[Freemarket] X-Altar and the Arts of Memory and of Promotion
Erik Weissengruber:
We will see how things go tonight.
Ron Edwards:
Hi Erik,
Today is my love-letter to Jared on the Forge, apparently. I've composed posts about InSpectres, Lacuna, and now Freemarket in the space of two hours.
I was greatly disappointed not to be able to participate in a real Freemarket demo at GenCon, due to time issues and fatigue. Jared and I were both so beleaguered with customers and chit-chat that we couldn't spend much time despite being booth-neighbors. The little I got to do only made me interested in doing more.
Here's my question: what sort of play or approach to GMing really puts pressure on the characters? And as I see it, a related question: does it matter to anyone what memories become concrete, aside from gaining better chances at succeeding with later resolutions?
I know that when I get around to playing, I plan to do it quite seriously and long-term. So these questions are practical; I want to get an idea of what I should be able to expect. I guess I'm asking whether memories are important in a thematic and creative sense, and whether as GM I should be pushing hard along these lines. As I'm seeing it now, which is admittedly minimal, Freemarket is starting to look like a fruitful cross between Bugtown from Those Annoying Post Bros and le mon mouri (see my threads Beef injection: Sean Demory's Le Mon Mouri, Two [censored] at once!, [Le Mon Mouri / kill puppies] Dang!, and Dang #3 (Le Mon Mouri) from ages ago).
Let me know if I'm totally off-base about this.
Best, Ron
Erik Weissengruber:
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Here's my question: what sort of play or approach to GMing really puts pressure on the characters? And as I see it, a related question: does it matter to anyone what memories become concrete, aside from gaining better chances at succeeding with later resolutions?
Memories matter. Ninja 12 got around to visiting an old pal who had gone "flatline" -- living in a capsule hotel, taking what he needs from a simple food and clothing printer, but not engaging in station life. He was willing to give up some bizarre recent memories in return for access to some exclusive drugs. So Ninja 12 took him back to X-Altar headquarters. Ninja 12 was willing to keep one of these memories alive in a long-term memory slot. Caecilia was willing to host one as well. But Kotoru balked. Again, in-game and meta-game language mash into each other A LOT during this game, I wasn't sure if it was the player voicing thoughts through his character, or it was the player himself speaking, but he said something like "I don't want weird stuff like that in my head or to have me think that I was the one suffering that weirdness." He took the memory and broke it down into 3 points of Data for later use. The choice of having your character now think "I was the one who witnessed a deranged slaughter by the Leopard Knights MRCZ" is a difficult one. Carrying around a memory that you don't like is like being a surrogate mother for a couple that you despise.
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I know that when I get around to playing, I plan to do it quite seriously and long-term.
Even by session two, people had started to grok the mechanics in an intuitive way. It didn't take much time. People started realizing how that losing a challenge got them bug chips for later challenges and they started weighing their options more carefully. They also got hooked into the practice of exchanging long-term memories for improvements to their skillset. Maybe by session three they would have gotten into the habit of jotting down little short term memories for possible promotion into long-term ones. Once they started to see how I did my scenario prep out of their long-term memories, they might have been more conscious of their decisions. And they were ready for a MRCZ tier challenge by session three or four. My bet is that by session six they would have been able to balance immediate challenge mechanics, mid-term reward mechanics, end/start of session mechanics, and strategies for medium and long-term play. Every player had at least a digital copy of the rules. But as with the Burning games there is no substitute for stepping into the mechanics and FEEL how they start changing your behaviour as a gamer.
Advice:
- remember that a tie means that you start again with new cards. Don't make the mistake I did and think that previous cards still counted for margins of victory
- always remember to set flow costs AND to make flow setting part of the fiction. On several occasions I just started tossing out cards to see who won the conflict. Nuh-unh. Offering a flow bid, reacting to a flow bid, mustering flow as you try to accomplish some go and the Aggregate or interested parties watch -- these are all happening in the fiction and that fictional reality can only be supported by following the rules
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So these questions are practical; I want to get an idea of what I should be able to expect. I guess I'm asking whether memories are important in a thematic and creative sense, and whether as GM I should be pushing hard along these lines. Quote
I have never looked at the games you cite at the end of your post, so I can't comment.
But absolutely concentrate on memories. I was doing prep before the session and coming up with all sorts of loopy conspiratorial connections between the memories my players had assigned their "users." But when I was superusing during the session I just played up my challenges to the memories and NOT the elaborate backstory I had created for them. That stimulated the players into pursuing their own goals.
Examples to follow in subsequent post.
Erik Weissengruber:
Arggh! A computer feeb should not mess with HTML tags!
