We got about halfway through character creation tonight for the first-ever Mask of the Emperor game. In the next couple of days, I should have three PCs all set to go, and some idea of where to begin. This is super-exciting! Thanks to everyone I've talked to at the Forge about these ideas, and ideas for any other game of mine - I'm sure I'm not the only one who's recycled my old ideas in later projects. Huzzah! See the game (work in progress, mind you) at http://totallypinkrock.livejournal.com/194474.html.

Bringing you up to speed: MotE is a game about honor, privilege, and how you deal with an unfair society. The Godlike Emperor doles out Honor dice to characters whose actions are pleasing to Him (through PC voting at the end of each session), and the PCs have opportunities to gain and lose Honor through play. The Premise is "What do I think of the Emperor and this state of affairs?" The character roles (stretchy, porous classes), voting mechanic, and Honor rules all serve to further this discussion and draw people's opinions and ideas into play.

This is all very intentionally Narrativist, by the way; I've wracked my brain for the past two years trying to get the hang of Narrativism, only to realize that it was much simpler than it seemed. The question, "Is the Empire a just society?" popped into my head when I pitched the idea, and I've been hanging the mechanics on that essential Premise.

The players
Victor - a Spanish exchange student at our student cooperative, who's been my friend for a few months now; also quite experienced with mainstream RPGs. Speaks English far better than he thinks he does. He chose the Hairy Barbarian role, joked that it was based on him (since he's a foreigner, as he reminded us), and then picked some stats and skills. Since he chose to play a character from outside the Empire, I asked him to come up with some information about the Barbarian's homeland; he will sleep on it.
B - my romantic partner of several months and my roommate; a total newcomer to RPGs. B took a lot of warming up to get to this point; recently, we tentatively messed around with the Vision Cards and Fortune Deck from Everway, and that got B over some initial jitters about being creative in public. B asked me earlier today if it'd be cool to join me and Victor and our other player tonight for character creation, and I, surprised, said B was more than welcome. B chose the Outcast role, intrigued as zhe was by the thought of playing a disgraced nobleman.
Katie - a non-student member at the co-op (actually, Victor's the only current student among us); she and I go back several years, and she's got a good deal of (primarily D&D) role-playing experience. She caught a stomach bug and was too ill to join us tonight, but she helped me work through some early ideas about the game last summer, and is very excited about the social conflict rules and the chance to play a Dishonorable thief, the counterpart to her favorite D&D class.

There's actually kind of a triad going on: there are three players, and the game provides three roles for Dishonorable PCs: Outlaw, Outcast, and Hairy Barbarian. This should be an interesting group to work with, as two unanimous Honor votes (one per session) can turn a Dishonorable (Dh) character into an Honorable one (after one vote, you're at zero-Honor, a vulnerable spot to be in), and the players might decide they want to try to clean up their reputations and become model citizens, after all.

Okay, actual play: some noteworthy events were 1) reading rough drafts of the first half of character creation, while I was on hand to explain and elaborate, 2) Victor pointing out another way to do the point-buy for the stats, and 3) rolling dice to simulate each kind of conflict, with higher and lower stakes.

I was able, thanks to B, to print out a four-page document explaining some of character creation, and we spent a while sitting in silence after an awkward-feeling introduction from me about Honorable, Dh, and Aloof character status. They liked the writing style of the intro, and then spent a long time reading descriptions and getting a feel for the information. After a few questions, Victor noted that my stat system, "10 points, four stats to put them in, and if you leave a stat at zero, you get an extra point", could be reworded as "14 points, four stats to put them in, but the first point in a stat costs two points".

It was really exciting when B and Victor settled on roles they were interested in, and picked out names without alerting me to this; that was a nice little "yeah, this is my character now" touch. Shortly, we had mechanics done, and we'll be filling in details for B's Fallen House and Victor's Homeland between now and the next meet-up.

