Topic: [WGP] Questions
Started by: Bret Gillan
Started on: 8/9/2010
Board: Incarnadine Press
On 8/9/2010 at 12:53pm, Bret Gillan wrote:
[WGP] Questions
Hi! I've played a few sessions of With Great Power and I have some quick questions.
Is the beginning of a Conflict Scene the only time you discard your hand down to a maximum hand size?
Is it legal to have scenes that don't seem to have any conflict in them so there is no need for stakes-setting and whatnot? Ex: Shade primes her Aspect: Being a Mother. She introduces her daughter in the scene who is having a playdate with a friend. There doesn't seem to be any confict. Do I as the GM push the scene towards a conflict? Do we continue to play until one arises?
Thanks!
On 8/9/2010 at 3:37pm, Ron Edwards wrote:
Re: [WGP] Questions
Hi Bret,
I can provide answers based on my own understanding, but Mike is obviously the authority. I'm hoping for corrections if I get them wrong.
1. I think you are correct that discarding down to seven cards occurs only at the beginning of a conflict. It may be misleading to speak of a maximum hand size, because that implies that later events, during the conflict, cannot result in a bigger hand size. I think if that were to happen, having more than seven is legal. My current understanding is that seven cards is the starting hand size for a conflict, not the maximum to be applied during the entire conflict.
2. I think that Enrichment scenes must provide Suffering in their content or else the scene is not worth changing the Suffering status of the Aspect. That includes Priming, which is perhaps best understood as being brought to our attention, as an audience, as something that is a source of Suffering in the character's life.
If you want a quiet scene like what you're describing, I think either this game isn't going to provide it for you, or that it might be part one of a longer scene, whose second part would focus on the increased Suffering.
You might consider that choosing Being a Mother as an Aspect for play strikes me as a very gutsy, potentially horrible choice. By definition, the character's status as a mother is at risk, with every imaginable way for that to happen now being demanded in play. Demanded, not merely possible. You're literally telling the GM to kill the child or to do something so awful to the child, or to the mother-child relationship, that he or she might as well be killed.
I'm perhaps too cowardly for such a move; my preference would be to keep "I'm a mother" on the Scratch Pad. That way I could have events like you're describing as part of scenes, but with the Suffering in those scenes being about something else. But if you really want to have it be an Aspect, then yes, it must suffer in the fiction whenever you or anyone else increases its Suffering in game mechanics terms.
I don't know if you're following the Actual Play thread, but as we noted there, Aspects can be dramatically hard even when merely Primed or Risked. None of the examples highlight this point, but it does follow from the rules. Literally killing the child even at that early point is fully legal, because the only constraint is that the Aspect can be restored to its original state through later events.
Best, Ron
On 8/10/2010 at 4:32pm, Bret Gillan wrote:
RE: Re: [WGP] Questions
This does help, thank you.
With regards to "Being a mother" being an Aspect, the way rules stated it was that Being a Mother being wouldn't be drastically affected unless it was the Strife Aspect (and its not). Even so, I don't think the Devastation or Transformation of the Aspect needs to be as harrowing as al that. Possibilities could be the child being taken into custody by the other parent, amnesia causing the character to forget their child, their child being abducted and taken into another dimension and when she finds her child time has flowed differently so she is all grown up and no longer remembers her mother and is now a supervillain, etc.
On 8/11/2010 at 3:58pm, Ron Edwards wrote:
RE: Re: [WGP] Questions
Hi Bret,
All that's true, but I'm a savage and ruthless WGP GM, so I wanted to make it clear here that such extreme content is fully legal by the rules.
(And Michael, I should be up-front with you that I at least suspect that you have sometimes softballed players in your history with the game. I'm willing to be corrected on this; it's an unseemly suspicion only.)
The notion that non-Strife Aspects wouldn't be drastically affected by narration seems odd to me. They can be Devastated, certainly, in rules terms, and although that means they can "bounce back" in changed form at the end of the story, the available range for such changes is very wide. Can you point me to the text you're referring to?
