I've posted a session log from our first Universalis actual play session at http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=17266.0 .  Besides posting the pointer here, I wanted to add some comments specific to Universalis.

1.  We all had a great time.  We like this game!  We only played through one scene, but we all were so pleased with the story that we'd created out of thin air that we wanted to keep the story going.  We've decided to play more sessions later and continue the story from where we left off.

2.  Ralph, you'll be glad to hear you've generated some sales.  All three of the players my wife and I invited left saying that they were going to get copies of the game.  They also said they'd probably play it with some of their other friends (and this was three people each with a different set of friends... the power of networking is on your side!).

3.  I actually haven't bought a copy of the game myself, although I will shortly.  Between the downloadable materials from the website and the discussions on The Forge, I was able to piece together what I think is a reasonable approximation of how to play using the basic rules.  Still, I'm looking forward to picking up the actual game itself and seeing what I've missed.  So call that four sales from one session. :)

4.  We used poker chips for coins, four colors of index cards for components (characters, objects, locations, and other), d6s for dice, a dealer's button from a poker set to indicate the scene framer, and a laptop to record facts other than components and traits.  This all worked out very well.  The poker chips were nice heavy ones and they felt good when tossing them into the bank, plus they stacked nicely in front of each player.  The index cards made keeping track of control very easy (just put the card in front of the controlling player).  Also, having all the important things laid out on the table on cards let everyone keep in mind what stuff we were dealing with in the story and what traits were available.

5.  We used a couple of the "other" index cards for "Rank treachery" and "Mystical martial arts".  Technically those are story elements rather than components, but as Ralph has stressed before: a fact is a fact is a fact; the categorization into "elements" versus "components" is more of a conceptual aid than a hard-and-fast rule.  Having those facts as cards on the table led one of the players to draw upon "rank treachery" as a trait in the complication.  We allowed it, but pointed out she'd have to use it in the resolution... which led to the twist of the swordsmith working for the emperor.  I call that a feature, not a bug.

6.  Our transcriptionist discovered that it's not easy to transcribe when it's your turn *and* you're coming up with stuff with reckless abandon.  So we passed the laptop between two different people; that worked out well.  The transcription wasn't exact; it was a best effort at keeping up with the things people had paid coins for.  The log that I posted was extracted after-the-fact from the running transcription.

Events in particular were essentially summarized or paraphrased by the transcriptionists.  The players would say "such-and-such happens, and so-and-so does this, then they both do that..." and toss out coins every time they thought something they said was significant.  There was frequently discussion, clarification, and/or embellishment by the other players (i.e. challenges, but the formal mechanism quickly disolved into the background).  The transcriptionist would try to capture the important points as things played out.  I strongly suspect that the number of coins spent on events doesn't exactly correspond to the number of events recorded in the log.  But it was close enough, so nobody was concerned about it.

7.  We only played one scene.  That scene, however, changed locations several times.  Looking at it after-the-fact, each location change probably does indicate the end of one scene and the start of another, but from a game-mechanic point of view, the scene never ended because the scene framer didn't end it.  She later mentioned to me that she found it hard to ever end the scene, because the players kept driving things forward even as things moved from location to location.  It never felt like the story was at a scene break because something was always going on.  Only after the big conflict did it feel like a natural scene break.

I think we had lots of micro-scenes (not Mini Scenes, that's something different).  Each one was pretty sparse and short... only by stringing them together did it feel like something had been accomplished worthy of a break.  Still, I was pretty happy with the pacing overall.  Nothing ever felt forced, nothing dragged, and we weren't wandering aimlessly (not knowing where you are going isn't the same thing as wandering!).  I think in the next session I'll have us deliberately focus on putting more meat in the micro-scenes, turning them into actual scene breaks so that we get more coin refreshes and give more people a chance to frame scenes.

8.  We only had one complication.  This was partly deliberate on my part.  I held off on introducting the complication mechanics until the group was comfortable with the basic concepts of turns, components, narration, interrupting, etc.  After a while, I told everyone to start looking for ways to introduce conflict into the story.  Not long after that, hey, guess what, we had our first complication!  I walked everyone through the rules and it turned out well, although of course we were still feeling our way through everything.

