A little Background
I'm doing revisions of the Path of Journeys, one of the Ashcan Front games from 2007. The original impetus for the game was a combination of A) frustrations with how my motivations/desires were undermining my creative efficacy and B) my way of coming to terms with a religious title I'd recently been appointed to in my local community (May King for a local neopagan group with a semi-active population of about 150-175; picture prom king but with religious pretensions and plenty of opportunities to be subjected to the delusions of others... not to mention your own delusions). It's taken about two years, but I think my understanding of both A and B have matured enough that I feel confident of being able to go back and make a solid revision. I'm jazzed about trying to get it ready for an actual finished release.

I've been running two weekly games with short story-arcs to try out some mechanical tweaks with moderate success- enough that most sessions have ended with players excited about their characters (awesome!) and the story (sweet!), and talking about how they hope to run the story for a long time.

The Game Last Night: Social Level
The problems tonight began on a purely social level. The last story arc had 9 players and we'd split the group in two, each playing on different nights (fortunately, my other playtest group had just disbanded when the alpha player and his wife moved out of state, so I was still only going to be leading two sessions a week). During the first fifteen minutes, the alpha player in this group made reference to how this was the 'B' group, and his girlfriend made reference to how they'd been considering not coming tonight. This set the tone fairly quickly, and I immediately knew the playtest would be lost if I wasn't able to manipulate the social level (I refuse to get players to grudgingly play something, but I'm not above easing them into something they would have otherwise dismissed).

I wasn't able to. It was total social failure.

The Game Last Night: Actual Play
Because the primary concern of PoJ is to deal with questions of motivations and responsibility, the thematic qualities have been far more important than any kind of definitive setting ("here are the ingredients for setting and conflict- add your preferred spices"). Each new game I've ran has started with everyone sitting around and creating the setting, which plays an important part in the mechanics of the game. The inherent antagonism in the social dynamics quickly mucked up the development process, and were spiced with complaints about how it wasn't DnD  (at one point I decided the only way I could save the evening was to print off some DnD character sheets, which prompted complaints that they were 3.5 instead of 4.0).

I spent some time trudging through it- I'd been planning on using the system to create an analog of DnD with a standard fantasy trope setting and related conflicts for this group anyway, so I was hoping things would smooth out as we entered familiar territories. Not so much. We got through the first part of character creation, but stalled in character motivations (another red flag for me was when the lesbian player made a character with the motivation "I want penis" and then said "Man, I *already* hate my character!"... only partially in jest). As expected from the antagonism in the social dynamics, the vast creative freedom presented was used by the group to meet their needs- which largely revolved around expressing discontent.

I stopped the recorder at an hour and ten minutes and told the group "Look, this just isn't working. We're not in a mindset to play tonight and I need to focus my creative energies on developing this system- I'm not in a place where I can run a d20 game right now. This game isn't meeting your needs as players, so we're going to call it an evening. It's early enough you guys can go catch a movie or something."

The Lesson for the Night
It wouldn't have helped tonight, considering the social dynamics, but one of the things that the game expressed was that I should develop some pre-packaged conflicts and settings. A significant part of a cohesive game is having creative buy-in from the players. I've been lucky enough with the other groups that they've trusted me enough from the beginning and buy-in hasn't been a problem. In last night's situation, wariness of the creative buy-in was an exacerbating factor in the social antagonism, but I can imagine groups where the wariness of the buy-in motivates social antagonism. I need to be better prepared for this and have some strong introductory samples.

This was particularly poignant since I've seen the players in last night's group enjoy sessions that were very close to the kind of session that I'm trying to model with PoJ, but system wariness helped fuel the social antagonism which in turn disrupted the creative process that the system is built on; the mechanical sandbox turned into a litterbox.

Will limiting the creative process cause the social antagonism to go away, or remove the system wariness? Nah. Worst case scenario, it'll just cover up the discontent and no one will be satisfied. Best case scenario, though, it'll keep the process from being a vicious cycle (i.e. disruption of creative process proves validity of system wariness, rinse and repeat). Strong samples will also make it a little clearer what kind of creative buy-in is being asked, and how the buy-in is expressed in the mechanics, which will either undermine system wariness or validate it.

