So my Sorcerer game is dead. We only managed a handful of sessions, separated by delays of up to a month at a time, and in short never gained sufficient traction or player investment to give the game legs. Last night we met and talked it over, and decided it was best to end it and move on to other things.

This is the autopsy.

By the way, prep discussion is here, previous actual play threads are here, and here, The last time we played, we had a couple of interesting developments, but it was far from smooth. We only managed a couple of scenes, one in which Robin Last, coming to his Indian mentor pleading whatdoIdo, whatdoIdo, and surrounded by cops, pisses off the mentor and they fall out and disown each other, Robin goes out to ambush and demon-massacre the cops, gets himself horribly shot up and taken into custody in critical condition. The other scene was V and her pal Pigeon following their hospital getaway, heading out to her secluded Cabin (just across the valley from Robin and the Mentor!) while Pigeon explains that their employer wants them to steal artifacts from the Mentor for her ceremony.. They pass by the Flying J in flames from the grenade debacle, and V receives a Perception from her Demon that one of the ceremony ingredients she needs is in a car outside the disaster scene. She hops out of the car to go after it, attracts some police attention, plays some cat and mouse, and ends up escaping to her cabin via an underwater drainage pipe her Demon pointed her to.

There were a number of factors that killed the game. Any single one of them could possibly have been resolved (not "ignored" or "tolerated" but resolved) in order to keep the game alive and enjoyable. But all of them together were a death knell.

• Difficulty coordinating schedules. This one was sort of a beyond anyone's control thing, on the surface. But I tend to think that underlying all that was a lack of commitment to the game to some degree. Not that I'm saying people's priorities were "wrong" or "bad"; I never, when I knew the reason for a conflict or cancellation, thought that they were unworthy activities to prioritize. It's just that bottom line, for whatever reason, people were more committed to other things than they were to the Sorcerer game.

• We spent a lot of time chatting and BSing. This was mainly because we all like hanging out and this is our only time to do so, so we get sidetracked easily (and we've determined that spending time together IS valuable to us, beyond the context of this game). But I think it's fair to say that lack of commitment to the game--such that it's impossible to say "OK, let's play now" and have everyone respect that--was also a factor.

• We had a massive mismatch of preferences and aptitudes for procedural frameworks in a game. We had one guy who loves to get under the hood of the rules and examine and tinker, one guy who loves "mechanics" (dicerolling, stats, etc.) inasmuch as they robustly support creative aims (that'd be me), and then three people who, in varying degrees, don't want to be bothered with rolls, scores, defined powers, math, what have you, and rather just want to more or less freely spin a story together, urged on by creative prompts. One player says, "at the mention of dice my eyes glaze over." Basically, if "roll dice equal to a relevant score, compare to an opposing roll for high die, number of victories rolls over into the next, relevant roll" is too much fiddly stuff for this group, then Sorcerer isn't going to work. Similarly, issues of when to employ the dice tripped people up, and someone would be spinning some string of narration about their character, and I'd have to go "wait, baaack up there; you know those police over there? With guns? Yeah, they're opposing you." The net result of all this was that I felt like a killjoy for constantly reigning in people's creative output, and everyone was kind of pushing and pulling over what kind of game we were playing.

• We also had a mismatch regarding imaginative content and what we wanted to do with it. Everyone had a set of expectations about what the game would be, and though I tried to transmit the Sorcerer paradigm clearly and communicate well in our collaboration over setting and theme we still entered the game with often very different ideas about what it would be and what it would be like. I think everyone had a general idea of Sorcerer as "the game of summoning demons and what you do with the power and what cost you pay for it." But within that rough framework everyone brought a different set of expectations regarding such things as the shape of the story (Jake said in our talk that he went in wanting primarily scenes and conflicts with other PCs, and our prep just didn't have much Positioning on that score), the particular dynamics between  characters (Willem has stated that most of his character's relationships, as played by me, turned out totally different than he pictured them, in a manner that left him cold and left the PC with no direction or motivation), or the capability and methodology of specific capabilities (such as Willem thinking he could tear through a bunch of cops and getting creamed, or Jana struggling with what her Demon abilities could do and balking at the specificity of their operation clashing with her concept).

