[[SS/WoN]] Secrets and Training
Eero Tuovinen:
I would expect Janus to get that wiki up at some point again; meanwhile, there are other places where those texts are available.
Anyway, I think you've got it on the Secrets front - there's no need to make a big production of learning Secrets, most of them will be handled routinely. It's up to you to decide how much of a production you want to make of training montages, daring thefts and whatever else characters might use to get their hands of crunch. Some folks even play with a rule that player characters are always entitled to claim any Secret at all, and the player provides justification to whatever degree he wants - typically a short flashback narration about how his character happened to pick up this thing some time in the past. Up to the Story Guide in his role as a guide.
How you speak of the game mechanics is very much a matter of taste. I myself am very explicit when speaking of game mechanics, as well when speaking of my own motivations. For example, I won't just say that "Chief Kheagan uses Secret of Mighty Blow", I'll say that "OK, here's where I show you why Kheagan here is a Hero while you're just twerps. Check this out, huh, I imagine you'd want to have one of these as well! And yes, I'm totally dangling this Secret as a bait here, I think it'd make a fine addition to your character, provided he can awaken his bloodlust to grasp it!" This sort of explicit narration of what I'm doing and why I'm doing it is useful in keeping up communication, the bedstone of play. This goes into the topic of audience play as well.
As for the audience role, my experience matches yours; the requirement of being a good audience is not a trivial one, and I would expect most roleplaying groups at this time to fail the full requirement of being both able to express something others want to be audience over and receive what is being expressed by others as valued contributions. Despite the entrenched difficulty I am, however, pretty convinced that learning to appreciate what others do in play and doing things that others will appreciate is a winning strategy in the long term: my own play has always improved immeasurably when we've found this sort of accord even among a subset of the group.
That being said, it's an issue of skill. Part of it is group dynamics - these people who've learned these particular ways of communicating with each other. Part is personal skill among the participants. Both are improved by practice and by experiencing successful play; once your group recognizes and knows to play towards successful communication (coherent creative agenda, I might say), then it'll become easier to achieve later. Getting the audience role really to work pretty much requires that players understand what other players are doing, Story Guide included: understand and, consequently, appreciate.
I think that playing party-based is an excellent way to support play when it seems that the skills of the Story Guide and the players are not up to keeping a game coherent without. Besides, there's nothing wrong with party-based stories, it's just that there is less opportunity for individual protagonism, and in practice you'll have to choose between foregoing drama and sidelining individual characters; a party will be naturally inclined towards one lead protagonist, dramatically speaking, which tends to get in the way of some types of stories. The support you get for keeping everybody engaged and aware of what is going on is nothing to scoff at, though.
Aside from that, I mentioned an useful principle for long-term improvement of group coordination: over-explain yourself and always make sure that others understand and appreciate (I repeat that because it's the key) what you're doing when you play. When I explain some fine nuance of the fiction or what my character is doing, I look the main receiver of the narration in the eyes and don't stop talking until I see in his body language that he's getting what I'm driving at. The same goes for procedural and mechanical things - I don't just frame a scene where a player character gets into trouble, I explain that I'm intentionally framing the character into trouble so we can see what he'll do about it. Everything gets explained, and in time this improves the overall level of communication: the other players pick up my habit of over-explaining, and once we're all explaining ourselves thoroughly, we can slowly scale it back, confident that these people I've been playing with for a while now understand me when I do and say things. This feeds directly into everybody's ability to be audience for each other's play: when others understand what you do, they'll be able to appreciate and comment upon your moves.
(As you can see, I don't really draw lines between players and Game Masters in this whole group communication and mutual appreciation thing. It's not traditional to look at players as having any sort of mutual relationship among themselves, but I find that a group where everything moves through the GM is really playing at half strength.)
Anyway, I'd say that leading by example (over-explain, understand what others are doing, ask for clarifications when you don't understand and appreciate, encourage what you understand and appreciate) is the most powerful tool you have in improving the play of your group. I don't usually use explicit teaching or training or anything like that myself; roleplaying is supposed to be fun, so we'll just play at a level that is currently feasible for us, while pushing the envelope to expand our abilities. I definitely don't set myself up as a guru for the group; not only would that be foolish when we're working on mutual cooperative skills, but it would also take away attention from play. Much better to play with passion and give immediate feedback on both good and not so good play to the others - not feedback that a guru would give to a student, but feedback from one player to another. I don't really remember that this method would have failed in the long term for me, unless we count the times when a co-player's interests in gaming have been incompatible with mine.
Incidentally, a 15 minute solo scene is not a bad length; I wouldn't necessarily go over that in any but the most passionate groups. In fact, thinking back on my last year of TSoY play, there was just one mini-campaign I played in Helsinki with some old friends where we had the social robustness for fully independent characters who'd only encounter each other incindentally, through crosses and weaves. Those particular three sessions were very strongly predicated on complex scenes for fully independent characters; players went well over an hour at a time without having their own character in a scene. However, in 85% of my play through last year we've had a rudimentary party in the campaign, although not necessarily all characters have been part of the party and not all party members have had the same motivations. Part of this is because I play a lot with teenagers who tend towards pretty uneven play, but mostly it's just that I haven't had time for a full, leisurely campaign with undeterminate sessions and plenty of time to build up the fiction.
But that's that - I need to focus on the upcoming Spiel Essen convention now for a bit. I'll read up on your campaign at some point (maybe after the convention) - do take it up if you have any other concerns or ideas about the game; I like discussing actual play of TSoY.
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