Note: this post is the first in a series: rather than pack every issue to explore into a single post, I'm going to examine the same two play instances from three distinct angles. Parte the First:

I've played my game The Dreaming Crucible (formerly Tragic Dominion) a few times now, and the results have been rewarding. but I'm still working on calibrating a few factors. I'm going to compare two games, the first playtest I ran in March, and the most recent game I played a couple weeks ago.

The game in brief: players tell the story of a troubled adolescent who works out their shit via a perilous journey through Faerie. There are three player roles: Hero/Heroine, Dark Faerie (playing the Nemesis who draws the Heroine to Faerie, with all his dread Powers), and Light Faerie (playing the helpful Allies that meet the Heroine along the way). You create these characters using Story Seeds, short, evocative descriptions that give you a starting image to flesh out. As the Heroine journeys through Faerie with her Ally, the Dark Faerie player presents Obstacles stemming from the Nemesis or his Powers. He places Dark Stones from that Element in a bag, the Heroine chooses an Element (Gift or Flaw) to meet the challenge with and spends Light Stones into the bag. She then pulls a stone blind, and if it's Light, she passes the Obstacle positively and re-places her stone; if it's Dark she passes the Obstacle negatively and the Dark Faerie re-places the stone. The Light Faerie can have the Ally intervene to face the Obstacle instead, and spend their own Light stones.

As the game progresses, you gradually run out of stones. Also when you win a stone pull you get the chance to place it on your opponent's Element, gaining some pastery over it fictionally and being able to spend from it in future stone pulls. Those two factors intersect thusly: whoever pulls the last stone from an Element gets to Transform that element, resolving its role in the story for good. When only Light stones or Dark stones remain, the Heroine completes her quest, and, respectively, returns to the real world or not.

I played the first game with Willem in the role of Heroine, Jana as Light Faerie and myself as Dark Faerie.

Josephine, an angry fatherless girl from the poor South, is caretaker of her baby sister and player of a mean fiddle. The King of Trolls sucked her sister deep within the earth, and Josephine followed her on a strange subterranean journey, with luminescent fungus, a helpful dwarf, and beings who swim through the earth as through water. Josephine rode the streams of earth following her sister floating in a stewpot, and taming and charming the wild rock-beings with her fiddling. She fought the King's Troll Soldiers with her Bloodlust Rage, her fists splattering them into chunks of rock and mud, but was exhausted in her fury and collapsed. She awoke before the King himself. He set her on a throne beside him and decreed that her rage made her a fit bride for the King of Trolls, and that he would have her baby sister prepared for her as a marriage feast. Aghast, Josephine leapt into action to rescue the baby. Just when the sisters were about to reunite, the King of Trolls intervened, and declared that he would cook the child himself--all to dote upon his new Bride, of course. Josephine confronted the king, and forced him to relent, though it broke his heart to lose his Queen. And so with her sister in hand, Josephine was ejected from the depths of the Earth. She returned to her life, still bearing the burden of baby care and ready to fight any poor fool that looks at her crosseyed...but in private fiddling to the pebbles to make them dance.

The second game featured Harry as the Heroine, Hans as the Light Faerie and me once again as the Dark Faerie (it being the easiest role for facilitating and teaching). Story-wise, it was the single most "down" game I've played so far. The ending was as grim as mechanically possible, in fact.

Megan is a girl with an alcoholic pill-popping mother and absent father, who always has to watch her baby brother while her mother lays passed out or stays out all night. Her Gift is an enchanting singing voice and her Flaw was that she follows her mom's example and hits the bottle herself.She has a supportive friend, Casey, who comes over and helps her when she gets blitzed. One night JackO' Draughts appeared and stole her friend away. So she followed them into a strange land, and met a surly dwarf who offered his aid, reluctantly, because she was under his protection and any blood shed was on his head. They pursued the blissfully oblivious Casey, encountered Jack in his many deadly or beguiling shapes, and finally caught up with them both on a hilltop gazebo, where Casey, whose lips had never before touched liquor, was lounging drinking, and Megan and dwarf succumbed and joined in, Jack filling all their cups. And so they danced and sang and drank, swimming in a stupor, as in a land far away a mother returned to a house empty but for a crying baby. And so they sit drinking and reveling to this day.

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One reason I want to compare these stories is, they used many of the same seeds (same Heroine, same Ally, different Nemesis), with very different results. In particular the Heroine Seed "A girl rocks her baby sister asleep, watching for her father while her mother sits dazed in the next room." informed both games immensely. And the stories are very different. One factor is that the Seed doesn't tell you what Gift or Flaw to give your character, so Willem and Harry were able to go in completely different directions. I'm quite pleased with how that works out. There are an infinite number of variations possible within any given Seed combo for making a unique story. I even notice in typing it out here that the Seed doesn't specify the father be missing from the girl's life, just that he's gone right now and she's watching for him. So there's greater variation than even I envisioned when writing the Seeds, which is exactly what I hoped for.

I was originally concerned that, though it works OK for an in-development demo, having so few Seeds (5 for the Hero player, 3 each for the Faerie Players) would limit or stifle players' options. So far that's not the case; players engage fine with the range of choices. It'll be especially interesting to see what happens when the same players play again a time or two--would the Seed options start to exhaust themselves then?

