Our gaming group played The Mountain Witch last night, using the beta playtest rules. Thanks, Tim, for the game, and thanks Jeff, Mike, Jeremiah, Jessica, and Bryant for trusting me with your evening and for entertaining me so thoroughly. I had a very good time as GM, and I think the other players did too.

I say “think,” because the initial reaction seemed great: people were way into the game during play, and there were a lot of fantastic moments. When play stopped, some people seemed surprised it was so late and that we were stopping. And there were lots of non-specific comments like “that was SO fun” and “that was GREAT!” But then when we got into talking about specifics, some criticisms of the game and the mechanics came up very quickly, and by the time we left maybe half an hour later my immediate post-game high had been deflated, and I feel like the group had talked itself out of liking the game.

On balance, I think our group’s criticisms of the mechanics are very real and worth hearing, but I also think that our initial enthusiasm and excitement were real and valid too. I’ll try and do credit to both here. Finally, there was one HUGE thing that I wish we had done differently, which might have changed everything in the way the game felt and ran -- yet I didn’t realize it until I sat down to write this post. I don’t know if that huge thing was the fault of the rules or of my own hard-wired gamer instincts. (I’ll get to my big mistake below.)

(I hope you're sitting comfortably. This is a long post.)

WHAT WE DID
There were five players, plus me as GM. I sent out an email outlining character generation early in the day, but most of the players created their characters from scratch at the start of the session. This took about an hour, but could have gone faster (we were waiting for one player to arrive). I also spent about two hours that afternoon prepping ideas for the Witch’s fortress and its challenges. I give all this data to point out one thing I really liked about Mountain Witch: it can be played with very little prep, almost like a board game, yet it plays like, or “feels” like, many games with much more intensive preparation (working on backstory, plotting conflicts between characters, and so on). (Plus I could easily reuse my prep with a different or even the same group of players.)

The players drew Fates randomly and picked Zodiac signs by choice. I also had them each pick a color. At the start of the story, they did not know each other’s names, only their colors (the red ronin, the green ronin, the blue ronin, etc.). This was a nod to Reservoir Dogs, but it also seemed Kurosawa-esque: the five samurai, each dressed in one bold color, making their way across the white snow. (In a longer game, we could have used the colors as motifs in character flashbacks a la Hero.) It worked well in functional terms too, since it allowed us to have scenes where the players introduced themselves as trust grew (“Please, call me Goto”) plus it was easier to remember the five colors than five rapidly chosen Japanese names. We had bingo chips in the five colors, so we used those as Trust Points: each player wrote down on their sheet how much trust they had in each other PC, then distributed chips of their own color accordingly. I highly recommend something like this to anyone playing the game.

One other thing I did that was just color, but fun for me, was to narrate little voice-overs between chapters as Yama-Ubu himself, as if the Witch was telling all this as a story to some unseen audience. “This is the story of five masterless dogs who tried to defeat me where an army of thousands had failed...” – that kind of thing. Mainly I did this because I wanted to say things like “foolish samurai!” in the voice of Aku from Samurai Jack, but this was also a way of making the Witch a living character in the players’ minds before the structure of the game allowed him to actually appear. Yama-Ubu’s narration could also be used to expose character secrets to the other players (not the other characters – I wasn’t suggesting that the samurai could hear Yama-Ubu’s narration). Our players didn’t need help doing that, but it’s fun to let the Witch sow dissension among the ranks, and more channels of information are almost always good. Finally, I just really like the idea of the whole story being a tale told by the Witch himself – even if (especially if) he is killed in the end – it raises neat questions about what the moral of the story is and how it all ends.

FATES
With five players, all the Fates but one were in play. I added “Desperately in Love” after reading the other playtest threads. “In Love” worked great: I stipulated that the love had to interfere with the mission in some way, and it absolutely did. The “in love” player decided his purple samurai was a low born warrior, in love with the sister of the blue samurai, a match her family would never allow. They had tried to elope but she had been captured by the Witch. We had great interactions between the purple and blue samurai along these lines even before the blue samurai’s player knew any of this was going on, and it all unfolded into just the sort of melodrama the game is supposed to create.

The Fate that didn’t work well for us was “Your Fears Will Come To Life.” It’s more internal than the others, and it doesn’t generate story or connect with the other PC backstories as readily as the others. Particularly if the player picks a vague kind of fear like “the cold” or “darkness” -- which I think many players will pick if they haven’t seen all the other Fates and how they interconnect the PCs with NPCs and eachother. (Our red samurai player picked the cold as his fear, and I see in other threads another playtest group went with darkness.) I suggest maybe rewording this Fate to encourage more story connection: requiring the fear be a specific person or monster, stipulating “your fear caused you great dishonor in the past” or even something like “through your cowardice, a great wrong was done to one of the other members of your company (though they may not know this was your doing).”

