[UtB] Under the Bed with Adolescents, pt. 2

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JoyWriter:
Interesting, I note this time you had both more engaged players and took more initiative for setting up the situation. I wonder if that would have helped with the last group, or whether letting them shift it more was actually what allowed them to keep playing. Bizarrely it sometimes seems to me that the players who are less engaged with the setting often create more detailed starting situations, perhaps because they have a specific overlap between the their interests and the game.

The lower age probably helped in another respect too, in that if people want to play a character closer to their own capacities, they will focus more on making the toys dynamic and active, because they can't reasonably get the child to do it. In that sense the empathy baseline might be more trying to look after their younger brother/sister when having been shrunk rather than imagining themselves surrounded by the toys.

Jaakko Koivula:
I think that taking more initiative helped the players to grasp the game and actually start playing more easily. With experienced role-players you can get away with just explaining the rules quickly and expecting that everyone will start narrating like hell. It might even work.

With these guys it was a completely new situation and an experience and they had heard that it would be silly and nerdy etc. etc., so I guess they just would have needed more time to warm up than what I gave them at the first session. I should have tried to prepare them better, I guess. Might've helped, or then not.

But at least I think I got it nailed in the last session yesterday! And boy, it went well! I actually just plain enjoyed the game. No buts, no even ifs. It was simply a pretty nice game of UtB.

I again used a bit more time to give examples of play and emphasised the point that it would be completely up to them how much fun they would have during the session. I think this was actually pretty important. The players actually guessed why I said this and that some people from the first session had had some attitude problems.

I have crappy notes again, so Im just writing up the story and then offering some meta-game info or observations at times.

Anyways, we had a 5-year old Child called Kalle. I again went for a younger kid. Not sure if this group would have had the juvenile delinquent -problem, but played it safe.

The toys:
Me - Barbie-doll (beautiful, flexible, impressionable)Marc - Spiderman action figure (x,x,x)Jack - Slug-plushie (something like this: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2336/2441914274_92ce2836d0.jpg) (clever, gentle, x)
Johanna - Dinosaur-plushie (violent, passive, peaceful)Teela - Witch-doll (treacherous, determined, stubborn)Fiona - toy-gun (disobedient, x, x)
Started narrating again by getting the Child lost in the woods. Their kindergarten was having a trip to the small forest nearby, but Kalle had seen a rabbit and decided to go after it. Kalle Cleverly makes a trap for the rabbit and then Gently lures him into it (Jack). Kalle spots a deer, decides that the rabbit isn't interesting after all and bolts after the deer. The forest is really thick so following the deer is difficult, but Kalle still manages. While hunting, Kalle finds his way into a clearing.

At the clearing Kalle finds a bear! Or bear finds Kalle. A wrestling match ensues. Kalle tries to fight the bear off by scaring it with the toy-gun, but the bear still grabs Kalle and lugs him into her cave. The bear had lost her cub earlier and now she took Kalle as a replacement, simple. Kalle is being watched closely at the bear's dark cave, but Barbie-doll bedazzles the bear with her beauty and creates a diversion for Kalle to escape.

Kalle unfortunately cocks it up and the bear eats the Barbie-doll. I get a new toy: http://www.made-in-china.com/image/2f0j00PeZQVMLshacDM/Speaking-Plush-Toy-Beagle-Dog.jpg. I had cowardly and then some dog-like characteristics and that picture is actually exactly like I imagined the toy to look like.

(I've decided that the person who starts the game by narrating the first conflict, also gets to solve a conflict on the first turn. Not sure what the rules say about this. I just think that it's pretty harsh that you could potentially have to wait 15 conflicts before you get to play again at all, if you get really unlucky with the hat and all the others beat their conflicts on the first round.)

Next Kalle tries to sweet-talk his way out of the cave. The bear Really needs to be loved and also Has a horrible migraine at the moment, so it is rather difficult though. But Kalle prevails and sneaks out while the bear is sleeping his headache off. Kalle wanders around in the forest for a bit and finds a rather dodgy-looking cabin. Kalle knocks on the door and the stakes of the conflict are if a nice or a nasty person opens the door.

(This got sort of meta-gamey. The toy and the Child obviously couldn't affect directly what kind of person would open the door, so the conflict was played nearly directly for the narration rights. The characteristics were used in more general sense and more about how they would fit into the story and less about what the toy was actually doing right now. This was pretty nice actually, as I had had a long talk about how we're creating a story together and big part of the game is just about playing for narration rights and who gets to take the story forward into his/her direction. Didn't realize it at the time and was wondering if this was a "good" UtB conflict etc., but it actually just was really in line with what I had been telling them about the game earlier. Nice!)

A nice old lady opens the door. She's really nice and asks Kalle to come inside and offers milk and cookies.. but she wasn't nice after all! The cookies are poisoned! Stakes: Will Kalle eat the cookies? Characteristics: Kalle is super-hungry already and The old lady seems really nice.

Happily Kalle had his witch-doll with him. Treacherous witch realized that the old lady was an evil witch also. Kalle on the other hand was so Determined, Stubborn and Strong that he didn't care about any wimpy poisons, but wolfed down the cookies any way. Then he nicely thanked the old lady for the cookies, took some for later and left the cottage. (This was just pure gold, brilliant :)

Soon Kalle met another kid from the kindergarten who had also got lost. Together they decided to hitch-hike a lift towards city. A greasy, smelly truck-driver picked them up. He locks them in the cabin, but the guys manage to escape when he stops at an ABC gasoline station and accidentally leaves the door open. The kids run like hell, but it's never a good idea to go running on the motor-way in the dark.

