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.
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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.
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.
Ref: https://indiegamereadingclub.com/indie-game-reading-club/the-king-is-dead/
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:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QdRrUkaaxZvUO1ENt2D6OpjoBv1SEhVuG2Q5wcdeono/edit?usp=sharing
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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[…] well for us here: setting the game up was amazing, but actually playing flummoxed us so badly that we quit after about 30 minutes. Not a great experience. But I hoped the designers had learned some stuff along the way, and future […]