I'm slowly but surely losing my capability to move my limbs- its a painful and not currently curable (treatable, but not curable) muscularskeletal disorder :( Today is a good day though, I don't have much pain & work is slow, so I'm taking advantage of it and writing this up. {I'll be getting Dragon Magically Speaking 6 as soon as I upgrade my computer's RAM which will probably get me back up to being an active daily FORGE contributor again.}

My friends are constantly looking for ways to keep my spirits up. They're appreciating the fact that GMing is becoming hard on me because I'm tired all the time and no longer able to just rattle off stats or page numbers (not that I'm good at it in the first place). So brave little Simulationists with gamist or narrativist tendencies that they are, they're accepting a lot more freeforming and very lite, narrative systems. What's more: They are liking it.

Last night, we played Exalted without dice. I borrowed some Sorcerer mechanics like bangs and kickers.

The Social Contract was unstated. There were three players besides myself, all of them female over the age of 20, all of them playing male characters under the age of 20. Player #1 is from my Friday night group, the others are not. Three of us originally met in the very WoD chat game I described as "a dysfunctional, abusive relationship between 30 people" in a post somewhere earlier this week five years ago. The other is a school chum of one of the other players.

The game involved the PC Solars trying to stop a prostitution ring inside a temple in the Scarred Lands. The Antagonist was a Dragon-Blooded of House Cynis of considerably advanced skill and power, the father of one of the PCs who had preformed acts of child abuse of the NC-17 rating and then sold the PC to slavers-- this was the PC's kicker as a matter of fact.

Child abuse and rape are tender issues in any game. The fact that we were women, playing without men, made it inherently clear at the onset that everyone in the room was more open to exploration of NC-17 material than they probably would have been in mixed company. Nothing was said explicitly. It was a vibe and an observation based on playing with these ladies in the past.

The players each took turns describing the scene and their actions, asking me questions regarding what they saw and answering similar questions when I asked them.

The PC who had the kicker mentioned above at one juncture took direct Directorial control and began using the Antagonist, having it capture her PC and hold the knife at its throat and firing a drugged dart into another PC to stop them from intervening.

One of the big "no-nos" of Freeform play is taking control of someone else's character and dictating what happens to them, but my players all opted to disregard this without batting an eye, letting Player #1 tell them how/when they were hit or injured and just determining the extent of the damage and if they could counter attack or mitigate the circumstances.

Meanwhile, I let Player #1 (my girlfriend, who says she's "too shy to GM") keep Directorial control and brought in my own PC instead to help the others. This went smoothly, in ceamless transition. Player #1 remained the primary GM for several hours before she even caught on that she had that role. She let the other PCs work together against the Antagonist and then after her own character had been rescued after a long chase scene, turned to me and gave me a "deer-in-the-headlights" look and suggested softly that I take over.

She didn't say it, but I was aware that she wanted to play her PC and be the one to actually kill the antagonist. I took back the directorial reins and framed the climatic scene in such a way that it was possible, putting my own PC in a life-or-death situation that the other two players were able to rescue him from and then letting Player #1 triumph against his father.

We played until midnight, losing track of time. Everyone walked away feeling very, very alert and excited. They hung around until 2 pm talking about the game and I made them talk about what was so fun.

1. Everyone involved is familar with online WOD freeform, but only two of us had played Exalted in a chat room. Everyone had played Exalted tabletop. They liked the fact that the game session flowed like a chat game, with almost total game mechanics drift.

2. The content. All of them felt like saving a group of women and children from a life of prostitution was personally gratifying for them. All of them liked having an NC-17 villain, and didn't mind at all Player #1 using that subject matter on her own character. "No worse than watching La Blue Girl" was someone's quote. They all agreed that it would have made them uncomfortable if I, as GM, had done so. The voluntary, "self-inflicted" nature of the incestuous rape was kosher to the group. Anything else would not have been.

3. Player #1 started apologizing for "hogging" the game. The others assured her that they had loved the way it had gone, it had gotten them emotionally involved on a level they hadn't anticipated.

I asked the group to try & articulate our social contract. Here's what everyone agreed was the Contract, things they'd all assumed from the beginning or decided upon midway through.

1) No PC was going to die over the course of the scene
2) Rape and graphic violence was acceptable, as long as it was the victim's player who initiated and described the circumstances. No one was going to rape or maul someone else's character.
3) Anyone raped or mauled would be saved by other PCs before the end of the game.
4) Charms and combat manuevers didn't have to be word-for-word as detailed in the book, but had to stay on the same general level as everyone else was using.
5) Any combat manuever used in an episode of Rurouni Kenshin was a viable play option. (All players were avid Kenshin fans)
6) The PCs were going to triumph, but at a cost

Thanks for the awesome post of FF, Laurel. Your game brings up some interesting points:

The fact that we were women, playing without men, made it inherently clear at the onset that everyone in the room was more open to exploration of NC-17 material than they probably would have been in mixed company.

The content. All of them felt like saving a group of women and children from a life of prostitution was personally gratifying for them. All of them liked having an NC-17 villain, and didn't mind at all Player #1 using that subject matter on her own character.

Player #1 remained the primary GM for several hours before she even caught on that she had that role.

5) Any combat manuever used in an episode of Rurouni Kenshin was a viable play option. (All players were avid Kenshin fans)

No one was uncomfortable with the content level, and it wasn't discussed ahead of time, but the group had played WoD together in the past with risque and violent content albeit not in some time.

I don't think anyone would have seized directorial power in anything but Freeform play. For the first time ever in playing Exalted, I felt like we got through a game session without anyone looking to me to assure them that they were "doing combat right".
I've never seen these folks immerse so deeply in their characters except for the illusionism of immersion its easy to aquire in regards to other players in online play.


It wasn't a conscious decision. However, most of my friends share a love of anime/manga and WW games, and Kenshin was a very easy source of reference. Apparently that's what all three of my players think of as examples of how most Exalted combat charms work.