Jeff, the player who had the Fear Fate afterwards said the game might benefit from tying the Fates more tightly together, suggesting the kinds of pre-gen PCs you get in a Paranoia adventure as an example. Having labored over Paranoia pre-gens often, filling them with hooks that get ignored once the shooting starts and clever little ironies that are too often visible only to the GM, I’m inclined to disagree. I think Jeff just got stuck with the dud in the set. I actually think you could run Paranoia very well without pre-gens, using a deck of six open-ended Fates a la Mountain Witch and indeed some variation of Trust Points, then trusting your players to create all the backstory and intrigue anyone needs.

CHAPTERS/SCENES
We didn’t finish a game; I didn’t completely expect to but I did want to get through more “scenes” than we did. I should note here that I found the use of “scene” and “chapter” in the rules confusing. As the rules are written, Trust is recalibrated after each scene, right? But a “scene” is long, longer than a scene in many movies or games, with maybe ten to twenty conflicts per scene and only four to six scenes in an entire game. Our group, I think, tends to think of scenes as much smaller units. I certainly do. So I actually called scenes “chapters” to avoid confusion. I really like the way the chapters give the game a fixed structure, but the fact that chapters and scenes are almost but not quite equivalent (each game has four chapters and four to six scenes) made me wonder what the point of distinguishing them was.

Anyway, we only got through two chapters, or long scenes in our game. (We did do the Trust distribution at the end of the second chapter as if we were going to keep playing.) I wanted to have more scenes or chapters in our session, with more opportunities for Trust to change, but both times conflicts went on longer than I expected and I had a hard time bringing things to break points.

This is not totally a bad thing. Lots was happening, and I was very happy in terms of how much story we got to in one session. A majority of the Fates were “in play” in an active way by the end of our second chapter and one or two of them were close to being quite satisfyingly resolved. One player (Blue) complained that he couldn’t advance his Revenge Fate much since he and Purple were separated from the other PCs for much of the second chapter, but given the intensity of the interaction in that chapter between Blue and Purple re: Purple’s Fate, I don’t regret the separation. In the next chapter I would surely have reunited the group.

But I do wish we had hustled the combats along quicker. (More on this below.)

BETRAYAL
This was the biggest criticism everyone had with the mechanics: betrayal is too hard. Most of the players had someone they really wanted to screw over, but nobody really did get stabbed in the back in our game.

Trust points are far more effective when aiding someone (+1d6 to their roll) than when betraying someone (+1 to your roll against them). The players all felt it would take far too long to build up the necessary trust to successfully take out a rival, especially since one roll is rarely conclusive.

We expected a game where trust was dangerous and betrayal was easy. In fact, the mechanics seemed to produce a game where the reverse was true. There was little incentive not to increase trust every turn, and even though there was a lot of talk about betrayal, it never seriously happened and didn’t seem that likely to happen in the immediate future.

Some of the players wished they could use Trust Points against other PCs at any time, not just when their character was present and directly opposing them. I don’t know that I agree: this would make Trust Points more meta-, like Paranoia XP’s perversity points, and might discourage actual confrontation between samurai even further. But I would look for ways to make betrayal mechanically more powerful: maybe letting Trust Points give a +2 or +3 or even +1d6 when used for an Opposing Bonus.

MY BIG MISTAKE
OK, I’ve kept you in suspense long enough. Here’s the huge mistake I made in how I ran the game. I think all our problems with the game were affected by this in some way.

Whenever we went into combat, I slipped from fast elegant conflict resolution, where one roll determines a whole scene, to bog standard task resolution, where you roll to hit, roll to hit, roll to hit again and again, chipping away with cumulative wounds until finally someone is taken out.

I can’t believe I did this. I’m down with Sorcerer, Trollbabe, and HeroQuest. I know all about Conflict versus Task Resolution, and I know I prefer the former every time. I was already bored with long drawn out fights back in 1986. I even read the thread where Chris Kubasik warned that the wording of the rules might encourage this to happen when people played. So why, why, why, when we got into combat, did I do exactly that?

We could have narrated every fight being over (not fatal, but over) after just one exchange. Maybe two or three exchanges for the really critical showdowns. Instead we just hacked away for exchanges on end. And 1d6 vs. 1d6 rolls have such a flat distribution, you can roll for a loooong time before a fight becomes decisive. Especially if some fraction of the failures are converted into other kinds of setbacks than –1 wounds. The result was that combat scenes took far longer than any other kind of scene to resolve, that each chapter took longer than I had planned, and a lot of time was spent hacking at zombies and tengu that could have been spent on cool interplayer conflict.