It's hard for me to discuss this issue precisely because I had different expectations from them; often I would be looking across the table at a player seeing all kinds of exciting potential for proactive motion for their character, while they shake their head and go "man, what a dead end." Couple of examples: Jake's PC hustles some stolen checks and gets some cash in hand, and goes "well, I guess my Kicker's resolved." (Really? really?! Getting a bit of cash (and acquiring criminal entanglements in the process) constitutes a sustainable situation for Mike? Whaaa. . .?) And then there's the latest development in Robin's story--the mentor bitch him out, and Willem just feels like the relationship is destroyed, not in a "great, dysfunction, emnity and fallout!" sort of way, but in a "poof! it's evaporated, as if it had never been" way. And then he felt that Robin's only reason for caring about the Mummy Kicker was on the Mentor's behalf, so now he just "doesn't care" and has nowhere to go. Whereas I feel that I entered into the game in the good faith that the player actually did care about his Kicker, and correctly (after some floundering) identified that it was the relationships surrounding the mummy that were the meat, put pressure on those relationships. . .and the player (from where I;'m sitting) just up and gives up.

Hmm. Looking over that, it's awfully judgmental; it just can't help but bubble up when I write about it. Now, I do feel that I'm entitled to my judgment, but at the same time I don't want to paint a picture like "I was the very picture of fairmindedness and creativity and they just wouldn't work with me." Anyway, I'll let the comments stand as the most honest assessment of my feelings at present.

• On the whole, I think we ended up rather at sea in a number of areas because of our careless approach to the game. I mean at every level: forming a play group, determining our aesthetic preferences, investing together in an SIS, learning the rules, etc. I posted up a Sorcerer game at a local game meetup, and simply assumed that those who signed up and came to my table would be the right people in my community to play this game. While I succinctly stated what the game is about, I don't think I was able to effectively communicate to the group what the play experience is like, or what creative and social duties would be expected of them. Also, I didn't go in with a planned thematic scenario of the "one-sheet" variety, figuring we would work it out as a group. And we did, but we ended up with some things ill-defined (esp. Ritual and Demons), and a lot of gaps for people to fit their disjointed expectations into.

As the months flew by and awkward sessions trickled in, it became clear that the group wasn't gelling and the game wasn't gaining the necessary traction. I was reluctant to quit the game, for a number of reasons: I didn't want to "fail at Sorcerer" or give up on the challenge of running a satisfying game, I didn't want to let down this friend group or leave them with an unfun experience, and I was invested in the fictional content we had created and wanted to see a payoff for that creation. Hell, I hadn't even gotten a chance to introduce the major NPC I had created, which was primarily what my own creativity was sparking on regarding the game. So that felt like altogether an unsatisfying place to leave off.

But in discussion we all made it clear that the game was frustrating and unworkable for us, and we need to move on (yes, even me, despite the above paragraph: my fellow players' unwillingness to continue merely clinched a difficult decision). But it wasn't all gloomy. I think a number of positive insights and observations emerged from the wreckage:

• We've affirmed that we DO like each other and DO want to play games together. Now that we've got a better handle on the group preference and agenda, we can select games appropriately and have more fun. What the group preference boils down to is "low handling time, room for all players to participate and interact all the time, lots of collaborative fiction-building and narration, low commitment week to week to account for schedule conflicts." We're thinking about In a Wicked Age, the Pool, 1001 Nights, and some others. Hopefully this'll evolve into a cool, relaxing rotating-game group.
• I learned a lot about running a Sorcerer game; the campaign becomes a sort of dry run to work out the kinks. I believe I've honed my personal skills and my "radar" for potential pitfalls, and my ability to run Sorcerer in the future is enhanced, not diminished.
• And in that light, I know exactly what I want to do with the ashes of our game. I'm going to take wat really engaged me about the material (most of which I didn't even get to introduce) and lift it out wholesale to build a whole new "Cascadiapunk" setting/concept for a future game. I'll do up a proper one-sheet, with Sorcery and Demon definitions alongside Humanity, and zero in on exactly what in the "setting" I'm focusing on (our previous game was just sort of "eh, anyone from Portland is fine"). This way I can hit the ground running with my own investment and enthusiasm engaged, seek out players who can also invest in this same thing, and create some awesome together, with a firm basis for aesthetic judgment and procedural expectations.

So, yeah. I've got some lingering frustrations, to be sure, but I think there's a happy ending to the tale. I'm looking forward to the next step, both for this group and for Sorcerer.