Best, Ron
On 8/12/2010 at 1:21pm, Bret Gillan wrote:
RE: Re: [WGP] Questions
I told my player about this post and she kind of grinned, so I guess killing the child is not off the table.
And I am misremembering the rules. It says if you don't want to risk something, don't put it on the character sheet. You can still risk things if they're not the Strife Aspect, they're just not the focus of the villainous plot. My mistake.
On 8/15/2010 at 6:55pm, James_Nostack wrote:
RE: Re: [WGP] Questions
I think that Enrichment scenes must provide Suffering in their content or else the scene is not worth changing the Suffering status of the Aspect. That includes Priming, which is perhaps best understood as being brought to our attention, as an audience, as something that is a source of Suffering in the character's life.
If you want a quiet scene like what you're describing, I think either this game isn't going to provide it for you, or that it might be part one of a longer scene, whose second part would focus on the increased Suffering.
That isn't how we've played in the past, though I'm not 100% sure we're doing it right. From the rule book, page 22:
Any scene that is not a conflict scene may be an enrichment scene.
That "may" seems to indicate that there are Conflict Scenes, and Enrichment Scenes are one type of non-Conflict Scene. By implication there are other types of scenes out there too, though they're not described in the rule book. One example might be an Expository Scene, corresponding to those awesome cutaway diagrams of the Headquarters, weird text pages that punctuated the old "Giant-Sized __________" comics in the early 70's, and the flashback/montage page recapping a character's recent history, which would be sort of like the Swapping Back Issues rule in WGP. (The idea of an Advertisement Scene strikes me as pretty funny, especially if in service of Hostess Fruit Pies.
But anyway.
If you're having an Enrichment scene, by definition you've got to either raise or lower the suffering of one of your Aspects. Theoretically this also leads to a miniature conflict involving stakes, because the hero wants the scene to end in one way, and "the opposition" wants it to end in another way. But the dispute doesn't necessarily involve the Aspect that was shifted around earlier. All that matters is that the shift in the Aspect's suffering is somehow highlighted during the scene.
(Example: Peter Parker rushes home to check on Aunt May's health problems, thereby relieving some of the stress on that relationship. When he gets there, Aunt May's fine, but she's hassling him into dating Mrs. Watson's niece. The miniature conflict becomes, can Peter avoid this blind date or not?)
Whether an Enrichment scene simply must have a miniature conflict is kind of an open question. We've played it where the player basically didn't care how the scene ended, or there wasn't an easily identified opposition, or there just wasn't much of anything up for grabs in that scene. In those rare situations, we just said "screw it" and went to the next scene.
I interpret this as something like a "bob" in Sorcerer, where we're just watching the hero do his or her thing and savoring the moment, maybe building a sub-plot or referencing some beloved part of the Scratch Pad. Done sparingly, it didn't seem to hurt anything.
All that's true, but I'm a savage and ruthless WGP GM, so I wanted to make it clear here that such extreme content is fully legal by the rules.
This ties into the sub-discussion we were having in the Actual Play thread. I suspect that Ron might be referring to killing the child as short-hand for "do real bad things to that aspect," but still:
1. Aesthetically, directly harming the child is pretty much the least creative thing you can do with that material. Something like the father/daughter relationship in Synechdoche, New York seems far more fucked-up and knife-twisty. Aim carefully, and even a light kick to the balls is enough.
2. From a practical GM'ing point of view: you kill the kid the moment she's primed. WTF do you do next? Either for the next four stages until Devastation, or heaven help you, through the next nine stages until Transformation? Past some threshold, the suffering becomes either repetitive or comical.
3. From a rules perspective, if the Aspect gets Redeemed, it's back in the pink of health. But under some circumstances, the audience could feel so revolted and disgusted by the aspect's X-TREEM!!! suffering that the aspect is pretty much ruined anyway, regardless of the player's victory.
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