So I’m kicking myself for this screw-up. And I’m marveling at the fact that it happened and that I didn’t even notice it had happened until the next day. But if quick conflict resolution combat is what you want, I implore you to really push that in the text of the game with clear wording and big fat examples. The fact that someone like me, who gets the theory, who vastly prefers quick one-roll resolution to blow-by-blow combat, and who just that day read a thread warning “the wording here may encourage people to fall into blow-by-blow combat” still got stuck in these long drawn out combats with zombies and tengu -- and couldn’t see a way out of them while they were happening – speaks to how easy it is to fall into the standard gamer way of doing things and to how important clear writing and examples and careful terminology are when trying to break those habits.

WHAT I LIKED
Ah, but I don’t want to end on a down note. Because really I did like the game and I think, the complaints above notwithstanding, the players did too.

Everyone said they had fun (one person grudgingly). Two of the players said they’d definitely like to play Mountain Witch again (it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon given the number of games this circle is involved in). Two immediately started talking about how to borrow the Trust Point mechanic, changing Trust to Love, for a romance game they’re starting up. A romance D&D game, I might add. And the only player who said he didn’t want to play Mountain Witch again has said that about every game our Ad Hoc group has played, or at least every one I’ve run, so you can’t take that too personally.

Finally, I think the game impressed me more on the GM side of the table because it did a lot of things elegantly and effortlessly that my group also does in other games, but only through greater effort. I said, way back at the top of this now novel-length email, that the game was low prep but played like it had been carefully plotted.

The Fates came into play elegantly. No particular pressure from the GM or the game rules was required. The character back stories linked up in cool ways that weren’t at all planned but often seemed like they must have been. The simple act of saying “does anybody want to aid?” before each roll is very powerful. Every action, every conflict, had the potential to reveal character and story. Any standard “search for a secret door” or “fight with a fortress mook” roll could suddenly highlight questions of trust and betrayal.

When I pointed this out to the players afterwards, they were inclined to give themselves, and me, credit for this, rather than the game. “Yes, but all our games have interesting backstories and characters that interact in cool ways and conflicts that highlight those things.” Which is true. It’s a great group of gamers. BUT Mountain Witch deserves credit for doing all this incredibly efficiently. Yes, our old Unknown Armies game had great conflicts that highlighted the internal struggles of the characters in rich and symbolic ways, but it took me days and days to prep each session. Yes, our current Age of Paranoia game has a group of complex PCs with secrets and rivalries, but char gen took two months, not forty minutes. This difference may not seem extreme during actual play, but it makes a great difference to how games like this can fit into a gamer’s life.

(We had a similar experience when I ran Trollbabe, by the way. At the end of our session I said, “Wow! Wasn’t that cool how everything just naturally built to a big satisfying climax at the end of the evening and then everything was resolved?” and the players shrugged and essentially said, “That happens in [almost] all your games.” Well, that’s very nice of them to say. But I didn’t have to sweat to do it this time, the game did it for me. Or for us, I should say. That’s a real difference.)

Well, that’s more than anybody needs to read about a game. Thanks again Tim, and thanks again to Jeremiah, Bryant, Jessica, Mike, and Jeff.

Rob

Rob MacDougall wrote: Whenever we went into combat, I slipped from fast elegant conflict resolution, where one roll determines a whole scene, to bog standard task resolution, where you roll to hit, roll to hit, roll to hit again and again, chipping away with cumulative wounds until finally someone is taken out.

Rob wrote: I also had them each pick a color... it was easier to remember the five colors than five rapidly chosen Japanese names.

Rob wrote: We had bingo chips in the five colors, so we used those as Trust Points: each player wrote down on their sheet how much trust they had in each other PC, then distributed chips of their own color accordingly.

Rob wrote: One other thing I did that was just color, but fun for me, was to narrate little voice-overs between chapters as Yama-Ubu himself, as if the Witch was telling all this as a story to some unseen audience.

Rob wrote: I added “Desperately in Love” after reading the other playtest threads. “In Love” worked great: I stipulated that the love had to interfere with the mission in some way, and it absolutely did.

Rob wrote: The Fate that didn’t work well for us was “Your Fears Will Come To Life.” It’s more internal than the others, and it doesn’t generate story or connect with the other PC backstories as readily as the others. Particularly if the player picks a vague kind of fear like “the cold” or “darkness”

Rob wrote: Jeff, the player who had the Fear Fate afterwards said the game might benefit from tying the Fates more tightly together, suggesting the kinds of pre-gen PCs you get in a Paranoia adventure as an example.

Rob wrote: We didn’t finish a game; I didn’t completely expect to but I did want to get through more “scenes” than we did... we only got through two chapters, or long scenes in our game

Rob wrote: I should note here that I found the use of “scene” and “chapter” in the rules confusing. As the rules are written, Trust is recalibrated after each scene, right? But a “scene” is long, longer than a scene in many movies or games, with maybe ten to twenty conflicts per scene and only four to six scenes in an entire game. Our group, I think, tends to think of scenes as much smaller units. I certainly do. So I actually called scenes “chapters” to avoid confusion.