They nearly get run over by their friend's mother, but she manages to stop in time. The mother still didn't see who the kids were and Kalle ain't sure if he wants to get into that car. Even though he knows that she's Lotta's mother, Kalle has never liked Lotta. And the mother looks somehow dangerously giddy, Kalle's not sure what's up. Still Kalle and Pasi climb into the car and hope for the best.

(at this point Fiona had 4 tokens, and the game was obviously heading for an ending)

New round starts and the stakes of the next and final conflict are: Will Kalle get safely home? The characteristics: There's deers on the road and Lotta's mother is really tired. Fiona gets to solve the conflict. The deer-king was chasen by Kalle earlier in the forest and was so shaken about the whole deal, that he told the rest of the deer to stay put tonight, so there isn't any deers on the road, hooray!

On the other hand, even though Kalle makes a horrible racket, disobediently turns up the car-stereo and faithful to his horrible personality, shoots around in the car with his BB-gun, Lotta's mother still falls asleep on the wheel. The car goes tumbling into the ditch and an ambulance soon arrives.

(Fiona lost the roll and everyone was visibly shocked. All were ready for the ending, but it still didn't happen. We were soon running out of time and people were obviously more interested in wrapping the story up in satisfying way than about who would win. I agreed that the next conflict also should be "final". Not sure if the players realized that the rules had been bent a bit or if they just didn't care. There was so much concensus sloshing in the room that we should get the story to a nice ending, that there really wasn't any chance of us doing anything but final conflicts at this point)
Same stakes, but this time Kalle is really dubious about grown-ups in general. He has met stupid bears, stupid witches and stupid mothers for the whole day, so he isn't sure if he can trust an ambulance driver. Also Kalle has a bad reputation. He has pretty much been a horrible brat for the whole day and the ambulance staff ain't sure if they dare to get him on board.

The Witch-doll manages to smooth things out. Fooling the ambulance staff is easy and Kalle has had such a day, that at this point he really just doesn't care about anything. He has been kidnapped by a bear, fed poisoned cookies and driven into a ditch, so damn it all, he just wants to get home right now (stubborn, determined, strong, etc, nice usage of characteristics here).

Kalle climbs into the ambulance and goes to grow up to be a Stubborn, Determined, Strong and a Treacherous man. Propably a politician or a lawyer, as the guys at the table said.

Jaakko Koivula:
I must say, that this game was really interesting and fun. We made a nice story and looking back, I realize all the weird and funny stuff that went on in the game, that I didn't realize at the table.

For example, what's the deal with Lotta's mother being somehow oddly happy and giggly while on the wheel? The Child is obviously taken aback by that, but it never really got mentioned what it was that made the mother so giddy. Then next it was toned down to her just being really tired.

I mean, all basic child-hood lessons are in there:

"Hitch-hiking will get you molested by a truck driver"
"Never take candy from a stranger"
"If you behave badly, everyone in the world will know and it will come haunting you" etc.

And I've got a feeling that this sort of stuff is something that UtB is supposed to be all about :)

JoyWriter:
Interesting, cool how someone seems to have put in veiled drunk driving, and it led to a crash. Maybe not a childhood lesson though!

Another interesting thing I noticed is that the "danger" stays regardless of the success in defeating it. I wonder if this is because of the concrete way that avoiding it has to be done; you don't just roll to avoid, you find a tendency that can mitigate the situation, and so it somehow retains it's force, rather than being wiped away.

I notice you got very in-fiction on this one, but how did these players interact? Did you find they were doing things differently/more confidently?

Jaakko Koivula:
Yeah, realized that I wrote this one pretty completely from the story's point of view. Im thinking that it was because this time the story was actually interesting and everyone was really building it together. So it would have felt sort of unfair to write it up in terms of "Jack threw 4, 3 and 7 and beat the conflict. Next stakes were..." etc. I guess there's some middle ground there, but haven't found it yet.

Player interaction is a actually rather difficult question here. I think that we actually had less player interaction than in the other games, but more group interaction. Trying to explain it better:

There was less individual players trying to help another player come up with stuff to say, than in the previous games for example. Instead, everyone seemed invested in the story and sort of worked as a whole better. More macro-interaction, less micro? This might have been, because the players were more confident as a whole. No-one needed so much personal coaching and the game just flowed more evenly.

And Im not really sure where that confidence came. In this group we had one person who had done live-action role-playing before, so she pretty much knew what was up. But otherwise I was actually pretty scared about the last group, as I realized that I've put some very quiet and potentially spoil-sporty people in it. Then it just worked beautifully and I have no idea why. Maybe I really managed to pitch the game better and explain the rules more clearly, maybe the LARPper helped to set the mood more accepting towards the game, or maybe by freak chance we just had a bunch of latent RPGers at the table.

Propably it's a sort of mix of me getting better in selling the game and all the other reasons and the stars just aligning right that day.

And yeah, it was curious how often the danger in the conflict wasn't really negated or solved even when the toy won. Often it was just scaled down to survivable levels or the Child managed to weather the effects, rather than beating the odds and removing the opposition completely. I think it has something to do with the stronger story again. The Child was a little kid from kindergarten, so it would've been silly if he had wrestled bears into submission or stopped cars by punching them with his Strong hands or something. We had pretty subdued and symbolic use of toys again, so they couldn't pull of any deus ex machina -type of saves either. So solving the conflicts became more surviving and making the best of them, rather than making it all better.

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