[Grey Ranks] The Durham Crew
Jason Morningstar:
Hi Ron,
I'll have more to say about this after our next session. Right now there's been no incentive, social or mechanical, to apply any pressure to one another at all. It's all been pretty care-free - the worst pressure has been self-administered, I think. Joe did invoke the thing he holds dear, which was pretty early for that, and got us licking our chops. It was well established at the player level that we are going to make Danusia hate God very soon, to Joe's evident delight. Remi declared that he's fighting to stay out of the corners as a meta-goal. We'll see how it goes.
In terms of the experience of play providing context and information about the current state of the world and its history, I'm also interested to ask some before and after questions of these guys.
Jason Morningstar:
We finally got our second session in, after a couple of weeks of illness and other commitments. The session suffered a little because of the lapse - it took us a while to get up to speed and we surely forgot some of the details we'd created earlier. But the clear through-lines emerged and advanced, all pretty sharply focused on things we hold dear.
My guy, Robert, is in love with Remi's guy, Zygmunt. By the end of chapter six we were lovers, Robert's mind was more or less broken, his twitchy nervousness subsumed by an eerie stillness and a slavish devotion to the drunk, horrible, amoral Zygmunt.
Clinton's guy, Bogusław, lost his eldest sister to a horrible mistake, fell in love with a well-connected Russian, got beat nearly to death and executed my cousin.
Danusia, Joe's girl, is hard aground with her Catholicism and in love with the devoted Communist Bogusław. It was a night of clearing out traitors and informants - Danusia also shot a Catholic priest at the Polytechnic. She's definitely at the breaking point.
So it was grim and often moving. We're set up for a vastly tragic third session with plenty of remaining resources to guide the story as we choose, if we elect to give up our precious stuff. Everyone but Clinton has invoked out thing held dear, so there are a lot of free dice available. We've all agreed that he's getting no love from us until he frees up his little sister for us to pick off! We've definitely played the grid very tactically and cooperatively thusfar. Robert, my guy, is in the most danger at this point.
There's something a little unexpected about Grey Ranks' collective missions, in that players have free reign in their description, guided only by the die size they contribute. This can lead to talky, descriptive scenes where the spotlight player merely says what happens. Occasionally this is perfect, but groups should take care to ensure that mission scenes involve multiple characters and include some interaction. We fell into this trap in chapter four and corrected later on.
Jason Morningstar:
We finished out Grey Ranks game last night. After a soft mid-section, the game ended on a high note. Well, a low note, but with a lot of excitement, really good quality play, and both enjoyment and pathos. We returned to form, editing furiously, and driving toward individual and collective conclusions for our Crew. It was really cool.
Here’s an interesting thing: we had conflicts and subsequent outcomes that colored everything that went before. There was a personal scene, a flashback, where Danusia (age 11) learned that Robert (age 13) was gay. The crux of the scene was how the very young, very Catholic Danusia would handle this information. Robert lost; she handled it badly, and we didn’t even play out that reaction – suddenly the two character’s entire relationship across the previous two play sessions took on a different meaning. It informed scenes in retrospect.
Of course the third session of Grey Ranks is rough – you are up against the wall both narratively and mechanically, pretty much destined to fail brutally unless you pull out all your resources, which you have (hopefully) squirreled away. We blew through everything – the thing we each held dear was destroyed, every scrap of innocence was lost, all four characters were shattered. Robert visited the nervous breakdown corner a second time and shot himself in Chapter Nine, after repudiating his collaborationist father and saying goodbye to his lover, who he had once held dear above all things but then abandoned in blind panic. Zygmunt survived him by a day. Bronislaw watched his little sister get machine-gunned by Russian soldiers as she paddled across the Vistula to safety, and later joined the truly terrible RONA anti-Soviet partisans in the pay of the Germans. Little Danusia, so devout, had a crazy, gripping scene in which she talked to the Virgin Mary in chapter seven, asking if she’d die a virgin. Mary told her “yes”. Danusia’s denoument – 1965, in a convent school in New York state – a little kid asking about the nun’s funny accent.
We had some seriously good scenes. There were a couple of times I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach by choices my friends made.
So if you play Grey Ranks, some suggestions, and I hope Joe, Clinton, and Remi will contribute:
My biggest suggestion is to aggressively edit. If you have a huge issue for your character to resolve, open the chapter with it, and edit near the decision point, and return to it to close the chapter. This is so powerful. What transpires in the chapter will inform the outcome in deep and memorable ways. We were editing like madmen, stopping scenes, jump cutting between scenes, moving around in time and space. It adds tension and interest and freights small scenes with additional meaning and resonance. I know I suggest this in the game, but it should be in big red letters.
Another suggestion – keep your eyes open for ways to support your fellow players through reincorporation. There’s no need to introduce a new character if an existing one will do. Conversely, don’t get hung up on using all the situation elements – these are scene painting, and are useful even if they don’t end up in the fiction for that chapter.
fjj:
Reincoporation is so central to good stories, so why is it that it is a detail that most games leaves for the players to know and fix?
Jason, I completely missed out that Grey Ranks was hot when you visited last fall. I've later had a chance to check it out and it is definately high on my must play soon list. I especially like the chapter structure with the broadcast openings, this is so effective to channel the story. I've done a similar thing with Montsegur 1244 (which just might appear in an English version at some point). Flashbacks is also central to Grey Ranks. This encourages tight scene editing, a very effective tool to create intensity.
So how much of the success of the three sessions is due to your roleplaying skills, and how much is transferred through the text?
How accessible is the game as a learning tool for e.g. high school history classes?
Jason Morningstar:
Those are good questions, Frederik. I'm probably not the best person to answer.
I know I've played Grey Ranks with all sorts of people from different backgrounds, including at least one person who arrived at a convention table having never played an "indie" game (this particular guy is a big fan and signed up to play again at Dreamation 2008). It's always worked, with varying degrees of intensity, for me. More skill equals better game, usually. I'd be interested in hearing other players' comments on the divide between player skill and text-as-written.
Personally, I think Grey Ranks is not the most accessible game in the world - it demands complete engagement, for one thing, and there is (quite deliberately) no procedure for initiating or ordering scenes. I'm not sure it'd be effective as a classroom exercise, although I'd love to be proven wrong.
I'm looking forward to an English version of Montsegur 1244, as well as a play report from Fastaval!
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page