[Polaris] Transcending the Rules
Frank Tarcikowski:
I just returned from another one of those German forum meet-ups. Yesterday’s Polaris game was a blast (what people call a homerun these days). Here are some highlights and a lesson.
[*]All of the six players came up with incredibly great ideas. The best was a demon called the bee eater, who brought the sweet scent of flowers and honey and who used honey as the vessel of his power and made the people taste its sweetness.
[*]A very dense web of crosses and weaves between the protagonists, keeping players on the edges of their seats even when they weren’t moons.
[*]Three of the six protagonists just naturally emerging as the main characters, two as sidekicks and one not at all, with all players totally jazzed about it.
[*]Random stuff people had written down as aspects or in the cosmos being picked up and making sense.
[*]The fate aspects, both initial and acquired in conflicts, mostly being fulfilled in the end.
[*]Real, consequential character development and growth.
[*]A very dense and consistent atmosphere of beauty, decadence and tragedy.
[/list]
I used to think that bloody hard adversity by the mistaken is key to making Polaris rock, and sure did we have conflicts in most scenes, but as opposed to previous games I’ve been in, we did not press too hard, and apart from a few times “YOU ASK FAR TOO MUCH”, most things got accepted. The game was much more amicable, and also, in some scenes the moons (usually full moon) started providing adversity and the mistaken just sat back, waiting for the moment for “WE SHALL SEE WHAT COMES OF IT” but it never came. As we played, ownership of the story shifted, everybody contributed at all times by making suggestions even though we stayed with the rules on “where the buck stops”. Fewer key phrases got used as the story had taken on so much momentum, and the contributions were adding so well to it, that we rarely felt need for it.
We had ripped the experience rules badly in order to be able to make veterans in one session, but with the last round of scenes, we stopped to even make experience rolls as one protagonist joined the mistake and the two “sidekick” protagonists’ deaths were simply narrated, without conflict, in the main protagonists’ scenes with the sidekicks’ players nodding enthusiastically (one of the sidekicks accidentally killed, Elric style, by another protagonist who loved him).
The lesson here is to go with the flow and let the transcendence happen. Ben has written a fantastic game and his rules and source material took us to that place, but we went on from there and brought the game to a breathtaking final which we could not have done quite that way had we not transcended the rules.
Questions and comments are welcome.
- Frank
oliof:
You are aware how much your report fits the blog post about respecting the fiction over at anyway?
Frank Tarcikowski:
Moin Harald,
Well, I like Vincent’s article (it kinda reminds me of this), but I do think that my "transcendence" is more than just “the fiction leading”. Because even when the fiction leads, the rules normally follow (like with the rules on character death in Sorcerer). To stay with the “dancing couple” metaphor, in our Polaris game the fiction let go of her partner (the rules) entirely and startet spinning in wild circles all on her own.
- Frank
Ben Lehman:
Hey! This is really cool.
Yay on Polaris rules-breakers. Actually, given your end state, you proably broke the rules less than many previous players have (including me!) For instance: all the stuff about the protagonists shuffling off during someone else's scenes (with the player's nodding along) is there, in the rules. In fact, it's the only way a protagonist can die before hitting Veteran. All the stuff about everyone contributing to different characters: also there.
But there's definitely some absences.
So I had a metaphor talking about the rules in Polaris the other day. Particularly about "it shall not come to pass." What I said is "It's like a gun in a bank robbery. Ideally, it never goes off. But it still matters that you have it."
When I read you talking about people waiting for the phrases, but then moving on when they didn't receive them, it makes me think of that. The rules are there, absolutely. But they're not being used actively, simply there.
Check me on that. Do you think that that's a correct description?
There's some other interesting stuff here, too. Worth getting into. But I want to get a sense of this, first.
yrs--
--Ben
Frank Tarcikowski:
Hi Ben,
Quote
When I read you talking about people waiting for the phrases, but then moving on when they didn't receive them, it makes me think of that. The rules are there, absolutely. But they're not being used actively, simply there.
True for the conflict key phrases! The rules were like the net or rope in a high wire performance. They would have been there to catch us had we slipped. Also true for guidance.
Not true for experience. The way we messed around with experience, we might have as well just changed the scores around at whim, and in the end we quit paying attention to them entirely. We did have one cool Solaris Knight scene, though.
That part about protagonist death is interesting, I had not been aware that we were actually within the rules with that.
Looking forward to getting into the other stuff.
- Frank
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