The game did not have an auspicious beginning. I hadn't slept well, Aaron had to beg off at the last minute because he had a sick baby, and the player who hadn't read the rules for last time not only still hadn't read the rules but had also lost her character sheet. Given that, the game went surprisingly well.

I started the session off by telling the players that each of them would be responsible for a scene: the third Ripper murder had happened last night (the night of the ritual), and I wanted each of them to make a scene showing how their character found out about the murder and what their reaction was (both publicly and privately). I also told them that for next session, I wanted them each to frame a scene that was about how they got into the occult. I was looking for more character definition than we had had so far. In the first session, we had skimped a little on character development. I needed to make sure we had ample time for actual gameplay. I needed some idea about how the game ran in practice, since I was going to be running the game at a local convention. As a result of this speedy char gen, I didn't really know all that much about the characters. As a result, I had a really hard time generating bangs for the PCs this session (also one of the downsides of having the Abyss unknown to the GM at the start of the game).

This all tied in with a comment one of the players made about the focus of the game; it seemed to him that the game didn't focus very strongly on the characters. I replied that I didn't really think that was a lack of focus in the game as written, as much as it was because we had started off with a not very well developed set of characters. This was because we had gone into the game with the thought that it would be a quick playtest rather than a continuing campaign -- *and* we had a limited time for the first session. I do think he has a point though: it's easy for the players to get wrapped up in all the cool events they are creating as "backdrop" for the PCs, and lose focus on the PCs. Not that I'm sure this is really all that bad a thing as long as everyone is having fun with the backdrop (which we certainly were).

I expect this whole issue is an artifact of (1) our hasty character generation, and (2) how much fun we were having even when we weren't focused on the characters. I expect that as we get to know the PCs better and give them more ties, then this "problem" will fade away.

Aaron's abscence left us with three characters:
-- RobertBraeburn, the biologist who spent time in India
-- KatherineRussell, the daughter of an East India Company man
-- ElizabethMontcliff, who spent time in Africa and is the niece of JanePercy

Robert's player was chomping at the bit, so we started with him. His scene began with Robert visiting a colleague at the coroner's office when the Ripper victim was brought in. Dr. Buxbaum immediately dropped all else -- as did all the other staff, even those not involved. Dr. Braeburn's reaction was largely one of clinical curiosity. He made professional small talk with Dr. Buxbaum during the initial stages of the examination. The player then suggested that Robert noticed that the pattern of cuts on the victim was similar to one he vaguely remembered seeing in India. We weren't actually certain how to handle this -- whether or not an Action Resolution was required. So we just let him make the assertion and moved on. Looking over the rules after the game, I noted that this is addressed in the "Asserting Reality" section. This section of the rules might be more memorable if it were moved ahead of the sections on Action Resolution and Magical Resolution.

Robert then headed over to the library, to do some research, and see if he could get some hard information on the pattern of cuts -- who did it and why. He didn't get much hard information, but he did note that a certain Dr. Cliffords Rubens was referenced in a large number of the works. Steve then played The Hierophant to Mark this Dr. Rubens (Marking allows you to bring the person/object into a later scene at your discretion).

Katherine's turn. Her "Ripper scene" was at the police station, where she had gone to visit Inspector Stafford. She wanted to follow up on her contact last night, flirt with the inspector and see what she could shake out of him. We started off with an Action Resolution to determine how successful she was at befriending the inspector. I elected for a random difficulty draw, which turned up a Knight; I narrated this as the inspector being happily enough married and quite concerned about his standing in the department (ie, he would respond poorly to flirting in the office). One of the players elected to drop the difficulty a bit, stating that the inspector had just had a fight with his wife and was still angry with her. Katherine's player then played a card to drop the difficulty to 2, and took a Concession. With Katherine's parents in India, she is staying with her cousin Matthew Russell. It turns out that one of the other policemen in the office knows Matthew, and let him know of Katherine's flirtatious behavior (scandalous!).

Her success at befriending Inspector Stafford led to further success at the Action Resolution for getting information from him -- Katherine learned most of what she wanted to. Given that there were a number of items of information that she was looking for, I would normally handle this situation by different degrees of success. Since SITF doesn't really have different degrees of success in this way, I had to think for a minute on how to handle this. I ended up with a perfectly reasonable solution -- have Katherine state what information she was looking for, set the difficulty, then let her back off her initial goals as Concessions. As it turned out, Katherine got most of what she was looking for. Most importantly, she learned that Alice Wilkins was involved, and learned the name of the hospital where Alice was (Alice is an acquaintance of Katherine and Elizabeth).

Just in time, too, as the office suddenly erupted with the word that another Ripper victim had been found this morning. Katherine's reaction was curiosity -- but not in a way that stood out among a roomful of curious people.

