Hello,

We used the introductory phrases as per the rules, but when we talked about lowered lighting or candles, the group decided our ritual-opening would be a flurry of sardonic mockery of the game author's artiness, so we did so and proceeded successfully from there. "Some rituals are more equal than others," I suppose.

As for our story content: demons, demons, demons. Evidently Sorcerer wasn't enough for these guys. We decided on Winter via a die roll, which put the two protagonists with hardcore "outer waste, loner, wanderer, frozen outback" themes into a tizzy, being stuck mainly in at-the-Remnant assassination-heavy, hidden-demon heavy intrigue. We ended up with one protag with a demon in his lover's head, one protag with a spikey demon embedded in his body, one protag claimed by a demon/song as its romantic property, one protag chasing a demon who kidnapped or murdered his acquaintance, and one protag enthralled by a poem which may or may not be a demon. It's all sort of messy at the moment, actually. With five protagonists, play gets pretty extended - not a criticism, but we recognize we're in for a multi-week haul.

My protagonist took the "Bound Companion Arrakis" Aspect - I blame the hot-chick sidekick card from Dungeoneer.

The most interesting aspect of play for me is the shared Fate, which in our case, is a person, Ka Kuen. My character was the only one to bring Ka Kuen into a scene, and we all realized that he wasn't very Fate-y yet, unless we push toward that end with lots more Crosses and Weavings next time. None of us feel inclined simply to erase him from most of the sheets based on non-usage.

I'm numbering the next points so that we won't get them mixed up in the discussion.

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1. Our biggest conceptual hump concerned who has guidance over non-protagonist characters in a scene who are (a) designated in a particular part of the protagonist's Cosmos, and (b) not in the Cosmos but important as Theme (Fate, Blessing, whatever).

[A small side point: I recommend that Aspect-based adversity be included in the "Advice for starting scenes" section, p. 58, in addition to looking at the Cosmos and taking suggestions from others. Every Aspect has negative stuff in it, and all of it is solid gold for conflicts. Tod got great mileage out of this when I suggested it to him, as my Mistaken.]

The issue concerns trading around usage of a given character within the same scene. For example, if Na'ir is in the Full Moon portion of a protagonist's Cosmos, but the Full Moon does something with him that's very antagonistic or adverse to the protagonist, the Mistaken ought to take him over, right? Or conversely, if the Mistaken wants to, he or she can reach right over "into" the Full Moon portion and play Na'ir, even introduce him into the scene, as a source of adversity, right?

In other words, and partly due to some phrasing of mine in the beginning of play, I think a couple of people got the idea that if the character wasn't in his or her designated section of the Cosmos, then they couldn't "grab" that character or play him or her in that scene. I tried to explain it later by saying that all three "GMs" were in the heads of each and every character in the scene, potentially. Does that work?

It becomes a little more difficult for the same players when the character wasn't even in the Cosmos at all, but rather listed as an Aspect - in the case of my protagonist, the Fate (a character named Ka Kuen, specifically left totally undefined at the outset of play), and the aforementioned Bound Companion. Again, the issue concerned who "got" that character during play, and I want to have it confirmed that the answer is, "all three of you, it depends on what he or she does," or if that's wrong, corrected.

All of this is a bit more sophisticated than the basic points and guidelines laid out in the text (pp. 62-63), and specific to the particular issues that we, as individuals, experienced. Personality plays a big part of it as well. Julie was my New Moon, which means she desperately wanted to introduce tons of adversity through characters close to mine (because Julie just does that as a GM, period), so she and Tod (my Mistaken) will have to develop their skill at her set-up + his smash, as in volleyball.

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2. The players who hadn't read the book ran into an interesting stalling point during the interaction of phrases. Specifically, during You Ask Far Too Much, when faced with the two phrases (original and altered), they froze. This kind of puzzled me, as I see it as a pretty clear choice, but I now realize that it's a very radical shift from player-role to GM-role, and then, given that you have to come up with the next phrase, back to player-role.

Yes, I realize that we all do better simply to put the GM-role and player-role archetypes out of our heads in the first place, for this game, but like it or not, they persist in our heads and in this case, created a very distinctive and repeated hiccup.

A little dialogue revealed that the players got stressed over a double-decision - (a) which phrase and (b) whether the following statement would be It Shall Not Come to Pass or not. So they wrestled over a four-part decision rather than a two-part one:

- "The demon punctures me and enters my body" + [anything except It Shall Not Come to Pass], which accepts the event (we'll ignore the possibility of repeating You Ask Far Too Much, which wasn't an issue)]

- "The demon punctures me and enters my body" + It Shall Not Come to Pass, which takes the completion of the event to a dice roll

- "The demon punctures my friend and enters his body" + [anything except It Shall Not Come to Pass], which accepts the event

- "The demon punctures my friend and enters his body" + It Shall Not Come to Pass, which takes the completion of the event to a dice roll

I definitely see how this caused the freeze-up, as these players were still processing the dynamics of the basic phrases in the first place.

Oh, speaking of It Shall Not Come to Pass, we are dice-junkies and reward/reinforcement system junkies, so this phrase became a big deal and generally a favored goal during resolution: how to set it up, how to integrate it with other phrases, and more. Since the larger-scale reward system is in part powered by failed rolls, I found myself actually angling toward stating It Shall Not Come to Pass in order to fail it, thus getting Experience checks.

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Overall, I saw a lot of points from previous actual-play threads confirmed, particularly the principle of not wimping out as the Mistaken, and to be open to one another's points during free play, both of which worked out pretty well in our group. A couple of people still have to be prompted to say "He has sex with you" rather than "He tries to get close to you" or something equally vague or transitional.

