First Sessions Are The Worst But Some Are Even Worse Than That
Hey all. Nice to be back in the saddle. Typing’s gonna be a little awkward with my mummified hand but let’s see if we can make it work.
We finally got to fiddle with The Veil last night. Our first half-night of setup, we picked the most emo of playbooks — The Wayfarer, The Dying, The Empath — and got, oh, maybe half the setup questions answered. Well…I think we got them all done but those questions will beget even more, you know?
The setup procedure produced a really nice setting: an undersea city, overpopulated and starting to collapse, with wandering nomadic seafaring crowds on the surface, just off the coast of a climate-changed Scandinavia. At some unspecified point in the past couple generations, a cloud of nanites “fell from the sky” onto the mainland and began changing the world. The changes were too extreme and ecological collapse was quickened, and everyone fled to the sea. The nanite angle has a very Annihilation vibe to me: the coast is just fuckin’ weird.
In the undersea city, there’s a very small population of folks called Coastals; the Wayfarer is one of them. The open secret is that they’re infected/infested with these nanites, which use the Coastals to consume human memories. Those harvested memories are somehow transmitted back to the coast, where the mainland is starting to reflect them. So the cityfolk are slowly forgetting their own lives but, maybe, their lives are reappearing in fits and starts back on the shore.
The Dying is suffering a malfunction of that nanite infestation; he doesn’t have any of the weird Wayfarer powers, he’s just … dying. The Wayfarer consumed the Dying’s memory of exactly how he came into possession of the disease. I love that so much.
The Empath is just a one-off bit of psychic weirdness. Might be tied into the general Coastal theme, might just be she’s unique. Haven’t decided and it probably doesn’t matter. She’s a consort/companion to a small handful of powerful men: the director of the city’s secret police, Aquatek executives (they’re the big biotech corp with a powerful interest in harnessing the nanites; think Protogen from The Expanse).
So yeah, the setting is terrific. Just love it. The interplay of setting worksheet and playbook questions offered some interesting choices that led us here, in a way I’m not sure we would have gotten to ourselves.
That said, we’re having trouble fighting our way through some stuff. I’ll talk about more positives at the end! Don’t run away!
The playbook questions are super interesting but boy howdy the moves are um…not well designed. They’re written in a very awkward way, confusing you/they type stuff, but also it’s hard to tell what the intentions of these moves are. In the case of the Wayfarer and the Empath, each basically has a tick-tock economy you’re supposed to engage in: the Wayfarer earns Essence by “nourishing your homeland.” In our case, that’s the memory-consuming effect. The Empath earns Flow by engaging with their Burden (a question you answer early about how the Empath relates to all that emotional energy around them).
In both cases, it’s really hard to see how the currencies can be applied. Mostly the moves are just weird, trying to model ideas that are too vague. I get that they need to be vague so the players have some freedom to fill in the blanks. But at least for us, we mostly just shrugged when we looked at the move effects.
There’s a larger idea that I’ve been sitting with for a while, in that a good move needs to provide an affordance. Like, it makes available a choice and invites the player to engage with that. Moves in The Veil, I found, are so weird and vague and, frankly, poorly written that there’s no real invitation to engage with them. I’m hoping this is mostly a matter of settling into the game’s voice a bit more.
Mostly we engaged with the basic moves, which are … okay. Surprisingly not that far afield of fundamental Apocalypse World, which honestly is a perfectly fine choice. Those affordances we’re accustomed to.
I think the big hard struggle I had with our first session came down to the fact that the starting relationship map isn’t very interesting. Like, every playbook has a series of questions that exist largely to generate Obligation (another in-game economy). And they’re nice! They led to some interesting “so just how is it that you saved X from harm?” type pre-play conversations. But they didn’t embed the players into the larger world, if that makes sense. The first session has a rule that each player is supposed to make the Link move (basically, introduce an NPC and roll to see how they feel about you), which I think is supposed to help that out. It didn’t, not really, since making the move kind of requires the players bring a whole lot more direction to their play than the first session can possibly hope to provide.