The Next Step
For my next explicitly introductory session of PoJ, I'm going to take an iconic setting or two for players to choose from and make several characters, then chop them up into their base components and let players make their characters ala carte style by cherry picking motivations, skills, and traits. Hopefully this will give enough freedom to be engaging but give enough structure that players can be eased into system familiarity (instead of being stuck in system wariness).

Also, it makes me want to be snarky and make a partial parody, partial fun time sub-game called "The Path of Killing Things and Taking Their Stuff."

Wow, ouch. How do you know these people?

Hi Ram!

Oy, veh. And people objected years ago when we arrived at the idea, here, that everything about role-playing functionality is a subset of social functionality among the people involved.

I stopped the recorder at an hour and ten minutes and told the group "Look, this just isn't working. We're not in a mindset to play tonight and I need to focus my creative energies on developing this system- I'm not in a place where I can run a d20 game right now. This game isn't meeting your needs as players, so we're going to call it an evening. It's early enough you guys can go catch a movie or something."

The Next Step

For my next explicitly introductory session of PoJ, I'm going to take an iconic setting or two for players to choose from and make several characters, then chop them up into their base components and let players make their characters ala carte style by cherry picking motivations, skills, and traits. Hopefully this will give enough freedom to be engaging but give enough structure that players can be eased into system familiarity (instead of being stuck in system wariness).

[center]Social Component and System Wariness[/center]

Wow, ouch. How do you know these people?

That leads me to pose the question, who then is the target audience for the game? Based on your post alone, which granted was not written toward that topic, I can infer that successful play so far has been among people who trusted you as a person.

I did this with some success in early demos of Sorcerer, and I think it will work well with The Path of Journeys. Such play definitely doesn't showcase the game as a whole, though, which is something I decided to live with in those demos.

That leads me to pose the question, who then is the target audience for the game?

1) The May Court is a remarkably useful iconographic summary of consequential social roles. It's not an "attitude" or psychological thing, nor is it metaphysical in the sense of the Tarot. Most importantly, it is dynamic - the profiles do not shut down decision-making during role-playing, but rather charge it up. (2) The "path" of character transformation is not a one-way ticket to betterness but rather a moral issue of its own; the increased effectiveness combined with the decreased human nuance means a player must think about whether he or she wants the character to improve. (3) The mechanics of losing conflicts, upon the dice of Essential Skills, translates into a kind of raw brutality for the in-game consequences which I really enjoy seeing in play, for physical, social, and psychological effects alike.

The more I play The Path of Journeys, the more I like the application that the May Court is neither a designated within-setting group, nor necessarily even an allied group at all. I've been enjoying play in which player-characters may be found on all sides (and all perspectives within a side) of an in-setting conflict, and in which their decisions and conflict outcomes change the circumstances for everyone else's conflicts. The settings we've been using are usually borders, i.e., communities defined by the meeting and interaction of social institutions, and in which widely-believed stereotypes of Them and Us are not validated.

Hey Ram,

Doplegager wrote:

The more I play The Path of Journeys, the more I like the application that the May Court is neither a designated within-setting group, nor necessarily even an allied group at all. I've been enjoying play in which player-characters may be found on all sides (and all perspectives within a side) of an in-setting conflict, and in which their decisions and conflict outcomes change the circumstances for everyone else's conflicts. The settings we've been using are usually borders, i.e., communities defined by the meeting and interaction of social institutions, and in which widely-believed stereotypes of Them and Us are not validated.

That's entirely fitting- I'm glad you brought it up explicitly. Part of the reason for the May Court is that it's tied with the symbolic qualities of Spring, which dance around the processes of self-discovery and self-invention. It's the time when the youth begin defining who they are, what they care about, and what they do. That the setting should be a continued reflection of that theme is a natural extension... and one I hadn't consciously thought of previously... spring heroes for communities in their spring phase makes sense. Spring heroes in a summer, fall, or winter community are all possible, but would have a different feel- it'd be less about growth and discovery and more about the role of growth and discovery in relation to something else.

[center]Group Cohesion[/center]

Maybe the Sons of Liberty advance society, and maybe they don't, but a group of characters who maybe don't ever find a shared purpose is one too many maybe for me. I already have that in spades.

I have to say, the border communities thing doesn't grab me at all, not the way the ashcan text's focus on "growth communities" does.