[Grey Ranks] Joyriding in tanks and other skylarks that will get you killed
GreatWolf:
Filip,
Awesome! Now I can try to mangle the pronunciation like an American!
Amusing story: My brother-in-law is Polish. (He emigrated to the U.S. at age 8 after his father spent three months in jail for being part of Solidarity.) When I saw him for Thanksgiving, I mentioned how Polish is known as the "secret language", because it's so hard for non-Poles to learn. He looked at me in utter confusion. "It's simple. Just look at the letters on the page and say them." I almost laughed in his face.
Turns out he's right, though. Once you know the rules, Polish is apparently easier to pronounce than English, with all its silly exceptions....
Ron,
Quote
We found that Radio Lightning always provided inspiration for the Mission itself, so armed with this structured flexibility, scene framing was actually ten times easier for us than when playing Polaris or some other "you! now frame this!" games.
Did you and the others in this game really make use of that particular rules feature?
Radio Lightning was quite helpful. In fact, our Chapter 3 mission was framed straight out of Radio Lightning information. It's a great tool, especially combined with the Situation Elements.
As I've thought about it more, I've realized that this is a common issue that most GMless designs need to address. "We have our characters, but now the situation needs motion." And, oddly enough, the start of the Uprising isn't enough. This is a change in the setting, but it's still up to the players to establish what this means for the characters. (I'm running into a similar issue with my current design; I'll be posting about it in Playtest in the near future.)
Upon some reflection, I think that Chapter 1 was probably the hardest for me, because we were establishing our characters in play. Since I didn't have a good sense of who my character was, I was trying to figure out what to do in the situation. Combine this with my confusion over the "length" of a Mission scene, and I found myself a little adrift. Once I got my Reputations and (especially) my Thing Held Dear, I had a better sense of what do this with this character. (For example, Gigant is set up for a horribly tragic love story of some kind.)
I do agree that the interaction of Mission scenes with Personal scenes is quite powerful. I made sure to stress to the players that they can call for Personal scenes whenever they want. I suppose that I could simply view the "scene length" the same way. In other words, just keep going until you run out of ideas or someone else frames another scene.
Now, maybe this is just my open personal hangup, and now I'm performing self-therapy on an Internet forum. Dunno. Am I alone in this? I'd love to hear from other folks who have played Grey Ranks.
Valamir:
The mini GM capability of assigning someone a mission scene works pretty well.
In Chapter Two after careening wildly out of the tank park for my initial mission scene, and after Keith's mission scene of trying to get on the tank, I looked at Seth and said, "we've encountered a road block...shoot the gun! shoot the gun!".
In Chapter Three after getting my friend killed due to the tragedy of my d10 die, and after Seth's Gigant beat Plug unconcious for it, and after Crystal had her moment of bossing every one around to try and salvage the mission by taking an alternate route I looked at Keith and said, "Stephan's dead, I'm unconcious, Gigant is carrying the guns and me...guess who has to scout ahead for a safe way through the old ghetto..."
There are certain actions that just seem to follow as an "obvious" next step for the mission, and so far its been equally "obvious" whose character just has to get it done.
If we had to choose our own mission scenes that would suck.
Having to narrate the chosen mission scene when we've taken the "total tragedy" die also sucks...but in a very good way.
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