The best part was definitely the example dice-rolling: B is a very visual learner, rather than verbal/textual, so I gave an example of a soldier and an ogre-bushi duking it out in the underworld. Resolution always follows Stat+Skill+Honor (onlookers determine whether or not Honor works, btw), but I decided I would leave Honor out of the picture for now. I demonstrated the first-tier risk level of conflict, or a Simple Challenge, where each round takes away a die from the dice pool of the loser. These dice return at the end of the Challenge, but this helps establish in the narrative who came out on top, and have a greater feeling of "settling something" to plink away thus than simply rolling once and counting successes. B played the soldier, abandoned by his lord in the Nether Realm, and I played the fierce but disciplined ogre-bushi. We did a Strength+Banditry Simple Challenge to start, I demonstrated the Interrupt system to switch it over to a Self-Discipline+Dueling Simple Challenge, and the soldier pressed the attack, bloodlessly, until the ogre relented, bowing to his worthier adversary.

This example, using dice, did a lot for B to get a hang of what Challenges looked like, and it gave Victor a chance to skip ahead in his reading and see how the dice pool system worked, which he approved of. Good times!

Afterwards, B and I had a chat about making sure this game didn't invade too much into our general lives, which was a good player/GM boundary to set, and I went over B's character sheet, coming up with examples of how to use different stat/skill combos for very different results in play. I left zhe with the maxim of "You say what you're hoping to accomplish, and I'll help you express that through the rules", which I think really set the tone for a player-empowered game.

Actually, on a related note, Victor asked me about the To the Death! Challenge rules: he was concerned about the fact that PCs can only die with the expressed permission of their players, and was worried that you could just go right up and spit in the Emperor's face if you wanted to, and not die. I replied that yes, he could, but if he was worried about credibility, wouldn't it be more dramatic for that PC to be publicly tortured and left out in the elements as an example to all, which would of course give an opportunity for his pals to spring him. This seemed to give him some ideas, and let his concern give way to intrigue. Before we wrapped up, he said, "What if my character's number one goal is to kill the Emperor?" I laughed out loud and patted him on the back, and said, "My friend, that is a Hell of a goal for your character! Go for it. Why not?" I hope that's the other maxim for our play-testing: Why not?

More to come. Any thoughts, ideas, or probing questions are greatly appreciated!

- Abby

Hi Abby

I noticed that rule about PCs dying only with player permission and the discussion that ensued with Victor. If I may be so bold, I think you two are seeing it somehow backwards. If such a dramatic event happens in actual play, it's because that's how the player wants his character to die, not because the player wants to see you come up with some absurd justification of why the character doesn't die after all (in my experience, players only do that when they're pissed off by the GM arbitrarily preserving characters in some specific state just in order to be able to continue the scenario, effectively rendering player input null). You most probably wrote that rule to guarantee your players that you won't be killing their characters by accident or by sadistic needs for your scenario, right? Spitting on an Emperor is not an accident. See how making your position clear about when characters die actually gives the players a great deal of (welcome) responsibility for their actions and a guarantee that when they say something it will matter?

I'm very interested in seeing if Victor's character will spit in the Emperor's face, just because of that rule! And then, by all means, do kill him as the Emperor would have it... except of course if the Hairy Barbarian achieved a position where he can do so safely. Savoury in both cases!

Hey, Chris! Thanks for reminding me how I first looked at this rule. When Victor and I spoke, I completely forgot to say, "But what if you wanted to die, and that's how you went about it?" Brilliant! Yes - the point is not to cheat death; the point is to say "I will die for something meaningful."

Katie and Victor and I had a session tonight that lasted about 90 minutes. In brief, here is the play-story:
- A mummers' troupe has come to the city, and Lady Minomoto has brought her children, the governess, two soldiers, and a Herald (her husband's favorite servant/slave) to watch the show.
- Katie's Outcast thief/mummer with dwarfism starts the game trailing after Victor's Herald/secret assassin, looking to rob him.
- The dwarf makes off with the money, but not without the Herald noticing. He tails her back to the temporary stage, where the show is still in progress. Without skipping a beat, the dwarf stashes the money in her clothes, walks right up onto stage during the fire-twirler act, and joins in. When the gypsy ribbon-dancers come on next, the dwarf slips out of view, but not before the Herald alerts his mistress's guards to what's going on.
- They walk inside an ancestor-shrine on the corner to look for the thief, double back to the wagon, and demand that the actors backstage let them in to look for the thief. The dwarf, meanwhile, has crawled into a hidden compartment used by the troupe's stage magician for storing doves, so her hidey-hole has a lot of bird crap and it smells really terrible. Ick!
- The actors see the crest of the powerful Minomoto clan on the Herald's scalp (tattooed there, as it happens), so they are respectful, but refuse to let them search the wagon without a city guardsman accompanying. The Herald sends for an officer of the guard, while Lady Minomoto chides him for being so dreadfully serious.