Since I was explaining as we went along, two of the players didn't really get the resolution narration mechanic until it was too late.  They won the complication and got a bunch of dice; they narrated some things, but didn't spend many dice and didn't actually do much.  Then the losers started narrating and managed some impressive turns of events.  That's when the winners realized, "Oh, wait, I can't stop them now... I can't interrupt!"  They had been thinking that the resolution narration would continue in rounds like normal, instead of winners-do-all-their-stuff then losers-do-all-their-stuff.  Still, the story went forward in a satisfactory way, so no real harm.

Next time we play I'm going to encourage more complications, faster resolution, and more coins spent during the results.  I think everyone will be ready for it.

9.  I made up a one-page rules summary that can be folded up into a mini-booklet; it covers just the most basic rules.  I've got it saved as a Word document.  I don't have anyplace to post it, but I can email to anyone who's interested.  I handed copies out to the players and they found it very helpful; I would give them out to any first-time players.  The booklet has a pointer to the Universalis website, which my players will find very handy when they go to order their books this week. :)

In that booklet, I changed a few of the terms.  I found "Conflicts" a more natural term for "Complications"; it's shorter, too, which is important in a mini-booklet.  I shortened "Story Elements" to just "Elements", and I lumped Rules Gimmicks and Social Contract Issues into the single term "Rules".  I didn't mention the word "Tenets" at all.

10.  There were a lot of things I left out of both the booklet and our game: edge dice, master and sub components, fines, mini scenes, possession traits, relationship traits, etc... I did cover group traits, because we had several groups come up (it took me all of fifteen seconds to explain the concept).  When I discussed importance, the players realized all on their own that adding a "wounded" trait makes the character harder to remove from play, and adding "dead" makes them an even more important dead character!

11.  I included some rules that have been recommended on the forums, like free dialog and d6s.  During play, I introduced another new rule: Friendly Interjection.  I explained the rule like this: during someone else's turn, you can introduce facts (components, traits, events, etc) without interrupting *if* you pay the cost for those facts *and* the current player has no objection.  The interjection should be brief.  After introducing your fact(s), the other player continues with their turn.

This rule lets you do something like this:  Player A: "The wizard is old and feeble..." (plunk, plunk, plunk); Player B: "... and insane!" (plunk).  Basically it's like a challenge, except you're adding something of your own without denying what the current player is doing, and you have to pay for it, not them.  It's a way to increase creativity and collaboration without interrupting the narrative flow.

I actually did a friendly interjection *before* I proposed the rule.  When I did it, the other players looked a little confused, i.e. "okay, so that means you're interrupting, right?"  I quickly then proposed the rule, everybody said "Oh, okay, that sounds good," and we went on.  It proved rather popular and got used a few more times in the session, always to good effect.

==========

Okay, I've gone on long enough.  Let me close by thanking Ralph and Mike for developing such a fun game and such an elegant system.  We're all looking forward to playing again!

Hello emaise. I think these are your first posts. Wellcome to the Forge!
It would be nice to know your real name.

About your comments:

I was also thinking on using my laptop in the next session. In the last one (that I had no time to trancribe) there was too much stuff and it was difficult to find some details on the paper sheets around. Of course we are moving the transcriptor job form player to player. It is easy with paper, but with the laptop I think it is better to get only two persons on it.

I also thought on using the index cards to show who controls what. But we were not using it yet. I was thinking that this means that the person who add a trait to a component, typically under his control, also has the card and needs to write it. Of course, if you only write traits it is not such a problem, or even the player by your side can do it for you. Nice, surely we will do it.

In our case, the transcriptor, when writting facts, is also using short expressions to remind us the core of it. Many many times the writer asks about if what he is wriiting captures the essence of what the other has said. It stops the narration a little, but we are feeling comfortable with it.
I agree with you. Universalis transcriptions lose the nice color that make the sessions so enjoyable, but they are really helpful to get the notion of how other people use the system.

I've noticed that being 5 persons you had much more total coins to invest than us (we were only 3). In my last session we had 4 scenes, with pretty much the same extention, scope and coins spent as yours. Every time you where "moving" the scene we were surely ending and bidding for another one which more or less continued the previous one. I find this mechanism quite natural once you have done it a couple of times and for us it was needed to refill coins.  I was also thinking that if we are only three persons we can adjust our innitial level of coins, or the amount we refill between scenes to increase our potential.

