[Annalise] In which there is neither Annalise nor a vampire
Tim C Koppang:
One thing I've noticed about our Annalise game is the deceptively large number of narrative balls we are trying to juggle. To name a few, we have our character back-stories, an awkward high school dynamic, the father/mother angle, jobs, college, the police, Iraq, and of course the vampire violence. (Some of these have been hinted at in this thread, while others were emphasized more in our third session.)
I think the mechanics of the game have encouraged our sprawling story in three ways. First, the Claims have encouraged us to introduce recurring motifs in new situations. Second, the fact that the vampire is so amorphous has led to an expansive amount of weirdness. Third, we have consistently created Moments with multiple orthogonal Outcomes -- which has consistently led us to introduce new twists into the story.
The Claims have been addressed in the posts above. I think they work well even if it took me a session to get into the mindset of actually taking Claims mid-scene. I like the mechanic (how it feeds into Outcomes) and I like that it forces everyone to think about what they want to see pop up in the story over and over.
The lurking vampire is my favorite part of play thus far. I, like Ron, worry a bit that the vampire won't live up to our creative expectations when we are actually forced to define "it". For a while I even worried that we had lost sight of defining the vampire at all. But the group made some more concrete decisions last Friday that I suspect will put us on the path to full-blown vampirism within a session. I can see the story pace increasing at that point as well. I look forward to the transition (in a good way).
Finally, I wonder if we wouldn't have a tighter (quicker?) game with less Outcomes per Moment. This is not a negative. I am not complaining. But I do find myself preferring punchier Moments with less Outcomes -- unless there is something extra I obviously want to insert into the scene. I can't tell if this is because I'm failing creatively to come up with extra Outcomes, or if I just like more straightforward conflicts. What's interesting is that as soon as all of the Outcomes are defined, no matter the number, I almost always have a strong preference for which of the Outcomes I want to see fail and succeed. So it is not as if I am having trouble connecting with them after the fact.
All in all, it's been a sort of weird experience. There is a lot of space in the game (and the story). Certain scenes have been very poignant. Others have just hung there. I'm anxious and excited to see it all come together.
(I'd also like to talk about the rotating GM, and its effect on story creation, but that will have to wait for another post.)
Nathan P.:
I absolutely advocate for my character in this game. There's been a couple of outcomes that I really really wanted to happen for my character, even though it wasn't necessary that important in the overall ongoing story (like stopping his nose bleed after, uh, quite the night out).
One problem I'm running into is that I made a character with a weaksauce Vulnerability (drowning in debt), but thankfully I pulled a strong Secret, so it's been working out ok.
Ron Edwards:
Geez, in system terms, Nathan's been squatting on that Secret's content like a puddle-of-flesh dragon-toad over its dungballs with gems in the middles. None of our Pushes have come close to cracking it, and that's after he's named three whole Traits on it too. I can't wait to start targeting it directly during the Confrontation phase.
Character advocacy is not a simple thing. I think assuming "success against imposed adversity at every step" is too simplistic. The game which really taught me the most about this is With Great Power, in which the long term of triumph, or possible triumph, is what matters, and the real self-defeating strategy is to turtle and keep everything about your character safe right from the get-go. Or to put it more generally, sometimes, it's character-advocacy to help ensure that he or she gets the right kind of adversity, or encounter the right kind of setback. As I say, even though the character hates it. Call it "Author Stance Immersion," I suppose - I take a hand in screwing the character over at the moment, and I feel the stress it imposes most poignantly. Making this work in game terms is not necessarily easy; according to Paul Czege, and I think he's right, there has to be some kind of back-and-forth among people at the table for it to work. The design of Annalise offers a lot of insight into that.
Anyway, back to those Outcomes and preferences, I want to stress that a "miss" on many Consequences connotes action on the player-character's part, rather than just an attack of some kind missing. In fact, in terms of that hyper-significant Outcome regarding going home with Ray, 1-3 ("success" from the Consequence's/Guide's point of view) would actually be narrated in terms of her inaction, or failure of action; whereas 4-6 would be her, or someone (Tony as it turned out) taking action.
