This is the second in a series, examining different aspects of the same two play instances. The first, addressing the use of Seeds, is here. I'll reproduce the rules explanation and play summaries:

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. I'm looking primarily at A) the spread of narrative outcomes and how the numbers and rules-interactions push toward that, and B) the particular function of the three player roles and how to facilitate and support players in them.

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 Jack O' 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 issue with the game is that the roles are uneven--there's not as much for the Light Faerie to do. Through the Ally the LF player is a full participant in the plain ol' roleplaying side of things, describing actions, speaking in character, and such--but they have limited impact on the resolution of the story. It's a supporting role--it's really the Hero's story, and the Ally helps him on his way and provides Color, but isn't really a protagonist--any issues the Ally wrestles with are in service to the Hero's struggle.

(Interesting side note--in the case of the first game the Light Faerie's relative non-involvement was a bonus: Jana was tired and unable to fully engage with the game, so playing as LF allowed her to participate on a more casual level, and opt out (she pulled all her stones early and Transformed her Ally amicably) and go to bed when she was tapped out. But that's not the normal situation, certainly. I want the default to be total engagement.)

In the second game, Hans said he enjoyed himself but felt like it was hard to engage or have input. In the previous thread, Hans elaborated:

Hans wrote: 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.

Wow.  Mind-link, man.  As I was reading your intro, I was thinking, "Huh, doesn't sound like there's much for the LF to do."  And as I was reading the part where you said "Not much for the LF to do," I was thinking, "You do need a third player for a good Ally dynamic, so how about giving that third player more setting authority?"

Do you have a preference about what type of creativity is demanded from which players?  Would you rather that the burden of GM-ish duties be concentrated in one person (only need to talk one person into the hard job!) or spread across two people (the hard job is less hard!)?

If you have any way to note a moment of "now some more setting needs to get made up" in play, you could flip a coin to determine who makes it up.  The rule could then be that the LF player describes something that is either helpful or aesthetically pleasing, while the DF player describes something that is either the next Obstacle or is just unsettling.

Or, if you wanted to present Faerie as a place that tends to seem nice at first, you could always have the LF set the scene and then the DF introduce the Obstacle.

I am a little fuzzy on how Element-claiming impacts play, but another option would be to have the LF player engaged in a game of "spend resources to most effectively turn Dark Elements into Light Elements."  I'm not sure what the current payoff is for that, though.

Hey Joel,

Sorry it took me so long to get in on this thread. I want to give you good advice about the Light Faerie, but really I feel like I need to play more. That the LF doesn't have enough to do is really more of a hunch than an established fact in my mind. I'd actually like to play again as the LF with this issue in mind and see how I feel afterward.