So Misery Bubblegum has this system where you give each other your dice, and then people can use dice from other players to represent each having emotional influence over them.

The rules as they stand (for the past two sessions) have an Auction in which you buy control of cards (representing tensions and issues) by giving other people your dice.

In the play-session two weeks ago it was just me and Eric, playing two young mecha pilots who were already thoroughly inside each other's heads.  We traded huge heaps of our dice, and it worked like a charm, jump-starting the game by having us immediately working each other over in the biggest ways.  It didn't matter who had which cards, because all of the complexities were tied up with the relationship between the two of us, and we were addressing them together anyway.

In the play-session I played last night, we had me, Eric, Sydney and Jennifer.  We decided to play in the Nobilis setting (which we quickly sketched in for Sydney).  Sydney played Lucifer, visiting a chancel to negotiate for the Lance of Longinus, and Eric and Jennifer played the Powers of the chancel, trying to keep the morningstar (who was a bratty ten year old boy with a chain-smoking habit) from going out of control and/or corrupting them.  They failed, on both counts, with the Adversary getting pissed enough to wreak havoc, and Jennifer's character concluding that she had more sympathy with the devil than with her own people.

Now, before I start running myself down ... this still hung together better (emotionally) than most Nobilis sessions I've played.  No offense intended to Nobilis or its players ... just this game focusses on the emotions, and Nobilis focusses on the philosophy.  This scratches my particular itches better, by design.

But with four people the dice trading and card shuffling simply did not work as well as it did with two.  It's quite possible for someone to get a card, but then not have any in-game relationship to it.  It's possible for someone to have dice, and not have any in-game emotional connection to the person in question.  It happened ... well, with the statistical frequency you'd expect from a pretty random reshuffling, which is to say a lot.

For instance, Sydney added a card "You're not the boss of me" which is awesome between Lucifer and the GM (representing God and the angel who empowered Eric and Jennifer's characters and everybody).  But Jennifer won it in auction, so any time we wanted to address those issues we had to do it through her.

Now it turns out, we made that awesome, by inventing a backstory in which Jennifer's character had been Lucifer's minion until something happened, but now she can barely remember any of that past.  We got into whole issues of whether her current angel was any better than her prior devil, and freedom and self-determination and all that jazz.  But it was a fair amount of work, and it was often unintuitive.

As it stands, I'm inclined to just pull the auction up by the roots and remove it from the game.  When people add cards into the game, those are the cards they play.  Then at least you can assume that they had a pretty solid idea of what the card would do, and how it relates to their character.

That also means that dice wouldn't get systematically shuffled in the early game (although I might let people make voluntary trades, to represent backstory), so there would be more of a tendency toward only controlling the dice of yourself and people you've already had heated exchanges with ... less of this random stuff where you have dice, but no emotional context in which to spend them.

But I'll admit that I lament the loss of the "odd" setups that drove us to create that quirky, difficult, wonderful story about Lucifer's rebellion playing out through the eyes and thoughts of another.  If I could figure out how to get the awesome of unexpected juxtapositions (both "Hey, I have a card that doesn't seem natural" and "Hey, I have someone else's dice, but I don't have any emotional connection to them") without the work and the clumsiness, that would be incredibly nifty.  Anyone got any ideas?