Lee Short (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} losrpg) wrote,@ 2005-12-08 18:15:00 |
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ACNW Amber Shadows
This is a writeup of the Amber Shadows game I ran at AmberCon NorthWest. Let me know what you think about the format.
The players were John Kim (jhkimrpg), Emma Sansone, Pol Jackson (pjack), Kath Nyborg, and myself. Thaddeus Rice was slotted for the game but had to cancel from the con. That left 5 players. SMC has never been played before with more than 4; 5 was fine. With 6, I think the game would have gone too long for a round of turns (that would have pushed it to 2 hours between turns). Had Thaddeus shown up, I would have facilitated the game and not played. Probably experienced players could make a group of six work but the game is really designed for 4 or 5. We sat around the table in the order Pol->me->Kath->John->Emma, in clockwise order. The player to your left is your GM, so I GMed for Pol, Kath GMed for me, etc.
I had originally asked for 2 separated slots, 4 hours Thursday night and 4 hours Friday morning. I wanted the players to have time for the game's process to sink in after the first slot, so that we'd hit the ground running in the second slot. That didn't happen (no fault of the schedulers); we had one 7.5 hour slot instead (including time for lunch). One of the things that I dropped from the game was the Gaming Preferences Discussion. The place where I think this discussion would have really helped the game was in the pacing. There was once at the table when it seemed that John wanted faster pacing than Emma, who was his GM. There was another time where I figured out too late that I scene I was running for Pol was too slow for his tastes (right?). I had the impression that Pol wanted the fastest pacing in the group, and Emma wanted the slowest, with the rest of us in betweeen. From table feel, I had the impression that there might not be any compromise pacing that would really satisfy both Pol and Emma -- but that, with a little discussion about references, either one could have worked with the other 3 of us.
I made a mistake right away by presenting the players with their full character sheets (we used pregens). We got sidetracked explaining stuff on the sheet, stuff that would have been better explained after we had done The Newsreel. I should have only presented them with a brief description of their characters, which was all they needed for The Newsreel. In The Newsreel, the players generated the plot that our player characters would be interacting with. I had prepped a *very* sketchy setting and no situation at all. Fortunately, everyone caught on very quickly and generated a bunch of interesting stuff. Since there is no single GM, The Newsreel has to both fill out setting details and set plot threads in motion. Everyone seemed to grasp this clearly and it worked very well; it was the smoothest part of the game. Mechanically, The Newsreel works by the players taking turns around the table playing tarot cards and then adding a new character or event to the setting that is based on the meaning of the card (two other mechanisms, Full Resolution and Free Exposition, are both similar).
After The Newsreel, each player framed a short introductory scene that illustrated some aspect of their character. I don't recall much about these scenes, but I think they did a servicable job at introducing the characters. To complete the character introduction, we had a common scene where we all interacted in character. The thing that's a little different about the common introduction scene is that there's no GM to play any NPCs -- every player has a PC, so the only significant characters are the PCs. We chose to play an informal, family-only dinner. As it turned out, our interactions in this scene set the stage for our individual scenes -- we discussed an upcoming visit of state, what needed to be done to prepare for it, and which of us would do each of these tasks. We were pretty cooperative in character -- a big change from the other playtests, where each of the characters was usually doing their own thing.
After this, we went to a round of Player Turns. In S,M,C, each Player Turn is generally a single long scene or 2-3 short scenes. The acting player can aggressively frame the scene if he wants, or not. Most of the time, it is the acting player who is framing the scene, but it is OK for the GM to spring a scene on the player once in a while.
Kibitzing from the other players about the scene framing is fine. Unfortunately, I didn't really explain any of this at game time and this caused some hiccups.
During the scenes, we got to use Quick Resolution and Full Resolution and Free Exposition. Unfortunately, there was an unnecessary glitch in Quick Resolution. The original rules had made trump cards in the player's hand useless in Quick Resolution. That was one of the things playtesting had uncovered, and I forgot about the updated rule during play. It was signficant because Kath tried something that was resolved with Quick Resolution where her trumps would have been useful. Because I had forgotten about the rule, she had a tough time of it and was a bit frustrated.