Peace,
-Joel

Over in [Dead of Night] Nice Mr. Fitzgerald, Ron said some stuff about handling aesthetic judgment calls as a GM that seemed to me to relate to my issues here with communicating expectations, particularly Sorcerer's Bonus Dice for Roleplaying.

The relevant bit:

Ron wrote:
There's nothing in the text about cliches being silly or not silly, foreshadowed or not foreshadowed, or anything else. The numerous examples are generally descriptive and range from the very familiar to the thought-provoking. Graham's question was the right one - how did I, the GM in this case, organize "my discretion?" When the rules hand me the judgment call like this, I am a big believer in telling people what's on my mind, and finding out what's on theirs, because I don't like to start over case-by-case during play.

Taking control of other people's relationships is something we've had problems with in the past. Because those npcs tend to reflect something fundimental to the character, and playing them wrong can totally set things the wrong way.

The main trouble seems to be when players cannot express what it is about your portrayal that undermines their character, even after they see it, so veto doesn't work that well. It's too blunt an instrument, and our current GM is too sensitive and illusionist to take it well.

I wonder if there is some way for players to share control of a character, perhaps with one setting general boundaries and the other the specifics. I suspect though that that is no solution, as general boundaries can become more and more specific.

Another tack is to try to find ways to make the meaning of the characters explicit, perhaps through more gentle introductory or tuning scenes, so the GM can get a feel for how to play them, or via some question/answer method, with in character questions about that person. The first should have non-continuity status, depending on how strict that is, perhaps formulated as a dream or explicitly labeled as a trial.

Well, for Sorcerer, the basic idea is that once you've generated an idea during character creation, then it belongs wholly to the GM to shape into whatever form it takes in play. That includes the Kicker, and everything else too. Just as the GM gives up all ownership of certain crucial parts of "where the story goes," every other participant gives up authority over any character except his or her sorcerer. By "give up," perhaps the best way I should say it is "give over," or "transfer." You have the idea and then you give it to someone else and accept what they do with it.

Joel, that sounds like one of the issues you ran into, but I think it's actually just a symptom. I'll be getting back to this rather involved thread later in the week, I hope, with the reply I'm slowly drafting.

As a contrast, Trollbabe is totally different. It has rules that are a lot like what you're talking about. If you, playing a trollbabe, designate a given character as a Relationship, then from that point on, you say what that character does. But the GM always plays his or her attitudes and spoken commentary. Each function belongs to the indicated person in full. It works quite well, actually.

I've found in many experiences that your basic advice is sound as well, even without funky rules of either sort. I think a certain jostling, or no-blood-no-foul period is often necessary when dealing with the shadowy, semi-defined, yours/mine character associated with you as a player. I might say, "OK, he's in his armchair, sunk deep in contemplation ..." and give one of those "is this OK" looks to the player who made the character up. There's a lot more joint play of characters than I think we acknowledge, and sometimes it even goes past this opening stage.

Best, Ron

Hi, Joy!

JoyWriter wrote:
Taking control of other people's relationships is something we've had problems with in the past. Because those npcs tend to reflect something fundimental to the character, and playing them wrong can totally set things the wrong way.

The main trouble seems to be when players cannot express what it is about your portrayal that undermines their character, even after they see it, so veto doesn't work that well. It's too blunt an instrument, and our current GM is too sensitive and illusionist to take it well.

Ron wrote:
Joel, that sounds like one of the issues you ran into, but I think it's actually just a symptom.

Hi Joel,

I apologize for making you wait so long.

The first issue is about you, the other people, and posting about the game, particularly your own reactions and feelings. You only represent yourself here, you're not finking on them or bad-mouthing them by talking about that stuff. If you need to work out whether it's appropriate in their eyes to say what you think, acknowledging that that is only what it is, then you should talk to them about it. If someone has a problem with it, then you decide what to do. But don't keep posting in this halfway, I-think + ooh-that's-mean-of-me way.

That's all necessary because, based on your post, I disagree that the failure of the game was due to the confluence of many factors, any of which would have been resolvable in isolation. That appears to be face-saving, let's-not-blame social rationalizing. I think you were far more accurate when you wrote,

... we ended up rather at sea in a number of areas because of our careless approach to the game. I mean at every level: forming a play group, determining our aesthetic preferences, investing together in an SIS, learning the rules, etc.

