The Forge Archives

I ran a BW one-shot for my roleplayers meetup group tonight. It went very smoothly and was a lot of fun. I've been doing fairly intensive prep for the last three weeks, and I'm glad to have delivered it.

Everyone really liked the story and the system. I'm glad of that. I had reservations about teaching such a crunchy game. One thing that helped was to use a one-page rules summary. This accomplished two things: (1) writing capsule versions and (2) making a short list of mechanics targets for play.

This was a four-hour event with five players, total, eventually. I used pre-generated characters, each with its own loose events progression. One member I'd been hoping to see didn't show, but another who'd said maybe actually made it. A quarter of the way through, a member called the venue to apologize for not being able to attend; he hadn't RSVP'ed, so no big. Halfway through, he showed up. His son also played, briefly, but was sabotaged by attentional demands.

After briefly reviewing the five mechanics I had targeted on the one-page (i.e. tests, advancement, Artha, combat and an authorship mechanic, plugged in), I let the players take some minutes to read through the characters' BIT's. I had a merchant ship captain, a village manor knight, his squire, a well-off plowman and a dairy maid. They chose the knight, squire and ship's captain. (Tanner, Chris' son, got in one scene with the plowman.) Confidentially, the dairy maid had the best story leads.

I chose to constrain the game world to the race of men. I also elected not to use any monsters or any magic. The exception was an insurrectionist wizard whose band of raiders were to sack the village of Jasop. We never got that far, though. (This approach is typical of my aesthetic, which I describe as thematic purism.)

Grease pencils are the way to go. I'd tried using fine-tipped, erasable markers, but forget it; it's China markers, or bust. We only had two combat scenes. And I found myself following Luke's advice, to make a few rolls and then proceed to the script.

I found myself blinking a few times, trying to figure out which skill to use to resolve social conflicts. I ended up using Persuasion and Intimidation a lot. Those were good for breaking the advancement mechanic to open skills. Chris used Captain DeBargo's Bureaucracy once to counter exorbitant harbor fees.

I had a number of productive, out-of-game exchanges with one player, Frank. We quickly adopted terms like "the player, Frank" and "the character, Sir Waystead"--say that out loud for a big laugh:) Totally unintentional; I swear--to denote whom we were addressing. At one point, I walked the player, Frank, through the sequence of scenes that established Minister Veirrus as a co-conspirator to Rowan the Damned. Then he got it.

They quickly accelerated their character portrayal and pursuit of character goals, creating showers of Artha, which they spent freely, to their greatest advantage, given the particulars of the test. It was really stunning to experience how the flow of Artha fed play.

Vs. tests to resolve contested movement was so slick. It's just .. sexy. I'm particularly excited about how well this went and how sharply it settles combat distance. I really think BW is ahead of the curve in its approach to movement; and this dynamic used to frustrate me the most. Revised edition will reveal Luke Crane's final word on the matter, but for now, the variant I'm using really sings.

There was very little dead-end gamer think at the table. There were a couple of IC duets between Chris (DeBargo) and Frank (Waystead) that suffered to make a point, but those were exceptions. Mostly, everyone was highly invested in their character's concept and focusing their actions on delivering or advancing it through the story.

One player, Ron, who played Thom Farley, squire to Sir Waystead, just dove into martial moves. To me, those are some of the most mechanically complex, both in concept and implementation. (I find this to be the general case with crunchy, task-based systems.) But Ron only thought as far forward as what he wanted to do, and was, therefore, fearless. I complimented him on taking them on, and he said, "They don't seem hard at all, to me." So either I'm great at explaining things or it's just my phantom fear.

I give good name soup, and that wash was like stones in their boots, dragging them deeper into the world. e.g. Ron asked, "Who's Jenna Perive?" I said, "She's Thom's sweetheart. Her uncle, Knobbs, a village swineherd, recently passed and left an inheritance to his son, Barry. You, he and Jerrod Reiner--the miller's son and your childhood friend--go drinking sometimes."

I'm surprised how non-lethal this event was. The first scuffle was resolved when Thom Farley ran away. The second combat conflict started out as a chase on horseback. (Don't these examples just sheen with vibrance of movement?) Thom rode up alongside her, made a Lock and dragged her off her mount. While he slowed his mount and turned, Sir Waystead caught up and pummeled the lassie into submission as she sought to stand. Here, I sprinkled in a little conflict resolution, using the Strike action as a place-holder.

Last night, I was sweating bullets, trying to figure out how to drive story creation. Then I read a retort to a Forge thread on a member's design method. It said something like, don't presume another's inner experience, and related LeGuin's writing method: follow the characters as they create story. I found this to be really inspirational. In the past, there's always been some seed or spark that begins my process, and it carries me in a rush. Well, at 10pm last night, it still hadn't hit! Then, I got the idea to write a progression of events that weren't so much dependent as they were chained by a route of vocation. Et voi la; stuff just started pouring out. And I was briefly tortured by the thought that that material could become a cruel yolk to my players, but the immense relief of having something, if only to ignore it, allowed me to collapse and get some sleep.

As it worked out, an experienced awareness, on my part, of players falling out of the zone, a discipline of qualifying disconnection through targeted questions and a pre-planned mechanic to express authorial breakthroughs all worked together to allow play to move where the players secretly wished it would.

The best example is when Frank (Waystead) grew distracted during the near mugging of Squire Farley. I asked him, "Is there something you want Waystead to be doing?" He described a scene in which he could denounce Minister Veirrus before Baron Ephalous, but he was concerned about the consequences and doubted that his word would be taken highest. "If there were only something undeniable I could present .." I told him I loved that scene and that we had to do it. We used the authorship mechanic to establish the resource he needed and his approach to obtain it. The event ended with this scene, which, if I'd been a little more cognizant of the BW skills list, I would have made some kind of vs. test; but we got carried away with the drama and just role-played it. It was intense.