Rob wrote: I really like the way the chapters [meaning the informal structure of play --timfire] give the game a fixed structure, but the fact that chapters and scenes are almost but not quite equivalent (each game has four chapters and four to six scenes) made me wonder what the point of distinguishing them was.

Rob wrote: I wanted to have more scenes or chapters in our session, with more opportunities for Trust to change, but both times conflicts went on longer than I expected and I had a hard time bringing things to break points.

Rob wrote: Lots was happening, and I was very happy in terms of how much story we got to in one session. A majority of the Fates were “in play” in an active way by the end of our second chapter and one or two of them were close to being quite satisfyingly resolved. One player (Blue) complained that he couldn’t advance his Revenge Fate much since he and Purple were separated from the other PCs for much of the second chapter, but given the intensity of the interaction in that chapter between Blue and Purple re: Purple’s Fate, I don’t regret the separation. In the next chapter I would surely have reunited the group.

Rob wrote: This was the biggest criticism everyone had with the mechanics: betrayal is too hard. Most of the players had someone they really wanted to screw over, but nobody really did get stabbed in the back in our game.

Rob wrote: Here’s the huge mistake I made in how I ran the game... Whenever we went into combat, I slipped from fast elegant conflict resolution, where one roll determines a whole scene, to bog standard task resolution, where you roll to hit, roll to hit, roll to hit again and again, chipping away with cumulative wounds until finally someone is taken out.

Rob wrote: Every action, every conflict, had the potential to reveal character and story. Any standard “search for a secret door” or “fight with a fortress mook” roll could suddenly highlight questions of trust and betrayal.

Rob wrote: When I pointed this out to the players afterwards, they were inclined to give themselves, and me, credit for this, rather than the game... BUT Mountain Witch deserves credit for doing all this incredibly efficiently. Yes, our old Unknown Armies game had great conflicts that highlighted the internal struggles of the characters in rich and symbolic ways, but it took me days and days to prep each session. Yes, our current Age of Paranoia game has a group of complex PCs with secrets and rivalries, but char gen took two months, not forty minutes. This difference may not seem extreme during actual play, but it makes a great difference to how games like this can fit into a gamer’s life.

Bryant wrote: I was not at all worried about betrayal, but I did go into the game fully expecting and wanting to betray people. It seems possible that if you don't want to roleplay betrayal... yeah, there's not much mechanical incentive to do so.

I was the Red Samurai.

1. My fear of ice and snow -- see, originally I saw the character as sort of an academic/mathematician/economist/numerologist/astrologer type, able to reason his way out of things, and therefore terrified by blizzards and such on accout of there's no arguing or reasoning with weather -- ended up being a mere "ice! why did it have to be ice?!" minor aside kind of thing. If I had it to do over again, I'd have come up with something more directly involving the other samurai, but I didn't have a lot to go on.

2. Maybe it was the way Rob was adjucating the rules, but even three samurai working together still took, what, four or five sets of die rolls to defeat one ice monster? This is also why we thought betrayal needed to be beefed up -- it provides a bonus to only one die roll, and multiple die rolls seem to be needed to resolve an encounter.

3. Prepackaged Paranoia adventures used to have their pregenerated characters with all these interrelating hooks. Like, one character had been demoted because he was blamed for another character's screwup that resulted in the maiming of a third character. It was usually pretty intricate and no one character had the full skivvy on the backstory (which in practice meant it was, as with so much of prepackages Paranoia adventures, basically just something for the GM to laugh at). Going to this extreme would be too far, but I really liked the way that the Purple Samurai (Desperately in Love) was able to tie his Fate in with the Blue Samurai's backstory. Some guidelines for Dark Fate interpretation in this way would be very helpful.

jeffwik wrote: 1. My fear of ice and snow -- see, originally I saw the character as sort of an academic/mathematician/economist/numerologist/astrologer type, able to reason his way out of things, and therefore terrified by blizzards and such on accout of there's no arguing or reasoning with weather -- ended up being a mere "ice! why did it have to be ice?!" minor aside kind of thing. If I had it to do over again, I'd have come up with something more directly involving the other samurai, but I didn't have a lot to go on.

2. Maybe it was the way Rob was adjucating the rules, but even three samurai working together still took, what, four or five sets of die rolls to defeat one ice monster? This is also why we thought betrayal needed to be beefed up -- it provides a bonus to only one die roll, and multiple die rolls seem to be needed to resolve an encounter.

3. Prepackaged Paranoia adventures used to have their pregenerated characters with all these interrelating hooks.

timfire wrote: How tough was the monster? Did Rob adhere to the Weak (Regular Succes), Able (Critical Success), Strong (Double Success) rule? Most of my monsters are Weak, with a few that are Able. Strong monsters definitely are kinda hard, and I usually try to only throw one or two at the party at a time.

