Hi guys!

This is me raving about my mystery game, please hop along. We got to play the Iä! Iä! Ph'iles this Wednesday and laughed our asses off. Check it out!

The guys, the context

I had been trying to organise a nar-session since a few weeks with people from around the place where I study. I used Doodle.ch to get the dates down and we should now be playing on a fortnightly basis.
On the site, I just said I was looking for 2-4 players interested in an rpg about telling a story. The game would be chosen amongst a selection including Polaris, 1001 Nights, My Life with Master and the Pool.

Julien
Same guy as last time, one of my best friends and a great help for bringing the game so far. I think he really enjoys this game, he quickly said he was interested in either this or Polaris.

Cyril
A high-school acquaintance with whom Julien and I played once. He usually plays with another group near where we come from. His past experiences include D&D, Cthulhu, Agone (a french rpg highly acclaimed for its elaborate renaissance-fantasy setting) and others I don't know. He GMs and plays. Very nice quiet guy.

Jerome
We met on internet forums probably a year back and have discussed a lot of theory topics, usually not agreeing on some fundamental points while still being very respectful and confident we could find some common ground. He's an active member of the french roleplaying scene, writing for professional game lines such as Qin. Some of you might have met him at Gencon, I know he got some indie games off the Forge booth.
So, the funny thing is that he lives... a good 7 hours drive away in southern France, but recently got a job near where I study... so we decided this would be a superb opportunity to actually play together. We had met IRL a week before and had a few beers to get to know each other face to face.

We all met at my apartment and chatted a while so that those who didn't know each other could get a chance to do so. The flow seemed good and we went on to choose a game. Jerome was ready for anything, while Cyril was clearly interested in testing my game.

Actual Play

The first thing to do in the Iä! Iä! Ph'iles is to establish a Setting in a few words. Cyril quickly suggested Great Britain in the 70s, then Jerome suggested playing cavemen before speech was invented, he also suggested doing something in the lines of The gods must be crazy, for the weird object landing in the tribe rather than confrontation of the two cultures, and this got everybody interested.
Especially when we chose the "trigger" to be the disappearance of Lucy... (but we actually didn't say anything about the weird object).
This might have been too "soft" and some more incisive formulation could have lent the game some additional punch.

We where all okay to include humor, but not slapstick. A little dose of paranormal activity was fine as well by everyone's standard.

We quickly created characters with silly names:
Cyril: Narfff the chieftain of the tribe and husband to Lucy
Julien: Gniff, the shaman and "shepherd" of the tribe, responsible for counting the tribe members every morning
Jerome: Gnarf, the shamans silly apprentice and sister to Lucy
Me: Knorr, some young cavelad, in love with Lucy

I had to refrain Jerome and Cyril from detailing their characters too much, asking them to keep the ideas for play, but they quickly got it. Cyril was a bit in a "skill + ability" mindset for his character at the beginning, but then homed in to more story-oriented thinking.
Jerome was already working on the recurring joke about "Lucy in the sky with diamonds" and his character's musical interests that will be present all the way to the end. I think we all enjoyed the joke and the way he brought it (using a translated verse or two of various Beatle songs when narrating for example)

I fired off with the first round of clue & trait, suggesting the presence of some monster and a kind of telepathic awareness of Lucy's whereabouts for my character. The others added clues and hints in a fairly classical way such as: Cyril establishing Narfff's iron will to find his wife (trait), Jerome situating his character as the tribe's "funny guy" (trait) and Julien stating that Lucy had been seen talking to the lake at night (clue).
Second and third round are still clue-defining rounds, but traits are given to one's character by another player one chooses.
This is where it all went crazy.
I described my character discovering the cliffs at the end of the world and asked Jerome to narrate a trait for my character... which he promptly did, describing a very detailed scene of how my character walked down a secret stairway in the cliff face, leading to a hidden door to his apartment where his wife was reading the newspaper. "Hi honey!"
So Cyril's suggestion and the movie reference made in anyway! And play was open to all sorts of wild stuff from that point onwards. Knorr's real name was Diamonds...

Two main leads where developed from there: the search for Lucy and the incursion of modern civilization always without the real cavemen knowing anything. Except that they were finding clues fast, and that it was suggested that Lucy probably was some kind of scientist working with Knorr.
Finally, a somewhat tragic bent was lent to the game with three clues: Lucy had given birth to two stillborn babies in the past, a column of smoke was seen rising from behind a cliff, "Knorr's" wife spotted an unidentified helicopter flying around the reservation. We also discovered that Narfff had lost his first wife to a forest fire, Gniff had a violent lean, Gnarf heard voices in the night (the players knew these where Beatles songs) and Knorr had a brother in the Royal Air Force.

I noticed that none of us took advantage of Drama points and said so. We agreed that there was no need for that for the while being. We would never use any during the whole session.