And now, what happened around the table: Victor and I were very pumped up about starting tonight; Katie had her Kicker ready, I explained them to Victor, and I was delighted to get a lot more scene-framing from my players than I expected. Victor was cool with being pick-pocketed, as his secret assassin status is unknown to the character at this time, so he's just babysitting his Lord and Master's family at the market.

My players went to the hilt with their concepts! Victor got the hang of affectations and the unclear social status of Heralds (they are seen as an extension of their masters, and not exactly human), while Katie kept saying, "This sounds silly, but..." inevitably followed by awesome, dramatic ideas (like walking right up on stage to hide in plain sight from your mark, or stuffing yourself into a hidden compartment used by a magician). Victor joked that he knew the rules better than I did, and Katie commented that she had a ton of dice and never really lost. We all had a blast, and we're playing again on Saturday. The only thing like a complaint that I heard was Victor's suggestion that we could use another player, to get more energy going in the room; most of the folks at our cooperative, unfortunately, aren't RPers, at least nobody we like ^_^ but I may have a possible third player around here somewhere.

Some things that came up: ties - with only six-sided dice, ties came up three times tonight. I really like six-sided dice, but I think I could just change what happens next, and leave the dice as they are, for fun. My idea: a tie on an Interrupt leads straight to a Simple Challenge, which goes until a winner emerges in the conflict.
Teaming up - at one point, the Herald and a household guard were both looking for the pickpocket, and I ruled at the time that they should just push their dice pools together. This seemed to work fine, and it was an idea I'd been bouncing around but hadn't put on paper yet. For Victor, it seemed to be missing a bonus or some such that he was looking for, but he was OK with my answer.
Failure - I get the feeling that Interrupts and changing the pools used for the ensuing Challenge are going to come up a lot; Katie consistently had huge dice pools, since she was a thief doing thiefy things, while Victor was a more social character who seemed to be struggling a bit with bad dice rolls and with finding uses for his Propriety (manipulation through rhetoric) skill. I imagine that in court or in some sort of organization, he'd be more powerful, while Katie's social skills are much weaker, aside from Face (manipulation through emotional connection, considered somewhat vulgar).
Non-Honorable characters - the Outcast is Dishonorable and the Herald is Aloof; I need to think about how to keep the honor-point-based Premise nice and relevant if the characters have foresworn access to the Emperor's favor.
Sadly, I don't have public hosting for my rulebook yet; PM me and I'll get your email address so you can view my Google Documents file for the Mask rules.

- Abby

In case folks don't notice it, check my signature line for the URL you need to check out the basic rules.

Sounds like you guys had a ball. I'm curious though what was B's disgraced noble doing during that session, or was zhe not able to attend?

After a lot of discussion, B decided that roleplaying games were not hir thing. I even suggested looking into Gamism, as it requires the sort of creativity that zhe is comfortable with - strategizing and tactics and such, rather than artistic improvisation or the like. But we still play Warcraft cards together, so we can game with one another, at least ^_^

We play again tomorrow, and, having suggested my new Honor vote/temp. Honor dice ideas to Victor, we'll go forward with a retroactive vote for last session. That will be a good opportunity to more clearly define what folks are voting on, exactly - if it happens every time, and not every session involves tales of derring-do, I suppose that acting in accordance with Imperial values will have to also count for these purposes.

I've bitten the bullet and started a blog at Blogspot. Check out the rules for MotE as I upload them here: http://abbysgamerbasement.blogspot.com/

- Abby