What I'm saying is that with, say, four Outcomes on the table, the eight possible things that could happen are going to vary a lot in terms of how much personal proactivity is involved in, or would be involved in narrating, each one. And which require more do not necessarily line up with "success" for either Guide or player. I was dead certain on getting a 6 onto Bobbi not going home with Ray, not in the sense of parrying someone else's attack, but in the sense of exactly what she wanted and how she handled such things in her life. I've found I gravitate toward, i.e. commit to or find acceptable, Outcomes which correspond to character-revealing actions, regardless of whether they are Achievements or Consequences, at least most of the time.
I'm becoming a fan of insanely-multiple Outcomes in Moments, possibly because I'm used to the same thing during Flashpoint in Spione, and possibly because I'm enjoying the system side of it all, and that's really the only way to clean Coins off the sheets. That's also why I don't go for the "automatic new" Achievements and Consequences on 1's and 6's as much, because (i) we already have a high number of Outcomes at hand and (ii) I like the way 2's penalize Coins.
Best, Ron
Ron Edwards:
I guess I'll start by answering Adam's question: yes, Bobbi fell in love with Alex against all her better judgment, in the midst of a Moment in which my stated Achievement was to drive all curiosity regarding Bobbi's father's house's basement from his mind in the most direct and distracting manner possible. Apparently this was sufficiently absorbing or satisfying to the rest of the group that we went a whole session and a half without moving Bobbi forward in the story's time, and considering we missed a week of play due to scheduling, Bobbi and Alex lay cuddled together for three weeks, real time. During the next session or two, we ran her scenes as flashbacks. Strangely and repulsively, although Bobbi turned out to be cool as a cucumber when backed into that room at the morgue by weird cops, it turns out that she had taken Katie's finger and class ring with her (as in, from Katie's body) when she left.
Anyway, we'd played the third session prior to my last post, and it might be thought of as the maximum period of high-character, depth-based play relative to minimum knowledge of back-story or vampire-definition. Jasper, Nathan's character, became revealed as quite the freaky motherfucker, including having been the one to kill Tony. We spent a lot of time developing the strangely calm and surreal cops, who apparently had some kind of unpleasant tie to Bobbi's dad via a mysterious detective we came to call "Officer Friendly." That's how she met the one nice, normal cop named Alex who was frustrated at seeing what appeared to be heinous crimes continually covered up.
Mechanically, I was mainly interested in spending the Coins rather than gaining them, and found my sheet much less covered with currency than the other players. I found that this made me quite engaged with the consequences of my turns, a little edgier and more devoted to content. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that Nathan and Tim were perhaps suffering from an excess of riches and had a little more trouble finding their feet about what their characters wanted. Or I could be wrong and it's the other way around, such that their current thinking about their characters (whatever it may have been) led to accumulating the Coins; or perhaps what Nathan suggested in the previous post was in effect, that he had received a Secret which made playing the character a bit tricky and less obviously directed.
Keith Senkowski was visiting during our fourth session and we didn't get too many scenes in because we talked too much. Play was rather bloody, actually. A whole self-help group was slaughtered mysteriously, Jasper killed a cop and drove Gabrielle insane and then dead, which was all covered up by "Officer Friendly" ... I'm tring to remember why and how Jasper ended the session getting more-or-less cursed, becoming withered and aging rapidly. Tim and Nathan, remind me exactly how that played out. Vince's parents turned out to be surrealistically sinister, Katie came to see Vince after she died, and Vince took her advice to find out what was in Bobbi's basement. That didn't go too well for him as he was dragged down into the dirt of the unfinished floor.
Our fifth and final session went through a couple scenes and then phased into the Confrontation. Throughout play, my big thing has been not to force anything, and this phase transition seemed especially important in that regard. The fictional circumstances at the start of the session included Jasper all aged and sick with the cops, Bobbi nestled in bed with Alex, and Vince battling Bobbi's undead mom in the basement. We specifically called for Confrontation for one general and one specific reason. The general reason was that three distinct kinds of "vampirism" had arisen through play, and their relationship to one another was getting nailed down. The specific reason was that one of the characters had been dragged into a grave by its occupant, who was sucking his blood.
i) Going with the last first, Bobbi's mother was a fairly classical undead blood-drinking fiend, whose malign influence on the town was best expressed by Vince's parents, and probably parents of many of the other members of that particular high school class. Most everyone had figured out that it was her skull in the dad's study, and for the fight to offer any insight, which was dramatically practically obligatory considering how Vince got to the basement, it seemed the Confrontation had arrived - and still, without quite defining the vampire yet. As it turned out via the fight, yes, they drink blood, and no, they don't burst into flames in the sunlight, but they sure as fuck don't sparkle either.*
ii) Bobbi's father had killed her (to be articulated fully a bit later in play) and buried her, and in general worked against the vampires, committing numerous atrocities and ruining a lot of people's lives to do it. His malignant influence was expressed by becoming one of his routes of control, usually through some terrible psychological manipulation. Here, vampirism wasn't blood-drinking so much as pure codependent psychology.
