[Cold Soldier] "Upon horror's head, horrors accumulate."
Ron Edwards:
Oh yeah. You can always use one of those free sites like Mediafire or whatever, or Google docs, that kind of thing. Even a free blog, posting the game as a series of entries. I suggest looking through this forum to see what other people are using.
It is not entirely impossible for me to upload it onto the server I use for Adept Press, and give you the link. But that option opens icy chutes of scariness in my mind and I might have to reserve it strictly for Ronnies winners.
Best, Ron
Tim C Koppang:
Bret,
Well I'm glad to hear we played correctly -- for the most part anyway. As for our "big mistake," I can say it did accomplish at least two things. First, it increased the amount of cards we flipped, and therefore sped up the game. I consider the extra card-flipping to be a good thing. Second, it gave me less control over the cards in my hand while at the same time keeping my hand completely hidden from Ron. Thematically, I like the idea of pulling random cards as it adds to the helpless feeling of playing a zombie. But it also provided an incentive to take more memories. Because I couldn't control what cards I had in my hand, I couldn't build the perfect poker hand. Instead, I had to pull as many cards as possible in the hopes that the odds would work out in my favor. I haven't played the rule as written, so I have nothing to compare my experience to, but I'd say it was positive.
Using the "Go" structure from S/lay w/Me helped shape our experience. At first, I wasn't sure when or how much to narrate. I was confused and thought there was going to be a bunch of little obstacles for each command. However, once it was established that there was only one card pull per task, and that my power to advance the story was quite broad, everything fell into place naturally. Even if you don't use the same structure as S/lay w/Me, I think a sentence or two explaining the scope of each scene/episode would be helpful. (Or maybe that's already in there and I just read too quickly. I'll have to double-check.)
We almost always flipped the dark master's card right at the beginning of each scene -- usually at my insistence. The reason I insisted was that it informed my decision as to how I would play the game. I wanted to know whether I would plan to resist, use one of my hand cards, and/or narrate more towards a likely failure or success. Letting the dark master's card just sit out there while the scene unfolded was sort of ominous and helped me to figure out where I wanted to direct my zombie's action.
The only downside, and the reason I brought up the "big mistake" rule confusion with Ron is that I knew, right away after the dark master's card was flipped, whether or not resistance was going to be an option. If the dark master's card was high, I knew that I couldn't resist unless I happened to either already have a high card or pulled a lucky card as a memory. This limited my play options. At times I didn't mind. At other times I felt as though it took some of the power out of the resistance mechanic because it wasn't so much a choice as a foregone conclusion – especially at the beginning of the game when I didn't have many cards at all. (On the other hand, now that I put that into writing, I think it makes sense. It should be harder, even impossible, to resist the master when the game starts. Please excuse my waffling.)
It's interesting that if we played the rules as you intended, Bret, that resistance would become easier. If I could take the dark master's card into my hand, then I could take away his high card and increase my chances of resisting. Similarly, if we waited to pull the dark master's card until directly facing the obstacle, then I wouldn't know ahead of time if resistance was possible, and, therefore, I might narrate more openly. I can't decide if that would be "better," but it's interesting to think about the different possibilities.
Question: If you wait to pull the dark master's card, does that mean that you can't take a memory under your original rules until facing the obstacle? Put another way, if there are no cards on the table early in the scene, where is your memory card supposed to come from?
Tim C Koppang:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on February 01, 2011, 07:29:18 AM
he and I use any system feature as a creative jumping-off point, even when it's not mechanically mandated. We also treat personal advocacy for our characters and author/audience enjoyment of disasters as independent and desirable variables.
Ron has a lot of good things to say, but I really can't emphasize his statement above enough. Regardless of whether the dark master's card was high or low, I was going to, on the one hand, advocate for my character, and, on the other hand, play towards an enjoyable resolution based on all the information available to me. Knowing ahead of time whether my character was likely to fail or succeed may change the way I play, but it's not going to necessarily diminish my enjoyment of that play. Besides, I always had the option of resisting.
Bret Gillan:
Tim,
Playing the game the way its written should produce the exact same amount of card-flipping, unless your deviation from the rules-as-written goes beyond what I thought. You pick a card up off the table and then flip a card from the top of the deck to replace it. This should result in you going through the deck at the same speed as picking one up off the top of the deck.
To answer your question, the way I've been playing it, flashbacks occur during the resolution of the task. At that point the scene is set so there is information for the player to draw on, and things are at a dramatic point, and then we do the flashback. I really want to try it with cards drawn at the beginning of the scene, though. I think the flashbacks could use a little more room to breathe.
Tim C Koppang:
Bret,
I don't know what I was thinking about the card-flipping. You're obviously right. I must have forgotten that the card would be replaced.
As for timing the flashbacks, I think you should definitely try flipping the master's card earlier. Flipping the cards so close to the conflict seems like it would create big wad of action at the conflict point without much around it. But the nature of flashbacks seem much broader. In play, I enjoyed having the entire scene to riff off of details to use as my flashback trigger instead of (I imagine) having to scramble for something meaningful right before a conflict. I think it's at least worth a play-test comparison for you.
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