[Bliss Stage] Kids having kids
Ron Edwards:
The latest Dice Dojo game will probably go into further sessions as well, as we made a very solid start. Playing are me, Sam, Shweta (her first-ever RPG session!), Jake, and Phil. I'd played the game before ([Bliss Stage] Men and girls), but not GMed before. You can find the handout I used here, and any comments on it are welcome with the proviso that it's still in development.
I confess I haven't kept up with Bliss Stage's development and am still using the Ignition Stage book I bought a few years ago. If Ben or someone could give a quick summary of the version or versions which have been released since then (I mean just a list of titles, not an extensive description of content), I'd appreciate it.
The Dice Dojo is located in the north side of Chicago, not too far from Lake Michigan, so when one of the players suggested that our resistance cell was based in the remains of a university, with an emphasis on the tunnels beneath campus, I suggested Loyola University, in one of the science buildings. That led to the Authority being created, Dr. Scott Montgomery, an archaeologist professor, obsessive researcher; convinced that his ancient Aztec artifacts are the key to the Bliss. The group's main practical problem is water, with the added difficulty of the alien effect on it.
We briefly discussed the dream world, deciding that it appeared as a disturbingly artificial idyllic woodland with curving Escher effects. We only briefly touched on the aliens' appearance in the dream world, arriving at a horrific spider theme, which as it happened, really squicked people out during play. In both of these discussions, I stayed pretty quiet, only contributing when it felt to me that I was rounding out what someone else said. We moved into character creation, working off the templates, arriving at:
Jake: Jimmy, 16, hedonist
Phil: Iain, 17, veteran
Sam: Timmy, 14, eager young soldier
Shweta: Tina, 13, innocent novice
I decided to go with two Anchors, the minimum from the rules to keep the total character count down a little: Amira, 17 and Sean, 15. Whoops, I just realized we totally skipped the rule that you name Anchors based on your high-school crushes - damn. Further discussion created some more kids: Will the tough one vs. the dogs (clearly a Bliss Stage archetype) at 15, Leelee a non-English speaker at 12, Christy the responsible water manager at 16, and a very little boy named Gus, 4 (more about him in a minute).
Everyone assigned various characters as relationships, which worked out very interestingly. One Anchor, Amira turns out to have had sex with both Jimmy and Iain, and just about with Timmy, but with very little Trust for Jimmy or Timmy. The other Anchor, Sean, turns out to have a close but negative relationship with Jimmy, and a solid relationship only with Tina. So there's kind of two cliques going on, possibly with Timmy as a kind of social loose cannon. Also, one startling, edgy bit got added at this point, when Phil suggested that one of the kids, Gus, was only four, and that his character Iain and Amira are his parents. Later, we established that Sam played Amira except for the Interlude when Timmy and Amira interacted, and Phil played Sean.
The hopes for the game are: I hope we can figure out what's up with the Bliss, I hope we can defeat the aliens, I hope we can ensure future generations. Sam commented that he perceived the resistance group as rather mature, given the parenting, the hopes that were either decisive or forward-looking, and the relatively high ages of the chosen characters.
We ran the first Mission just as in the book instructs, with all the Pilots going in sequence, each with the same two Mission Goals to stop the drones and defeat the enemy pilot. Jimmy the hotshot busted out a great roll and emerged from the tank exuberant, having splattered bloated evil-human-faced spiders all over the plasticine-green trees, with his "white knight, all tech and rounded edges" ANIMa. Iain's ANIMa was very old-school, beginning as a kind of cheap-looking rocket that he walks to and gets into in the dream-world, then transforming into a fighting robot as Relationship feature. Of course, I had him fly into a big web, and as he was coping with that, discover that the main spider-thing was already in the cockpit with him. He succeeded at the cost of some Trauma. Tina did some exploring of the forest in her Roman-motif ANIMa, which Shweta described as being clearly under-protective due to her character's naivete. She was nabbed from above, and her fight was pretty desperate, including getting extremely stabbed by spider legs after she'd bashed its head in with her shield, and Sean even lost control of the dream-world. Tina came out of the tank in near-catatonic panic. Timmy's run showed how deceptive the aliens might be as they lured him into a trap with a simulacrum of Dr. Montgomery, and he too experienced damaging psychological effects, breaking his Relationship with Amira to succeed (note: he was being Anchored by Sean, so this wasn't as disastrous as it sounds.)