We went on to formulating Trails. Here the conspiracy theory worked really well. We had various suggestions about scientists studying the cavemen (tying in to Lucy's two stillborn babies), things not going according to plan, everybody spying on everybody, Gniff needing to be taken out of the reserve to protect the tribe from his violent fits, something about Narfff's first wife not being dead but very jealous of Lucy, a helicopter crash and Gnarf being a hippy who escaped to this quite place of the world to smoke his pot in peace.

Then came the Interrogation questions. Each player may ask another player's character one question in order to untangle the mess from the trails, the answer being definite content to work with. There we found out that Lucy and Narff actually knew each other from university (and so where "outsiders"), Knorr's brother died in a crash, Gniff got a kick out of hitting women and that Gnarf had no idea what a hippy was.

Finally, we had to vote for the chief criminals. The Investigation Points acquired by other player's using one's clues to formulate trails where distributed thusly:
Jerome: 7
Cyril: 7
Julien: 4
Christoph: 3 (my clues really didn't fit with what was to become the main tone of the game. I see two reasons: I played earlier to show an example so that I couldn't riff off the other input as much and I didn't fully realize what was going on in the sis, still pushing for something with a tragic bent when really comedy was on air)

Jerome and Cyril really riffed off one another's clues, some where used a bit too often for my tastes (I'm wondering if a clue should be limited to three different trails maximum), but I just decided to finish play by the rules.

So, Jerome and Julien voted all their points against my character, while Cyril put all his points on Julien's character (Gniff). I wasn't finding any cool ideas so I decided to split my three points amongst all the other characters, hoping somebody had some good revelations.

Since we were pressed by time, we decided to just do the main revelation and Jerome got to tell us what my character really was up to! (I stupidly lumped revelations and epilogues together too... so this explains Jerome's high degree of control on end-game).

His basic theory was that we really all were actors playing a reality-tv show. All was going well, the BBC was good at censoring all the weed-smoking that was going on (only Knorr didn't seem to indulge in this habit). Until the night when Lucy and Gniff screwed in the lake (this is a reference to a scene that occurred in the first french reality show, Loft Story) and the BBC decided that something had to be done to get the actors back on track (too much film was being wasted!)
Knorr got the mission to take Lucy to the islands shore where a helicopter would bring her back to the mainland. The whole thing had to be disguised in a disappearance of the character in the show, and this explained all the running around in the forests we had seen at the beginning of the story.

But most importantly, the helicopter's pilot was Knorr's brother... and Jerome sang: "Lucy in the sky with diamonds" and we laughed and applauded.

We ended the story at this point, satisfied by play and some in a hurry to get their trains and buses before it was too late.

Observations

My previous concern about the dryness of narration induced by the mechanics held no ground this time. Cyril and Jerome "roleplayed" quite a lot. Roleplayers just roleplay, and the others just tell the story (which would mean that Julien and I are not real roleplayers, but we can live with that...)

Jerome had quite a few suggestions for the game of which I will note the following:

He felt that he had won and was concerned that if set as a goal, this could disrupt story.
I agree that the "reward system" has lots of room for improvement, but as I mentioned, we didn't play with drama points and I forgot to differentiate the revelations (the character's roles) and the epilogue (what happens to the characters in the end). We also only heard Jerome's revelation+epilogue, where we normally should have had four such sequences.
But indeed, the mechanics encourage a player to bet all his points on one single character to maximize the chances of that character becoming the "bad guy" and getting the rights to narrate his role.
So I'm considering changing the rules a bit: Investigation point totals designate the chief criminal, but the second highest single bid on a character defines who gets to narrate the character's role in the story, except if his player has more drama points (this allows me to drop the rule for "half as many drama points as the highest bid grants narration of one's own character's role")

During the Investigation stage, we asked a lot of additional details about other player's input. This in fact often killed a lot of possible interpretations, and Jerome suggests that we should all just stick to what the player writes down on the sheet with the clues. I think that's pretty good. It also speeds up the game.

I'm a bit worried about potential deprotagonization. While getting other players to add traits to one's character is neat, I feel that the other player shouldn't get too much control on their actions. I'm thinking about Jerome's description of my character going down the cliff face and back to his wife, while I found this instance totally cool, I do fear this kind of narration could be problematic.
I'm reading Jack M. Bickhams Scene & Structure and he basically says that there are two types of passages in a novel: Scenes where action is plenty and Sequel where the character may reflect on what just happened to him (but still showing this through physical acts). So I'll try the following rule change for next time: a Clue is the equivalent of a Scene with game-specific constraints and a Trait is akin to a Sequel. I reckon that this will still allow lots of room for creating potential trouble for characters, without actually having them accomplish anything definite.
But maybe I'm just being anal and should leave characters to be tossed around some more.

Finally, I mused over Ron's authority description and how it applied to this game (given the new distinction I introduced just above, which makes things a bit clearer).
Content authority is given to the player adding a Clue and answering an Interrogation question.
Plot authority comes with Traits, then Trails, answering an Interrogation question and explaining characters's roles in the mystery.
Situational authority is basically with the player who's turn it is to narrate. Situations are established in the Investigation process, while they are only hypothetical during the Deduction stage (where Trails are suggested).
Then narrational authority is shared amongst all, since the whole game is based on resolving just one big "What happened, and how?" question.

