[FreeMarket] Trouble with something
Ron Edwards:
Uh-oh. This is one of those times I have to come clean about why a game didn't go so well. Or in this case, why I'm not entirely sure what (or who) the main culprit was.
At the Dice Dojo, I met up with Timo, Peter, Sam, and Todd; Megan came by later as a spectator. I'd spent a hell of a lot of time prepping, perusing the rules and pestering Jared and Luke. I even made up a pretty interesting diagram to help me get my head straight about the game (apologies; it's a Word file; I'll put a PDF of it up later); any comments or questions about it are welcome. I also have a lot of beginning thoughts about Freemarket compared with the BTRC supplement NeoTerra for EABA, and about Tanith Lee's early novel Don't Bite the Sun, which I'd like to develop in this thread if anyone's interested.
Tmo and I both brought our deluxe boxed editions, and pre-play orientation and discussion went well. We moved into making the characters, who turned out to be:
Peter: Jim, a First-Gen experienced handyman
Sam: Fine Swine, a Second-Gen quester for the ultimate high
Todd: Franklin Somerset, a First-Gen old-school hobby collector
Timo: Stardate Slim, a Second-Gen mold artist
Cultivation was the main thing across most of them, with Fine Swine being the exception but still consistent with his emphasis on Printing and Ephemera. I stayed out of making up the MRCZ as much as I could, not wanting to impose, but providing setting information when asked. They eventually worked up the Pac-Men, whose purpose is to create political art. Amusingly, they didn't have any particular axe to grind so one of their Needs was to find a message, or perhaps messages from people who wanted some supportive art.
Tags: Social Engineering, Mercenary, Space Hippies
Needs: Message, Space, Following
While they worked on that, I prepped based on the memory mash-up. I messed it up a little bit, though, because I got confused over two of the ex-girlfriends and ended up with a couple of events which focused too much on single characters. In retrospect, looking over the MRCZ sheet, I now realize that I should have had that in front of me instead of scribbled notes. Its format is just right for what I was trying to do.
We were pumped! I think we really got into the light-touch but actually-significant content and everyone was happy to enjoy any incidental Color that popped up through either narration or table-talk. Opening play was enjoyable and colorful. We had a lot of fun with the four slackers who shared the living/MRCZ space with the characters and the highly fraught line someone had painted down the middle of the deck.
Let's see, going by my notes, Fine Swine's parents were trying to set him up with a girlfriend, who was part of someone else's memories, and Jim came home from the sort-of antique junk shop place with the remains of a robot sex-worker, to discover that it had been based on Franklin's ex. The Jim-Franklin dialogue about this was excruciatingly funny. I really suffered from the error I made with the mash-up as I had to struggle to get everyone into some kind of interesting scene. We ran a couple of resolutions to deal with minor hassles, and the mechanics were nearly instantly disliked intensely by Peter, and as it went along, less and less enjoyed by all of us, me included
The biggest conflict, between an NPC named Gordon, a member of the Readers MRCZ who were kind of perfect-suicide intellectual types, and three of the characters, ended up being frustrating. By this point, we'd figured out that either the system features didn't mesh with the group, or we didn't grasp the features well enough (or in a way we liked) to enjoy them. And in this case, by having Gordon wordlessly draw his katana and seek to slice up the characters on his way to Fine Swine's cache of pills ... see, none of the characters were combat-oriented, and the conflict was connected to the characters on paper, but was not articulated in play at all. So perhaps I merely called a conflict which was totally off the beam as far as the characters were concerned. Plus it was about as classic example of "monster appears, attacks" as one can get in FreeMarket.
Looking at my notes and also at the diagram, I may have strayed out of the blue zone and into the Grimjack/Post Bros area with their emphasis on butchery and family.
To clarify, this has nothing to do with understanding the basics of resolution. We got that, and grasped that card-counting played a big role, and also that one should learn to enjoy losing. I don't think we mis-played a single step in the various card-draws or card-readings.
Stardate Slim was lightly deathed by Gordon, which turned out to be kind of funny when the servo-med-robots, whatever they're called, showed up and stitched-glued his head back on, and he was fine in about an hour.
