A Sky Full Of Sentences
Jan. 31st, 2010 10:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraI ran the Tines game! Am all full of satisfaction now that it finally happened, and worked!
The high concept for this game was amnesia x abducted by aliens x airships!, which, you know, good stuff there. Very nice reveal of "wait, what, we're *where*?" when someone obligingly opened the "open me" door and ended up dangling a thousand feet above the ocean.
I had great fun seeing what people would do with the amnesia situation - my intention was that the characters would have various skills, that they might discover by a combination of hints and trial-and-error, but that personalities were entirely up to the players. But some of the players made the (totally reasonable) assumption that there was a personality their character was supposed to have, written down in my secret notes, as well as a skillset, and were worried about guessing wrong about what kind of thing they would try to do, which was not what I was going for... I still really like the character creation mechanic wherein people pick attributes that carry hidden stat bonuses/penalties, but in previous games the attributes have been much quirkier (things like having a psychotic pet parrot, or being a competitive ballroom dancer) and this time they were too generic to catch the imagination - just ages and sexes. (Since, you know, everyone's waking up naked, with amnesia...) If I was doing it over I would give people more in the way of physical details - tattoos, calluses, inkstained fingers - little things that would feel like hints as to what kind of life they'd been living, but with room for interpretation.
Having some forty bodies on the board (Tines = pack intelligences) also went a lot more smoothly than I was afraid it might. And while it was sometimes frustrating for some of the players, who felt like they got stuck with their characters standing in corners half the time, I felt like the positioning constraints really captured the feel of "what it was like" to be a Tines and never be able to get too close to anyone else. We unfortunately did much less playing around with the flip side of that coin, being able to spread yourself out and be in several places at once, because the timing worked out such that we only got through Act I, the Airship act, and never made it to any of the possible Act IIs, in which there might have been more running around The City or The Island. Which I think was okay - people seemed to be having fun and it felt like there was a decent amount of plot - but it wasn't well balanced in the kind of action going on. This thing of how much game your people will play through in how much time continues to be tricky... on the one hand, it feels like good preparation to have maps your party never wanders onto, that the world is big enough that they're not coming up against the edges, and on the other hand, maybe they would have had fun in those helium mines, maybe confronting boss villain would really have brought the drama, and on the other other hand, I don't want to rush everyone through Act I in a hurry if they seem engaged with the Act I problems.
This is one reason, though, that I think the Next Big Thing is going to be a miniseries instead of a oneshot. The big reason is to work on the combination of making short episodes feel satisfying but still part of an overall plot, but it is also attractive to think of having a little more wiggle room if something runs a bit long. (Of course this still requires having some sort of fluffy filler episode that can be cut without regret, if the goal is still to wrap in a set number of sessions.) So, if you've read this far, and you think you could play an evening every other week for a couple of months sometime later this year, and you like Avatar: the Last Airbender, you totally don't exist and I have no idea why I'm addressing you. No, seriously, I should probably investigate whether there's actually an audience for this before getting too far writing, but I am getting so hooked on this GMing thing, my reaction when we wrapped today was totally "how soon can I do this again?".
The high concept for this game was amnesia x abducted by aliens x airships!, which, you know, good stuff there. Very nice reveal of "wait, what, we're *where*?" when someone obligingly opened the "open me" door and ended up dangling a thousand feet above the ocean.
I had great fun seeing what people would do with the amnesia situation - my intention was that the characters would have various skills, that they might discover by a combination of hints and trial-and-error, but that personalities were entirely up to the players. But some of the players made the (totally reasonable) assumption that there was a personality their character was supposed to have, written down in my secret notes, as well as a skillset, and were worried about guessing wrong about what kind of thing they would try to do, which was not what I was going for... I still really like the character creation mechanic wherein people pick attributes that carry hidden stat bonuses/penalties, but in previous games the attributes have been much quirkier (things like having a psychotic pet parrot, or being a competitive ballroom dancer) and this time they were too generic to catch the imagination - just ages and sexes. (Since, you know, everyone's waking up naked, with amnesia...) If I was doing it over I would give people more in the way of physical details - tattoos, calluses, inkstained fingers - little things that would feel like hints as to what kind of life they'd been living, but with room for interpretation.
Having some forty bodies on the board (Tines = pack intelligences) also went a lot more smoothly than I was afraid it might. And while it was sometimes frustrating for some of the players, who felt like they got stuck with their characters standing in corners half the time, I felt like the positioning constraints really captured the feel of "what it was like" to be a Tines and never be able to get too close to anyone else. We unfortunately did much less playing around with the flip side of that coin, being able to spread yourself out and be in several places at once, because the timing worked out such that we only got through Act I, the Airship act, and never made it to any of the possible Act IIs, in which there might have been more running around The City or The Island. Which I think was okay - people seemed to be having fun and it felt like there was a decent amount of plot - but it wasn't well balanced in the kind of action going on. This thing of how much game your people will play through in how much time continues to be tricky... on the one hand, it feels like good preparation to have maps your party never wanders onto, that the world is big enough that they're not coming up against the edges, and on the other hand, maybe they would have had fun in those helium mines, maybe confronting boss villain would really have brought the drama, and on the other other hand, I don't want to rush everyone through Act I in a hurry if they seem engaged with the Act I problems.
This is one reason, though, that I think the Next Big Thing is going to be a miniseries instead of a oneshot. The big reason is to work on the combination of making short episodes feel satisfying but still part of an overall plot, but it is also attractive to think of having a little more wiggle room if something runs a bit long. (Of course this still requires having some sort of fluffy filler episode that can be cut without regret, if the goal is still to wrap in a set number of sessions.) So, if you've read this far, and you think you could play an evening every other week for a couple of months sometime later this year, and you like Avatar: the Last Airbender, you totally don't exist and I have no idea why I'm addressing you. No, seriously, I should probably investigate whether there's actually an audience for this before getting too far writing, but I am getting so hooked on this GMing thing, my reaction when we wrapped today was totally "how soon can I do this again?".
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Date: 2010-02-01 04:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-01 04:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-01 11:11 pm (UTC)I've also been thinking about my own ideas for a Tines game, and realizing that what I want is on the one hand more tactical and mechanics oriented, and on the other hand should involve some turnover of pack members even without having all the characters gassed and thrown into a heap... This is all leading to a not-at-all serious card game (not RPG) concept which would stand in relation to what you've done with the setting approximately as Munchkin stands to D&D, for which my current working title is...
Tines of the S.P.O.R.K.*
*Scouts, Pilgrims, and Outlaws of Round Keep
The idea is that players represent members of a loose fellowship of (mostly) chaotic-good-ish packs who have adventures and do good deeds all over the place but occasionally gather at their mountain hideout to swap stories, something of a cross between the Knights of the Round Table and Robin Hood's merry men. The game would be set pre-contact, with post-contact (and possibly space-era) expansion sets. I can even imagine a module covering the events of FutD itself, as a co-op game... but I should figure out the regular rules first!
I'll say more about this in my own journal once I have the core mechanics sorted out.