Ultimately, the game needs the MC to narrow down the overall theme of your particular game: The Question. And then, once that’s sort of settled out, most of my decisions should be directed back at that Question. That’s fine advice and it’ll probably work fine. But I’m not there yet. I’m betting just letting the first session’s stuff percolate a bit will help shake out more direction. It did make for a very not-punchy first session though. I have no idea how on earth I’d ever one-shot it, compared to Apocalypse World (you need to eat, the world is out to get you, there are no status quos, GO) or Sagas of the Icelanders (oh my god look at how fucked up your family is, GO) or even good old Dungeon World (spout some lore, oh hey it’s a dungeon, GO).
Overall, I felt my game-analysis brain bump into the edges of lots of design choices that seem incoherent. Advancement is built on missed rolls (via Dungeon World), which is marvelous when what you want is players reaching for the dice a whole lot, but felt off-tone in the far more speculative/meditative vibe The Veil was feeding me. I mean it works and it’s easy, but I’m not sure it’s serving the right master. The game also has the players write Beliefs, Burning Wheel style, buuut that feels like an uneducated design choice: not only are Beliefs fucking hard to write well and play against/toward, the way they’re implemented in The Veil is just straight XP. They’re missing the larger context of how they work in BW, how bringing Beliefs into conflict with one another is a primary source of tension in the game. We found writing our first Beliefs to be a drag, and evaluating them post-session for XPs was hard as well.
Obligation is another one where it didn’t feel like the underlying idea was necessary or even coherent with the game. Like, back when it was Giri, it lent a kind of Japanese formality to stuff. And I get why they changed it, although the result feels now like it’s trying to evoke Urban Shadows’ Debt economy. But it’s toothless, mechanically. Mostly I have never gotten a sense from cyberpunk media that honor-type stuff is even a genre trope once you get away from Japanese sources. (I have some quibbles with Debt in US as well, but at least in that game there’s an underlying theme of one’s debts embedding you in a community).
We won’t get to play again until late July, and I’m gonna have to love-letter everyone back into this game’s head space. I’m actually kind of looking forward to that, because I think I can preload some momentum that way that we weren’t able to generate on our own.
Some more positive notes:
* The game doesn’t have stats, really. Instead, you evaluate your character’s emotional state and roll that value. I was super scared of this being “gamed” but my players were awesome about engaging with that in an principled way. It’s even totally okay to play it prescriptively: my best stat is Sad sooooo…. sure, yeah, here’s how she’s sad while she Probes you. Totally fine, very pleased, everyone loved the Feels Wheel printout.
* The setting setup stuff really is nice. I love that the setting/situation aggressively accretes around the specific playbooks because of the per-playbook questions. That felt much more on-point than, you know, the generic postapocalyptic tropes you can fall back on in Apocalypse World (well, until the Maelstrom stuff starts showing up).
* The general conceit of The Veil itself — the vast, rudderless augmented reality everyone lives in — makes very a very surreal experience. I super-enjoyed having the Psychic Maelstrom Veil start asking questions of the players. Some pointed, some harmless, always interesting. I think the players felt a little…interrogated, which is a good feeling for them I think. 🙂
* I am ultra pumped about the situation. My suspicion is that the game is really intentionally more plot-driven than character-driven, which I feel like PbtA isn’t awesome at for various reasons. But I’m sure curious to see it play out.
That setting sounds really cool, even though I feel like I barely understand it.
I want to hear more about the plot-driven vs character-driven thoughts!
Aaron Griffin okay.
I think it comes down to the relationship map questions again. Their function in this game is to juice the opening Obligation economy. Everyone owes and is owed. But they don’t really create relationships per se. “I confided in you about my disease” or “I saved you when you were in trouble.” Those kinds of questions prompted more interrogation but I didn’t feel like they left those two characters with a lasting bond. Or an unresolved situation.