Elizabeth's turn. She learned about the Ripper murder at breakfast in the garden with her Aunt Jane and her Uncle, HenryPercy. Young cousin Alan had finished his breakfast. A servant brought in the latest edition of the newspaper, which headlined the murder. As Elizabeth began to read a letter supposedly from the Ripper, Uncle Henry began to make disparaging remarks about the character of anyone who could believe that anyone of station could be involved in such a horrid business. After Henry left, Elizabeth and her aunt had a less dogmatic conversation about the murders.

After breakfast, Elizabeth went to visit Katherine -- they had agreed to pay a visit to Inspector Stafford together. Elizabeth found that Katherine had already spoken to Stafford; the two of them went to visit the recuperating Alice Wilkins. They found Alice both incoherent and wary of strangers, and learned little new from her.

Robert's turn again. He took the train to his father's estate out in the country. There he has a small laboratory. He found a pig and began some magical experimentation on it, attempting as best he could to mimic the ritual performed on the body of the victim of the Ripper. He player The Lovers (attraction, foolish designs) to activate this ritual. This called for a full Magical Resolution.

Many details of this resolution are a bit hazy now; I was dragging a bit at the time. Through the resolution it came out that Robert's laboratory was set up in an old abandoned chapel, that his activity there stirred up old powers (Temperance), that he felt he was being watched by them, and that the groundskeeper stumbled upon Robert and was scandalized. Robert also felt a strange sense of elation during the ritual. He learned a little of what he desired, but has much yet to learn. In the end, the powers that watched him were thwarted by the same force that saved Billy Malone (The Emperor).

Katherine's turn again. She retired for the afternoon and performed a ritual, attempting to divine how Alice Wilkins' connection to the mysterious ritual of the night before. From the second we turned over the kitty I was jazzed about this. The three face up kitty cards were The Tower, The Devil, Wheel of Fortune! As Host, I was very happy that no one outbid me for the kitty. It turned out that all of the face down kitty cards were face cards, too. This tension of "who gets the kitty cards" is en element of fun that could be expanded on during the course of the trick too, like in Host-initiated play. Look for something on this in my Amber takeoff of SifF.

The ritual was invoked with The Empress (fruitfulness, action, truth, unraveling of involved matters, etc). It began with Cups. In the first round, The Hermit came out -- Alice is vulnerable to corrupting influences and -had great fear of the consequences of the ritual. Further, she was fearful about her future relationship with the other conspirators -- not for her life, but for her soul! This had all come out by the time I played to the first round! My first play was the Knight of Cups: there was someone highly placed who suspected Alice knew more than she was saying, and was playing on her fears. They want her to cough up information (which they wanted for ends of their own). I won the first trick. Seeing as how I and other had generated plenty of trouble for Alice in the first trick, I elected to play the Wheel of Fortune (fortune, success, luck, felicity) to say that Alice herself will come out of this mess OK. I was very surprised when the trick went around, and no one grabbed either The Devil or The Tower (it wasn't until later that I remembered that only the Initiator could have played them). So for my next play, I grabbed the Tower: in response to the pressure of all the bad events around her, Alice would try a desperate ritual. This ritual would be intended to counter those pressuring her, but would in fact bring ruin to many (all?) of those around her. As luck would have it, The Devil was still out there for my next play. I interpreted it as meaning that one of Alice's occult compatriots was close to The Ripper.

That all sounds fun, but that's not a very good response.

So, I read it over a few times, and there's an important piece I don't get: what is the central conflict? Or, if there isn't one, what conflict is each character involved in? I get the sense these are just people - who have gotten involved in the occult - and now fear their experimentation is taking them close to the Ripper. Am I on the right track, or no?

The first thing to keep in mind here is that this was a playtest session. That effected both the actual play, and the style in which I wrote up the session.

This post is more in the travelogue style than it would have been were it not a playtest. One of the important things it is intended to communicate is how we played the game, based on our reading of the rules text. For example, the scene between Elizabeth, her Aunt and her Uncle would not have been included if this weren't a playtest session. But, as a playtest, I felt it was more important to include 'color' scenes like this to give a better overall picture of the gameplay.

That said, I've got to agree with you that there's no central conflict tying the PCs together, and not even much of a conflict for them on an individual basis. We collectively have largely failed at involving the player characters in the conflict (not just this session, but the first session too). The kicker is that we still had fun with the game. A lot of fun. In just the wierd-events-folding-in-on-themselves kind of way that Chris has aimed for, I think. And I think that’s important.