So the two factors I propose made this work: SENSUALITY and FLEXIBILITY. I focused on sense details for the Seeds (a technique I first picked up from In a Wicked Age) , and left things general and connotative, not prescriptive. Both those factors mean that where you take the Seed is wide open. The why of the character is completely blank. You can take Seed "An angry, misshapen dwarf, gruff in conversation and reluctant in aiding strangers", and he (she) could be "gruff and reluctant" because she's really kind and covers it with a curmudgeonly crust, or is self-interested but bears an unwanted obligation to help, or whatever. ANd the Hero Seeds are intentionally even more open. The girl watching for her father can become two-fisted, fiddlin' Josephine, or alcoholic, codependent Megan, or Sarah from the Labyrinth, or Ida from Outside Over There. Which makes me happy.

Sure, I'm all for adding more Seeds in an appendix, and including more as a bonus in any supplements I write somewhere down the line. That way people can keep playing multiple times with fresh Seeds if they wish. But I have another model for play, which is that people approach the game with the Seeds given, play it a couple of times, get really comfortable with the game principles and basic procedures...then strike out on their own. Play of the game will teach the game. And it looks like Seeds are right on track.

I welcome comments and questions, and be sure to look out for future installments. This was the easy one; with each post I'll delve into a more and more thorny play issue. So brace yourselves!

Peace,
-Joel

I played in the second game Joel mentioned. I was the ally, the gruff & misshapen dwarf, reluctant to help. Some observations of the game & of Joel's post:

1. Joel, you said, "The Light Faerie can have the ally intervene," which isn't how play feels. As the ally, you decide when to jump in, and you really have to push to get yourself in the spotlight--since the antagonism is firmly directed toward the Heroine, the story naturally flows from her trials and tribulations. I like how, fictionally (as a result of how the mechanics work), the ally really is an ally and not a co-hero. However, as the player of the ally, I sometimes felt like I wish I had a little more to do. Although--the game went long and I was getting hungry and starting to worry about getting to my next game late, so that could have impacted my concentration and thus my impetus to act in the game.

2. I think having so few Seeds isn't really a concern, both for the reasons you stated, and because, upon further play, people get to play different roles. This is something I was thinking about today: the game has 3 different fictional roles to choose from, but each fictional role is also a distinct player, what-I-am-doing-at-the-table role. The Heroine makes a Gift & Flaw and plays out a journey, the Dark Faerie sets up situation and throws obstacles at the Heroine based on its Power and nature (Nemesis), and the Light Faerie is the foil/companion and acts strongly and sharply in a few instances. Even if you exhaust the Seeds (about which more next) from one role, you can always jump into another one, which gives you new Seeds and new things to do.

3. I think what you said at the end about players, after a while, creating their own seeds is spot-on. Look what people are doing with characters & settings in S/lay w/Me--playing it enough to get a grip, then when they want new ideas they just make them up because it's (mostly) easy enough to understand what makes a character/setting (in S/lay's case; Seeds in Crucible's) work, especially after you've played enough. I think it would be fantastic for the final book to include some rules or directions on how to create your own Seeds--i.e., the SENSUALITY and FLEXIBILITY stuff.

4. I do have one real concern about the game, though I'm not sure if it's a disconnect between what I thought it would be and what it actually is, or whether it appears to be one thing and is actually another. Basically, looking back on the fiction we created, the game was one big metaphor (I'm reading all the Faerie stuff in the game as metaphor; if that's not what you intended, Joel, please correct me) for Megan's battle with teenage alcoholism, and showed us that in the end she succumbed to it in some profound way. Which is cool. But in play, it didn't feel like we were struggling with Megan's internal battles. It felt like we were in Faerie and struggling with external obstacles that the Dark Faerie threw at us. Since the Dark Faerie was "Jack O'Draughts," I suppose Megan's real issues were being brought up and dealt with (in a hazy space between metaphorical/real), but in the end I guess I'm simply saying that it didn't feel that way. At the end of the game, we looked back and had a sad story of this teen girl, and this metaphor of her failures, but contrary to what the game promises it didn't feel to me that we were playing a story about the trauma of growing up. And right now I don't know if that's a problem with the game, or with me as I was playing that day. I'll try to puzzle it out, but in the meantime, I hope that's helpful and not entirely obscure, Joel.

Here's another thought and question:

I know you, Joel, are big on Fluency Play (i.e., "the Pedagogy of Play"). Joel facilitated a 5-ish (?) session game of Perfect for Harry & myself a couple months ago, and he used a lot of Fluency play techniques in it.

So, how does Dreaming Crucible incorporate that stuff? Does it?

Wow, Hans, lotta great questions! I might split some of them into separate posts, especially the last one.

Hans wrote:
2. I think having so few Seeds isn't really a concern, both for the reasons you stated, and because, upon further play, people get to play different roles. This is something I was thinking about today: the game has 3 different fictional roles to choose from, but each fictional role is also a distinct player, what-I-am-doing-at-the-table role. The Heroine makes a Gift & Flaw and plays out a journey, the Dark Faerie sets up situation and throws obstacles at the Heroine based on its Power and nature (Nemesis), and the Light Faerie is the foil/companion and acts strongly and sharply in a few instances. Even if you exhaust the Seeds (about which more next) from one role, you can always jump into another one, which gives you new Seeds and new things to do

Hans wrote:
3. I think what you said at the end about players, after a while, creating their own seeds is spot-on. Look what people are doing with characters & settings in S/lay w/Me--playing it enough to get a grip, then when they want new ideas they just make them up because it's (mostly) easy enough to understand what makes a character/setting (in S/lay's case; Seeds in Crucible's) work, especially after you've played enough. I think it would be fantastic for the final book to include some rules or directions on how to create your own Seeds--i.e., the SENSUALITY and FLEXIBILITY stuff.

Hans, I've continued discussion of the Light Faerie role in a new thread, [urlhttp://www.indie-rpgs.com/forge/index.php?topic=29888.0]Know thy role.