In our last session we instinctively structured it like you. On our first 3 scenes (that is more or less the same as all of play before the conflict) there was no complication. We were adding components and facts to flesh the situation.

As prop for coins I was thinking on buying poker chips. I agree, they have a good size and weight, and they pile-up easily. I was on my way to buy them when I stopped in a bricolage shop. I found big metal washers with exactly the size of a 50 cents of Euro coin. They were cheap, and they work pretty well. We like the metal sound.

We are using something similar to your "friendly interjection" but only during dialog. We strongly impose the interruption  rule because it forces you to have something more than a little detail in mind to invest the interruption coin.  But in dialogs both players are constanly adding new things, so we allow it.
However, many times, especially when a player doubts or stops for a little, the other players introduce suggestions informally. Most of the times the player with the turn is taking and using them. It is our way to allow that collaborative flow. It came naturally. We had not thought about it previously.

Cheers,
Arturo

Hi emaise (what's your real name?),

I think you'll find the book a good buy. I can tell from your descriptions that you're doing some things that aren't quite by the rules. Not that you have to stick to them, you could gimmick them simply to be what you have. Just that you might be interested in how they work as written, as I think you'll find that the original rules have some advantages.

For example, your "friendly interjection" rule has some ramifications that I'm not sure that you're aware of.

Anyhow, glad you liked it.

Mike

Great write-up.  I'll touch on a few items.  To save space I'll just refer to your numbers.  Hope that doesn't cause folks too much trouble.

2. Fantastic.  Some folks have pointed out that I have enough material on the site and these forums to pretty much recreate the game without buying it, and once you know the rules it isn't a game that requires much referring back to.  But this is exactly why I did that.  I figure anyone interested enough to piece together the rules like this is a dedicated enough gamer to buy the game if they enjoy it

While I'd love to get your money ASAP, there will be a revised version coming out soon that benefits from alot of the Universalis experience of the fan  base to make it (I hope) a much clearer rules set.  The rules aren't changing, but they should be easier to follow.  The price will be going up (to at least $18 depending on what the expanded page count works out to) so I'll leave it to you to decide which version you'd rather have.  I'd give an eta, but due to some unfortuneate circumstances its taking slightly longer than I had planned to get finished.  By year end almost certainly. 

4.  I haven't heard of anyone using a set-up that elaborate.  It sounds like it worked pretty well

5.  The rules are actually fairly strict about only using bona fide Traits for dice in a Complication.  But as a Rules Gimmick I've seen folks do this before.  Technically, to draw upon "Rank Treachery" as a Trait she'd actually have to justify the treachery when the dice were taken so there would be ample oportunity for Challenge rather than waiting until resolution to reveal it.  But I don't see any harm doing it the way you did as long as everyone was cool with it. .

6.  The revised rules will actually contain some additional text on the role of the recorder / transcriptionist.  The original text actually leaves pretty much the entirety of how to do that part undefined.  A violation of my own oft espoused rule-writing philosophy which I'm currently remedying.  Transcriptions are never exact.  I think in terms of bulley points when I do it.  I'v e noticed the loss of color in the record myself, which is why most of the examples on the web site use a narrative format rather than a true transcriptions.  True transcriptions make the game sound rather boring...not the best sales tool. 

7.  Its ok to change locations during a scene.  That's actually one that rarely has happened in my games and I don't recall having any real discussions about it here so its not surprising that your recreation of the rules didn't get this part right.  In a nut shell, changing locations in the midst of a scene should only be done when all of the principal characters in the scene will be traveling to that new location...like a group of friends having a party and starting at an apartment and moving later on to a club...or a classic chase scene where the characters start in one place and race around to another.  For more traditional cut back and forth from one location with certain people to another location with different people, that should always be done by ending the scene and starting a new one...or for a brief cutaway by a mini-scene. 

I'd be interested in hearing how your way worked during play.  It might make for a good gimmick to put up on the site.

