The past couple weeks, Jonathan Perrine has been running Epyllion for us. We just wrapped our third session and we have one more to go before we lose one of our regulars. I don’t know what the plan is beyond next session. But whatever happens, another player in the group is starting his Burning Wheel game whenever Epyllion wraps up and I’ll be playing in that one as well.
This will be the longest stretch as a player in long-form games for as long as I can remember. Like, I literally cannot remember the last time I did this. Possibly a MET Vampire L.A.R.P. 20 years ago? A WOD mashup game around the same time? Hard to believe it’s been literally decades — god I’m old — but there we are.
I’m taking this time to really dig into a few things.
My favorite side activity is observing player dynamics on the player side of the table. Super interesting! Kind of aggravating! From the GM’s seat, I can enjoy the fireworks because I don’t have fireworks exploding in my face. Quite different when you’re operating in the immediacy of character play. I’m playing in ringer mode (mentioned before: there in a support role to help make the GM’s job easier via modeling play or whatever) so I’m keeping my own character and the rest of the table kind of at arm’s length. But I definitely feel the engagement/disengagement of each player in a different way when I’m among them, and not dedicating all my bandwidth to facilitating the rest of the show.
I’m reeling my play waaaaay in. I could probably shoulder my way into the action, but I’m trying to feel out new ways of being fulfilled by the experience other than by being the center of attention. The hardest part of this, for me, is fighting my worst Star Player urges. The thing I mentioned in that old essay about Star Players generating energy but also demanding energy? Yeah, giving up being in the middle of everyone’s attention is hard. I spend a lot of time sitting and listening and trying to figure out to throw softballs to the other players. I’m kind of bad at being a helpful sidekick.
Another interesting thing for me is feeling out authority among my peers. An Epyllion specific thing: the economy of handing out friendship tokens. Quick version is, each character has a virtue, and the player hands out their tokens when they see that virtue played out by someone else. It’s a clever way to keep the players engaged in scenes they’re not in and to pay attention to each other. Our table is kind of terrible at it. Since I’m a fiend for reward cycles and chasing economic inducements, it’s actively aggravating when the table ignores it. A couple times I goosed another player about what it would take to get one of their tokens, which unfortunately also creates kind of bad or awkward feelings: nobody likes to be called out. This is something that jumps out at me as a player more strongly than it would as a GM, since it directly impacts my play priorities. I’m singing and dancing as hard as I can but I can’t get tokens from anyone! Anyway, the point of all this is that bringing this topic up as a player, to another player, just feels different than as a GM. In a perfect world we’re all perfect peers regardless of table role. We live in an imperfect world, though.
Oh, last priority of my purposeful play experiment: observing another GM’s craft. I kind of never do this in a one-shot convention setting where I’m a player, unless something really interesting shows up. But I’ve got time and space to do that in this game. One interesting bit I saw Jonathan do was take detailed notes about mechanical engagement, as in what widgets did we not use? That’s an interesting level of analysis. He noted to himself that my Crafter hadn’t had a chance to use his dris An Eye For Detail move and then muttered “that’s on me.” And I was like…maybe? Could be an interesting exercise in some future game I run to evaluate that sort of thing.
Anyway, it’s been in turns interesting, relaxing, and aggravating. I know for sure I’ll be raring to go once my vacation is over.
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I’ve been feeling for a while now that getting onto both sides of the table — both in short and long form — is a good thing when you can do it. Even if you’re like me and GM 90% of the time, even if you’re like Mo and play 90% of the time.
Seeing things from both sides, really having time to experience it and see how things work, feel, and flow, is super cool.
(Its also one of the reasons I think my split-GM/player games work — everyone involved has experience on both sides of the table, and with each other.)
I’d love to come up with a fun way to mandate every player in my regular group run something.
Do they have any interest in Night Witches? You could do the thing where you rotate GMs every time you rotate fronts.
Playing games where players hand out rewards unguided IME only works with a table full of experienced GMs…and sometimes with tables full of people with no traditional baggage.
Ralph Mazza that is proving itself extremely true at this table. Our newest addition is having some trouble fitting into our play culture in lots of ways, and this game (and my AW game prior) is really highlighting that.
?
Brand Robins we did Night Witches a couple years ago and it was a very positive experience! I’m not sure that it’s a great fit, thematically/emotionally, with my current table composition. But the rotating GM trick is outstanding.
Paul Beakley what if it were flipped? What if YOU get the token when you observe someone else playing to your virtue.
How would that change the dynamic?
