[Burning Empires] Grinding Gears on Beliefs
Bret Gillan:
Per,
In any collaborative process like this, I always try to check in with anyone before decisions are made. It goes like this:
"Okay, so the world is going to be alien life supporting? Everyone cool with that?"
I look around for nods of assent and wait a few beats for someone to disagree. If not?
"Okay, cool."
However, I also know that Josh's brother, Jere, and I can really dominate discussions like this because we're both enthusiastic and full of ideas. Josh, not so much. So I'm going to try and stay aware of that in future sessions of any kind and make sure he's not getting talked on.
But then, on the other end of the spectrum, I try to stay in tune with what's going on in the table. If someone's clamming up, I generally notice and stop to be like, "Dude, is everything cool? It seems like this sucks for you." Josh's reaction to me doing that is to just shrug and say, "Yeah, I'm fine," in that way that most people mean, "No, I'm not fine, I'm just being passive-aggressive." But more badgering doesn't do any good and maybe I'm just reading him totally wrong. So long ago, I've just accepted that that's Josh and have left it alone.
I think he's definitely there to play and not just to hang out. Josh and I have roleplayed since high school, and he's really grown a lot. He's always on board for whatever game I throw out there. He played Shooting the Moon and The Shab Al-Hiri Roach and enjoyed them both. He's definitely into gaming.
Chris,
He hasn't checked out the comics, but you're probably onto something. He might be floundering in a setting that isn't totally well-defined for him. I know for me I love that kind of setup because I can just spin all sorts of ideas out of the nothing. It could just be that it's too unstructured for him and he doesn't know what to latch onto.
He was and still is excited by the character. Tying the character to the world through Beliefs was the hard part. I mean, Beliefs marry the character and the player to the setting, and if you don't know the setting that well you might get cold feet. World Burning is supposed to help with that, but I think we still left things way more nebulous than most groups might.
Chris_Chinn:
Bret,
Ok, then it sounds like it's mostly about making things concrete. I usually would help flesh out some more details and situation- then the Beliefs become easy to figure out. Stuff like:
- What's his big money making criminal enterprise?
- Who's his competition?
- Who has he stepped on along the way?
- Who's his allies- who is bought in the government, the church, etc.?
- Who would he protect from his criminal side- friends, family, lovers, etc?
Pretty much the usual set up for a good crime/mafia story, once you lay out some ideas like that, people start to get direction on what's going on- "The new magistrate has been cracking down, trying to make a name for himself. He's the Lord's nephew, a goldenboy, so no one is willing to stop him... yet. And he's got his sights on me..." etc.
See if that helps generate Beliefs.
Chris
Callan S.:
Hi Bret,
Your probably overlooking how you enjoy making up beliefs - it's just so natural to enjoy it, you don't feel it. It's kind of like how after you put your clothes on, you don't feel yourself wearing them.
Does Josh actually enjoy making beliefs? Have you asked him if there's anything he thinks he might enjoy about it? I'm suspecting he couldn't think of anything he might enjoy.
Bam, that's it - some activites exclude people by the very nature of the activity. If someone wasn't able to taste wine, then a wine tasting excludes them. He just lacks a taste for it. He may develop a taste for it at some point in life, but if it's not in him right now, he's excluded. If you like being with him, perhaps set up a DVD watching session or something, to make up for the roleplay time your unable to spend with him.
Ron Edwards:
Whew - I am glad you wrote that, Callan. Neither you nor I know these folks directly, or role-play with them, so it can't be 100% ... but that said, I'm not getting any impression at all that the guy wants to use the Beliefs technique. What I'm seeing is Bret wanting Josh to play (or prep) in a particular way, and Josh saying no. Not "no but," or "yes if I only understood it," or "yes if you inspire me," but no.
Bret, you're the only one who can really assess the situation, but Callan's point shouldn't be overlooked. At some point in time, you'll have to decide whether this is about you helping Josh do something he wants (albeit a bit baffled by), or whether it's about you shoehorning him into something that you like and he doesn't.
Best, Ron
Sydney Freedberg:
My group had a fair bit of trouble with Beliefs, and they're all pretty hard-core new-wave/story-gamer/Indie/Narrativist types (our previous three systems used had been Capes, Prime Time Adventures, and the The Shadow of Yesterday). The thing about the whole Burning Empires/Burning Wheel system is that you do a TON of definition up front, and at least for some people that's premature -- "destructive pre-play," even" -- because they need to play the character for a while to figure out what they're really about. I ended up letting people keep some Beliefs vague, or even keep one blank, and refine them in play.
Now my group also crashed and burned after four sessions (three, if you don't count world-burning) -- we ended up porting the entire campaign over to TSOY because the BE system was just too complex for us -- so I'm hardly the expert how to make Burning Empires actually work, but at least I know painfully well some of the ways to have problems with it.
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