This kind of analysis could be interesting to "debug" and formalize the game a bit, so if anybody sees some blatant problems (either in the game text or this description), please feel free to share.

Wrapping up

Okay, this was a long thread yet again. It serves two purposes: as a log of a session in regards to how it informs future changes of the rules and a call for help to make the reward system more interesting.
I'd really be interested in suggestions as to how to improve that part (by tying it into all stages of play according to clear guidelines) as a step towards formalizing the game. I realize this might mean narrowing the scope of the game down somewhat. Seth Ben-Ezra thinks that I should choose between detective stories and the lovecrafty horror-investigation, and this session shows that other kinds of mystery are possible too. I think he's right but I'm afraid I've got some knots tied up in my head on this issue.

Thanks for your interest!

Hi Christoph,

Looks like the game is fulfilling its potential.  You wrote that you never used the drama points. Do they still seem needed, or may they be something you'll let go of?

I'm a bit worried about potential deprotagonization. While getting other players to add traits to one's character is neat, I feel that the other player shouldn't get too much control on their actions. I'm thinking about Jerome's description of my character going down the cliff face and back to his wife, while I found this instance totally cool, I do fear this kind of narration could be problematic...So I'll try the following rule change for next time: a Clue is the equivalent of a Scene with game-specific constraints and a Trait is akin to a Sequel. I reckon that this will still allow lots of room for creating potential trouble for characters, without actually having them accomplish anything definite.
But maybe I'm just being anal and should leave characters to be tossed around some more.

Hello Emily!

Drama points stem from my concern in Call of Cthulhu that loss of Sanity is a punishment most of the time (except for those who don't care for the investigation and just want to show how their character goes nuts). From this observation, I thought I should give the player a fair choice between taking risks for his character and playing it safe. That's why Drama points represent bad stuff in the fiction with nice meta-game advantages.

But really, since we all know the others will make sure that our characters have bad stuff happen to them whatever our choices, a bit less or a bit more really doesn't make a difference anymore (actually, the fact that Traits are created by others is relatively new in the game). Also, the sense of character ownership dwindles to a point where the bad stuff in the fiction really isn't a thing one tries to avoid that much. Finally, knowing that a character is only played for one session takes off a lot of the point of keeping him safe (in traditional CoC, one could hope to play a better character in subsequent play).
Perhaps I should kick the possibility to create one's own Traits at all and get rid of the Drama points.

At that point, the very notion of player characters isn't very useful anymore. As a friend suggested once, a web of characters could be enough and everyone chooses which one's story to continue when it's their turn (characters who aren't chosen for some time could have Investigation Points placed on them each turn they aren't played, à la Puerto Rico, so as to increase player interest in them).
Interrogation would have to be changed somewhat as well.

I need to think and test some more, but this has set my thoughts flowing!

Onto the difference between Traits and Clues:

Investigation Stage
Clues are at first not linked to characters at all. They must explicitly be independent of them.
Traits give us more information on the character's social and psychological features. They are illustrated by something which becomes a "what has gone before" as soon as the turn ends, so there would be no new limit introduced by your idea. Those should have just enough of a bend to them that they could be used as an element of accusation against the character in later stages (I'm increasingly finding that this is always the case, whatever the Trait).

Deduction Stage
Each player chooses at least two Clues (perhaps I should set a max, as it stands now the risk of telling a story that is too complete exists) he did not invent and a character's Trait and creates a Trail out of them: a hypothesis somehow linked to the crime scene.
The Clues' authors receive an Investigation point (to reward the authors for their inspiring input), Traits do not reward anything (since they are used to accuse characters, which is perceived as a reward in itself).
Now, if Drama points and character ownership disappear altogether, Traits could easily be handled the same way as Clues (and my awkward reasoning for rewarding or not needs not be anymore).

Later Stages
Clues and Traits are not used directly anymore.

Example taken from this game (from memory):

Julien narrates his character running through the forest and suddenly stumbling upon a boar killed by human weapons, but with blood that is not it's own on its tusks (Clue). At first, he is taken aback at the sight. Cyril goes on to say that the caveman finally bursts into a fit of exuberant relief (does that make sense?). Trait: excessive reactions when de-stressing.

Later on, the boar came up again as having suffered "collateral damage" from a fight between Lucy (the "victim") and a "mysterious woman" (another Clue). This mysterious woman should be the supposedly dead first wife of Cyril's character (covered by one of his Traits).

Julien' character was involved in another Trail as the source of a lot of destruction (boar included again) based on his violent impulses (he had another Trait with a similar meaning, so I'm not sure which one it was that actually inspired this Trail, but it illustrates the point). The Trail suggested that the caveman shaman could thus be directly involved in Lucy's "disappearance"...

Does this answer your question as you hoped?

Thanks for your help and interest, Emily, I appreciate it.