[S/lay w/Me] Lukuls the Savage and troubles
Bret Gillan:
So I played S/lay w/Me with Carly over the weekend. She's not particularly new to roleplaying since she's in my Apocalypse World game that's been going on for a couple months, but she's never GM'ed before. So after a relatively smooth session of my "I"ing and her "You"ing, we switched rolls and I played Lukuls who was journey to the Lunar Citadel with his tribesmen.
There was some interesting goes, and then it hit a point where she struggled quite a bit. She had planned on the monster springing out at a certain point, and I narrated Lukuls past that point on my go. She kind of floundered a bit after that point and I think she was uncertain of how to proceed with the monstering. In the meantime I was stacking up a massive pile of dice.
She ended up narrating that Lukuls heard his tribesman shouting outside. He forced his way out of the citadel, through the priestesses after they were blandly nonhelpful and nonresponsive to his escalating anger. Carly sort of corrected course at this point and (rightly) had the moon goddess show up. I kept urging her to have the moon goddess kick Lukuls's ass all over the place but she was like "the moon goddess wouldn't do that!" So we hit this weird point where I realized that Carly had no monster. The moon goddess was filling that spot, but Carly wanted her to be just and good, so basically in order to advance the plot I had to have Lukuls be a total shitbag.
And afterwards she did that thing that was like "Your tribesmen were fine the whole time!"
We did a little bit of deconstructing but not much since she was pretty clearly tired and frustrated, and since she'd never GMed before I didn't press it since I didn't want to come off as criticizing her. I emphasized, though, that the monster has to want to kill Lukuls. By narrating that the moon goddess, or nobody in particular really, wanted to kill Lukuls, it was bringing the game to a standstill and all I could do was keep piling up dice and wait for something to confront me.
I can't put my finger entirely on what happened, but I think it was part narrative inflexibility, and also a certain point where she had sided with the moon priestesses and the moon goddess and so wanted them to be 'right' which left me kind of floundering.
We're going to try to play again tonight. She's already talking about having people after me for revenge as monsters which makes me sigh a little because I never WANTED Lukuls to be a priestess murdering psycho, but there was a lot of stymying going on. We'll see.
Gregor Hutton:
Hey Bret
One thing I've wanted to do with S/Lay w/Me is to have a Go where I don't get a die at the end of it. If the other person isn't accumulating dice I feel that would allow me to take a Go "off" from shooting at my Goal/Lover and just immerse myself in the world where we are right now. Y'know, find a forward-moving event but not one directed at the Lover or Goal.
And from that fiction see where it goes.
Bret Gillan:
Gregor, we actually had a long series of Goes that was like that when Lukuls was trying to escape the Lunar Citadel and rescue his men. He was neither working towards his Goal (get the blessing of the moon goddess) nor working towards the Lover (he only got the one die when he rejected her). We actually had quite a few Goes where dice were not gained on either side.
Gregor Hutton:
Great! My games of it so far have been very sharply angled towards the getting dice on each Go, so I'm hoping to get more of that stuff you've had where that's not the case.
Christoph Boeckle:
Hello Bret
I recently played with someone new to Story Now, and she also had a pretty precise idea of how things were supposed to work out (except they didn't, of course). When I noticed that, we managed to quickly talk about it and she let loose and just played the monster (a small military company) and everything worked out very well after all (I'm really jazzed about my character, will write up an AP report after we've played some more).
Not wishing to sound pretentious, but I wonder if you too should take care of not preparing too much concerning Lukuls. The way I understand the game, the only decisions that are truly and solely yours are the forward moving events of Goes (including climax outcomes and decisions concerning the Lover(s)), as well as your written character description. If Carly prepares a monster that is intent on revenge for some past actions of your character (which doesn't contradict your description)... well then your character has to deal with his past. What you get to decide is how he deals with this shit now. Of course, the Monster's player cannot decide everything about your past and due to "playing loose" will have to accept some of your twists, as we just saw, so you get quite a bit of leeway.
If you've played again, I'd love to read about it!
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