I have a thing for totem passing mechanisms. I get a point for passing you a totem. But now you have the totem and I can’t get another point until someone passes it back to me for me to pass again.
I’m feeling the “observation of player dynamics from the other side” feeling right now. Playing in two games, back-to-back, after only having run for a looooong time, and I’m in particular noting things that are not being done that I have come to rely on as second nature, and I’ve had to shift myself hard into “ringer mode,” as you put it.
Like, I get heavily improvising a short campaign; that’s how I roll. But if that’s going to happen, I build a lot of structure into character creation, with leading questions like “A, what did B do in your shared history that means you’d walk through fire for her?”
Without that? Yeesh. In our Uncharted Worlds game, there was none of this group-structure-building, just a vague reassurance that the GM wasn’t going to restrict us much, and we ended up with a completely unworkable mess of characters. Sociopaths alongside big-damn-hero types, everybody keeping their super seeeekrit backstories to themselves, players thinking they needed to pass notes to the GM. Frigging nightmare. (Literally my first scene: I picked another character, took him aside in game, and said “you seem like someone I can trust; here are all my secrets! Also, what do you know about mysterious plot element?”)
It took less than ten minutes to fix it between the first and section sessions, but it required me to say “look, we dropped the ball and our party is a mess, can we try to build our characters to actually give half a shit about sticking together in this giant open world?”
One of the “worst” players in our group, in the sense of making characters and playing them like precious little darlings who are oh-so-super-unique and also don’t need anything from anybody, has never run a game. Maybe ever. Certainly not since he’s been playing with my crowd. I think there’s definitely something to the notion of flipping the screen every once in a while.
Ralph Mazza like you pay yourself out of a pool when you see someone play your virtue? Dunno, having trouble imagining that. It feels like it’d undermine the laser-like MLP focus on friendship that runs under the game.
I didn’t see myself as a GM for like the first 20 years of playing… going behind the screen was a big eye-opener for me. Gave me a lot more empathy of for what GMs are trying to do, and I suspect it made me a better player, or at least a less selfish one, in the process.
Ralph Mazza the mechanical side of this is that giving your gems to people improves their rolls when they help you, so having everyone at the table loaded with your gems gives you reliable assistance.
Jonathan Perrine sure. I’m just thinking from a share-of-player-attention perspective, the game might have benefited from reversing that.
So instead of: I pay attention to you so I can give you a reward that may help me. Flip it to I pay attention to you so I can get a reward that may help you.
Psychologically I think we’re wired to be more likely to recognize when it’s time to get something than to recognize when it’s time to give something.
That’s one of the reasons Keys work so well.
Ralph Mazza that might be. I know I feel a bit aggrieved when I do the thing, then have to ask for my cookie because my performative virtue went unrecognized.
I didn’t notice that dynamic in one shot play but it’s kind of building up in this campaign.
Great post, Paul. I like this kind of introspective analysis. I also really enjoy observing how others play and GM, to appreciate it, but also to mine their techniques for my own use!
Right now I’m having trouble because I joined a group (an ongoing campaign) which has a variety of easily-fixable problems, but they don’t ever make time to talk about the game and don’t like e-mails… it’s frustrating.
As a GM, I’ve never tried tracking people’s uses of their powers/moves/abilities.
However, I do often go through the characters’ sheets and look at abilities or special details which haven’t seen play and think of scenes or NPCs or Bangs which would give them opportunities to do that. It’s a very handy prep technique!
(It gets good when you make pairs of them. “Ben hasn’t used his mind-reading skills, and Julie hasn’t earned XP from interacting with her old mentor.” What’s the most obvious thing? Have a scene with the mentor, and give him a mysterious secret he won’t reveal. Dumb example, but you can see how it works. Very quick and effective prep.)
Paul Taliesin one reason I track this is because Epy doubles down on ‘players picking those powers are signaling intent /interest to you’ and it’s on the GM to offer opportunities that fit that. Also, everyone only has 1-3 powers so making a short list and checking them off is simple and quick.
Jonathan Perrine oh that’s interesting, I hadn’t noticed that but it’s pretty true!
That sounds like an excellent technique! How does “Epy double down” on that?
Paul Taliesin there’s a section called Beneath the Scales that says as much, before covering the Playbook moves in detail and what to provide for each to help push that move.
Oh, so it’s a technique built into the MC advice in the game? That’s good.
I meant to do this before 12/31 but, well. Y’all have read plenty about my malware woes. It’s under control for now, but I’m looking at maybe, possibly reinstalling at wordpress.com and letting them deal with the server headaches.
