We played thursday and sunday last week. And it didn't rock. Which has been bothering me a bit, so I've spent some time wondering why. Here is my take on what happened, and I am wondering if this makes sense to you guys.

The crew:
We are a group of old time friends. Friends of the sort that can say; "hey this sucked" without the entire feedback process devolving into a vicious blame game.

Prehistory:
In the aftermath of the collapse of our Burning Wheel game last summer we have been unable to get any long term games going. We love these games. We had a four episode run of TSOY in space, and some one off testing of my games-in-progress. But no real many sessions campaign

Afraid in the past:
I asked Vincent if he could post the notes he had in time for my game previous Saturday, he did and I bungled it. Allergy induced brain coma mainly.

But it had a major effect on these last two days of gaming, Character generation. My players and I do not want to spend our game-nights creating characters, just to play them for the rest of that night then to toss them in the bin. However this is unfortunately the state of affairs right now.So when my players last Saturday made characters for Afraid I could not ask them to make new ones for these two coming games. Fair enough, but when I failed at creating a situation fitting to the characters, or grabby enough for the players to adapt their characters to the situation the mechanics of Dogs fucked me over.

The players and their characters:
Christian playing Carmine Moltisanti, corrupt cop with the in trouble circumstance. (last time, thursday and sunday)
Andreas playing Mickey, human trafficking gypsy with the in trouble circumstance (thursday and sunday)
Espen playing Yuri Orlov, international weapons smuggler with the unprepared circumstance. (last time and sunday) Espen has played Dogs before
Glenn playing XX XXX, a fixer with the unprepared circumstance. (thursday)

I was absent during chargen when the corrupt cop and the arms dealer were made (believe it or not, I had to go home to get dice cause no one brought any). And these two characters set the terms for the two others. Which lead to a weak and tenuous connection between the situation and the pcs that felt forced.

Afraid actual play:
So we got to down to the playing. And thanks to bungled scene framing, a skill I yet have to master, and the players telling a story way off my r-map, we ended up somewhere totally different and it was highly unsatisfying for all parties.

Does this say that Afraid, or its mother-game DitV doesn't work? Quite the contrary. The game did what it should, preventing me from telling a set story and allowing the other players to tell theirs. The problem was that the heavy scene-framing implied in the play-test documents of Afraid combined with my bungling, meant that I kept framing the player characters in a different story than the one they were telling.

Now to compound this, one of my players got hung up on getting even with a bit of colour, some Mexican gangbangers and was busy telling this story of a bad cop getting fucked over by a small town rife with corruption. Me, I was trying to get them to dive into this juicy r-map
of mine. This was why I kept framing scenes that would drag them into the r-map. Giving them npcs with purpose and all that jazz, Christian was telling the story of his character following up the first scene (those gangbangers) with a vengeance.

Now don't read this as me saying that Christian was being an ass. He wasn't. Nor did I try to apply any force (other than aggressive scene framing) to make the game go in "my" direction.

It was just that there was a big disconnect between the story he felt implicit in his character and the one I had the r-map and victims for, (the gangbangers being a part of one of the slaves preventing the cop access to the victim, but mainly colour). This boils down to a non-grabby situation.

Lessons learned.
Scene framing is hard, and when bungled leads to wrongly applied force which can quickly add to any disconnect between the characters and situation, as well as hurt the players interest in said situation.

Over at anyway, Vincent suggest that the Gm should be required to frame scenes according to the circumstances. Now aside from my bungling, this, when applied to the real-time game didn't work. "In trouble" leads to high-octane scenes and this again gives an splatter movie feel. The other circumstances set a different tone, the more classic slower horror pace.
Which led to some jarring (as in no good) transitions.
When I began using them less they had more the edge of your seat effect that I look for in horror games. Such as the time when Mickey the gypsy got lost in the basement of the police station. And was filmed and nearly killed by the monster.

In my humble opinion telling a good horror story is all about pacing, and having the circumstances as vulnerabilities to be exploited instead of circumstances that are required to play out are excellent pacing tools. I’d keep them like that.

Sort of like: all is well then, "BAM Ha! you are alone in your room and a slavering pit fiend stares at you."

So the conclusion is that Afraid is very dependent on good scene framing and like Paka (aka Judd) said: this needs to be explained very carefully in the finished text. Creating a situation and then characters to that situation is a major advantage, but not a make or break. But not adapting a new situation to the characters is a game breaker. I should have known this. Yet I slipped up.

And the Dogs mechanics do just what they were intended to do.

So for me, its back to reading up on scene framing (good links appreciated) and for my players . . . sigh . . . it is time for new characters again.

* I just wished I'd read Pakas AP before playing and I love the new first aid rule.

Kaare, did you want to talk more about scene-framing?

Yes, sorry for not being clear. Particularly with regards to Afraid.

Now I royally bungled most of the scene framing that I did the last few times we played it. I admit that.

Some of my players were playing a different game than me (namely corrupt and violent criminals doing nasty things in the name of revenge). That was problematic. But easily solved. We start over and make sure we are all on the same page before we make characters. Done.

Vincent wrote

Mm, I should say: if a character's not in trouble, you aren't allowed to frame her into an impossible situation, but if she is in trouble, you're required to.

Kaare_Berg wrote:
I your character has the lost circumstance, and I repeatedly frame her Lost, and you repeatedly win conflicts that get you found, it just gets silly in the end.

Most def.

Gah, it was simple really wasn't it. Doh.

We were simply running with the Circumstances stand until paid off with experience fallout. When two of my players had in trouble and I kept slamming them with scenes that put them in trouble it felt like a badly scripted action-movie. Which may have prompted the whole evil criminal thing some of my players had going.

And unprepared just got silly.

We'll see what happens when I try again. I am nothing but stubborn.