The game drives the MC toward settling on one Big Question, which is definitionally the plot, yeah? Because the Big Question you’re supposed to come up with is philosophical — is the Earth worth saving? would be suitable, and it was my first go-to after the first session, for example.
The players have to do a lot of heavy lifting to really get involved in each other’s lives. I think our r-map got us most of the way there but not because the game provided any tools to make that happen. I happen to be very good at that aspect of these games, is all.
“Left those two characters with […] an unresolved situation.” Oh Paul, Paul, stop clarifying things for me, will ya?
Kit La Touche it’s my answer as to why the otherwise-boring-seeming relationship questions in SotI produce such immediately payoffs.
The setting setup stuff is just terrific in that game. I feel you on the looseness of the moves, but it worked for us when we engaged them a bit loosely rather than in a strictly prescriptive way. It’s a highly suggestive ruleset, in my mind, that benefits from players being assertive with it, rather than leaning on the mechanics to generate narrative momentum, if that makes sense. See also: Beliefs, etc. You kind of have to bring it a bit more, compared to tighter and more focused rulesets, IMO.
J. Walton suggestive is a good word! I used aspirational.
Listening
Paul Beakley this is what I need to write in the “how to make an Arcadia town” section, just btw. I want seemingly boring but tense when they intersect, ideally.
It’s a very suggestive framework and demands more / something different from players than typical PbtA, no doubt.
Fraser Simons please read all this as charitably as possible! I know I’m using some tough language but I’ll always be 100% honest about my play experiences.
I get a strong sense of how my Veil game came apart from reading this. By the time we had dialled in on the play experience we were expected to get and wanted to get from the Empath, and specifically the Empath’s moves, the wheels had come off the session completely. Probably we were just starting too late at night to realistically be “aspirational.”
I’m looking forward to giving it another whirl, some day.
Honestly I found it pretty refreshing that the game places a higher degree of trust in the players, compared to some other stuff I’d been playing that was more restrictive, but I also came in with strong ideas about cyberpunk that I wanted to poke around at, so The Veil was perfect for that.
No worries, It’s a pretty weird PbtA game, indicative of my own thoughts regarding the genre and how I like to play. In some ways, it asks a lot more of folks; at the very least to come at it from a different way than others. The table experience through line is the questions posed instead of the constant results from narrow frameworks in other games. A lot about The Veil is intentionally interpretive. It’s weird, and has more narrow appeal because of it, but it fulfills the design goals I was going for. People who rely on the mechanics to do all the heavy lifting are gonna hate it though. Adam Koebel, for instance, would definitely not like it.
It’s also a scaffold for a larger narrative framework on a meta level through three books. Not gonna be for everyone, depending on what they want from the mechanics and a game and that’s cooool with me. Glad ya’ll are giving it a go to see if it’s for you or not, though! Always sweet hearing people talk about it and play it.
Affordance. This needs to be a full post on its own, Paul. Regardless, I think you just hit upon why I’ve been having a hard time falling back into a good groove with a recently started BW game: BW is all GM-side affordance(s), and I’m not in the headspace for it. Every skill/stat is so precise, there’s rarely a question on the players’ side as to what’s happening (zero affordance, usually), but then comes a failure and it’s 100 per cent offloaded to the GM. Hmm.
Anyhoo. Thanks for the write-up. Appreciated your thoughts on The Veil!
If anyone is interested, I’d be happy to point people to videos of series of The Veil I played in that likely give a good feel for it…
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Paul, is the problem with using Beliefs largely “Beliefs on top of all those other things”?
Rob Alexander that, and how they don’t do anything specifically in service to this game. There are lots of ways to express flags to a facilitator and these are especially difficult to implement well.
Up until now I had The Veil filed under inaccessible and not for me but after reading this I scheduled an impromptu session at our local rpg meeting and ran the Cascade Quickstart. Now I might reread the books and see where that takes me. So thank you for the write-up.