[Covenant] First Name Terms
Simon C:
(Crossposted and more information here:http://www.collective-endeavour.com/node/1602)
Malcolm, Steve, Emma and I played a three-session game of Covenant.
There were things I really liked and things I really didn't like about the game. The game itself was a really intense experience. We were playing the remains of a cult based in Wellington, New Zealand, and we drew on a lot of New Zealand cinema references to inform that, the "Cinema of Unease" especially, with kind of gothic trappings, lots of long-buried secrets, themse of lonliness, missed communication, silence, the unsaid. There was a good splash of kitchen sink drama as well, with a lot of our conflicts focusing on the relationships between individuals, family members, husbands and wives.
Covenant was excellent at really drawing out those conflicts - at promoting really harsh calls in conflict. Working traits and consequences into a conflict can be a really powerful engine for discovering new things about characters, and about their relationships. The best conflicts were between characters who cared about each other, and seeing how much they'd hurt the other to get what they wanted. My character, Gavin, threw his wife's failure to bear them a child back in her face. Emma's character told her daughter that her father was only remaining close to her because he hoped to repair the marriage. These all drew groans, cheers and indrawn breath around the table. I found the conflict resolution system was a good prop to support these conflicts. Looking at traits, consequences and so on, and figuring out how to bring them into the conflict was a great prompt for inventing these kinds of details. That aspect of the system worked really well.
There were other aspects that didn't work so well.
Cell creation, I thought, didn't really fire on all cylinders. I could see that it was trying to set up internal conflicts and start the game with an interesting situation, but for our game at least, that's not how it worked. In game, we referred to our "faction" very little, and our orders not at all after the first session. What the game was actually about went in a very different direction. I would have liked to see a more explicit tie between truisms and relationships, and the situation creation system. The conventions and motifs, on the other hand, were fantastic, and did a really good job of getting us all on the same page in terms of tone and genre. I found they were actually much less important during the game than they were at the beginning of the game. That was tied to some of my problems with the conflict resolution system.
Maybe it's because it's still fresh in my mind from reading it, but I was thinking a lot about Vincent's recent "Rightwards Facing Arrows" essay about the relationship between mechanics, players, and the fiction. If I understand him correctly, he's saying that what a lot of "Story Games" lack is opportunities for the fiction of the game to mechanically affect the procedures of play. So, for example, in My Life With Master, you roll the appropriate dice for the scene, and then describe what happens in the scene based on the result. What I interpret Vincent as saying is that games like this can sometimes drift (non-technical sense) away from their fiction - that the dice game takes precedence, and soon you're barely justifying your mechanical actions in the fiction, and the fiction begins to feel like a millstone. I could feel the mechanics and the fiction kind of tugging apart at points in Covenant.
In a physical conflict with Frank (the monster who ran a large part of the cult), I didn't feel very invested in the actual events of the fight, though I was very invested in the actual outcome. I found myself scanning the character sheet for traits I could bring in, and then justifying them after the fact. It began to feel like what was happening in the fight didn't really matter - it was an afterthought. What mattered was getting those traits ticked off and staying in the fight. Going back to Vincent's essay, there was no "moment of judgement" where my contribution the the fiction was assessed for its impact on the mechanics, it was purely the reverse - my use of mechanics translated directly to the fiction. Narrating in conventions and motifs was especially susceptible to this. It was easy to invoke one of these with spurious or weak justification. In social conflicts I felt this effect less keenly, because we were more invested in the actual fictional events. What people said really mattered.
A lot of this was exacerbated by what I saw as a pretty serious flaw in the conflict mechanics: The number of relevant traits you have is a far bigger determinant of success than what you roll on the dice. Because you have to bow out if you have no further traits to roll in, you're encouraged to scrape to find any relevant trait you can. Sometimes this led to interesting and powerful new content, but sometimes it just felt like scrambling. I felt like rolling the dice was superfluous to what really mattered in the conflict. It also led to a lot of conflicts spreading beyond their original arena. A fist-fight usually involved a lot of trash-talking, just to use the traits. I usually found these uses of traits far more interesting anyway, and I felt like there wasn't a lot of usefulness in the seperation of "arenas" of conflict anyway. Similarly, the rules for bowing out of conflicts and intiating them again in a different arena weren't very useful to us. We didn't use them at all.
So it was a mixed bag, I guess. There were things I found really amazing about the game - things that I really enjoyed. I think the mechanics of the game did help us to produce something that wouldn't have been possible with a different system. Other times though, I wished we'd been playing Sorcerer or something instead. Definitely an enjoyable game though, and it's made me really excited to play more games with the same people.
Callan S.:
Hi Simon, nice write up!
Quote
Because you have to bow out if you have no further traits to roll in, you're encouraged to scrape to find any relevant trait you can.
Why were you trying to stay in a conflict rather than bow out? Were you staying in because it was important for you to (try to) author something about that conflict, or was it perhaps remnant gamist stubborness and refusal to 'lose'?
Simon C:
I was staying in the conflict usually fror character-advocacy, y'know? like, wanting the character to succeed, because if you don't, why are you even playing? It's not about authoring something about the conflict in the sense of "I want to say what happens next". It's about going after your character's goal. Sometimes something would happen in a conflict that would cause the character to reconsider their goal, and you'd bow out (a lot like "giving" in Dogs), but for the most part, you play to win because the character wants to win.
Daniel B:
Hello Simon,
may I ask for a link to that "Rightwards Facing Arrows" essay? I searched the site and also did a google search but couldn't find them. (Granted they were BRIEF searches .. but easier to ask than do a more extensive search)
Thank you in advance,
Daniel
Simon C:
Of course! Sorry, I meant to link in the OP.
Here's the URL: http://www.lumpley.com/comment.php?entry=438
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