BESW's Spoil-Lair

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nitsua60

1:48 AM

@BESW hiya

BESW

yawp!

nitsua60

Here come some first reactions, completely unfiltered. I think there are six or seven--can I just throw them all out there then we can discuss?

BESW

Sounds good.

nitsua60

Cool.

1. Thank you for capitalizing defined terms. It makes the grognard in me happy. It also made me feel--stepping into a thoroughly-unknown game--like there was someone there leadingme by the hand. For me, very reassuring.

2. It took me a second to mull over the asymmetric FRIEND-RIVAL relationship one would have with a neighbor. But then I came to believe that it's just a multilayered relationship with the only asymmetry being who describes it.

But perhaps it could be either? As in I perceive you as FRIEND while you perceive me as RIVAL?

3. I have the note written "what makes an interaction FOREIGN?" I'm not looking at the draft now, so I'll just circle back when we discuss.

4. It's not clear to me what the consequences of SUCCESS or FAILURE are, generally. (Noting that SUCCESS on a FOREIGN interaction gains a coin.) Is it just anindication of which way we should describe the scene moving?

Of course, I play almost no narrative games, so maybe this is a thing that'd be painfully-obvious to someone who does?

5. another note: "just a game of attrition?" I.e. when I've got my six coins, am I no longer playing?

6. Another that might be painfully-obvious: is there a default mode for who starts/ends scenes? Or do you intend groups to just adopt anything that works?

/* end notes */

@BESW okay, that's what's on my half-sheet.

Thoughts, questions?

@BESW I'll say I think it's amazing to get anything into 200 words.

BESW

1. Yey!
2. That's exactly the sorts of thoughts I want you to be having!
3. It says "(e.g. their customs, technology, bureaucracy)." Is that what's unclear to you?
4. Yup, just a how-it-moves-forward determiner.
5. Yes, this is a game where players can lose and leave. It's harsh. There's a group win condition (but it's narrative, not mechanical) and a mechanical lose condition for individuals.
6. I haven't even mentioned if there's a GM or not. Totally dropping that in the group's lap.

nitsua60

1:57 AM

Well done. It's got a lot of flavor packed in there.

re: 3. I guess I had sorta forgotten about that by then. Looking back, it's perfectly clear.

Perhaps the only friction-point there was having the "?" after the right paren? I know it's grammatically correct, but it did make me go back to re-parse each time I hit it.

BESW

@nitsua60 Thanks! It was a challenge, but a fun one.

I laid down the basic concepts in about an hour or two around midnight two nights ago and have been whittling and polishing ever since.

nitsua60

@BESW re 5: I wonder if moving the last sentence up to being like a subtitle/abstract would improve it?

BESW

If I had more space, I'd repeat it with a slight re-phrasing.

nitsua60

On the FRIEND and RIVAL sentences, Is there a useful difference between "tell why" and "describe how"?

BESW

But I'm not sure about dropping a phrase using a keyword before I've defined the keyword.

nitsua60

2:02 AM

@BESW true.

BESW

@nitsua60 "Why" is a more demanding word.

nitsua60

@BESW sooth: wisely, wisely.

I'd love to playtest it!

BESW

Please do! I have to submit it within two or three days for the contest, but I'd love to hear how people use it.

If it gets traction, maybe it'll be expanded on based on feedback.

nitsua60

On second read I'm assimilating the coin-dynamic and getting how there's that incentive to push back against FOREIGNers.

BESW

Yup. And that pushback always gives another LOCAL a +1d6 on their FOREIGN rolls, meaning that when you act to lose a coin, you may be helping someone else gain a coin.

nitsua60

2:06 AM

There's a lot of dynamism rolled into that one-dimensional measure! (The coin-count, that is.)

BESW

It's approaching a zero-sum game unless there's cooperative effort to resist (multiple people resisting can each lose a coin, but only the one person rolling stands to gain a coin).

@nitsua60 It's basically All Outta Bubblegum's sliding over/under mechanic using Lasers & Feeling's dice pool and Cthulhu Dark's escalating pressure.

nitsua60

I think I'll print a few copies and wander over to the English and History building tomorrow--see if I can get a few people to drop fifteen minutes.

@BESW That's a lot of context I don't have =)

(Not having played/seen any of them!)

BESW

Lasers & Feelings and All Outta Bubblegum both have "Roll UNDER your number when doing X, OVER the number when doing Y."

nitsua60

Alright, I gotta hit the sack. I'll drop feedback in here if I get any traction tomorrow.

BESW

In Lasers & Feelings, you just pick a number between 2 and 5. Over is for Feelings, Under is for Lasers.

Okay, thanks again!

nitsua60

2:10 AM

'night.

14 hours later…

nitsua60

3:42 PM

@BESW okay, did a ten-minute playtest with four colleagues, none of who had ever played any RPGs. Notes:

nitsua60

4:07 PM

(actually, I have to run to a faculty meeting. Back in six hours or so...)

(not that the meeting's that long--just that it'll run into my next thing, and my next thing, and so on until after dinner.)

8 hours later…

nitsua60

11:49 PM

@BESW okay, back.

BESW

And I'm awake!

nitsua60

A lot of the notes I have might just come from playing a narrative-driven game with three non-gamers.

@BESW yay!

The scenario we picked was pretty close to home--someone suggested that the school we all worked at had been acquired in a hostile (business) takeover by a nearby competitor.

This then led to some cognitive dissonance, I think, as we tried to keep straight what was true-in-game vs. true-in-world.

BESW

Interesting. I like that they engaged with it so personally though.

nitsua60

We had the discussion you might expect about the FRIEND-RIVAL thing: is it a multilayered relationship, or is it an asymmetric-perception one? I don't believe we really settled on either: each player simply accepted or not the description given of them.

So when I said "Steve's my friend because we started the same year and lived in the same dorm," he accepted it and acted accordingly (even though that's not true IRL).

But when I said "John's my rival because I want to be in charge of mountain biking" (which he's the advisor of), he simply took it as "well, I don't feel any rivalry toward him even if he does toward me."

Which was a pretty cool outcome, I think.

BESW

I like it.

nitsua60

11:55 PM

They were really hazy on the mechanic, but again I think that's because they're not gamers.

The idea of roll-under, roll-over, dice pools, was perfectly clear to me; not so much to them.

Our most common sticking point was deciding whether an interaction was LOCAL or FOREIGN in nature.

Example: one DIFFERENCE noted was that the colonizing school is secular, while we're religious. So one TENSE INTERACTION came up when in a scene the school chaplain made to open it with a prayer.

Is this LOCAL because that's how we always do things, or FOREIGN because it's against how they like to do things.

What would your thinking be?

[On a completely technical note, when I print this the CC-BY statement bleeds onto a second page. Just that one line.]

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