iii) The police force in town had been fully co-opted by Bobbi's father and had become an institutionalized manifestation of "normalcy" which had soul-draining implications of its own, particularly in the form of Officer Friendly, who apparently believed very deeply in his role as enabler of whatever horrible things went on in town while pretending to protect it. The vampirism was more psychic and social, a bit more magical than (ii), still all wrapped up with bodies and blood, but not quite as classical as (i). The weirdo who'd tried to mutilate Bobbi's cat was typical of what went on under their influence.
It took a bit more content in a few more scenes to nail all this down, but its roots can be found all the way back to the beginning (retroactively) and the basics became a shared foundation right at this moment.
After consolidating our Claims as part of initiating the Confrontation phase, we coincidentally ended up with four each.
Tim: Tears on her face, No surprise on her face, Sharon, Surrounded by bodies
Ron: Thumping mortars, Katie's ring on Katie's finger, Blissfully unaware, "I'll make it right"
Nathan: Licking up the blood, Big dreams, Blood down the train tracks, Just shut up stop talking
By the rules, that's it, no more Claims. They might be refueled and used more than once, but they can also be sacrificed and taken fully out of play.
Our scenes and outcomes were characterized as much by infolding existing content as by moving things forward, although there was plenty of the latter. In many ways this phase of Annalise is the real creative push, gathering what's gone before, figuring out what's causal, what's coincidence, what's real, what's not, and finally shaking out into personal confrontations. In our case, those nicely corresponded to the three kinds of vampire. I'll recount the events of the story a little bit out of order, as we did Scenes person by person, but the events are better conceived as everything per character up to revealing each one's Secret, then everything after that. In all cases, the critical face-to-face with the vampire preceded the Secret.
So, Vince begins by battling and overcoming Bobbi's mom, but too weak and drained of blood, plus having had his arm broken, to resist when Bobbi comes to get her, and must flee the property, although he steals her car. He goes for a drink and chats with the bartender who mistakes him for a veteran (fooled by Bobbi's keychain), then battles his horrid vampire parents to save Sharon, finally revealing to his father the Secret that he actually threw the big game in high school, the one which led to him becoming a favorite-son in town. Call this "portrait of a man discovering he has a moral center."
Bobbi re-buries her mom for good, including her skull, and gets Alex out of the house completely clueless about all the shenanigans downstairs. Her dad comes to see her, and she reveals her Secret that he'd killed her mother. Obviously the dad knew this, so this "reveal" meant in terms of what's been made public knowledge at the table. She makes it clear that with mom really gone (the skull basically clinched it) she, Bobbi, has no interest in sticking with this fucked-up estranged-couple dynamic as the torn-in-half daughter any longer. That's my paraphrase; Bobbi was blunter.
Jasper confronts and then submits to Bobbi's dad (this happens before the above), but is then left out to dry when he disappears (explained in a bit, wait for it). He stumbles around weak and sick for a while, then stalks and drains Vince, revealing his Secret that "I hate everyone here so bad I can hardly stand it." Basically Vince is revealed to have been a villain all along, and his Giving In to the vampire effectively turned his character into an adversary. As Nathan explained it, every player-character belongs by default to the Anti-Vampire Team until/unless one gives in, at which point that character is emphatically not on the team any more.
So, after all this, the stories began to wrap up. Vince was now the one withering and aging, but found his moral high ground by rejecting Officer Friendly's overture to help him, which was sort of a second Confronting the Vampire bit - which although Vince didn't really understand the details, we knew meant that he'd become another ghoul/tool like Jasper. He left town, eventually dying quietly and alone in a hotel room while watching football on TV. Bobbi had just finished her Confronting scene, and the scene continued as her dad used the weird cops to arrest her. I smiled because "necromantic sorceress" is very close to my middle name, and Bobbi sicced dead-Katie on her father - killing him in the middle of the night, entirely out of play, left up to each person's horrid imagination to fill in. The next day, she simply left the police station which was a little disorganized without its nerve center, and left town as well. The epilogue concerned her pulling over at a nice overlook alongside the highway to bury Katie's finger. Finally, and repulsively, Jasper became the town's new bogeyman with the implication of Officer Friendly's support and protection.
