A while back, Ron posted an interesting actual play about a TSoY game he ran. In Ron’s report, you can see how the World of Near becomes a powerful storytelling tool in the hands of capable players who know the setting, the game rules and each other’s play styles very well. What Ron and the others were doing was high performance use of the setting as an inspiration and motor for their story. So that’s what happens when a well-tuned, highly experienced and skilled group plays TSoY, with a strong Shared Creative Agenda right from the start.

Now, for contrast, I played TSoY with a bunch of n00bs yesterday. Nicole, my girlfriend, has played the game once before, and has some limited role-playing experience, both indie and traditional. Jill and Mandy are the hot chicks I’ve been boasting about for ages, so finally we play, yay! Both of them have played like once, long ago, so they have some idea of what a character and a GM is, but not much more. Jill’s boyfriend, Wolf, has something of a DSA[1] history.

I’m of course the GM, and I decide to just start play without any agenda talk in advance, because in my experience that rather puts people off. So what we are doing for all of the afternoon and evening is toy around. Fortunately, we have a solid base of social relationship, with all of us being grown up and pretty relaxed people and liking each other well.

Character generation takes some three or so hours because I have a lot of explaining to do. Just like Ron, I start with the map and try to get across what the different regions are “about”. I’m only scratching the surface, though. Fortunately, the very basic concepts of the cultures of Near are just as grabby as the detail. I ask the players which they like best, and Wolf pleads for Zaru, so Zaru it is. I do not push too hard to fully integrate the characters and their Keys into that culture’s conflicts. I want to let the players try out this new toy on their own. The only restriction, therefore, is that their characters are somehow around Zaru and that they are not too terribly incompatible. We end up with:

* A Goblin with a pyromania addiction and the Key of the Masochist, played by Mandy.

* A Ratkin with the Secret of Zu, Uptenbo, the Key of the Collector and the Key of Bloodlust, played by Wolf. This one screams “Moon Men” to me.

* An Elven Sorceress from Maldor with the Key of Power and the Key of Glittering Gold, played by Jill (I think Jill didn’t really buy into those Keys, let’s see when she gets new ones).

* Her travelling companion, another Sorcerer with the Key of the Impostor and the Key of Glittering Gold, played by Nicole.

As you can see, these characters are not really locked into conflict from the start. I think I would have overburdened the players with asking them to make something like that up. That’s kind of advanced level. With these characters, it will be my job as the GM to draw them into conflict and engage the players. Since I don’t know yet what the players may prove interested in, I’ll have to probe.

After creating the characters, I took a little break and prepared some back-story, re-reading the Zaru section of the book. Everything I needed was right there in front of me as I drew from the stereotypes, giving them a little twist. So I here’s the situation:

* An Ammenite plantation, ruled by one of the nicer Lords, however with a real mean sadist slave overseer.

* On that plantation, an old man from the Watchers who is guarding some Zu syllables.

* In the ruins of a pre-skyfire village nearby, a cell of the Moon Men, part of which forms a small litter of Ratkin.

Our two Maldorite Sorcerers wander Zaru looking for the Power of Zu. Our Goblin is the Pet of the Ammenite Lord, but I frame the first scene with her being chased off by the guards for setting something on fire. The sorcerers enter the plantation and we do some interaction, character portrayal and stuff. I use description to conjure up a picture of the landscape, drawing on my own China travels for inspiration, and a colonial-type mansion/fortification. The Goblin gets arrested, and the Lord starts courting the Elf.

The Ratkin is of course part of the Moon Men, and I frame him in as he is assigned the mission of returning three little children to their mothers, switching them back. That’s directly from the book. Nicole said afterwards that she really liked that idea. So I get two plotlines running and cut back and forth. Wolf is showing some classic gamer behavior, carefully picking his approach to the mission, and is a little surprised that I keep saying “okay”. I link the two plots as the Goblin escapes the guards and the ensuing search gets the Moon Men into trouble. Also, Wolf’s character is approached by the old Watcher who accuses him of causing harm to the people. The argument is pretty good, though Wolf seems a little surprised that I, the GM, would assign a mission to him and then question it again. We’ll see how that develops.