Each Aiding samurai added 1d6 to the roll, right? So with 3 PC's aiding each other, the ice monster conflict should have been 1d6 vs. 3d6, right? Even if you needed to win by a margin of 5, I would have been surprised if the conflict lasted more than 2 rolls. 1d6 vs. 2d6 (just one extra aiding PC) isn't a huge advantage, but 1d6 vs. 3d6 is a pretty big advantage.

Hi, all. I should respond in more detail to Tim's first post, but for now, on the subject of the long fight scenes:

I was following the rules regarding Weak, Able, and Strong monsters. But the "ice monster" was actually the Giant, as described in the rules: a Strong monster that cannot be harmed by normal means. The Red Samurai doused him with burning oil, which I was happy to say counted as abnormal means. There were three samurai fighting him, so they would have been able to take him out in one if they'd all acted in unison, but there was other stuff going on and they only aided each other some of the time, and at no time did all three samurai add their rolls together using Trust. (In fact, at no time in the game did more than two samurai add their rolls together using Trust.)

But actually, *that* fight was kind of fun. It took maybe four or five exchanges to wrap up, which I was fine with. The fight that seemed to go on forever was between the Purple and Blue samurai and a horde of tengu. Purple and Blue had no trust in each other (or they might have each had one point, but it was quickly spent at the start of the fight and the others were elsewhere (busy with the ice monster). So generally, it was two rolls of 1d6 (take the higher) on their side versus three rolls of 1d6 (take the higher) for the tengu.

At first it was fun: there was a lovely subscene in the midst of the fight with Yuki-Onna posing as Blue's sister / Purple's beloved and sapping his will. (As in HeroQuest and the like, the very abstract damage system allows all sorts of cool subtle "attacks": Yuki-Onna sang a sad song which laid heavy on the Purple Samurai's heart; I treated this as any other conflict, resulting in a -1 "wound" to the Purple Samurai.) But once that was resolved, the tengu hacking kept going and going, and everyone seemed to fall into the "gotta keep rolling til this is over" mindset. I don't blame the rules for this--it's just a mystifying thing that sometimes happens. Why didn't the players just retreat? Why didn't I find some way to end it? Why didn't someone just die? (I actually think one or the other samurai would have been Taken Out in just one or two more rolls, but one of the other three players finally stepped in to buy narration and offered a way out.)

I also could have ended the fight scene quicker if I'd just been more ruthless in applying wounds to the PCs. So some of their failures were converted into failures like "You don't make it to the ledge" without applying a -1 penalty. If I'd hit them with a -1 wound every time, the fight probably would have been over quicker.

All of which provides a nice object lesson in the power of Trust and teamwork: the Giant, which I thought would be a big challenging fight, went down relatively quickly and easily in the face of 3 semi-cooperating samurai (and might have gone down in one round if they'd really pulled together). A lousy bunch of tengu proved nigh-insurmountable for 2 non-trusting samurai, and probably could have taken them both out if I'd been applying penalties strictly and firmly.

The more I think about that long fight scene, the less I think it had to do with the rules, and the more I think it was just a mutual failure of communication and imagination. Maybe the Purple and Blue players wanted something to happen that wasn't happening; maybe people were waiting for me to advance the plot in some way while I was waiting for them. I probably exaggerated when I called it a "huge mistake", but I do wish I'd run it differently. It might not have colored our verdict on the game so strongly if it hadn't been the final scene of the night.

Rob

Rob wrote: All of which provides a nice object lesson in the power of Trust and teamwork: the Giant, which I thought would be a big challenging fight, went down relatively quickly and easily in the face of 3 semi-cooperating samurai (and might have gone down in one round if they'd really pulled together). A lousy bunch of tengu proved nigh-insurmountable for 2 non-trusting samurai, and probably could have taken them both out if I'd been applying penalties strictly and firmly.

Rob MacDougall wrote: But once that was resolved, the tengu hacking kept going and going, and everyone seemed to fall into the "gotta keep rolling til this is over" mindset. I don't blame the rules for this--it's just a mystifying thing that sometimes happens. Why didn't the players just retreat? Why didn't I find some way to end it? Why didn't someone just die? (I actually think one or the other samurai would have been Taken Out in just one or two more rolls, but one of the other three players finally stepped in to buy narration and offered a way out.)

Rob MacDougall wrote: The more I think about that long fight scene, the less I think it had to do with the rules, and the more I think it was just a mutual failure of communication and imagination. Maybe the Purple and Blue players wanted something to happen that wasn't happening; maybe people were waiting for me to advance the plot in some way while I was waiting for them. I probably exaggerated when I called it a "huge mistake", but I do wish I'd run it differently. It might not have colored our verdict on the game so strongly if it hadn't been the final scene of the night.

Jere wrote: I think it had to do a lot with the rules.

Hello,

I suggest an alternate approach, Tim - which is actually to defeat, injure, and possibly kill player-characters. This is done even with weak foes by ganging up on the player-characters. If the players can't get it together to fight the foes using Trust, then eventually they'll get hammered - beaten, wounded, imprisoned, and possibly killed.