Play moves pretty quick in the Confrontation phase! Some interesting features show up due to the altered rules. Holds turned out to be a minor factor compared to Giving In, although more of the former makes the latter more likely. For us, though, the character who was least Held was the only one who Gave in.
Another thing is that, if you plan to spend all the Coins off a Claim during this phase, it makes more sense to sacrifice it and get double the points. The only reason not to is if you wanted to make it publicly available for re-purchase for some reason. And that leads to another interesting feature of this phase ... much more adverse Guiding, partly because all the systemic elements of play drive toward either Giving In, revealing one's Secret, or establishing more Holds via draining Vulnerability. And perhaps the currency shift leads to a certain amount of conflict-of-interest, because you have to spend Coins into a Moment rather than just upon resolving it. So merely by Guiding a scene, you're necessarily siphoning someone's sheet of the exact thing they need to use to deal with the problems in it. It tends to lead people to construct momentous Achievements for their characters because there ain't much juice left and you don't want to be caught in a more important Moment having spent crucial stuff on something minor.
Bobbi's Vulnerability had hit 0 in the fourth session, but I'd restored it before anything really horrid had happened due to that, and after that I protected it fiercely and made it through the Confrontation phase with a coin or two still on that line of the sheet. As Tim and I found, a great deal of the Confrontation phase centers on whether you have the good rolls to support defending against the "give in to the vampire" Outcome.
The three-way vampire concept was led to some tricky interactions between Holds, give-in Outcomes, and Confrontations, because the various sorts of vampire (small-v, meaning conceptual) had conflicts of interest among them. For example, when Bobbi "gave in to the vampire" briefly and buried her mother's skull, it struck directly against her father's interests.
a little bit like dual-Humanity in Sex & Sorcery
Whew, that's it! I am not exactly sure where to start with provocative discussion-inspiring questions, so feel free to ask any questions about how the game works textually and how we did it.
Best, Ron
* I haven't seen Twilight. Upon drafting this line of this post, I said, "Screw it," and ran a video seach on "Edward sparkling." I am very disappointed. It wasn't even flashy enough to be genuinely offensive to the vampire-aficionado. It was lame even if it wasn't a vampire sparkling. It was intrinsically, cinematically lame. Whatever was paid to to anyone to write, direct, act in, produce, be key grip for, or otherwise participate in this movie, it was too much. I only forgive Nathan (for extremely indirectly compelling me to do this) because searches on "Edward sparkling parody" and "Twilight parody" provided immense amusement.
Tim C Koppang:
I hope you’ll forgive me for waiting so long to post this. I saw the thread about to drop off the main page, and wanted to mention the rotating GM aspect of play.
First, what do I mean? In Annalise, each scene focuses on one of the PCs. We generally rotate around the table taking turns. So in our game, it went Nathan, Ron, Tim, Nathan, Ron, Tim, etc. When it’s your “turn,” you pick someone to be your Guide (GM) for the scene. Who you pick, however, is not set in stone. You do not have to take turns, even if this is what we usually ended up doing. One scene, I’d pick Nathan as my Guide. The next I’d usually pick Ron. Sometimes we’d mix this up depending on who needed a break, or who had an immediate idea.
What did I like about this system? Variety and flexibility. Each turn, I’d have a different Guide with different ideas about what the vampire was and how my character should best be challenged. The plot was never set fixed because no one person was ever allowed to see their vision continued from scene to scene. It was truly dispersed amongst us all.
What did I find frustrating at times? Pretty much the same thing. Sometimes I wished that I could have continued to develop a plot point that I started for Nathan or Ron during a previous scene. But I couldn’t because one of them had taken things in a different direction in the intervening scenes.
I also felt like there was a weird dynamic at play when it came time to choose a Guide for my own character. I couldn’t always tell who wanted to be my Guide. I also didn’t want to slight Ron or Nathan. Sometimes it just came down to whoever first said, “I have an idea!” This isn’t bad, it’s just a dynamic that I had to get used to. And it did lead to some satisfying results. For example, the “lurking vampire” motifs that we all so enjoyed in play would not have been possible without this dispersed GMing.
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