In the end, the Moon Men kill four guards and the old Watcher steals a Syllable of Power from Wolf’s character, despite five bonus dice. I rolled +++, tough luck for Wolf, but he took it with humor. We quit play as the Ammenites discover the dead guards and the old Watcher blames the rebels and begs them to spare the slaves. The children have been successfully switched. Wolf’s character is still around and eager to get his Syllable back. The Goblin got tossed into a Rambo-style arrest-pit after dashing into the dining hall and stuffing a big mouthful of Chillies, knocking herself out all by herself, a scene I thought was pretty cool. The two sorcerers are the Ammenites’ guests, our impostor is pretending to be a rich trader from Maldor.

So, three hours of play and no real agenda emerging yet. That is no surprise, given from where we started. Still I hope you can see how well Near lends support to me, the GM, in engaging these light-weight characters into some heavy stuff. For now, however, we are taking it slow. After all, we are still in the process of establishing Exploration and Techniques, and once we’ve done that, we can see to Creative Agenda. Play is still fun, just like toying around with something new often is, especially when you get a feeling that it’ll be cool once you’ve figured it out and when you’re around some nice people while doing it. I’m pretty confident that we’ll really get things rolling in a few sessions’ time, once I learn hot to push the players’ buttons.

Thoughts, questions, suggestions?

- Frank

[1] “Das Schwarze Auge”, being Germany’s most popular RPG, with a low fantasy setting and pseudo-“fantastic”-realistic rules, with text and published adventures implying illusionism.

Shoo me away if this is off-base, but I have a bit of a relationship with using TSOY with newbies. The relationship being, I've done it once and it's a horrid endeavour. Nowadays I categorically refuse to do it, and bash the teenage TSOY fanboy who's always suggesting that I run a game for his female friends with a heavy object whenever he brings it up. MLwM or Mountain Witch, sure, but I'm not going to run TSOY for anybody who doesn't already have a thing for fantasy and experience with lighter rpgs.

The process of consolidation you describe is very typical for TSOY. The thing is, the game works best with experienced roleplayers, who have learned to be very skilled in not only creating characters, but also in managing resource flows and developing a situation in play. Therefore I find that an experienced trad group can create characters and get into a flashpoint in TSOY in 3-4 hours. An experienced indie group can do it in a hour and a half. But a newbie group... they can't do it in one session, they'll need so much time for shifting through the setting for the relevant bits, for creating characters and hooking them into the situation. They can certainly do it, but I suspect that it is more frustrating than it needs to be, as TSOY doesn't make character creation and setting consolidation particularly easy. That more often than not leads to there not being a second session.

As a curiousity, one could do even worse than playing TSOY with newbies. You could play with a mixed group. That follows, in my experience, very tidyly along the exact same track you get with D&D: the veterans leave the newbie minority behind, or feel dragged down by the new guy who needs to learn all the basic stuff. The reward cycles in TSOY are all about leaving the other guy behind, though, so most likely the experienced guys are having fun and forget all about the silent one in the back. Needless to say, the girl I tried this with didn't come back. Can't blame her, spending over an hour in character generation is not very fun when you don't have the experience to understand how the choices made at that stage reflect in play to come.

So OK, that's my spiel about the one great flaw of TSOY, which is that it's a geek game compared to some other choices. Obviously it doesn't pertain that much to your play, as it seems that you have a group that's comfortable enough with each other and caring enough to entertain themselves with simple romping around. I agree with you very much that you have all the cards at hand for making the game go tight in the next session, now that the characters are somewhat settled in the setting.

Most of my TSOY posts these days read "What Eero said," and this one's not that different. Using HeroQuest as my model for what TSOY should be did give it a big flaw, as I learned recently running HeroQuest for people new to the game - it's overwhelming and hard.

However, I have found that by taking it easy and not pushing too hard, conflict will come in a few sessions. Play it like you would any traditional game for a few sessions - introduce some clear bad guys, give the characters something to do. In the second session, introduce something you know will split the characters a little. Keep applying light pressure. Within 3 sessions, you'll have conflict both within and without the characters.