I did this a lot to you guys during play, and that's why y'all spent a lot of time hanging from hooks in tengu larders, getting dragged off by giant spiders, and so on. It wasn't until people started using Trust that you would "get places."

This wasn't system-tweaking or cunning outcome-narration on my part, just using the mechanics. I think I'd advise any Mountain Witch GM not to be a weenie - really hurt those characters, really kill them (I did try, but you guys got Trust-y at the right moments).

You once mentioned to me that an early playtest-group got all Gamist on you and ramped up their Trust, thus remaining invulnerable, especially since they simply ignored their Dark Fates. I suggest that you had not yet processed that the Scene is over only when you, the GM, say it's over, and also to consider our suggestion that Scenes cannot be over unless player-characters have brought in something to do with their Fates.

Given those two points, when a group tries to do this, all the GM does is continue the existing scene, conflict after conflict, and sooner or later all the Trust will be spent, and then, one more gang-up by a bunch of even weenie foes will wound and possibly kill one or more characters.

"Sorry guys, I couldn't close the Scene - you just didn't bring in your Fates."

So if they fail to use Trust for added-value rolls, they get wounded and/or killed. If they abuse Trust (meaning, without bringing in the adversity of the game as well), then they get wounded and/or killed. Makes perfect sense to me.

Best,
Ron

Ron Edwards wrote: I suggest an alternate approach, Tim - which is actually to defeat, injure, and possibly kill player-characters. This is done even with weak foes by ganging up on the player-characters. If the players can't get it together to fight the foes using Trust, then eventually they'll get hammered - beaten, wounded, imprisoned, and possibly killed.

Bryant wrote: I'd agree. This was what I noticed during our session as well -- I thought Rob simply wasn't mean enough. The two samurai off by themselves didn't cooperate or Trust enough, and they should probably have been slaughtered or imprisoned as a result.

Bryant wrote: I'd agree. This was what I noticed during our session as well -- I thought Rob simply wasn't mean enough. The two samurai off by themselves didn't cooperate or Trust enough, and they should probably have been slaughtered or imprisoned as a result.

Jere wrote:

Bryant wrote: I'd agree. This was what I noticed during our session as well -- I thought Rob simply wasn't mean enough. The two samurai off by themselves didn't cooperate or Trust enough, and they should probably have been slaughtered or imprisoned as a result.

This a radical difference in perspective. Start with 2 trust each (maximum possible, start with 1 due to zodiac, bump up by 1 for chapter end). Spent all 4 trust in this scene.

Blue spent 1 trust getting Purple to the caste, even if he was a little suspicious. Then he spent another trust freeing Purple from the witch.

Purple spent his two on lue uring all that damn tengu stuff.

The players did what they were supposed to do (and were even on the road to resolving their trust/betrayal issue in favor of trust, somethng the game doesn't seem t allow, which is another discussion). The rules, nd their interpretation, penalized them for that.

Thus the rules are at fault and don't do what they set out to model. Now I understand that Rob didn't do a great job interpretating some of the rules (which points me t flaws in presentation), but still think fundamentally that this game does not succed as a game of trust and betrayal amongst kick-ass samurai.

Bryant wrote: That isn't actually mechanics stuff, that's the same kind of tactical decision that would lead to disaster in most games.

Hello,

Jere, I'm not understanding your point - can you clarify?

Maybe the following idea is relevant to my misunderstanding, maybe not. The rules are not there to build Trust automatically. They provide the option of building Trust.

It's hard to articulate in the context of an on-line forum. The Mountain Witch rules-set ultimately throws the responsibility completely on the players to decide whether Trust is important to them or not. It does not dictate that they must or should bulk up in Trust.

The alternative is a bloody, tragic disaster as the internal tensions and conflicting needs among the characters rip the mission apart. Conceivably, one or some of the characters might even become powerful henchment of the Witch, such that the bad guy wins.

I cannot over-stress that this alternative is not losing, and not a disaster at the player-level, but a perfectly valid outcome. If that's what the group and the dice turn up, well then, that's what happens.

The game rules do an excellent job of putting the ultimate responsibility for the overall outcomes right into the hands of the players. The rules offer multiple opportunities to change your minds about it along the way, as well, which is where the experience of The Mountain Witch gains its power.

Something seems to have been a little screwy with the GMing, I think, in your group - specifically that if one or more players wanted to go full-tilt with betrayal and their Dark Fates, that the GM did not take that opportunity to use the rules' outcomes - including higher risks of injury and death, as well as the possibilities of allying with the Witch.

Your game seems to have been a wonderful opportunity to enjoy the Reservoir Dogs potential of the game - what we often call "Blood Opera." Why that didn't happen deserves some reflection on your parts, but I really don't think the rules are flawed at all.

