[IaWA] Breaking Bad Habits
lumpley:
Bad for In a Wicked Age, that is. All of them are good habits for other games, variously.
These are some rules restrictions I recommend if you're having trouble breaking these habits.
Bad habit 1: creating driven characters
From now on, every character you make, do one of these:
- Make her best interests mutually incompatible. "It's in my best interests to seduce and marry the monk. It's in my best interests to drive the monk out of the region forever."
- Give her a best interest incompatible with her driving goals. "It's in my best interests to fail to seduce and marry the monk, even though it's what I intend to do."
- Give her a best interest totally dependent on other characters to make true or false. "It's in my best interests for the private negotiations between you, the new young king, and you, the elder of my cult, to go in the cult's favor."
Bad habit 2: setting stakes
Do not set stakes! It'll kill your game. You have to really genuinely not set stakes, too; it's not enough to not formally set stakes, or not all the way set stakes, or whatever. No setting stakes, even in your secret heart. So:
- From now on, in every action sequence, have the first round fully resolve the initial action. Here's how this might look:
Me: I run down the pier and I cut the anchor rope.
Mitch: I stop you.
We roll initiative. I win.
Me: So yeah.
Mitch rolls to answer and wins the advantage.
Mitch: Okay, you cut the rope, twang! I don't reach you in time to stop you. But the boat's only drifting, they're still fighting to get the sails up.
(We go on to roll initiative for round two etc.)
Bad habit 3: wrangling your forms
- From now on, in every action sequence, before you roll dice, think of what action you'll have your character do if you win initiative. Tell the GM. GM, you tell the player which forms to roll.
Me: I run down the pier and cut the anchor rope.
Mitch: I'm going to run after her and knock the knife from her hand. GM?
GM: Directly and for others (the wives of the men on the boat).
Mitch: Okay!
Bad habit 4: limiting consequences to the mechanical
- From now on, whenever anybody gets exhausted or injured, have the winner describe how. It must fully account for genuine exhaustion or a serious injury, so keep prodding until it does; otherwise, no input from anybody, especially the loser.
Me: Nah, I'd rather be exhausted or injured.
Mitch: Okay, exhausted. You sail away but I'm behind you. We chase through the archipelago for four days, and finally I corner you on some rocky barren island. You're starving and bone-weary from the chase.
Me: Crap, dude.
Bad habit 5: pacing hard
These are for the GM.
- From now on, in every scene, at least once ask one of the players to describe something about her character, her character's people, or the immediate setting.
- From now on, circle as many conflicts as you drive to.
- From now on, in every chapter, at least once set up a scene to open on two friends having a peaceful conversation. Let them have the conversation before you introduce anything else.
For goodness sake, let the characters sip tea together once in a while.
The end. Go and do.
Rules talk:
All of these are fair, by the book play. If you adopt every single one of these restrictions and stick to them diligently, you'll still be playing by the book.
As written, the rules allow you to decide when, for instance, you'll resolve the initial action in the first round, and when you'll hold it unresolved through the first round and beyond. What's happening now, though, is that you're never resolving it in the first round, even though you can and would, because you're promoting it in your head up to "stakes." Practice resolving it first thing and moving on, so that you can see how the resolution rules really work.
Same with all the others. Once you've seen how the game works with characters whose best interests aren't driving goals, you won't limit yourself to driving goal best interests. Once you've seen how the game works when the winner describes exhausting or injuring the loser, you can open it up to everyone having input. I recommend that you play with as many of these restrictions as apply to you, for at least a couple of solid chapters, before you start relaxing them again.
Questions very welcome!
-Vincent
Valvorik:
re Bad Habit #3, Form Wrangling.
That sounds like the forms would then change action sequence [round in original] to action sequence, within the same conflict? I though the rule was that forms stay the same throughout the conflict?
re Bad Habit #4, I think "negotiating with a stick" became "negotiating with an even bigger stick", but like it.
Otherwise, all I can say is sounds like excellent advice both to keep play fresh/exciting and to keep it a "story game" not just a "character game".
I posted recently in another discussion thread about using "conflict" not "plot" as a guide to sandbox style play (cf Chris Chinn's writing) that IAWA is a game designed around that whole concept and #1 in particular will emphasize that.
lumpley:
#3, just at the start of the action sequence. Tell the GM what you'll do if you win the first initiative. If you want to change forms for the second and third rounds, you'll have to negotiate it with your opponent between rounds, same as always.
-Vincent
lumpley:
Oh! Rob. What you're calling a conflict, I'm calling an action sequence (like in a movie). Each set of initiative-challenge-answer rolls is one round in an action sequence.
Also: My example for #4, with the 4-day chase, was always fair by the rules. If the stick seemed to get bigger to you, that's great! That's how big the stick is.
-Vincent
Valvorik:
re action sequence clarification - thanks and then "oh, it's all golden" becomes my comment.
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