During Emma's turn, we ran into an undeveloped part of the setting background that we wanted to develop some more. Here we used Free Exposition, similar to The Newsreel, to develop the background. Normally Free Exposition is about developing the background, not resolving character actions but in this case we did both at the same time ("your character finds out that Marcus knows the Kashfan ambassador" rather than "Marcus knows the Kashfan ambassador"). This worked out just fine. Free Exposition was designed for exactly those times when you're on the spot as GM but you don't really have any good ideas about what to do or where to go -- it's a way of getting some help from the other players at the table. It also works if you just want to give the other players some input. Full Resolution also works in this GM-by-committee kind of way (in Quick Resolution, only the Acting Player plays cards and only she and the GM are involved).
One of the features of S,M,C is that the other players can act for your player character (usually when "the right choice" is obvious). For example, when my character Jacques boarded a ghost ship, the Lord of Chaos who had conjured the ship jumped overboard and let the conjuration lapse. At this point, Emma narrated that Jacques felt the deck giving way beneath him and jumped back on his own ship. In S,M,C this is perfectly acceptable (with the caveat that the player of the character may contradict the narration) but it is strongly against traditional social contracts and game texts -- so Emma was hesitant about doing it until I told her to go ahead.
Another item of note about S,M,C is that the other players are almost never allowed to cause real harm to your player character. Unless you take suicidal actions, the only person who can harm your player character is you, through the Concession mechanic. I failed to make this clear, and it led to some confusion. During the scene, we had had a combat with a shapeshifted manticore and I had narrated that my character closed with the manticore and was struck on the arm. That is well within the rights of narration; I or any other player could have narrated that my character was struck. What cannot be simply narrated is the extent of the injury resulting. That is determined by how many Concessions the character takes in the scene. In our game, after the scene where Jacques took the blow, there was an issue about how wounded he had been. To me, it was obvious -- there were no Concessions, so Jacques wasn't wounded unless I wanted him to be. But I hadn't explained that at all.
I thought it was a very positive playtest. Everyone seemed to have fun, and I got some useful feedback about explaining how the system works. I also thought that it showed the system's strengths and weaknesses fairly well. IMO, the biggest weaknesses are (1) how the system handles group actions (though I made some improvements based on this experience), and (2) since the "default gaming social contract" is out the window, social contract needs to be very clearly communicated or there will be problems. I think the system has several strengths. First, I think it gets real group ownership of the plot and the setting -- you are left with the feeling of "look at what WE made". Lots of cool stuff happened -- but for most of it, I can't remember who did it (except for The Finger). Also, it's great for low/no-prep gaming.
This is a writeup of the Amber Shadows game I ran at AmberCon NorthWest. Let me know what you think about the format.
The players were John Kim (
jhkimrpg), Emma Sansone, Pol Jackson (pjack), Kath Nyborg, and myself. Thaddeus Rice was slotted for the game but had to cancel from the con. That left 5 players. SMC has never been played before with more than 4; 5 was fine. With 6, I think the game would have gone too long for a round of turns (that would have pushed it to 2 hours between turns). Had Thaddeus shown up, I would have facilitated the game and not played. Probably experienced players could make a group of six work but the game is really designed for 4 or 5. We sat around the table in the order Pol->me->Kath->John->Emma, in clockwise order. The player to your left is your GM, so I GMed for Pol, Kath GMed for me, etc.I had originally asked for 2 separated slots, 4 hours Thursday night and 4 hours Friday morning. I wanted the players to have time for the game's process to sink in after the first slot, so that we'd hit the ground running in the second slot. That didn't happen (no fault of the schedulers); we had one 7.5 hour slot instead (including time for lunch). One of the things that I dropped from the game was the Gaming Preferences Discussion. The place where I think this discussion would have really helped the game was in the pacing. There was once at the table when it seemed that John wanted faster pacing than Emma, who was his GM. There was another time where I figured out too late that I scene I was running for Pol was too slow for his tastes (right?). I had the impression that Pol wanted the fastest pacing in the group, and Emma wanted the slowest, with the rest of us in betweeen. From table feel, I had the impression that there might not be any compromise pacing that would really satisfy both Pol and Emma -- but that, with a little discussion about references, either one could have worked with the other 3 of us.
I made a mistake right away by presenting the players with their full character sheets (we used pregens). We got sidetracked explaining stuff on the sheet, stuff that would have been better explained after we had done The Newsreel. I should have only presented them with a brief description of their characters, which was all they needed for The Newsreel. In The Newsreel, the players generated the plot that our player characters would be interacting with. I had prepped a *very* sketchy setting and no situation at all. Fortunately, everyone caught on very quickly and generated a bunch of interesting stuff. Since there is no single GM, The Newsreel has to both fill out setting details and set plot threads in motion. Everyone seemed to grasp this clearly and it worked very well; it was the smoothest part of the game. Mechanically, The Newsreel works by the players taking turns around the table playing tarot cards and then adding a new character or event to the setting that is based on the meaning of the card (two other mechanisms, Full Resolution and Free Exposition, are both similar).