Boy, do I love being the monster guy!! Nightmarish, horrible, surrealistic imagery is what I do. Since damage in the dream world can be as extreme as I want, I started small and added a little bit more and a little bit more each time a player took some Terror and/or Trauma. I found that with this group, a little goes a long way, and apparently the spider-fear around the table was sincere enough to add a lot too. When Tina was stabbed by multiple pointy spider-legs, it was a big deal. Starting with Iain's Mission, I also started intimating that the aliens knew about Gus and wanted him for some reason.
At this point, I'm running mainly with the notion that the aliens are malevolent, or at least that whatever interface they have with human reality, the effects and expressions are malevolent. That may become softened or more complex with time, but the Hope is to defeat them, not understand them, and I don't plan on making them sympathetic all of a sudden during play.
As the first-time GM, I was responsible for one misplay: we forgot to add safety for relationships brought in via ANIMa activation during the first two mission scenes. We fixed that quickly and moved on, acknowledging that things might have been tad more tense with them in there.
Table-talk often acknowledged cool emergent rules features. A couple that were most relevant for us included: (i) the fun significance of too many plus results in your roll, resulting in much more Bliss; (ii) that Terror cannot be assuaged through Interludes and hence, if you reduce Trauma, the Terror may lurk at a high value to become Trauma almost immediately during the next Mission. At least, I hope that's the way it works, because it's pretty cool.
As I found in the previous game, the Interlude structure of play works wonderfully. Ours included Jimmy putting the moves on Tina, boosting their Intimacy to 4; Iain and Gus sharing quality time, including a heartbreaking moment when we saw the metal cabinet where all the little kids' drawings are posted; and the epilogue to the broken Relationship between Timmy and Amira, which Sam played much in the sense of PTSD. Everyone at the table took judging quite seriously, and some effort's being made to develop the Anchors' personalities and perspectives. Only a beginning at this point, but I can see the attention being paid.
There is nothing like a first-time role-player in a game like this! Jake and Shweta delivered a particularly good Interlude, and I think Jake was a bit surprised at how straightforwardly Tina responded to Jimmy's come-on, in sort of a "You do?" moment. It wasn't graphic but the content was definite - a classic example of good Veiling. I was really impressed with how effective this was. Here were two people who'd only just met playing teenagers necking and petting for the first time, and it was realistic, understandable, a bit disturbing because Jimmy's a bit of a jerk, a bit of a relief because Tina was recovering from her traumatic mission experience, and yet 100% non-creepy and non-indulgent at the level of the real people at the table.
I would like to follow up on that point regarding under-age sex and thematic content for Bliss Stage later in the thread.
As I mentioned, we're probably going to continue this game. But one thing concerns me a little - is the Bliss Stage arc too slow? You can soak 28 Terror through the life of a character, in addition to the 6 that might kill him or her, unless you Bliss Out instead, which needs to go to 108 Bliss in dribs and drabs of 3 and 1. Unless Missions have multiple goals, it'll take forever! especially with four pilots. Am I reading this wrong? Has anyone played the game out through the resolution of all the Hopes? How many Missions did this take?
I'm starting to look for the end runs: multiple-pilot missions (with concomitant pressure on relationships across sheets), hotshotting, Id situations, every imaginable way to threaten categories and risk relationships, and more. Seems like most of that stuff relies on people being willing to assign blanks and negatives to Pilot Safety, because Trauma is the GM's main source for those rules. Ben, any thoughts?
Best, Ron
Ben Lehman:
Hey, Ron.
Quick question response post.
The game is designed for 4-6 sessions. There's some factors in the game which cause Bliss and Trauma to accelerate as the game goes on. In my experience ... it usually takes 4-6 sessions.
Terror drops to zero at the end of a mission, so it doesn't have the effect you talk about. (the exception is if you get terror from a real-world source ... I'm trying to remember if this is present anywhere in the rules ... I think it may be. Regardless, it's easy to imagine that it could enter via either physical/mental violence or via the "monsters enter the real world" result for a broken anchor relationship. Anyway, since terror only zeroes at the end of a mission, that terror sticks around until it flops into trauma or you finish a mission.)
