I ask Vincent a bunch of questions like I was a horde of flying monkeys
Darren Hill:
About the three questions, i have an idea.
The playtest version of the rules had no limit on rounds, and it was quite possible (I know from experience) that conflicts could go on and on, getting more and more tedious.
So I think the three turn limit was introduced to put the brakes on that without needing to introduce another ablative stat to keep track of.
Given that the conflict system resolves a unit of action, kind of, and several conflicts can be strung together in an attempt to achieve the same goal ("I keep at it till he's dead, dead, dead!), a limit like this seems to me to be very necessary.
Christopher Kubasik:
Hi Darren,
Yes, absolutely. I was just curious if there was a reason for three, of if it was, "Well, we gotta stop this somehow... Three seems to be the right length for fun. Three it is." (Which is a perfectly fine explanation.)
Dain,
As for the world building -- yes. I just was curious how Vincent plays the game. Again, I've found across many games and sessions, that when I tried to build out without any setting/fiction structure the world felt less substantial. I'm just wondering about how Vincent plays.
For the people who kept saying, "Dude, it's like Sorcerer," and I was all, "What???" I am soooooo sorry. I swear, this experience of slowly sinking my brain into IaWA has been really embarrassing. Yes, of course it's like Sorcerer. Each round of rolling dice advances the fiction moment-by-moment, and each next rolling grows out of the fiction dictated (and improvised out of) the dice roll results.
For some reason when I played two weeks ago I had it in my head that I was supposed to declare an outcome I wanted, and then roll dice on my way to getting to that outcome. I was using the rules almost like this:
I'm a guy with a sword in AD&D and I want to kill an orc. So I keep rolling a D20 until I do.
It did not occur to me -- for reasons I cannot tell you -- to think, "Okay, conflict of interest. Roll dice, see who's on top, dictate/negotiate fiction, advance to another round of dice rolling to establish further fiction, until the three rounds are over and an outcome is reached that closes a unit of conflict."
I have my guesses as to why my brain jumped that way. But the fact it never occurred to me simply figure out how to use the game when I was so confused boggles my mind.
So, sorry I was so thick.
CK
lumpley:
Quote from: Christopher Kubasik on March 01, 2008, 08:18:31 AM
But I still want to know, "Why three rounds?" As far as I can tell, since the model is completely different than the ablative model of most conflicts (we wear each other down till one of us can no longer do anything, and then it ends) you had to come up with some method of actually ending the darned thing. Is that it? You needed to pick a number of rounds to make it finite, and three was the number you picked?
Yep. In early playtesting, you kept going until somebody doubled somebody, which kept it down to three rounds or less 75% of the time, but the rest of the time never, ever ended. Three rounds was the maximum I really wanted to play through - I found that after three rounds I'd just wish it'd end. So three rounds it is.
Quote
I'm just curious: Do you sketch out maps at all while doing these early creation phases? Are any other details of the world generated while fleshing out the Oracle details and characters? By that I mean, "If my PC is a merchant, let's have a big market in a walled city where he arrives every month." Honestly, that seems to heavy handed and like a lot of extra fat. But it seems like if there's noting defined but the elements sketched out from the Oracles and the Characters, there's not enough detail of a world for the PCs to exist inside of. I know that the rules say to build timeline and maps between game sessions. I'm curious what else might be done before the first scene of play.
I don't do any world creation stuff at all before character creation and I try to keep a tight lid on backstory during character creation. The philosophy's very much "we start HERE and go forward." I don't have anything against making a quick map during character creation and best interests, but it shouldn't be detailed, of course. In my experience, the world of the first session is handwavy and very sketchy, kind of scattered, but not like malignantly scattered.
Then in the second session, details from the first that didn't seem to matter much at the time get revealed as significant, connected to one another and to new details in ways we wouldn't've individually guessed. It really starts with the third session that the game's world seems like a real place, with its own momentum.
There's a further rule that's important but I didn't draw any special attention to it in the text, something like "whenever anybody asks you to describe or explain something, do," with the implication that your description is more or less authoritative. It's not just a matter of everyone throwing out details in the midst of action. I can turn to you and say, "hey, tell us about the religion of the horse tribes?" and you can lead us in some real world building. That's when most of the maps get drawn in our games, too, not between sessions. Somebody's like, "what does this city look like?" and there are a couple of us who can't answer the question WITHOUT drawing a map.
The GM has oversight over all this, but I hesitate to say veto power. More like the responsibility to introduce cohesion when it's called for, additively, not by contradiction. If there's a need for a real veto in your game, you're kind of outside the creative contract I've imagined for the game.
Con games are naturally the worst, since everybody knows there's no investment past the single session, and everybody's kind of anxious to have some high-action fun with strangers.
Was there a third question? I misplaced it.
-Vincent
lumpley:
I should add, I say "con games are the worst" but I've only played 3 of them. They seemed to confirm what I'd expect, which is that con games are the worst, but maybe I shouldn't say it like it's a given.
-Vincent
Christopher Kubasik:
Hi Vincent,
If there's a third question, I've misplaced it, too. With all the threads popping up all over the place, I certainly have enough info to give it another go with a great deal more success. I want to thank you for taking the time to answer my questions. Your patience has been awesome.
This:
Quote from: lumpley on March 03, 2008, 10:18:38 AM
There's a further rule that's important but I didn't draw any special attention to it in the text, something like "whenever anybody asks you to describe or explain something, do," with the implication that your description is more or less authoritative. It's not just a matter of everyone throwing out details in the midst of action. I can turn to you and say, "hey, tell us about the religion of the horse tribes?" and you can lead us in some real world building. That's when most of the maps get drawn in our games, too, not between sessions. Somebody's like, "what does this city look like?" and there are a couple of us who can't answer the question WITHOUT drawing a map.
... really turned a screw for me. I thought that passage was about, you know, describing something in-action. Breaking it out like that explains all my questions about the world building process for IaWA.
Also: Con Games. Well, I ran a session of HeroQuest and Pendragon at a local con two weeks ago and the games seemed to go great. I know I had a blast. And I played games of Sorcerer & Sword and Primetime Adventures at the previous local con a few months back that also went really well, so I don't think it's cons per se.
I do think that in this case we had gathered a bunch of people who wanted to give the "rules" a spin. And that meant the dice mechanics. And so we were focused on getting to them, rather doing all that 90% of the role-playing iceberg that I now see IaWA depends on, if that makes any sense. In the HeroQuest game I ran, for example, we rolled dice for conflicts I think four times (three standard and one extended conflict). Compare that to the IaWA game, where the whole session was pretty much moving from one scene-as-die-rolling conflict to another.
So, I'd say a lot of our IaWA game was misplaced effort simply because we wanted to see how the game "plays" -- not realizing (for whatever reason) that taking the time to just "make stuff up" is a big part of IaWA, and it isn't about getting to the dice, but that the dice serve a specific function when the making stuff up phase leads characters to a point where we can't just make choices for our characters, but that a conflict between the characters will demand action and adjudication from the rules. In other words, I think we meant well, but blew it in our eagerness to see how Vincent's new dice rolling system worked!
Again, thanks for all the effort and information.
CK
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