Ron,

Thanks. Yes, it makes sense. As for helpful, I'm still digesting. Let me digest out loud for a bit:

Ron wrote:
I disagree that the failure of the game was due to the confluence of many factors, any of which would have been resolvable in isolation.

Ron wrote:
the event arose very logically from the lack of buy-in in the first place.

Ron wrote:
For a person in that situation, the only option is to rely only on certain specific other priorities: (a) what you didn't like and try to avoid based on previous play, (b) some Story Before you're making up, and (c) social priorites that aren't centered on play itself. I suggest that many of the instances you described in your post arise from this option in action. The weird thing is, it's not about blame! No one can be faulted for falling back on these things if they don't buy into the Color and Reward, because there's literally nothing else they can do.

Ron wrote:
I only have one more little point that may be more generally useful. As I see it, no one actually hates dice. Someone may well hate being marginalized by shitty systems, and in response, have mastered a particular strategy of play. This strategy is to control the events of play through narrating, such that dice either get elided, or they only affect things that won't be permitted to really change anything.

Hi Joel,

1) What kinds of techniques are useful for facilitating buy-in in the first place?

2) How might one go about teasing buy-in out of an existing, floundering game? Are you pretty much doomed, or are there reasonably reliable ways to put on the brakes and solicit buy-in once it is clear you don't have it (bearing in mind that you can't make anyone buy in and you may still fail)?

3) It seems to me that there's an inverse principle to the necessity of buy-in: it's possible to be totally grooving on Color and/or Reward and have play still suck sour frog ass, because you don't know what to do with the Color or how to get to the Reward. In fact, I've been there many a time. I'm not sure if there's any cure that can be articulated though, any more specific than "know what you're doing and how to do it" (duh).

Melinglor wrote:
1) What kinds of techniques are useful for facilitating buy-in in the first place?

Hi David,

I think your exercise will only make sense at all if you try it with a game you know pretty well - either played it and reflected on it, or at the very least, have read it carefully and genuinely are prepping for play.

Best, Ron

Right now I'm prepping a Trail of Cthulhu game.  I've read most of the book carefully.  I'm planning to say something like:

(Color:) "It's X-Filesy paranormal investigation in the 1930s, except your investigations lead toward mind-blowing cosmic monstrosity."  (Point of play:) "The investigation is the framework that allows us to really explore and enjoy '30s Lovecraftian X-Files."  (Large-scale Reward:) "When you complete an investigation, you uncover a nicely chilling Mythos plot or happening, and your characters will have travelled some distance toward madness."  (Small-scale Reward:) "Each clue you follow exposes more of the GM's colorful story, and each harrowing experience the characters endure ticks off points on a scale of how crazy you should play them."

I could further specify that the task resolution system calls for depletion of finite pools, but right now that doesn't strike me as significant.

FWIW, my first instinct on "point of play" was to focus on the characters' goal: uncover the mystery.  That's probably how I'd have pitched this with a little less thought.

Ps,
-David

Thud.

There's no reward in your reward.

Try, "The more you understand, the more you're driven toward madness, as your increasing Mythos Lore skills and Sanity scores grind into one another."

Notice that I did not say, "Can you solve the mystery before you're a gibbering lunatic?" I left all strategy out of the reward statement so as to highlight the intended CA (the one I presume you were aiming at), and I left the door open for the player to enjoy the descent into madness or to try to resist it, either way.

I deliberately confounded player and character for the strong "actor/you" experience inherent in most Call of Cthulhu play.

Best, Ron

Ah!  So for describing Reward, don't bother with, "and this is why it's fun!"  Just state "doing X produces Y" in terms of the fiction and the mechanics' effect on the fiction.  Then let the players decide if "doing X produces Y" is something they find appealing.

In my friends' accounts of their ToC games (and the one game I played), it seemed like relevant Sanity decay happened too slowly to function as a regular reward for play, and that everyone was much more invested in finding out "what's going on here?"

What leads to your judgment that sating curiosity isn't a real reward?

It seems to me that perhaps, "My Sanity just went down by enough that I'm hallucinating!" is an instance of the game's large-scale reward cycle in action, while "we found out that Detective Tom is actually the cult leader" is an instance of the game's small-scale reward cycle in action.  The mechanical enforcement of the smaller cycle is the game's instructions for GM prep ("define clues that advance understanding"), combined with the "investigative abilities always find the clue" rule.  Does that work? 

