Bliss Stage: Crimson Pandora
Alexis:
Hey Jono,
I don't know the actual rules, but when I play or run Bliss Stage, I do have robot parts be permanently assigned to relationships. So if your little sister is your rocket pack once, she's always your rocket pack. This has the nice side effect of commenting on the relationships: "Okay, so my boyfriend is my shield, and that girl that I make out with sometimes is my laser sword" can be rather revealing. Also, it means that as your relationships break, your robot loses parts that it used to have and rely on. Suddenly you don't have that shield anymore.
That said, you don't have to pick relationships based on fictional justification for what would be useful. You can usually find a way to narrate a weapon or sensor array if you want to, and if you have four different parts currently active in the mission, one solution might not reasonably involve all of them. It starts getting silly to try and find a way to narrate using your rocket pack and your sensor array and your laser sword and your gun. But maybe you used your sensor array on the first mission goal, and now you're stuck with it until the mission ends. I like to think of having all those dice to roll as what you could bring to bear on any given mission goal. So you go into the mission with these different weapons, and the extra dice comes from having the flexibility to approach the goal in those various ways, even if you only end up using one or two parts.
If you're really set on tying the parts to the narration, it can be fun to use color-coded fudge dice for each relationship. So when you bring in your jetpack, that's three blue dice, and the laser sword is four red dice, and the shield is four green dice. And then seeing which dice give you pluses will give you an idea of which parts to be using. Your green dice gave you three blanks and a minus? Guess you won't be using your shield much on this goal. And maybe now you're irritated with your boyfriend.
As for the drones, I think that's going to vary by game. To the best of my knowledge, drones are supposed to be real enough that they can cause damage in the real world. That's one reason humanity is having trouble rebuilding, and also it gives you extra impetus to actually fight the aliens. And they need to be real enough that you were able to use their parts to build your initial ANIMa. But for the rest, some should be hashed out in the beginning of the game, and the rest over the course of play. Establishing how the dream world looks, and how it impinges on the real world when things go wrong is a good start to setting expectations. After that, it's usually up to the anchors and the authority figure to set how things happen. In the most recent game I played, some confusion arose because there was an old cannon in the real world, and then someone used it as a weapon in the dream world, including moving it across campus. We decided that for this game, the real cannon would be unmoved, and the dream cannon would just reset to where the real cannon was every time someone went into the dream. In this session, the real world and dream world were connected, and the real world was stronger. But in another game, we might have decided that the real world cannon also moved, or that the two cannons didn't affect each other at all. In a game I ran in Seattle, someone traveled through the dream world and ended up physically moving to the other side of the lake. it varies. When I run BS, I usually let the group guide these decisions, but as authority figure, I get the final say, unless it's part of someone resolving a hope.
Ron Edwards:
Hi,
My Bliss Stage handout might be useful, or I hope it will anyway. It's part of my ongoing science-fiction RPG handout project.
In our game, we also treated a given relationship's bot-part as fixed, partly as a feature of the character's visual identity. However, any given part's utility could be expanded or adapted in any way; a jet-driven wing array might be used as an attack or defense at any point, for instance, as well as or in place of movement.
Best, Ron
Jono:
Thanks Ron, that is a handy hand-out.
(I'm chuckling a bit at your description of "emo-bots" and "japanime" - it seems like an emblem of the generation gap in SF and comics fandom. I'm right on the generational cusp myself - people older than me still see the Japanese stuff as this weird foreign thing, while people younger than me tend to be way more familiar with manga than with American comics. Anyway, that's a blog post for another time.)
A couple more things I recall from this session that were interesting:
1. I had sex with my pilot (offscreen) in one of my interlude scenes, and it *didn't* take us up to Intimacy 5. Because the scene judge thought (and I agreed) that our interaction was more of a trust-building thing. Because we opened up to each other about our emotions and vulnerability and stuff. I like that the game gives us the opportunity to make these kind of subtle distinctions, to role-play them, to judge the role-playing of them, and to make them relevant to the missions.
2. Our hopes resolution was a little lackluster. The pilot who resolved "do we wake the sleepers" was like "Oh yeah, we totally wake the sleepers". I added a detail or two about how we spotted adults staggering around in the overgrown streets dazed and confused, rubbing the sleep out of their eyes and looking for something to eat, but that was just color. We didn't have any great revelations or tearful reunions or any of that stuff when the sleepers woke up, I guess because none of the sleeping people had ever been a focus in our session. We were much more interested (especially the pilot players) in exploring the fates of the blissed-out pilots themselves than exploring the resolution of the hopes.
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