I think there are several reasons why we failed at engaging the PCs with conflict:
-- we were working with less than fully fleshed out characters. In large part, this is because not all of the players have done their homework and come prepared to the game. For the first session, this was OK -- we had a limited amount of time, and needed to get a playtest done. After my problems with prepping Bangs, I knew that we needed to remedy this. In fact, I nearly cancelled this session because we weren't really prepared to game -- the problem is, we've had a hard time making a compatible schedule for the game. We were all there, so I really wanted to play. I tried to flesh out the characters in play by having the "Ripper scenes" give us some insight into the characters -- but that didn't really do what I wanted it to. We never really explored the characters' internal reactions to the Ripper news, despite my stating that that was an important goal of the scene. The players didn't volunteer this information like they should have, and I didn't push them to do it like I should have.
-- the version of the game we are using doesn't really do all that much to build in motivations to the player characters. Chris has done much to address this in the version of the rules that is on the Wiki.
-- Horror games have never really clicked for me, so in many ways the book SifF setup is not really what I do well with. I wanted to give it a try, though, so I'm waiting for a session where we've got all our prep issues out of the way and are comfortable with the system. Then, if I'm still falling flat as GM, I'll know that it just doesn't work for me.

BUT -- even if we weren't really engaging the characters, we still had a lot of fun with the game, and in a way that kind of reminded me of Once Upon a Time. One can argue about whether or not this is myth-building Sim -- or if it is even roleplaying at all.

Hey Clinton,

Clinton R. Nixon wrote: So, I read it over a few times, and there's an important piece I don't get: what is the central conflict?…

Lee Short wrote: The kicker is that we still had fun with the game. A lot of fun. In just the wierd-events-folding-in-on-themselves kind of way that Chris has aimed for, I think…

clehrich wrote: …My contention is that what's shifting here isn't Situation but engagement, because Sim as a reflexive agendum does not permit an absolute distinction between Situation and Dream, whereas Nar for example requires a distinction between Situation and Premise or Story.

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?p=152453#152453

Lee Short wrote: One can argue about whether or not this is myth-building Sim -- or if it is even roleplaying at all.

Huh. I continue to be surprised and fascinated by your posts, Lee. Not exactly what I had in mind at all, and yet, somehow, exactly what I had in mind. Neat! And fun is being had, too, which is the important part.

Jay, I don't entirely agree with you. I mean, I get what you're saying, but I do think that SITF runs just fine with central conflict Premise-style stuff. In fact, I think it thrives on this. What I'm seeing in Lee's posts is that the game is working pretty well, and that there is an increasing awareness of a gap: they need personal character conflicts to drive the train.

I think that's partly the way the game is designed, and partly this group for all the reasons Lee has stated.

A secret (well, not very much of one): I am, I think, not a very good GM. I get all wrapped up in details and keep sliding toward railroading. I can't figure out a coherent story when I do railroad. And all my NPCs end up being either straight color or insanely too smart and knowledgeable about what's really going on. (John Kim, you just keep your trap shut, but you know what I mean.)

So I wrote the game such that it would work for me as a GM, you see. I basically took everything I suck at and handed it over to the players, then bolted that into the rules from soup to nuts.

Sounds to me like this group is having trouble, because Lee is sort of like me in some respects. I don't mean he's a bad GM, but he sounds a little insecure about GMing and, if you'll pardon my putting it this way, he worries too much. He just doesn't sound like enough of a prima donna to take the reins of this mother and make it go his way. Ken Hite would fight this game and make it into his own thing, and it'd work dandy, but that's not how the game is set up. So I would encourage Lee to take it easy: just slack off a bit and make everyone else do the work.

Meanwhile, his players aren't quite sure how to pick up the reins handed to them, in part because they're not used to the game, and in part because they're not all well prepared (one of them still hasn't read the rules, which bugs me --- and Lee, it sounds like). The way to get around that is to have solid character conflict weirdness to drive for them when they get stuck, and they don't have that either.

What stuns me is that it's working, and actually working pretty well.

My guess is that as this goes on, you're going to generate character conflicts. I suggest that they go looking. Split the party hard, and keep it split, and have people hare off and join secret societies and get mentors and stuff like that. Then rejoin the party. I think that will get the whole Kicker thing on-line from in-game.

I'll get back to some more detailed commentary soon; I need to read it all over very carefully.

Oh--- and thanks for playing! Glad you're liking it!

clehrich wrote: Jay, I don't entirely agree with you. I mean, I get what you're saying, but I do think that SITF runs just fine with central conflict Premise-style stuff. In fact, I think it thrives on this. What I'm seeing in Lee's posts is that the game is working pretty well, and that there is an increasing awareness of a gap: they need personal character conflicts to drive the train.

I think Jay's last point nailed it. From the first time I read the rules, I kind of thought it might work out that way -- I had the inspiration for Lego of the Gods long before we actually played our first session.

Actually, Chris, the things you mention aren't usually much of a problem for me -- in fact, I think they are some of my strengths as a GM. My biggest weakness, IMO, is in portraying multiple NPCs -- I do just fine with one, but I just can't switch between character mindsets quickly. So SitF also takes what I suck at and gives it to the players. It's just a diffferent thing than for you.