Thanks,
-David

P.S. Interestingly enough, I was already planning to jack up all the Stability and Sanity tolls of given encounters...

Hi, Ron!

By the numbers:

1)

Ron wrote:
The trouble with your mermaids example is that it's Color only. I think that might be a major issue in the discussion. It worked in the Deathmatch case perhaps because the author of a game is often skilled at conveying understanding of Reward very quickly during play.

Ron wrote:
I dunno. I suppose one should simply have the Color + Reward get-together at that point and see if it's possible to re-start in those terms, without having the fiction itself re-start. I haven't been in that situation because I'm typically willing to let the current game die and try something else. Then again, we usually start with that process anyway, so if we and the game aren't working out together, then we're sort of past that particular repair.

Ron wrote:
Interestingly, I have no idea what you're talking about. To me, "totally grooving on" means actually doing it with everyone else doing it too, which negates your point entirely, so that must not be what you mean by it. Do you mean "anticipating" or "hoping," or maybe do you mean "individually/privately?" I'd like to know about one of your many times in detail in order to understand what you mean at all, especially the inverse principle.

When dealing with buy in, it seems like there are two ways to look at it; either the players are not working at it enough, or they don't get it. To some extent the second can be reformed as "the game doesn't get them", or less judgementally by saying that the game and players are miscalibrated, they're not matching.
Now I hope you see that this problem can essentially be stated as, "the game wasn't right for your group as a whole". This is why buy-in characterises what you feel happened so well; it's just saying that what each player wanted to do did not produce (as a whole system) the game you expected to be playing.

Now you can say "tough, work at it, you'll enjoy it eventually" or just "tough, do it or the book says your wrong", but that I think is a foolish task. Something already drew you together. They have enough investment in "something" to come to your house.

I don't think it's a failure that you didn't clearly define your preferences and expectations before you started; even in more logical fields like software design a perfect specification is hard to see without actually trying to use the softwear, and people have developed proper language for expressing that kind of stuff, a language you proabably won't share. The tricky thing is that you tried (as most people do) to find out in play what you wanted from the game. Now sorcerer is not set up for this, most games aren't, excluding the common game "constantly changing house-rules for all"! (sounds a bit like universalis actually, maybe that's why I love it so much)

Now onto the bard story, why didn't people buy into your stuff? When you interact with someone, you can expect or imply a certain response: You have an idea of "how this conversation should go", and obviously someone else's perspective is probably different.

One important part of this can be reciprocity; people feel encouraged to respond in kind, so you invest time in handouts and setting structure, and they invest time in them too. This can have two parts, in that they can be in a sense paying you back for the stuff you did that they enjoyed, either through duty or gratitude, or it can be through modelling, as they see how much you enjoy a certain action, or how much cool stuff is produced by it, and they get pumped up to do the same. This kind of bouncing off one another can amplify, if the stuff you do builds into the stuff they do and vice versa, so you don't just get two good things but a continuable process! A virtuous circle.

Now obviously we want that one, right? (Some people just want applause, but I suspect that is not what you want) The trouble is that when you bring something to the table, it can imply all these different circles of positive feedback; all sorts of different responses from them would feed back well into you and lead to you two going somewhere. But that might not be where they want to go. Or perhaps one circle does go that way, but neither of you can see it. The hard part is finding responses that are not identical but complementary.

So fitting this back into practical, your playing this Bard and people hear you make this song and say "cool, but I don't know how to respond to that, so is it just for applause?". They don't know how to react in a way that fits what both of you want. So people do what they can do, and switch. Their alternative to changing the subject would be to find a way to plug what your doing into what they are doing, as with the "disturbing visions" stuff.

So to recap, as I currently understand "bye in", it's about player investment, or in other words how much their natural self expression matches up with the game, either by forcing it to, or by clever embedding (if that doesn't make it clearer stick with the above!). For a game to be self-sustaining it needs to give out to the players as they give in to it. Or the more they force themselves to comply, the more benefit they should be getting out of it.

Now these things don't have to be synchronised, and I think this is where the reward cycle comes in; people put up with using dice and letting people take over parts of their character and all sorts of other things because of the unique benefits that are supposed to come from it. Now in the perfect world people will like every inch of the system, sometimes they'll just like kickers. But reward points in the system allow you to focus on just getting that bit right, so that whatever else happens there will always be that constant plug of positive feedback to keep everything ticking over, as you solve the harder problems of getting everyone's purposes and feelings about their characters to embed nicely, not necessarally so they agree, but so they all get somewhere better.