One point I made early on, which I think helped a lot, is that in Polaris, player-level disagreement and in-game fictional conflict of interest are handled in exactly the same ways. Since a great deal of this group's play-skill is based on socially/creatively agreeing on hard-core fictional conflicts of interest, that takes a little getting used to - we can start by asserting things at a highly individualized level and trust to the editing-rules to whittle things into shape through the resolution system itself. So far, it's fun!

Best,
Ron

Regarding point #1, this is something that our group stumbled over as well, and clarification would be welcome.

On the other hand, I found that "waving off" Moon input with "But It Was No Matter" was an important part of playing the Heart, which, of course, dragged the Mistaken into the act pretty quickly.  This allowed the Heart to push hard for his vision of the scene, which was a good thing.

Hey Ron,

The phrase that really  made us light up was "And Furthermore,..." Once we realized that it put a mechanical limitation on how much people could respond to it.  The first half of our game was all "But only if's" the second half "And furthermores".

It becomes a little more difficult for the same players when the character wasn't even in the Cosmos at all, but rather listed as an Aspect - in the case of my protagonist, the Fate (a character named Ka Kuen, specifically left totally undefined at the outset of play), and the aforementioned Bound Companion.

It's all sort of messy at the moment, actually.

Surprisingly, we used relatively few "But only if ..." statements.  We gravitated towards the "And furthermore ...", "You ask far too much," and "It shall not come to pass" statements.  I don't think we used, "It was not meant to be" at all.

We need to be more consistent with responses to Moon statements, 'cause that's where I think we ran into problems.  The two briefly described examples that Ron mentions:  Na'ir played antagonistically by the Full Moon and Ke Kuan played antagonistically by the New Moon, both just so happened to have been played by me.  In the first, we stumbled over who should narrate what.  In the Ke Kuan scene we at least used the "We shall see what comes of it" statement which helped to better structure the conflict.

Julie

Oh, forgot thist:

1d) Regardless of the above, the Mistaken can control the Cosmos by proxy via conflict statements -- "but only if Ke Kuan moves into your Mistaken section" is a fine statement.  If there is no conflict extant, it's pretty easy to grab someone with the "and furthermore" phrase.

yrs--
--Ben

On a related note, what happens when a Moon initiates a Conflict? Actually, can they? Does the Moon run the conflict, or does the Mistaken take over the character for the duration of the conflict? We played that the Mistaken took over the character for the duration of the conflict. But that felt a little jarring to me.

timfire wrote:
On a related note, what happens when a Moon initiates a Conflict? Actually, can they? Does the Moon run the conflict, or does the Mistaken take over the character for the duration of the conflict? We played that the Mistaken took over the character for the duration of the conflict. But that felt a little jarring to me.

Hey, Tim.

Daniel is wrong.

Moons cannot use any key phrase at all.  This means that they can't start conflict.

Is it clear that this doesn't restrict the actions of Moon characters in the fiction at all?  As in, a Moon can say "I run her through the heart and kill her" and that's fine, because it isn't a conflict unless the Heart or the Mistaken objects.

yrs--
--Ben

Okay, now for some actual response, not just rules clarifications.

Yay!  I've been waiting for this play to happen for a while.  It sounds like you're off to a very good start for a Polaris game -- if the protagonists' status quo is seriously threatened / basically eliminated by the end of the first session, something is seriously going wrong with the game.

Ron wrote:
We used the introductory phrases as per the rules, but when we talked about lowered lighting or candles, the group decided our ritual-opening would be a flurry of sardonic mockery of the game author's artiness, so we did so and proceeded successfully from there. "Some rituals are more equal than others," I suppose.

Ron wrote:
Overall, I saw a lot of points from previous actual-play threads confirmed, particularly the principle of not wimping out as the Mistaken, and to be open to one another's points during free play, both of which worked out pretty well in our group. A couple of people still have to be prompted to say "He has sex with you" rather than "He tries to get close to you" or something equally vague or transitional.

Ron wrote:
One point I made early on, which I think helped a lot, is that in Polaris, player-level disagreement and in-game fictional conflict of interest are handled in exactly the same ways. Since a great deal of this group's play-skill is based on socially/creatively agreeing on hard-core fictional conflicts of interest, that takes a little getting used to - we can start by asserting things at a highly individualized level and trust to the editing-rules to whittle things into shape through the resolution system itself. So far, it's fun!

Julie wrote:
Surprisingly, we used relatively few "But only if ..." statements.  We gravitated towards the "And furthermore ...", "You ask far too much," and "It shall not come to pass" statements.  I don't think we used, "It was not meant to be" at all.

Ben wrote:
Hey, Tim.

Daniel is wrong.

Moons cannot use any key phrase at all.  This means that they can't start conflict.

Is it clear that this doesn't restrict the actions of Moon characters in the fiction at all?  As in, a Moon can say "I run her through the heart and kill her" and that's fine, because it isn't a conflict unless the Heart or the Mistaken objects.

yrs--
--Ben

Hello,

We used the Moon resolution-phrases correctly, checking by the book as we went.

With five protagonists, we ended up with five scenes (turns) in our first session, one time 'round the table. I think three of them ended up with Zeal 3; the other two ended up fully refreshed. A couple of of them had at least two Experience rolls each, and all of them had at least one.

Two of the Experience rolls were behavioral, including my knight's (callousness) and Maura's (acknowledging a demon as her lover). Maybe one more was too (Julie's?). All the others, if I remember correctly, were based on failed rolls. Speaking of resolution rolls, we did see one fail on five-or-less that succeeded with a 6.

This was a much better-written and spritelier reply before I lost it through a connection glitch. Now it is cold and terse.

Best,
Ron