Here’s what I played and my year-later takeaway, nice and short for potty reading:
Epyllion
Played, didn’t run. I really enjoyed it! But a couple things still jump out at me a year later:
As lovely as the friendship crystal mechanic works (short version: you give away your supply of tokens to other PCs when they act on the flags you’ve put on them during character creation, then either count them up when helping or spend them on the “moon magic” move), I still remember it being especially punishing for groups that aren’t great at paying attention to each other. Basically, you end up spending a lot of energy playing toward other folks’ flags but if they’re not paying attention, it’s easy to feel resentful about spending that energy. Given how my year played out, I very much think this is a phenomenon of my home group. I hope to address this more specifically in 2019.
I have no idea how the long game plays out. I chased advancement really hard and got to the next age. It’s fine. I did notice that advancement choices are pretty narrow. I feel like everyone’s playbook will end up looking like everyone else’s playbook across play groups and experiences.
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No Thank You, Evil!
I played a good amount of this with my daughter early in the year but we haven’t played in months, now. Honestly, I’m kind of itchy to get her to try something with a little more mechanical complexity. That’s totally on me and if I’m being honest with myself, it’s probably not what she would enjoy. But I think about running NTYE and it bores me. The narrow, short formula absolutely works! But it’s a narrow, short formula for play.
Probably the next thing we’ll do with it is move her to the highest character sheet level. She graduated from triangle to square in January, and that might have been the last time we played.
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Burning Wheel
2018 has obviously been a long fucking year because I completely forgot we played Burning Wheel! I played, didn’t run. It was nice. I’m also clearly not the target demographic for this game any more. It’s just such a heavy load, both on the GM side and the player side. Lots to manage. We didn’t do a great job of really workshopping Beliefs, and our campaign reached a point where we’d just kind of…done what we came to do. Was that my short attention span? Maybe!
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Bluebeard’s Bride
Played this at NewMexicon 2018 and it blew my mind. It’s super weird, very arty-farty, not at all a conventional RPG in terms of agency and bildungsroman and long meaningful campaign play. It’s a one-shot featuring a series of horrific vignettes, everyone plays an aspect of a single character and takes turns in the driver’s seat, and it’s so squicky and weird that it’s just impossible (or perhaps just in poor taste) to try and describe actual play. Very high on my list of best games of the year.
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Sagas of the Icelanders
Another NewMexicon 2018 game. I ran this, because I always run it. SotI is on my very short list of games I’m so good at, I can make the game do anything I want. It is a lovely experience every time.
This particular game was a “spotlight GM” event that I ran. I remember it being funnier and more Fiasco-y than it usually is. Worked great and I’m adding that mode to my quiver for future runs.
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Masks
My first run at Masks and it was super fun. My buddy Kit ran it at New Mexicon, and he is to Masks what I am to Sagas. The game does some really interesting stuff about supers relationships and completely dispenses with Champions style physics modeling. It’s terrific, loved it, want to run it here in 2019.
I had another opportunity to play Masks later in the year, at Rincon 2018 with Jason Corley running it. I played a more conventional character and it was a more conventional experience, which is great because you don’t have to push the envelope every time.
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Golden Sky Stories
Actually a fantasy adventure hack called Fantasy Friends. GSS is cute but not my jam: it’s heartwarming and affirming, you basically bid points to get things done and then do heartwarming and affirming things to get those points back. I mean it’s nice! And Nick Hopkins did a really good job running it. I was just ehh on the whole model of play afterward.
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Coriolis
Coriolis was my only real heartbreak of 2018. I adore, absolutely love Mutant: Year Zero from Fria Ligan, and Coriolis is built on the same engine. The game is packed with interesting history and social context, the setting is super interesting, characters look neat. I mean just on reading the text, I was all in. But the game has a huge glaring problem at the center of it: a GM-facing economy called Darkness Points.
What I discovered was that I grind against the DP economy in every imaginable way. First off, there’s a huge list of bad shit the GM is “allowed” (?) to launch at the players by spending DP. I read that to strongly imply, or mandate really, that nothing on that list is in my toolbox without spending those points. Then what really killed me was that I can effectively earn and keep unlimited DPs, and the players can’t do shit about it. Even playing hard toward the intent of the system, this is I think intentional! So there’s no meaningful decision making, no tension, nothing. It’s a list of things I feel like I can’t do but actually can do because I’m spending an effectively unlimited number of points.
I will say, though, that Coriolis has an extremely nifty spaceship combat system. Each player takes on a specific on-board role and everyone’s contribution matters. It’s great.
Otherwise, the game left me restless and irritated. What a shame, because it’s so very beautiful. And it appears I only ran three sessions of it? Ye gawds.