Now in this context it seems like a reward cycle for any particular person is the guaranteed frequency of the stuff they like turning up in game, and colour is stuff that hints at stuff they will like, but is not mandated. What's the difference between colour and everything else people make up? Is it the creative content that comes ready with the game book?

Hi, Joy (is that your name? What would you like to be called?),

I have to admit I'm finding your post a bit hard to follow. I've been mulling it over for a week now, trying to hit at a fruitful discussion vector, but I can't follow the thread of your comment, it just looks like a bunch of disparate observations and opinion to me. So I'm going to have to reply kinda piecemeal. Sorry.

I have to disagree with your assertion that it wasn't a failure to establish expectations up front. You even said it yourself: Sorcerer (or indeed any game) isn't built to function without that foundation. Therefore, to play Sorcerer we needed to establish that, and not doing so was a failure. I'm frankly not interested in "changing houserules for all!" or "everyone enjoys what they like out of play and sort of tolerates the rest" or any other description you could tag unfocused (if not downright Incoherent) play with.

I mean, sure, I don't think we needed to sit and talk interminably about every last little detail of play and what it's going to be like and why it's cool and what we all want out of it, on and on and on. but a basic establishing discussion of what you do in the game and why and how, based on a focused set of parameters, would have been just what the doctor ordered. Ron's Color and Reward resonates with me as a powerful set of just such parameters. I think we got halfway there with Reward (they knew about Sorcerer's basic question, and about Kicker resolution, but a lot of the "how to do that" stuff was missing), but Color was woefully amorphous--without a strong focusing concept, we found it difficult to draw everyone's individual contributions and expectations together.

This bit though, is spot-on:

JoyWriter wrote:
So fitting this back into practical, your playing this Bard and people hear you make this song and say "cool, but I don't know how to respond to that, so is it just for applause?". They don't know how to react in a way that fits what both of you want.

Melinglor wrote:

One other thing: "buy-in" isn't about 'forcing yourself to comply" with a game in order to get some return on it, in some sort of "I put in the hard time, now you OWE me, game! You owe me big!" arrangement. Buy-in is about being enthusiastically engaged from the get-go about what this game does and how it does it.

JW,

Honestly, that "self-generating systems, social structure" stuff just makes me go, "well, sure." It's a nicely cogent and methodical description of the phenomenon, but I can't see where it adds anything to our understanding in the current conversation. I especially think that Ron's talk of the "Color and Reward" cycle is saying exactly that self-generating in social structure" thing in a different way.

Now, maybe you're presenting this as a way of checking my understanding of the concept. If so, lemme just reiterate, sure, I understand it OK, you've given me a nice model for further conceptualizing it, and we're done. If there's something further you want to build off the Maturana framework, by all means, but from my vantage point it just looks like a restatement of the whole undergirding of our discussion.

As far as your implicit question of "what if it was just that the game itself was weak?" I can only respond that I've arrived at my current understanding and purpose vis a vis Sorcerer through a concentrated effort of discussion, understanding and preparation. I don't feel that the game's framework was weak, because I've developed a methodical understanding of how it's strong. I think the conditions for convincing me otherwise would have to include me participating in a group which had clear communication, compatible play goals, and which played to those strengths and still flopped. So at this point asking the question 'what if Sorcerer just doesn't work?" seems fairly worthless. To paraphrase Chesterton, "Sorcerer has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult, and left untried." I'd need a lot more experience to overturn that impression.

But I know you were asking a very general question, not challenging Sorcerer per se. I just don't see a lot of value in considering that dimension just now. And I don't think we're in danger of collapsing all iscussion of solution into just one phrase. On the contrary, I think we're working out just what goes into a functional practice of "buy-in" as it relates to RPGs. Unpacking the phrase, if you will.

As far as "what if the players find something else fun to do in the game?" goes, I'm not really sure how to speak to that. I'm still working on getting functional buy-in in the first place, so asking "what if you get functional buy-in and then someone decides they want to buy in to something else?" feels a bit like racing ahead. My gut answer though, is that buy-in implies a maturity and responsibility such that an individual player can control their impulses at least to the degree of refraining from launching into a metal solo in the middle of a Coltrane tune. At the very least there should be robust enough communication that a discussion of change in direction can take place.

