[Lacuna] OK so I tried it... [SPOILER ALERT]
JC:
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if you want to play Lacuna and not GM it, you probably want to stop reading now
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OK so I just finished GMing my first game of Lacuna
to my surprise, it was very much an old-school experience
I mean, the system is clever and all, and the Static mechanic is great
but boy was it GM-centric and GM-intensive
I had prepared some bangs and stuff beforehand, as well as a couple of proto-missions
then I tried to feed what the characters "were about" into the game (their Mentors, the Talents...)
but I felt like I should have prepped way more, including NPCs, their motivations, etc.
maybe I shouldn't be surprised, but after playing DITV, Polaris, Contenders and the like for a while, I had forgotten how much of a pain GMing could be
has anybody else experienced this with Lacuna?
or, since the game is apparently a Rorschach Test for the GM, does that just mean that I fell back on my big bad Illusionist GM habits?
JC:
let me expand on that a little, now that I've slept on it :)
we started out like this: the player declares his intentions ("I want to see if that creepy guy is following us.")
then the player rolls
if he succeeds, the player (not the GM) decides what happens ("Yes he's following us.")
this felt very comfortable, as GM
I only had to throw little tidbits into the game here and there (my bangs), and play some NPCs
but the players felt like they were playing their own opposition
they also felt that their lending intentions to NPCs was incompatible with the "world full of secrets" style of the game
so we dropped that modus operandi, and reverted to "GM calls for rolls and narrates the outcome"
thinking back, I think we should have stuck with the first way to play
after all, the dice provide the opposition (will I succeed, and is it worth rolling in the first place?)
and maybe I should have been open and said: "guys, there's not pre-established story here, so instead of me making it up behind my screen, let's make it up together"
I guess I was swayed by the how the game reads (or how I took it to read): keep the players in the dark about everything (the rules, the background, their own characters...)
Darcy Burgess:
Hi JC,
I'm going to talk about what I experienced (as a player) during my first game of Lacuna, and what worked.
I knew about the 'roll an eleven' rule, the heart-rate rules, the no-gm-dice rules, a hint of the static rules, and the basic hook of the setting (you're agents in the matrix hunting bugs).
What really drove play for me was the tension between needing to get stuff done (roll dice) versus raising heart rate. That totally handled any concerns over "setting your own adversity" or whatnot -- the stuff happening on the character sheet was (for me) just as important vis-a-vis my continued enjoyment of the game as the stuff happening in the fiction. (I also submit that in practice, that divide is completely imaginary. However, it's a useful deliniation for the purposes of this discussion.)
Cheers,
Darcy
JC:
hey Darcy :)
so did you get to participate in building the story during play?
for example, when succeeding on a persuasion roll, could you, as a player, say "I get him to admit that he's working for Senior Agent Chambers", even though no one had any idea up to that point that Senior Agent Chambers was in fact still alive?
Darcy Burgess:
Hi JC,
Yes. However, not in the way you're implying. We'd declare what we wanted to happen before rolling the dice. The GM (usually) held the stamp of narrative authority over the results, but he had to keep it in line with our declarations, so it was cool.
I don't know how that compares to the rules.
Cheers,
Darcy
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