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The Veil
I tried to run The Veil but it catastrophically failed for us within an hour of the first session. When I had read the rules, the playbooks stood out as weird and very specific and I thought “oh wow, everyone is so strange!” And they are. But once you figure out where each playbook comes from, escaping the tropes and references becomes nearly impossible.
For us, I think, we worked hard at not doing that. But the moves, oh the moves. Designer Fraser Simons made a fairly lengthy argument explaining his approach, which was to build the moves in a very broad way. I like the idea in principle, but lordy in practice we just couldn’t get a handle on how anything was supposed to work or how any given move’s outcome was supposed to look in the fiction. The whole thing felt very abstract and it wore everyone out in about an hour.
But! But but but: I think The Veil may be best in class for how you create your cyberpunk setting. Each playbook has a very specific set of questions and inputs, so that any given playbook mix produces a wildly different and unique setting. We really liked this. The Veil produced a setting I’d be very happy to play in! Just with a different game.
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Scum & Villainy
My surprise hit of the year was Scum & Villainy, a sci-fi take on Blades in the Dark. I’d had the pleasure of playing once before at a private con earlier in the year, but I was so exhausted that the playbook felt like an incomprehensible wall of jet fighter controls.
I gotta say, now that I fully grasp how the GM-player transaction works in Bitd/S&V, it might be my favorite. Even more favorite than Burning Wheel! I really like how the negotiation bounces back and forth: how well positioned are you? How difficult is the thing? How hard do you want to try? Are you willing to take an additional consequence? Love it to pieces.
Our run at Scum petered out because everyone advanced to a point where there was really no more mechanical tension to the game. This is something I was worried about in Blades as well: the Resistance mechanism (short version: if you suffer consequences you don’t like, you can resist them at a cost to your stress) is such that eventually you can just do anything and everything and practically never suffer for it. I don’t love the realization that so much of the play juice was coming from the mechanisms, but in S&V it did for us.
It did get me thinking about versions of Blades where maybe you don’t get better, but the scope of your action just gets broader. Dunno. It was a good experience, very fun, just ran its course.
Oh and I ran it at RinCon 2018 and completely forgot! Pitched it, explained it, ran it, easy as pie. S&V is definitely on my short list of pickup one-shot games I’m happy to run without any prep.
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The King is Dead
This is Vincent Baker’s diceless, GMless game of fantasy intrigue built on the PbtA framework. I absolutely love this! And it may be my favorite of his games, even more than Apocalypse World itself.
The core of the game is that everyone gets a copy of the same rules book. You sketch out sexy young princes and princesses in a Game of Thrones-ish setting. And then you start picking little mini-games to play out scenes. You start with a game called “muster and intrigue,” which adds a little fictional context to the setting and gives you a card. The ostensible object of the game is to win the crown by any means necessary. You do that by building a good hand of cards, with more and better face cards worth more than numbered cards.
I’ve played this game twice now. The first time, we just rolled with the minigames and didn’t worry much about the underlying card game. It was really fun that way! But the second time, when I ran it again at Rincon in Tucson, I really charged hard at the card game. It was even more fun that way, because it forced me to play really strategically and think bigger-picture. My game basically shifted from playing Arya to playing Cersei.
Highest recommendation.
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Palimpsest
Okay, I pretty much never brag on myself but I’m going to now: I am super proud of my Game Chef submission this year, a little time travel game called Palimpsest. The premise is that three different time travelers converge on a small but vital moment in history, and try to make events conform to their wishes before uncertainty collapses and that moment is forever set.
I’ve run it twice, it was fun twice. It could stand a bit of polish and definitely some art direction, but this was the first time I’ve ever submitted a Game Chef and thought to myself “oh heck yeah, this fucker has legs.” I’m gonna publish it in some form down the road. But for now, here it is:
Download here
Legacy
Oh boy. The last game I ran this year.
It did not end well.
It started with such promise: a game about generations passing through time. A game about building up communities, rather than scrabbling for short-term wins.
It ended for a lot of reasons. Some had to do with the game itself: Mechanically, Legacy was overwhelming to everyone. There are move sets for your character and your family and the common moves and the story moves and and and. There are multiple economies. There is room for really unpleasant coercion via the game’s debts system. But beyond that, Legacy demanded everyone walk away from deeply ingrained habits of character monogamy, agency, and campaign continuity.
It was just too hard. It ended on a really sour note and we haven’t run a game since. That was early December, I think? It’s been a month.
It did, however, give me a lot to talk about.
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