So I got together with three friends of mine tonight -- Calder, Jasper, Anders. We played Polaris. This is the first time I've actually got to play the game face-to-face, due first to me being in China and recently to me moving around a lot.

We had fun. It was good. Even people who are normally a little bit not into this sort of thing were really into it. We did fairy tale tropes. There was a boom chain as large as the earth. An entire outpost of knights was destroyed by a horde blizzard demons. It was all good fun.

The collaboration thing worked pretty well, despite never doing any huddles, which was pretty cool. Calder said that it felt very much more like storytelling than acting, which was good. Jasper was appalled at the grimness, which was also good.

I was pleasantly surprised how much our group, which has a fractious social contract sometimes, went smoothly through the whole thing, rules hiccups and all, keeping a strongly sense of collaboration and producing some really good moments.

Some notes:

The Temptations are a bit... clunky. I mean, first of all, I think that the Full Moon temptations are much less exciting than they should be. But, more importantly, they drag out conflict and it is often hard to see where a scene will end up, even after the conflict has been resolved, so it can be hard to tempt. Jasper suggested changing things so temptations can be used at any time. I like this a great deal.

I'm thinking about moving the conflict resolution mechanic forward, to the front of the scene, and having it play out before every scene, because a conflict almost always comes up, and it creates this strange pacing break because the conflict system of Polaris is rather long.

In addition, scenes in which two protagonists both take a heavily active role need a little more guidance. My basic plan is -- both of them do a whole challenge process, then afterwards they play out the scene together.

There needs to be more ways to gain traits.

There needs to be an end of session ritual.

You should only do the chargen rituals once. Four times is too many.

We ended up giving all our knights the same fate: Virgo -- a fair maiden that three of us wanted to marry and was sister to the last. That worked *really* well. I'd like to encourage that sort of closer tie. Still working on the phrasing.