[Polaris] But only if it wasn't my fault
Gregor Hutton:
I played a Polaris three-player at the first IndieCon 2 years ago with Andrew Kenrick and Graham Walmsley. I was the opposition to Andy and Graham was the opposition to me. I found "But only if" very frustrating in that game because Graham wielded it so bluntly in my interactions with him. His wordings were very eloquent, sure, but they were so blunt in their use: snap judgements, exercises in clever one-up-manship, and it led the story down a spiralling path of nothingness. Basically I had to accept what was thrown at me or ask him to try again (when I'd get something worse come my way). I reflected on that game session for a long time in my mind. It was all about stabbing and not about circling if you see what I mean.
Polaris has a great choice of phrases to be used and I found it creatively and socially frustrating when all I got every round was "But only if" on my turn. I'm not sure what the answer is, I feel that there are times when "But only if" can be a sharp, sharp tool to bring in, but only if its use is rare and not the first wrench grabbed out of the box. (Use of phrase intentional.)
Frank Tarcikowski:
I think it's important to understand about Polaris that your job as heart and mistaken is not to outsmart each other. Ron's suggestion above, to note that by saying "but only if", you accept the previous statement, is a very good one. There are several dials in Polaris, like how often you evoke the conflict phrases, or how confrontational you go into the conflicts, but in the end you still need to be dedicated to create the most poetic, beautiful, terrible and tragic tale you can. Together.
Forget about that whole "everybody plays to win and the rules turn it into a great story" myth, it's bogus and always was.
- Frank
Ron Edwards:
One of the features of Polaris that I'd like to bring forward when I play it again is the 'family' of phrases that knock the current in-play statements down a peg. You Ask Far Too Much is the most obvious, which as I recall, by the book means that the person must revise his or her statement downwards, into a less extreme form. I remember when Ben was playing with the guy with the little demon puppet at GenCon,* and the puppet would say things like "I grab the moon!" and Ben would You Ask Far Too Much it down to size, again and again.
Gregor, you mentioned that You Ask Far Too Much would merely net you something worse from Graham. This sets off a danger-signal for me. As far as I can tell, that seems like a mis-application of the rules for that phrase.
The Moon statements also seem to me to be good regulators, if the Moons are paying attention. Perhaps that's one of the most serious limits of three-person play, that the structure of the Moon participants is so drastically altered.
Replying to Callan: In the diagram I linked to, some of the phrases are marked with asterisks. Those are the ones which cannot be used freely, but required using up resources from the character sheet. One of the mildest suggestions I made was to include But Only If in that category, so that it was not usable whenever-and-however, the way it almost is now. I do not understand how you can interpret this suggestion, let alone the more extreme ones, as discipline-centric. These are deeply mechanical points.
Best, Ron
* Too much to explain. From the DVD "Gamesmaster, Gamesmaster, What Have You Done?" made by Breakfast of Demons. The little demon puppet was a wonderful means of examining traumatized-gamer behavior.
Abkajud:
In my experience of Polaris, it definitely seemed to me that But Only If... could easily be abused, but at the same time I'd argue that there is a sort-of-natural limit inherently imposed upon its use.
That is, it's hard to keep all the dependent clauses of the negotiation straight in your mind before you forget the whole thing.
Perhaps a house rule, like, "Every time you use But Only If..., you must recite, out loud, all previous, connected facts established by But Only If... during this conflict." Maybe add a thing in there banning folks from writing it down, so that the effects of a given conflict are short-form and pithy, rather than long-form and over-elaborate.
And, regarding the whole Graham maneuver with You Ask Far too Much, this seems like an example of deliberately breaking the rules in order to get one's way. Of course, I can't speak to Graham's motivation, or even to the nature of the scene and how it was affected by such rule-breaking, but YAFtM is written to be a method of scaling down the conflict - the player using YAFtM *must* scale back on his second suggestion, and the other player chooses which one he prefers.
If someone in my play group pulled that kind of shenanigans with me, I would think it best to stop play and discuss the rules for a moment.
Being an overly aggressive Mistaken is like being crowded or fouled in basketball - even though both of you want different things, you're going to have to exercise a minimum of "sportsmanship" in order to be on the court together. I think there is an element of "play to win" in the game, and phrases like YAFtM and It Was Not Meant to Be are intended to prevent excessive "gaming" of the system to punish people's characters excessively. If somebody capitalizes on the price one has to pay to use these phrases, and tries really hard to knock down all of a Heart's Themes to make them test Experience more often, that's mean and aggressive and not at all what the game is supposed to do, or even *written* to do. You can do it, but that's not what the Mistaken is there for.
Now, if only I had a copy of the rules with me so I could back this up with some quotations :)
David Shockley:
'You ask far too much' does not require you to scale down the conflict. It requires you to either ask something lesser, or something 'completely different'. The exact meaning of completely different seems open to some interpretation, I think the rules leave this judgment to the moons. (Its possible he wasn't really asking something completely different, as the rules intend it but they don't contain any guidelines on what that means as far as I remember)
I don't see why you think you need to remember all of the 'But only if' statements? I see the need for remembering the last two (since thats what can be reversed) but not beyond that.
I wonder if Polaris encourages people to be aggressive as Mistaken because it has distilled all the antagonistic parts of being a GM into that one role, and left out the neutral elements (which go to the Moons).
Perhaps instead of increasing the cost of 'But only if', reducing the cost of 'You ask far too much' would be appropriate. Just reading the rules I had the impression that its cost was equal to 'And Furthermore', but after playing it seems like it is more expensive/less available. The main reason is because it does not allow you to introduce new content, so the aspect must already be salient in the established fiction. But its also related to the categorization of Aspects, and the way Cosmos encourages a focus on individuals (so Fate relationships are the most likely category to be salient). 'And Furthermore' prefers to use aspects which are already present (since the only reward for using it is to make the thing you narrate 'stickier', as opposed to say.. Dogs in the Vineyard, where you can narrate a trait in and get a mechanical bonus to the entire conflict) but you can also utilize arbitrary traits if you can fit them into whatever neat idea you wanted to make 'sticky'.
I've thought about introducing 'free' checkboxes, or just divorcing the checkboxes from the Aspect restriction. And maybe changing Aspects to some sort of scene framing tool. But I wouldn't want to make such large changes without having played the game more (with less of a focus on driving straight toward conflict and staying there as long as reasonable).
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