Also remember the Interruption rules.  If players seem to be creating little mini self contained scenes that don't seem to have much room to be developed into something else (which is a great pacing tool when used sporadically but can get old if it becomes the main way of playing) the best thing is to either interrupt and force the scene in a (potentially radical) different direction -- this tends to create meatier scenes as people try to steer it back to their desired direction; or create a Complication.  Often the competing around for Traits to draw upon or coming up with new Traits to draw upon winds up forcing players to think in greater detail about what's REALLY going on, and what started out as a brief throwaway sentence turns into a full bore "chapter".

8.  Your experience is pretty typical.  Also remember the key rule for triggering a Complication is whenever A player narrates a Component they Control doing something that would effect a Component some other player Controls.  This Control aspect is actually a fairly important rule to keep the Complications from getting...er...complicated.  If you control both Components...no Complication...just narrate what happens...UNLESS someone spends a Coin to Take Over one of the Components in the middle of your narration (specifically legal in the rules) and thus forces the Complication.

Also note that there is another rarely used method of starting Complications which is simply to buy dice representing the obstacle the other player is narrating a character overcoming.  For instance, Player A says "Bob picks the lock" and Player B jumps in and says "I buy 3 Dice for the Lock".  This is conceptually identical to Player B Interrupting, Creating the "lock" as a Component, assinging appropriate Traits to it and thus starting a Complication because Player A is controlling a character trying to effect a component controlled by B.  Its just a short cut.

10.  In the revised rules many of the items you list are being moved to a chapter on "advanced rules" so as not to clutter up the main text.  The edge dice are the only rules that are really getting changed.  The whole "special die" thing is gone.  Just add a die to the side with the higher sum and reroll. As you continue to play you'll find Master Components REALLY useful.  That should be a natural step for your group now that you've mastered the basics.  Think of them as creating a template or "character class" so you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you want to introduce a new ninja character.  You can create a package of "ninja skills" and then everyone with the "ninja" Trait has access to them. 

I shouldn't be surprised at how quickly people grasp Importance.  Its a natural way of looking at things, even though it took Mike beating me over the head for months before I got it (and then having the sense to leave me alone to figure it out for myself so that when I said "Eureka" he could say "About frickin' time".  The "Dead" Trait I've left to individual groups to decide for themselves.  When I play I tend not to allow it (or rather I challenge people who try to use it).  Reason:  The definition of eliminating a component by spending Coins equal to their Importance is to remove that Component from play such that it can no longer be Introduced into scenes and its Traits drawn on.  As long as that hasn't been done the character can continue to be introduced into scenes and have their Traits used in Complications.  There are only a few genres in which introducing dead people into scenes and using their Traits would continue to be appropriate.  One of course is the ubiquitous zombie stories.  The other tends to be more "artsy" (for lack of a better word) where players use the memory of those characters to power Complications as a justification for continuing to use their Traits even though they're technically dead.  Technically it should take a Rules Gimmick to introduce a character as a "memory" rather than an actual corpse in this way, but I don't know any one has done that, that formally.  Hmmm, that could make a good sidebar in the revised rules come to think of it.

11.  I think that ones on the website.  As Mike notes it definitely has some ramifications to actual game play.  While there are many benefits (like ease of play and not breaking the flow) it has the disadvantage of reducing the opportunities for Complications.  If I can make changes to your character without taking Control of him myself, that can reduce the number of characters Controlled by different people and thus cut down on Complications. 

On the dead character thing, you could consider the 'dead' trait to actually read 'died at time X'.

Which means the character is still there to be used in scene's in the past - quite different from being bought off, which means he's no longer available.

You may, of course, need to add a Tenet / Gimmick that doesn't resurrect dead folk willy-nilly (i.e. non-theme appropriate).

Actually that's how buying off Importance actually works.

If a building has importance 6 and someone narrates how there's a huge fire and spends 6 Coins to completely destroy the building and buy off the Importance someone could still use that building as a location if they did a flash back scene to the time before it was burned down.

...I'm pretty sure that's in the rules as written.

Really? (It's your game, I'll take your word for it).

The way we play it, if something's bought off, and you like a flashback scene, you have to buy it all over again (those parts you need, of course).

Reducing something to 0 importance, in our game, is equivalent to saying 'now the story won't be about this any more (at least, not without some investment)'.

