[InSpectres] First game, and new to player authorship.
Nathan W:
Ah. Thanks for clarifying what you were saying, and I apologize if my original post was somehow unclear.
Ron Edwards:
No way man, apology not accepted. You were clear and I was confused, and you fixed it. That's just normal dialogue, not an infraction of any kind. You never have to efface yourself at the Forge.
I'm loving your game report, by the way, because first-time InSpectres posts are just about my favorite thing to read here. Let us know what happens next.
Best, Ron
Nathan P.:
Hi Nathan!
I just wanted to reinforce Ron's point by stating it in a slightly different way: just because the players have more control over narrating stuff, does not mean that the GM has less control. In InSpectres, the "GM stuff" to do includes a lot of stuff you're probably used to as a GM, like introduce the situation, play NPCs, describe the environment the characters are in, and so on.
This will become really important to keep in mind once you add Stress and Cool into the game. Stress is fantastic, and there can be some hesitance to use it - fight this! Call for Stress roles freely and often! As an InSpectres GM, I don't feel comfortable until the players are grabbing dice off their franchise cards all the time to bolster their rolls.
I, personally, almost always go with player contributions of color or stuff that "makes sense" given how the scene is going just as part of non-mechanical gameplay and kibbitzing. In the case where a player wants to add or change something about a scene without their character actually doing something, or just to declare an NPC action (as you describe in your post), I would say that that would be in the province of the confessional.
Anyway, I hope this post is helpful. Yay InSpectres! It sounds like you had fun, and the Stress rules will only help on that account!
Nathan W:
OK, we played our second game tonight. I wasn't sure what the proper etiquette for posting a follow-up actual play report was. Should I have made a new thread?
Anyhow, I did what you all suggested and used the rules for Stress and Cool this time. I also reminded people about Confessionals at the beginning of the game, but when the game was over it occurred to me that none of the player had used them. I'll try to be more proactive about encouraging their use next time.
Stress and Cool worked well. By the end of the game, most of the players had their Skills reduced significantly and most of the franchise's card/bank dice had been used up as well. It seemed to make the players fret more over each roll, which I thought was fun.
Overall, I think the second game went even better than the first, and I'm looking forward to our third.
Some observations:
One of my players made the sarcastic remark that I was getting lazy by choosing a game where the players have to make everything up. Another player seemed stumped after making a high roll and, after mentioning an idea he had produced for an earlier high roll, said that he's only good for one or two ideas per night. Towards the end players were occasionally abdicating their authorship rights to fellow players due to their lack of ideas. Is this common to groups that play InSpectres or similar games? Can anyone offer any suggestions on how to jump-start group creativity?
Ron Edwards:
Hello,
My general experience with dice-assign-narration mechanics is that it's best to view them as passing around authority, rather than all the input. In other words, I recommend table-talk: a lot of it. The key is that the currently-designated person really does have the authority to pick and choose "what goes," up to and including telling others to back off or "no" or "let me do it" when he or she wants to.
The benefit is that no one is put on the spot in a sea of silence, so performance anxiety or the tendency to provide elaborate nonsense do not arise as much. There's no getting away from it, though; InSpectres and a lot of similar games do require basic creative action on the part of everyone. That's how they are.
I think that the accusation of lazy GMing is fundamentally illogical. By that assessment, most RPGs are guilty of lazy non-GM playing. However, whether that's worthy of an actual debate between persons isn't my call. The question is whether the person who said was merely taking a poke at you because he could, or making a valid point ("the GM doesn't work as hard as in other games," perfectly true), or expressing a valid preference (nothing is wrong with "I don't like it as much"), or really wants to hash it out verbally (just a guess: unlikely). You'll have to decide about that one.
It looks as if the curve is positive, though - I hope the group latches onto Confessionals, because that's one of the core mechanisms for shaping the actual tension, arc, and (most importantly) relationships within the story that's being created on the spot.
Best, Ron
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