The Pool permit the astounding opportunity to resolve conflicts; in fact, by definition, that's what they do. Don't think of rolls as combat rounds, but as fights.

3. Gamers are damaged in their social and creative faculties. This is not always 100% true, but it's true so often, and in such distinctive and recognizable ways, that I think it's worth keeping as the default expectation. If a person has been involved in role-playing in the context of gamer culture for even a short while, his or her ability to role-play is often tightly bound into limited activities which are, frankly, very poor at realizing a Creative Agenda with a group.

What they use as substitutes for social and creative faculties are acting per se or skill at exploiting poor game design for immediate advantage. (And contrary to a common outlook, I do not think that combat vs. no-combat has anything to do with what I'm talking about.) I'll tag a wholly-immersive (so-called) modern-horror drama queen right along with the Bob-kills-party-member guy in this generalization; they look exactly the same from where I'm standing.

3. I've found it to be perfectly OK to have players use MOVs for minimal input. They do not have to provide plot stuff or major Director Stance in using them - in many cases, Color is enough. That's a sign that they're comfy in the situation and are happy to let the GM or someone else generate new situations. One of the happiest Questing Beast players I ever saw conducted a scene in which his character killed an assailant, then scared the others away with a growl (his MOV of a successful roll). He could not stop talking about this scene throughout the rest of play and afterward.

So despite my harsh indictment in #2, it seems to me as if Yony was indeed on the right page.

Congratulations on a great game!! You just walked through a door that Terry Gant, Dav Harnish, and I walked through in 2001 or so. We've been in afterglow ever since.

Best,
Ron

P.S. An extensive discussion of issues that are relevant to this thread may be found in The Pool: Dragons and Jasmine, which includes a lot of important links as well.

[Judd]

Where can I find the Pool to take a look at it?

I have a Tuesday night one-shot new game trying group and I think my next slot will be the Pool.

[Judd]

Oh, and thanks for the write-up.  Nicely written and informative.

[Caynreth]

Look there: http://www.randomordercreations.com/thepool.html

[hanschristianandersen]

Paganini, Ron,

Thanks for the tips, and I'm glad you enjoyed the write-up.

All of our non-combat conflicts were resolved to our satisfaction in one roll, including talking to the wolf, failing to cross a ravine in the forest, and succeeding in reviving the villagers.  (The players originally wanted to deal with the Spider Baron before healing the villagers, so as not to alert the Baron to their presence, but after the setback at the ravine they decided they needed the locals' help to navigate the forest.)

As for combat... spot on, Ron, I was thinking roughly in terms of "combat rounds".  I (and probably Yony as well) am accustomed to action sequences having some blow-by-blow meat; my past gaming experiences are filled with satisfying swordfights in D&D, GURPS, and most memorably in TROS' SA-fuelled showdowns.

So, in combat, I wanted some blow-by-blow action to lead up to the resolution of the conflict.  In retrospect, I was trying to achieve something like the "moment-to-moment" action scale in Trollbabe.  (I had not yet read Trollbabe at the time of this game.)  The problem is that The Pool doesn't support that.

Nevertheless, I think The Pool did a good job of training us; take a look at this progression:

- In the first fight, conflict was really "Can we stop the spider before it goes for help?"  After five or six die rolls, it was readily apparent that "This spider is hopelessly outmatched and isn't going to be able to reach his buddies".  Thus, the conflict had basically been resolved, but the *trappings* of the conflict (namely the spiders) had outstayed their welcome.

- In the second fight, the conflict was "Can we keep the spider from killing the Owl Prince?"  One of Jennifer's actions also introduced a sub-conflict, namely "Is this bear willing to actually help us, or is he just going to follow us around?"

Interestingly, it took fewer rolls (perhaps three or four) before it was readily apparent that the players had won this one, and that it was time for the spiders to be narrated out of existence.

- In the third (and final) fight with the spiders, it was a showdown between Yony's character and the Spider Baron itself.  It had been established that the Spider Baron had been getting uppity and had forgotten his place; the conflict was roughly "Can we cut this overgrown attercop down to size?"

We resolved this one in one single roll.  Stabbed the sucker in the abdomen (Yony's narration) and the big lout just deflated down to the same size as the other spiders.  (my narration)  Conflict resolved.

(Six rolls -> four rolls -> one roll; If only all learning curves were so beautifully quantifiable.)

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

Yeah, that works - effectively you broke it into HeroQuest style bidding sequences, or mid-level Trollbabe Pacing. A very functional solution, but as you see, not especially system-supported in The Pool. If along the way, someone goes, "But why isn't it dead yet?", they have a point.

The rules in Trollbabe, HeroQuest, Fastlane, Dust Devils, and My Life with Master all make it clear just what scope the dice roll (cards, wheel, etc) is covering, prior to using the engine. However, see Nine Worlds for a very cunning alternative solution.

Best,
Ron