My feeling is that a transcriptionist is unnecessary and may even be a huge distraction to whomever is doing it.  I noticed in my group when we had a transcriptionist, that player played less then when she wasn't transcribing.  What my group does is just play and afterwards one of the players (it happens to be me) writes down scene by scene notes of what happened.  Then I distribute them to all the players for modifications and/or corrections and when that's done the notes are as "official" (which really means nothing, other than having a log for reminders -- what we players want to have happened is much more important than what actually <I>did happen).  ;)

But my point is that the person writing stuff down, IME, seems to be at a big disadvantage for play whether or not it is their turn.

Tobias wrote:
Reducing something to 0 importance, in our game, is equivalent to saying 'now the story won't be about this any more (at least, not without some investment)'.

The Rules wrote:
The game mechanic effect of Eliminating a Component is to render the Component unavailable to be Introduced into scenes chronologically set in the future.The Component could still be Introduced into scenes set in the past (before it was Eliminated).

Arturo wrote:

Hello emaise. I think these are your first posts. Wellcome to the Forge!
It would be nice to know your real name.

I was also thinking on using my laptop in the next session. In the last one (that I had no time to trancribe) there was too much stuff and it was difficult to find some details on the paper sheets around. Of course we are moving the transcriptor job form player to player. It is easy with paper, but with the laptop I think it is better to get only two persons on it.

I also thought on using the index cards to show who controls what. But we were not using it yet. I was thinking that this means that the person who add a trait to a component, typically under his control, also has the card and needs to write it. Of course, if you only write traits it is not such a problem, or even the player by your side can do it for you. Nice, surely we will do it.

In our case, the transcriptor, when writting facts, is also using short expressions to remind us the core of it. Many many times the writer asks about if what he is wriiting captures the essence of what the other has said. It stops the narration a little, but we are feeling comfortable with it.

I've noticed that being 5 persons you had much more total coins to invest than us (we were only 3). In my last session we had 4 scenes, with pretty much the same extention, scope and coins spent as yours. Every time you where "moving" the scene we were surely ending and bidding for another one which more or less continued the previous one. I find this mechanism quite natural once you have done it a couple of times and for us it was needed to refill coins.  I was also thinking that if we are only three persons we can adjust our innitial level of coins, or the amount we refill between scenes to increase our potential.

As prop for coins I was thinking on buying poker chips. I agree, they have a good size and weight, and they pile-up easily. I was on my way to buy them when I stopped in a bricolage shop. I found big metal washers with exactly the size of a 50 cents of Euro coin. They were cheap, and they work pretty well. We like the metal sound.

We are using something similar to your "friendly interjection" but only during dialog. We strongly impose the interruption  rule because it forces you to have something more than a little detail in mind to invest the interruption coin.  But in dialogs both players are constanly adding new things, so we allow it.  However, many times, especially when a player doubts or stops for a little, the other players introduce suggestions informally. Most of the times the player with the turn is taking and using them. It is our way to allow that collaborative flow. It came naturally. We had not thought about it previously.

Valamir wrote:

While I'd love to get your money ASAP, there will be a revised version coming out soon that benefits from alot of the Universalis experience of the fan  base to make it (I hope) a much clearer rules set.  The rules aren't changing, but they should be easier to follow.  The price will be going up (to at least $18 depending on what the expanded page count works out to) so I'll leave it to you to decide which version you'd rather have.  I'd give an eta, but due to some unfortuneate circumstances its taking slightly longer than I had planned to get finished.  By year end almost certainly. 

Mike wrote:

I think you'll find the book a good buy. I can tell from your descriptions that you're doing some things that aren't quite by the rules. Not that you have to stick to them, you could gimmick them simply to be what you have. Just that you might be interested in how they work as written, as I think you'll find that the original rules have some advantages.

For example, your "friendly interjection" rule has some ramifications that I'm not sure that you're aware of.

CPXB wrote:
My feeling is that a transcriptionist is unnecessary and may even be a huge distraction to whomever is doing it.  I noticed in my group when we had a transcriptionist, that player played less then when she wasn't transcribing. [...] But my point is that the person writing stuff down, IME, seems to be at a big disadvantage for play whether or not it is their turn.