I was talking about tSoY tonight with someone and the subject of ascension came up.

Has anyone ever ascended in a game you've run/played in?
If so, how many game sessions did it take?
How often does it happen in games you've played?
How hard is it to do in actual play?
What happened afterwards?

I'm curious how frequently this happens.  Tell me about your experiences.

Rich Rogers
Canon Puncture Show
www.canonpuncture.com

I've run two campaigns of tSoY. In both campaigns, a character ascended.

It happened at about the 8-10 session mark, at around the natural climax of the campaign.

It's fairly easy to do in actual play. Just advance to grand master, then, when the time is right, get everybody to dump their gift dice on you. Doing that makes the ascension feel like something everybody has a hand in, not just one person.

Afterword, the player did some awesome stuff which wrapped up the campaigns loose ends, and then the game ended.Because the player narrates the consequences of their ascending action, it's usually fairly awesome stuff. 

The ascension worked as a marker to everybody playing that, 'hey, maybe it's time to wrap stuff up'.

I've seen Transcendence in one of my play-by-post games, two times, at one time in the middle of the game where a character tried the system and wanted to change characters, the other time at the culminating climax of the game.

I've had few Transcendences in real play. I have the feeling that I'm forgetting something, but I only remember one from our Naruto campaign: it took something like five sessions, didn't feel rushed, and was used by the player to put to rest the various interpersonal relations the character had in the campaign. I seem to remember that we entertained the idea of bringing the character back as a jonin (a higher-rank ninja), but the campaign didn't last that long.

Also, yesterday I had a first: player characters don't die easily in Solar System, but we finally managed to kill one particularly mulish Maldorian warlord after an extensive prison fiction sequence. He froze to death after another character stole his blanket, actually. The player even demanded to become an elf, but a failed Resist (R) check sank that plan as well. Death is the great anti-Transcendence in Solar System.

Eero: That was an extended conflict, right? I'd be very interested in the details.

Actually, an interesting detail was that it was not an extended conflict that killed the character in question. Rather, it was his inability to conflict at all - he had a completely filled Harm track and totally empty Pools, so he couldn't pay the surcharge for conflicting as broken. This left him to the mercies of his prison-mates. The situation was quite fitting in that the character was something of an asshole who just couldn't hack it without the benefits of rank he'd grown accustomed to. He tried to get refreshment scenes, but as the inmates hated him and he didn't survive long enough to seek relationships with the guards, his Pools ran out. A very grim spiral, that.