After The Newsreel, each player framed a short introductory scene that illustrated some aspect of their character. I don't recall much about these scenes, but I think they did a servicable job at introducing the characters. To complete the character introduction, we had a common scene where we all interacted in character. The thing that's a little different about the common introduction scene is that there's no GM to play any NPCs -- every player has a PC, so the only significant characters are the PCs. We chose to play an informal, family-only dinner. As it turned out, our interactions in this scene set the stage for our individual scenes -- we discussed an upcoming visit of state, what needed to be done to prepare for it, and which of us would do each of these tasks. We were pretty cooperative in character -- a big change from the other playtests, where each of the characters was usually doing their own thing.
After this, we went to a round of Player Turns. In S,M,C, each Player Turn is generally a single long scene or 2-3 short scenes. The acting player can aggressively frame the scene if he wants, or not. Most of the time, it is the acting player who is framing the scene, but it is OK for the GM to spring a scene on the player once in a while.
Kibitzing from the other players about the scene framing is fine. Unfortunately, I didn't really explain any of this at game time and this caused some hiccups.
During the scenes, we got to use Quick Resolution and Full Resolution and Free Exposition. Unfortunately, there was an unnecessary glitch in Quick Resolution. The original rules had made trump cards in the player's hand useless in Quick Resolution. That was one of the things playtesting had uncovered, and I forgot about the updated rule during play. It was signficant because Kath tried something that was resolved with Quick Resolution where her trumps would have been useful. Because I had forgotten about the rule, she had a tough time of it and was a bit frustrated.
During Emma's turn, we ran into an undeveloped part of the setting background that we wanted to develop some more. Here we used Free Exposition, similar to The Newsreel, to develop the background. Normally Free Exposition is about developing the background, not resolving character actions but in this case we did both at the same time ("your character finds out that Marcus knows the Kashfan ambassador" rather than "Marcus knows the Kashfan ambassador"). This worked out just fine. Free Exposition was designed for exactly those times when you're on the spot as GM but you don't really have any good ideas about what to do or where to go -- it's a way of getting some help from the other players at the table. It also works if you just want to give the other players some input. Full Resolution also works in this GM-by-committee kind of way (in Quick Resolution, only the Acting Player plays cards and only she and the GM are involved).
One of the features of S,M,C is that the other players can act for your player character (usually when "the right choice" is obvious). For example, when my character Jacques boarded a ghost ship, the Lord of Chaos who had conjured the ship jumped overboard and let the conjuration lapse. At this point, Emma narrated that Jacques felt the deck giving way beneath him and jumped back on his own ship. In S,M,C this is perfectly acceptable (with the caveat that the player of the character may contradict the narration) but it is strongly against traditional social contracts and game texts -- so Emma was hesitant about doing it until I told her to go ahead.
Another item of note about S,M,C is that the other players are almost never allowed to cause real harm to your player character. Unless you take suicidal actions, the only person who can harm your player character is you, through the Concession mechanic. I failed to make this clear, and it led to some confusion. During the scene, we had had a combat with a shapeshifted manticore and I had narrated that my character closed with the manticore and was struck on the arm. That is well within the rights of narration; I or any other player could have narrated that my character was struck. What cannot be simply narrated is the extent of the injury resulting. That is determined by how many Concessions the character takes in the scene. In our game, after the scene where Jacques took the blow, there was an issue about how wounded he had been. To me, it was obvious -- there were no Concessions, so Jacques wasn't wounded unless I wanted him to be. But I hadn't explained that at all.
I thought it was a very positive playtest. Everyone seemed to have fun, and I got some useful feedback about explaining how the system works. I also thought that it showed the system's strengths and weaknesses fairly well. IMO, the biggest weaknesses are (1) how the system handles group actions (though I made some improvements based on this experience), and (2) since the "default gaming social contract" is out the window, social contract needs to be very clearly communicated or there will be problems. I think the system has several strengths. First, I think it gets real group ownership of the plot and the setting -- you are left with the feeling of "look at what WE made". Lots of cool stuff happened -- but for most of it, I can't remember who did it (except for The Finger). Also, it's great for low/no-prep gaming.