Hi Eero,
I agree totally about your hour/session count. Our advantage is that we are taking our time. We have settled to play once a month on Sunday, and bring some time. So the commitment is already there, I don't have to try and wrench it from a bunch of sceptics. Also, I trust in my skill to gently guide them and take care that no-one gets left behind.

Hi Clinton,
Absolutely, I'm going to take this one slow. If I hit some Awesome in the third session, I'll be totally on schedule.

- Frank

Hi Frank,

For all the games in this "family" of design, the agenda takes at least two sessions to emerge, and sometimes longer. The games I'm mainly thinking of are HeroQuest, Sorcerer, Dust Devils, Trollbabe, Dogs in the Vineyard, TROS, the revised Burning Wheel, The Shadow of Yesterday, and Nine Worlds. None of them have explicit issues at hand in the way Primetime Adventures does, nor any fairly rigid chapter structure like Polaris or With Great Power, nor any endgame mechanics like My Life with Master.

In these games, the progress of the developing story often begins in a meandering fashion. What happens next depends entirely on how innocent-seeming conflicts take on more and more significance as time passes, and turning points are passed without much fanfare, resulting in disproportionately passionate or horrific conflicts arriving soon.

It's always the GM who feels most at sea, in the beginning. It seems as if nothing is happening, or that people aren't really grabbing things and running with them. But if it all clicks, then by the third session, the tables have completely turned and the GM suddenly feels like he is mating with a large, bucking beast of prey. This may or may not happen with your group, but so far, the signs are very good. Let them experiment a little bit with the system, learn how to spend and refresh their pools, and let the fiction's components shake into place through plain old-fashioned role-playing. This may be the calm before the storm.

Best, Ron

Ron,

Out of curiosity, how much of the time does the rule of three games hit your groups?

I've seen exactly what you describe a lot, and usually around games 3 to 5 (games with fewer players take longer, but hit harder when they come), and so it just struck me as amusing and fitting that you'd pick 3 as your target.

Hi Brand,

Three is approximate for purposes of the current discussion; it's based on observing and playing with literally dozens of groups. Sometimes it's a bit faster or slower. It's not a rule or law.

I confess I do not understand your post at all and don't see what is amusing (why?) or fitting (to what?), or what would be not amusing or not fitting if I'd said (oh) two instead of three, or whatever. I'm not annoyed, but definitely baffled.

Best, Ron

Hi Ron,

I totally agree with you. And you know what? I actually like this “toying around” phase. It’s no good for a convention game or one-shot, where I’d rather use pre-generated characters and situation and do the consolidation Eero mentioned in the prep. Actually, I’ve run a pretty successful TSoY convention game that way.

But for a group committed to play on a regular basis for some time, it feels right to poke around a little and see what the game, and the group, can do. I think that the threshold for really getting to the meaty part is not that high for TSoY as compared to games with a really massive background like e.g. HeroQuest or Artesia AKN.

If I look at Artesia for contrast, I think that Artesia is really, really a game for advanced, well prepared players. That game is very complex and sophisticated and requires a lot of advance investment by everybody round the table (which is not to say that the investment doesn’t pay off, on the contrary). TSoY is pretty accessible by comparison. That’s why I play Artesia with Harald and other role-playing freaks, and TSoY with the n00bs.

- Frank

Ron,

Amusing is just... hell, it has to do with my personal sense of language and coincidence. It wasn't designed to reflect on you at all. It was just that while I was reading the OP I thought, quite literally, "Wait three sessions." I don't know why I thought three at that moment, I just did. It wasn't a scientific or reasoned response, just my gut acting out. And then you said three in your post, but with obviously a lot more thought and experience behind it, and it just kinda tickled me. So it was amusing because I'm a weird, weird guy.

Anyway, sorry for the hijack to your thread Frank!

Well, I'll take what I can get and count it as agreement! Brand's gut reaction says "three!," so there's two of us.

Best, Ron