In general, the first missions (when all the characters are juiced up with their starting stats, not very traumatized, small number of mission goals, etc) are the easiest. They get harder from there.
Some notes on how to make things faster:
1) In general, most missions are 3-6 goals (take a look at examples in the book.) So that's increased. You can do as many goals as you want. If you want to be nasty (accelerating endgame in the process), do a 10 goal mission, or do a rapid series of 5 goal missions with no interludes (other than the privileged) between them.
2) Barring privileged interludes, there are as many interludes as you, the GM, want to have. By ratcheting this down, you can push towards Trauma build-up, which accelerates the game.
3) If you want to encourage hot-shotting, offer players a chance to do things that they want, in the dream world, by going off the mission path. You can be explicit about this, if you want: "well ... you don't know what they're saying ... but you could hotshot a mission goal to find out ..."
4) Threatening Mission and Safety is good for making missions suck, which accelerates endgame. Doing some heavy threatening (weak relationships, mission) and then changing that up with something like Total Panic or bringing in a new relationship (which takes less dice) is a good way to generate bliss via + results.
5) Introducing new characters (yay! Pregnancy!) does slow the game. By making sure that these relationships are things you don't want to be damaged (yay! Pregnancy!) you can really crank up pressure (and, thus, endgame) by threatening them in missions.
6) Remember that relationship breaking adds 3x intimacy in bliss to both parties (this varies between 2x and 3x over the course of the book: the 2x stuff is an error.) This is a very fast way to build bliss, particularly if a character blisses out or dies (which rolls this effect over to everyone who had a relationship with them.)
I'm going to ask a better GM than I to take a look and see if I missed anything.
Ron Edwards:
Bummer about Terror, but we'll do it by the rules. I greatly appreciate the reminder about broken Relationships and Bliss! That's going to make a big difference.
I can see that I'll have to be more precise about mission goals. In Timmy's mission run, I now see I could have interpreted going to save the dummy version of Montgomery to have been a new mission goal. Probably the best place to start with that is being very clear about the stated goals in terms of accomplishing them in definite terms during the mission, rather than merely fighting something I throw at them and all of us figuring that somehow does the trick.
My only problem with minimizing the Interludes is that I really like the Interludes ...
4-6 sessions, huh? I'll be interested to see how it goes.
Best, Ron
Phil K.:
Having terror clear out between missions would change how we did things quite a bit.
One thing I like about the game is having a strong idea of what your character's priorities are will have an enormous impact on the task resolution. My character, Iain, would almost never put a minus on his relationship with Gus. The first plus that came up was always assigned to Gus, it just seemed like the thing to do with the character I'd defined. This created a lot of tension in the missions because my priority wasn't the mission or my own safety.
Ben Lehman:
Hey, I had a talk with Alexis, and with her permission, here's an edited chat transcript:
Alexis: the best way to get pilots to accumulate lots of bliss or trauma is to make the goals something that they want to attain
Alexis: otherwise they can just fail
I have a few ways to do this:
1. threaten to hurt or kill people (this one shouldn't be overused)
2. chained goals (you can't do step 3 without doing step 4). But this works best if the first goal isn't chained, because then there's less at stake if you fail it, weirdly
Alexis: whereas if someone has succeeded in the first two steps, they're not going to fail the third and thuse give up on the fourth
well, less likely
Alexis: 3) manipulate the pilots (my favorite). Make pilots feel responsible for their failure.
example:
In one con game, I had someone come in saying that they couldn't do anymore missions (their bliss was in the 90s) my authority figure was like, "oh, of course, thats fine. I'll give the next few missions to your best friend instead"
Alexis: or if there's someone who really wants to go on a mission, don't let them, because you're not sure they're good enough, and then they'll promise to do well. Or, "okay, we'll train your younger sister as a pilot."
these of course depend on the authority figure
a more military one would do something like the second example
an "incompetent" authority figure can damage pilots by pairing them with bad anchors
basically, three of the best ways to rack up bliss are making the goals fictionally/mechanically important, making the pilots commit themselves to doing well, and assigning pilots to the wrong anchors
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