Best,
Ron

P.S. Quick caveat: you guys were using the Beta version currently at the website, whereas our recent game used a more revised, pre-publication version. So some of my concern about your rules-comment might stem from that.

Ron Edwards wrote: The game rules do an excellent job of putting the ultimate responsibility for the overall outcomes right into the hands of the players. The rules offer multiple opportunities to change your minds about it along the way, as well, which is where the experience of The Mountain Witch gains its power.

Jere wrote: My verdict, after a degree of thought, on the version of the game we played Friday is that the mechanics do nothing to further trust and betrayal and do not represent kick-ass samurai very well in a way to be true to the source material. There is no incentive to give trust, get trust, use trust or betrayal because it doesn't make any difference in the one-way death spiral that the games mechanics enforce. Nor does it matter one bit what the players choose to roleplay ebcause that is not reflected in the mechanics.

Purple samurai checking in, daimyo!

Having read the whole thread (and only being able to comprehend the game from my own corner of the game, which was immensely satisfying), I wonder if the game as presently constructed is a last-man-standing sort of deal. In other words, a competition.

As the purple samurai, I was inspired to both trust and distrust Blue by the rules set out by my Fate. Trust and betrayal were entirely contingent on whether my Fate would be fulfilled. Could I convince Blue to let me marry his sister by proving my honor through insane suicidal valor? If I didn't, would I make the dishonorable choice to slay him and take his sister for myself? These were what propelled me through the adventure. In fact, the only regret I have is that I didn't have those kind of ties with any other PCs. On second thought, maybe that would've muddied the waters considerably.

Short answer: I think the game works, but I think I need more in the way of information on the game's precepts and goals beforehand. That being said, in my own personal gaming bubble, I had an excellent time.

clehrich wrote: 1. "Kick-ass samurai" in the source material. Well, such people have a habit of dying horribly in the source material. It's very common. Of course, sometimes they triumph as well, but hideous death for the decent and virtuous at the hands of an evil fate is a pretty typical sort of story. I don't see that an inability to kick enough ass all by yourself is really a problem, unless you see the source material as primarily Kill Bill.

Let me start rephrase on one matter.

I think Rob is a great gm. There is nothing I wouldn't trust Rob to run for our circle. Our gaming circle is filled with people who have mastered much of the craft of this hobby and are always looking for more experiences to challenge themselves. Based on my ancedotal evidence I'd assign our gaming circle on the high end of any curve.

This game didn't work for us. It didn't work for Rob as a gm and it didn't work for all the players (though I'm the most hardcore obviously).

Given that the easy thing is to say Rob didn't get it because of a mistake he made. But I don't think that is true. Oen thing you learn in risk management (what I do for a living) is that the easy answer is to blame the oeprator. Its almost never the operator, and based on my reading of the rules plus analysis of the game system I would not assign operator error as a root cause. I'd squarely assign it to document/procedure.

Which in a more relevant manner means your game is broken, you need to fix it.

Jeremiah

Jere wrote: Source material doesn't have physical death spirals. What it has is your kickass until you meet someone more kickass and then you die.

What MW witch did was death by a thousand paper cuts.

clehrich wrote: What I liked about the rules was that it seemed clear that the most likely outcome of a team ruled by its fates was a messy, agonizing, and ultimately pointless and tragic death. That's the ronin literature in a nutshell.

Sounds like there are some disagreements about what constitutes a good game, and in this case, how MW carried through.

Earlier in this thread:

Rob wrote: When I pointed this out to the players afterwards, they were inclined to give themselves, and me, credit for this, rather than the game. “Yes, but all our games have interesting backstories and characters that interact in cool ways and conflicts that highlight those things.” Which is true. It’s a great group of gamers. BUT Mountain Witch deserves credit for doing all this incredibly efficiently.

mgrasso wrote: As the purple samurai, I was inspired to both trust and distrust Blue by the rules set out by my Fate. Trust and betrayal were entirely contingent on whether my Fate would be fulfilled. Could I convince Blue to let me marry his sister by proving my honor through insane suicidal valor? If I didn't, would I make the dishonorable choice to slay him and take his sister for myself?

Hi y'all, I have alot to respond to.

First things first: Rob and his crew had the latest playtest version of rules, I emailed them to him. I also included a short update file that had a few, wholely inadaquate playing tips.

Re: Combat: In my last post, I choose some poor wording. Like Ron's post suggested, the GM shouldn't 'go easy' on the PC's. But I do feel that smaller fights work a little better than big fights. Ron, looking back over our playtest, the heros were equal or had the advantage of numbers in at least 50% of the battles. The group was only seriously outnumbered twice (@ the Gate and against the Nioo).

Bigger fights have a greater tendency to bog down not just because you have more foes to kill, but also since the GM is rolling more dice, he's more likely to roll high, which means a smaller degree of success. I think there's a sorta expotential effect that happens. I've noticed this in multiple playtests. (Usual disclaimer: This is not saying that the GM should shy from using big fights, he should just keep them in reserve for when he really wants them.)