Maybe Ron an address these points a little more completely? I'm still pretty much in the pupil role on this topic.

peace,
-Joel

Hi everyone,

Regarding the content of this term "buy-in," I should point to a concept I've written about over and over, and often quoted in the following construction. I should stress that I'm using any social leisure activity as the empirical basis for it, with a special point about role-playing.

1. You have to trust that the procedures work - look, these instruments make different noises, so we can make music; look, this ball is bouncey, so we can toss and dribble it

2. You have to want to do it, now, here, with these people - important! (a) as opposed to other activities, (b) as opposed to "with anybody who'll let me"

3. You have to try it out, to reflect meaningfully on the results, and to try again - if it's worth doing, it's worth learning to do better; failure is not disaster, improvement is a virtue

My call is that role-playing, as a hobby and subculture, has failed to accept this idea, historically. And as such, the base-line for any sort of successful, fun participation for any other activity is, in role-playing, something of a mystic unknown. Many, many groups and even publishing strategies have developed what I consider to be compensatory mechanisms for its lack, none of which seem to have panned out well. An example of that is what's come to be called, here, "Zilchplay," meaning the activity is effectively devalued and its content not evaluated. Others have developed a way to relate to their hobby in which their enjoyment is based mainly on reading about play and selectively remembering it rather than doing it.

So I want to stress here, in this thread, that I am not talking about any kind of special buy-in, any particular requirement for Sorcerer, or any particular requirement even for role-playing as such. I am talking about what, for any other person, engaged in any other activity, considers to be the basic requirement. It only seems special, particular, or in need of deconstruction to us because we are role-players.

Best, Ron

Sure!  We are roleplayers, which often means that when we get together in a group for the first time to try a game that's new to us, we have to work up to that basic level of buy-in.  Not like a soccer team that's been practicing for a while... but exactly like a bunch of kids showing up to their first practice to find out if they like soccer.

Do these procedures produce something I enjoy?  If so, then I'll trust them.

Are these people nice?  Do they want what I want out of this activity?  If so, then I'll play with them.

Is this activity worth putting any effort into, for the sake of getting better at it?  Depends on answers to the above.

That "working up to buy-in" interaction can be easy, and it can be hard.  If saying "understanding leads to madness as Mythos Lore devours Sanity" makes it easier -- and saying "if you show up and play you get to see the GM's cool plot unfold!" makes it harder -- then I'm grateful for any pointers in the right direction!

Joel, I wish I had some for you.  I hope Ron's example to me was helpful to you too.  It's given me an interesting new way to look at some stuff.  Once I actually get the damn ToC group together, I'll chime in with how the orientation speech went.

Ps,
-David

David,

David wrote:
I hope Ron's example to me was helpful to you too.  It's given me an interesting new way to look at some stuff.

Say, Ron:

I was reviewing the thread and there's a couple of things I'd like to consider exploring, but purely on a conditional, "if you think they're fruitful lines of discussion," basis. If not, then I think I'm ready to put the thread to bed (and start working on a Cascadiapunk one-sheet!).

1) Early on you mentioned,

Ron wrote:
I wrote up some of my personal takes on those instances, and then realized it was not right to do so. I wasn't there. And most importantly, dissecting out such an instance and trying to pin down why it was "wrong" or "not fun for me" in that particular case is wasted attention, when the event arose very logically from the lack of buy-in in the first place.

Hey Melinglor,

I hope you won't wrap things up just yet, as I've been going through your previous posts on this game trying to get a handle on it, seems like a shame to waste that analysis. As a preliminary thing it seems like the players worked quite well when it was just you+them+the setting. I don't have any concrete cause yet, but perhaps the rising complexity or creative conflicts were an issue.

Hmm I think I'm going to cut my losses! I haven't really got enough info from the history to make something concrete. I'll leave the stuff I've been thinking about for when I get my Universalis game up and running, which should hopefully be soon.

Sounds good. I'll look for it! Sorry I didn't get back to you, but I just haven't been able to muster any further thought on the thread. To move forward (at least for me) the issue needs recontextualizing, like Ron's doing in the Color First Character Creation Project over in the Endeavor forums. to that end, I was going to suggest that you take your observations to an Actual Play thread of your own. Which you're doing, so great! Best of luck, JW.

Peace,
-Joel