Let's address memories and play:
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Caecilia (S) is a mystical zen inventor
- Place: Uesuton's old theatre
- Person: "Sa," the recipient of the lethal package from the mysterious immigrant
- Object: Flamethrower mob
- Challenge: Sa was imperfectly deathed by the package delivered by Ninja 12. Sa is looking for revenge and wants to learn the name of the immigrant who sent it AND to deliver payback using the Flamethrower mob created by Koruto. He wants Caecilia's help in getting both. He picked Caecilia as the X-Altar member to approach because of the way she kept Maqqam in line. Sa's MRCZ, Sportsplex1 has the space X-Altar might need for a large-scale event.
- Memory Being Entangled: "I rejected the legendary seducer Maqqam"
In this case I took a person from Ninja 12's memories, an object from Koruto, and a place from Koruto's past. But Sa's desire to get Caecilia to work with him was motivated by a short-term memory from the past session that S, Caecilia's player, had bumped up to long-term.
Seeing the player make the choice of bumping up a memory to long-term is a good clue about what the superuser should be latching onto.
S. played Caecilia as being concerned that Sa had some sort of romantic attraction to Caecilia but I had Sa express simply and plainly that it was the way she confronted the emotional manipulation that made him think her a trustworthy person.
When Caecilia and Sa showed up at the MRCZ they were engaged by the other users right away. B. played Ninja 12 as both wary of Sa and unwilling to co-operate in divulging any information about the person who had sent the lethal package (ninja deliveryperson ethics and all that). R. continued to flesh out Kotoru by suggesting an alternative for the Flamethrower Mob, the Acid Spitball mob (Tags: wetwork/acid spit sacs/occasional backfire [the tag I added]). Kotoru had a memory about the Mechanical Barista's demeaning his lethal mob by using it to make frothy coffee drinks, and had decided that this mob was no longer cool. And Caecilia role played convincing her MRCZ mates to help her help Sa. I just sat back and watched S. do this in character. She argued quite persuasively about how helping Sa would help the MRCZ accomplish its goals. Now, her character won an in-game reward of 5 Flow for making this happen. So there was a satisfying parallelism between Caecilia's fictional engagement of her MRCZ mates, S.'s intelligent persuasion of R. and B. for going along with her plans, the in-game granting of flow for completion of a negotiation and the currency reward for S.'s choices as a player.
Now, did the players learn the details about the connection between Sa's involvement with nasty activities on Mars and an anarcho-terrorist MRCZ on the station? Nah. They engaged with the homunculus I cobbled together out of their disparate memories and sent tottering towards them, and caused the emergence of new fictional possibilities that I had not foreseen, and they made interesting creative actions as consequences of their engagement, and in S. and R.'s cases there were substantial in-game rewards for their character's actions and personal rewards for working with the game's mechanics (if their laughter, smiles, excited voices, etc. can be considered reliable indicators of what are unarguably private, interior states).
Erik Weissengruber:
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I hope to draw some conclusions from our 3 sessions of play
We have had to cut it at two. But broad conclusions are
- use the memory mash-up as scenario prep: the text as it stands and the procedures it recommends work well
- give the players time to get a feel for the mechanics
- the reward systems encourage players to do interesting things with memories, including other players' memories
- don't make everything a card-resolved conflict/seek out high-stakes conflicts for the deployment of the mechanic
This became apparent when I had the X-Altar's talk to a MRCZ that wanted to experience what it was like fighting a 0-G battle with security bots (they have lunatic dreams about messing with the station). The X-Altar's had arranged a space and were looking to provide an experience. I was about to use a Negotiation challenge to work out the details, but it seemed forced: each knew exactly what the other had to offer and there was little room for wiggling. Everyone was ready to go and there seemed no fictional or player stakes involved. When one of the players suggested enlisting the help of a MRCZ that had access to combat robots, I invented the COMBOTS and created a challenge where there was plenty of wiggle room for compromise and there were high stakes (20 flow risked by a low-flow character). Kotoru won the challenge by offering X-Altar's participation in the upcoming SOjurners battle with 0-G security bots. And he offered the inclusion of kick-ass combat bots as a gift to the SOjurners. This act of gifting allowed his depleted flow to rise.
Kudos to Jared and Luke: bidding mechanics have a long history in card games and in game-like economic behaviour. It is nice to see them implemented in both the mechanics and the fiction of an RPG.
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I want to engage the game's fiction and mechanics for memories, especially in relationship to the game's fiction and mechanics for dealing with the spread of ideas.
Mechanically: the characters created a promo video out of the video feed from a combat where Kotoru's hand-made ninja stars were deployed. It was an excuse to try the group challenge mechanics. They created a lame commercial using Thin Slicing and it only engaged 1 MRCZ. As I had made up several MRCZ names using the session prep rules, I chose one of them to be fans of X-Altar. So a connection between the SOjurners and X-Altar (in addition to the friendship between the SOjurners' Tekla and X-Altar's Caeceilia) was forged.
Fictionally: The players were working the divide between letting people know what they were up to and reserving choice memories and experiences for their discerning customers.
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