The final conflict concerned the repair of the robot, which in fictional content was actually pretty cool, and ended well with the robot being a very annoying girlfriend and Jim - after all this trouble getting her to work - switched her off. But mechanically, Peter was very grumpy about the system by that point and found it thoroughly un-fun to do; only his basic good will as a role-player and interest in the imagined material carried him through.
We discussed the game for a very long time afterwards. Here are the system features that Peter and Todd brought up:
- being good means you can only drag it out, not that you can get it done quicker
- being good can be undercut easily by the other guy calling fast
- narration does nothing - no "bounce" - especially since when you narrate, you don't know whether you're finishing the conflict or not
- if you get a lousy first draw, you're fucked, even if you're good
It strikes me that the only way around most of the above objections is to get more cards drawn at once, and there are some mechanics to do that which I'd like to see in action.
For my part, I found the different types and layers of Currency rather tiring to track
I want to stress that this group, and the Dice Dojo gang in general, does not suffer from several widespread problems with trying out games for the first time.
- we don't mind errors in play as part of learning, and I in particular do not mind being corrected by someone else at the table - such events never have that sour, demoralizing effect I've experienced in other groups
- we really like our characters and one another's characters and get excited about the issues and color involved in crisis situations
- we don't mind negative consequences to our characters as part of learning
- we don't mind taking the time to discover what needs to be said and shared as an interface or interstitial activity while conducting the mechanics
- we have a really good practical understanding of Authority divisions and how they might be organized very differently in different games
- we really learn systems, both through reading and through usage, and we help one another learn them through positive social means
So the conclusion at the table, and I agree with this thoroughly, is that something specific, embedded in the procedures of play, was definitely operating such that we didn't have our ordinary rocking-fun blast playing the game. But what was it? We fell into three or four camps.
- Timo was pretty sure we didn't go into it with enough grasp on the features and hence what we had to bring in.
- Sam and Todd were pretty sure that we didn't make it far enough along the learning curve to judge yet. (Sam and I are talking about organizing another try.)
- I was and am kicking myself for initiating a "he attacks you!" conflict with no information or memories obviously supporting it, which meant that the mechanics were being employed at a narrative disadvantage. I'm also provisionally underwhelmed about the exact role of narration during resolution, but I want to try it again to see if I was missing how to to do it right.
- Peter and Megan would take a full minute to decide whether to fellate Rush Limbaugh or to deal with this resolution system ever again. Megan described watching it as "excruciating."
As for this post, I really don't want armchair analysis of who's at fault. What do I want ... um, all I can think of to say is, Erik, help!
Best, Ron
Filip Luszczyk:
This mirrors my group's experiences with the beta pretty well. Was the system updated since then?
This, in particular:
Quote from: Ron Edwards
- narration does nothing -
I guess a system of this sort plain can't be fun without narration. FreeMarket was a funny case, since it wasn't fun with narration either.
Erik Weissengruber:
I want to address everything in your post but I don't want to do a point-by-point gloss, and let's see if chunking my responses will stave off rambling.
Responses to the Mechanics
I've
- Ryerson Crew: felt a little overwhelmed at trying to add colour with every turn of a card but they could at least come up with clever lines to make each card placement interesting
- Fan Expo Playtest: Two Forge posters were stymied by the mechanic. Both complained that narration seemed to be icing on the cake and felt that while there seemed pressure to turn each card placement into groovy fiction, there was no reward for doing so and no lasting consequences either. But others just whipped through the mechanics with only token attempts at in/out of character contributions to the fiction in order to role play the consequences. During this post-resolution role play some of the individual points in the process of resolution were fictified, but this was soldering together points of contact AFTER the mechanical resolution. They seemed to enjoy it that way and didn't worry that every moment of the resolution did not have a fictional consequence.
My recommendation: The staking of flow and the consequences of flow investment in a conflict are far more rewarding points for investing one's creative energies than in fictifying each step of the resolution process. If a character brings in a bug from a past conflict or burns tech, interface or geneline, that deserves some elaboration. But working out the implications of each and every step if not fun or meaningful.
