There is this moment in time. An agonizing moment stretched into an eternity when all you can do is wait and watch. When everything is going to shit and you're a helpless bystander.

It's when you've just set up a beautiful complication -- one that you're bound to win because you spent 3/4 of your Coins getting to it. And you're even proud of it. It's full of flavor and rich with possibility. And then the other players do that thing... Three (or seven) of them can match and beat your Coin outlay with trivial ease. And when the dice fall and, of course, you lose the complication, you're just waiting to see how the other players are going to screw up everything you spent those Coins to bring about.

Face to face, it might really be an agonizing few seconds. Online...who knows? 24 hours is easy to imagine. More would be reasonable. Either way, it's just a moment in the story. And either way, it's good. Right now, as I type, I'm in this position. Over here it's happening to me.

And when time re-engages and the story moves on, it turns out that what they had in their minds is really better than what I would have come up with anyway. It's always that way. It's really the whole point. The reason that I want to play more Universalis is that the stories we tell together through The Coin are better than the ones I'd tell alone. And every time I get to sit through that "moment in time" I'm reminded of why I'm doing this.

Chris

(who really didn't mean this to be quite the gush that it turned into)

Gush away my friend...:-)

This is the reason I refer to the Pregnant Pope example on my website so frequently. It was the first time that I experienced the moment you describe to that extent.

I'd had the very same feeling just a day prior... my characters were giving speeches, shouting defiance... it was glorious.

Then another player's input pulled the rug out completely! (Yes, it was Christopher and his character Patli Itztli that threw my plans aside). After a brief mental scramble (what the heck do we do now?), we drew the camera in, found a new dispute (and some new characters to speak in it), and we're off again.

Very very cool. It turned a very predictable plot point (captain rallies the crew to repel the boarding party, the pirates are dumb enough to attack openly, the noble crew is victorious) on its head. And made our story better, by far, than the path I would have followed alone.