A small fight still has the potential for disaster, as the Spider fight in our last playtest showed (3 samurai vs. 2 Spiders, one of the samurai ended up captured).

grasso wrote: I wonder if the game as presently constructed is a last-man-standing sort of deal. In other words, a competition.

grasso wrote: As the purple samurai, I was inspired to both trust and distrust Blue... Trust and betrayal were entirely contingent on whether my Fate would be fulfilled. Could I convince Blue to let me marry his sister by proving my honor through insane suicidal valor? If I didn't, would I make the dishonorable choice to slay him and take his sister for myself?

Jere wrote: Given that the easy thing is to say Rob didn't get it because of a mistake he made. But I don't think that is true. Oen thing you learn in risk management (what I do for a living) is that the easy answer is to blame the oeprator. Its almost never the operator, and based on my reading of the rules plus analysis of the game system I would not assign operator error as a root cause. I'd squarely assign it to document/procedure.

Jere wrote: Be all there Chris if thats what the game did. But it doesn't. Instead what you get is lots of little pointless fights that don't further the fates much and that death comes after a long-drawn out series of meaningless fights.

A little bit of math that I don't think's been pointed out.

I'm a trio of cooperating bad guys. I roll a 3d6 on my side of the conflict and take the higher die. This results in an average of 4.95.

You're a pair of cooperating samurai, each of whom has a Trust of the other at 1, or possibly higher than one, but you've spent some Trust already getting to where you are. The first two rounds you'll be able to trust each other, getting an average of 7, but on subsequent rounds you'll only get an average of 4.47, since you're cooperating.

On those first two rounds, on average, you'll defeat me with a margin of 2. I admit I never actually saw the rules of the game, but I got the impression that a margin of 2 was a pretty trivial, inconclusive victory. Afterwards you'll be out of Trust and I'll be likely to beat you, again lightly and slowly and death-of-paper-cutsy, but regardless the situation is unlikely to resolve itself quickly.

Even if there's only two of me, your margin of victory in those first two rounds is only going to be 2.5 on average -- again, I don't know exactly how much of a difference this makes, but I don't think it's much. Based on playing it, I think the system works well when it's one samurai against one foe, or two samurai against one foe, or three samurai against two foes, but when samurai are outnumbered fights drag on and on.


On reflection, what I would suggest to solve this is a page from Exalted: their rules for army combat are abstracted duels between the armies' commanders, with the massed troops treated exactly like weapons and armor. That is, I'd rule that "two bad guys" or "six wolves" or "eighty-eight crazy guys in Kato masks" are treated the same way as a single, powerful opponent, and fights be resolved as if they were one-on-one as much as possible. This privileges the PCs, since they can cooperate and tengu can't, but hey, that's fine with me.




Also I don't think there's enough incentive to betray, but I don't have any numbers to support me there, and others have argued that more persuasively than I could, so, there you go.

Hi Jeff, thanks for doing that math! The only caveat I would add is that a degree of success of 2 is a Mixed Success. In this case, given that the tengu in your example are weak, a mixed success would mean that one of tengu are killed, but a samurai would take a flesh wound. So, using your numbers, this is how the fight would play out:

The first roll the 2 samurai would win by a margin of two. One tengu is killed, but one of the samurai would take a -1 on their next roll.

Next, I'm not sure the math, but let'a call it a wash. So again the samurai win with a mixed success. Again a tengu is killed but a samurai takes a -1 on their next roll.

So, third round comes. There's one tengu, and one samurai has a -1 (only for one roll). The samurai have the advantage (like, 4.47 vs. 3.5) but it might take a couple rounds to finish the tengu off.
__________
Anyway, so I did some math myself. The first number is the chance of completely taking someone out (Double Success), the second is the chance of gettting at least a clean, Regular Success.

By yourself: 2.8% / 16.7%

With 1 person Aiding you: 37.5 / 62.5

Betraying (+3): 27.8 / 58.3
Betraying (+4): 41.7 / 72.2
Betraying (+5): 58.3 / 83.3
Betraying (+6): 72.2 / 91.6

So, you can see, a Betraying bonus +4 is more effective than than having one person Aid you. And like I said earlier, you can have Trust: 4 by the 2nd or 3rd scene, depending upon your zodiac. I think Trust: 5 is real break point, since with a +5, you will get taken out the majority of the time.

I also wanted to point out that when people are considering the strength of the Betraying option, they shouldn't overlook the simple Regular Success. Somtimes, there are worse things you can do than just injure someone. And if all you need is a Regular Success, Betraying has a big effect.

[edit] Almost forgot - the idea about treating a group of enemies as a single opponent (which is similiar to what Rob was suggesting, I think) isn't a bad idea. I don't think it should always be that way, but I might throw it in as an optional rule. I think it might help in certain situations. [/edit]