[Grey Ranks] The Durham Crew
fjj:
I have put the play report on Story Games as it is slightly more informal than for an official forge AP:
http://www.story-games.com/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=6119&page=1#Item_1
I guess the play report also explains why I'm asking the questions above for Grey Ranks.
We need to discuss reincorporation, replay value, and learning how to play from text at some time!
Jason Morningstar:
Definitely. I hope you saw interesting ways in which your two sessions differed. Grey Ranks never plays the same twice, although there are common tropes that people are drawn to.
fjj:
Jason, I finished my reading of Grey Ranks last night. It's great, I feel very confident that I can get excellent play from the game, even though it is very heavy material.
But I'd like to ask into the thing about drawing a line about what kind of stuff to keep out of the game. Clearly, the game has potential for a lot of ugliness, but then again, why go into playing such a game if you don't want scenes about the horrors of WWII? Isn't this exactly the kind of emotional impact, you want from a play experience like this? As always, it is just a game and you can step out of character and out of the game for a break after a particularly intense scene. My approach would be to agree on a stop sign during scenes, and then be sure to discuss particular nasty scenes afterwards, but to make no explicit agreement on content up front. Which seems like the approach you made in this particular game, trusting each other to know when to draw the line.
Would the game had been as successfull if you had drawn explicit content lines up front?
Did you stop scenes because someone was unhappy about the content?
Did you not stop scenes, and then later discover that someone was unhappy about the content?
Jason Morningstar:
Hi Frederik,
There are all kinds of groups and many environments in which the game might be played. I have the luxury of playing in a couple of very high-trust groups - people I know well and completely trust to be sensitive and forthright with the situations and content they introduce into a game. As it happens our "lines and veils" discussion for the game I've been talking about in this thread was very loose - we all agreed that we were ready for anything (no hard lines) and that we'd veil material on a case-by-case basis. We didn't end up doing that at all, as I recall. Some of the things that I definitely would have asked to "fade to black" simply didn't come up. We didn't have any content-related problems that I can remember. I do recall checking in a few times when something happened that we thought might be a problem - for example, Clinton's character was very attached to his sisters, and one of them was killed in a street fight, and we double-checked to make sure this wasn't problematic for him as a player.
In convention games, where I may be playing with a group of strangers, this dynamic is totally different. Usually hard lines are drawn and the game continues to work fine. A standard line for me when playing with strangers is "no sexual violence". This may limit the scope of the game in some circumstances but not enough to cause a problem. I suspect that this won't be an issue for you. Even if you are playing in a mature, high-trust group, I encourage you to begin play with the discussion, because it serves as a flag that everyone has permission to bring it up later in play if they feel the need.
Mk1:
One thing I'm curious about, Jason - did you ever run the game for any Polish players, and if so, what kind of response did you get?
(In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I am Polish, and I have... well, seriously mixed feelings about it, to put it mildly - though I really am asking out of curiosity, and don't intend to use this as a jumping-off point to get all holier-than-thou. Much.)
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