[Diary of a Skull Soldier] Dry, bitter, excellent
Phil K.:
Dave,
Procedurally, this is how play happened:
1) We read the diary entry.
2) Ron (the GM) made a brief narration about our situation.
3) Players, in turn, describe what actions they wish to take.
4) The GM calls for rolls.
5) The players roll.
6) For each roll, the GM compares the dice to the a table and announces an outcome that is a combination of pass/fail and mark/no mark. The GM directs the player to record his mark.
7) The GM narrates outcomes within the story.
8) The GM calls for marks to be shared with the table.
9) If you want to keep playing, go back to step 2. If you wish to play another diary entry, do so. If you wish to stop, do so. (I believe there is text in the game on which option to choose at any given point.)
I haven't looked at the actual rules since about a day after they were posted, so I don't know whether this is the written, explicit game procedure or just the way things went with us. To my recollection, however, that is the way things went more or less every time.
David Berg:
Excellent. Thanks, guys. From reading the document, I didn't even know #7 was part of it! I thought I just narrate an attempt and roll dice and get a Mark and maybe get told "you fail" and that's it. Your way sounds more like actual RPG play.
Phil, does Ron's statement about what y'all were thinking while writing Marks sound right to you? A combo of "How do I see it" + "How would my character see it" + "How would the diary author see it"?
To me, the Marks listed above sound like "How would my character see it." But "How would the diary author see it," is what I thought the text might be saying (confounding grammar issues), which is a little more interesting to me in an abstract sense.
Phil K.:
David,
I can see that as a valid description. My thoughts are slightly different in that I view the diary as the intersection between me (the player) and my character.
Character creation is almost non-existent, the diary entries are the only information you have about the world. From there, boom, you're in the world and you're a soldier, "What do you do?" All of this leads me to more or less consider marks like traits.
My take is that the whole game is character creation insofar as it makes you come up with a soldier from a blank starting point. The marks are what I would normally write on a character sheet: the defining characteristics of the character-construct in my head.
The marks were informed by what happened in the fiction and mine definitely took on a tone of catch phrases. Specifically "A rifle butt to the head never hurt no one" came directly from play. It was a phrase I used in discussing what my character was doing when clearing natives from a thoroughfare. When I failed and Ron described my failure as just angering the natives and causing a scene, I decided the phrase was too good to pass up. I didn't think too much about the diary entry, aside from how it exists as a setting. Yes, obviously, we were in a blasted urban wasteland. That factored into my marks but I didn't reflect upon the actual text of the entry, the intent of the diarist or my relationship to the diarist
That said, if I wanted to make/play a hard, gritty military politics game in a longer form I would actually consider using something similar to Diary of a Skull Soldier for character creation.
David Berg:
Okay, now I think I get it. That's a much more diffuse relationship to the fiction than I'm used to. "Am I playing a character?" even seems fuzzy. Interesting. Thanks for the insights!
Ron Edwards:
Hi David,
As far as I can tell, a person playing a character in this game is doing absolutely nothing else but play a character
The Marks show how the soldier has come into contact with the concerns and feelings described by the diarist. I think that's about as solid a paper trail of how one is playing the character as I can imagine.
Best, Ron
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