Erik Weissengruber:
What does "being good mean"?
Your AP records players' impression that if your first draw is bad, you just can't win. The question is how badly you want to win. So your 3 in Wetwork won't help you overcome a weak first draw? How much of your tech, interface, geneline, and experience are you willing to burn out to finish what you started? This isn't like trading STR points for some kind of dice bounus in a hacked version of D&D. Your allies can help you rebuild yourself, aggie can print you out again, etc. But here and now, the decisions about what you want and what of yourself you are willing to sacrifice to get the job done, that is what matters. A weak wetworker willing to freak out and unload a pistol into the ceiling made a big difference in my Phantasm game.
Once again, it seems as if dramatic choices made before, after, and sometimes during the resolution are more meaningful than the individual steps of the card mechanic.
If good = the ability to drag out a conflict that means you are pushing opposing players to make drastic decisions. The longer you drag it out the more the opponent will be tempted to make drastic "burn" decisions or burn up bug chips or attempt to drawn in allies. Drawing out a conflict provides a different aesthetic of victory than a solid knockout punch delivered right away. I am not a fan of whiffing and waiting out an opponent but the resolution doesn't take as long as a D&D fight so it didn't really frustrate me. For players who are still getting used to the cards I can see where it could become a tedious waiting game.
Perhaps less skilled opponents can cut their losses by folding quickly. True. But what does that mean for their flow. I don't have the rules with me but wouldn't the character who initiated a conflict end up losing the staked flow if they call early but aren't winning? Keep doint that and you will be off of the station. If you entered the contest from a position of strength but a combination of bad card pulls and drastic choices about what to burn have made stayingin the conflict unapealing? You can back out but your flow position doesn't make it catastrophic.
The sense that narration provides no bounce was a sticking upoint for some of my players too. I saw them try to make nice bits of colour or definitive pieces of ficiton for each card draw, but heard their disappointment at the end of the session when they becaem aware than little of it had made any difference. So your players are right. Narration doesn't make much of a difference.
But decisions about the kinds of conflicts you start, discourse around the flow being wagered, interpreting the results of those conflicts and those wagers, setting up challenges that will draw in enemies or competitors, making decisions about what to burn, these seem to be the fun mechanical decisions.
Wait -- the dramatic decisions that are tied to mechanics. That's where the fun it, not in creating fiction about every turn in your fortune as dictated by the Fortune playing itself out through the cards.
Erik Weissengruber:
Enough with the stream of consciousness:
Get to the point where you can flip out cards as fast as a poker player, not like a newbie trying to remember the difference between a straight and a flush.
Then you and your players can devote your energies to coming up with interesting conflicts that will gain you individual flow or tap the flow of rivals. Make contracts with others to get funky tech that you can burn wastefully in flashy conflicts.
When you are riffling through the cards, at most take a second to say "Blam, blam" or "I keep pushing" but do not expect those to matter any more than what you say as your Rogue swings a sword in the Castle Ravenstein boardgame. Where you can start laying down meaningful colour is in those moments where a character's interface saves them in a rough patch. Dramatic decisions like the sacrifice of tech or geneline or experience are worthy of in-character dialogue or (relatively) extensive description because the results of those sacrifices will persist after the conflict. (The ebb and flow of your strengths and the little bits of fiction that come up during most acts card laying will in all likelyhood NOT persist).
So here is my ranking of the mechanics that demand the highest amount of color when elaborating on points of contact between system and fiction:
1) Staking flow
2) Determining the fictional parameters of the flow rebates/loss as determined at the end of the conflict
3) Decisions to modify one's character during a conflict to get one's goal (i.e. what to burn and why, and the consequences of that particular act of burnification, and reactions to it, and dialogue around it)
4) The DECISION to Go For It, Support, Burn, Call, or Error Correct, or play bug chips
5) Individual moments of card pulling. Really, at most they are worthy of an Eastwood or Schwarzenegger one-liner, not detailed narration.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page