Our Travels in Near
Eero Tuovinen:
Quote from: Galwinganoon on April 11, 2011, 04:32:55 PM
Yet, the player who was playing Hrishikesh (the walozi) said she was going to create a really wicked drug and inxtoxicate the tree in which King Khale's spirit was said to reside so that she could summon his spirit (Secret of Eccentric Practice swapping Pray out for Psychonaut).
This is totally why I play TSoY; I haven't thought about it previously, but it makes sense that King Khale is, indeed, a spirit on whom Qek spirit-sorcery would work. Also, that's a really sensible Eccentric Practice, I imagine that there are a lot of more-mellow-than-you Walozi practitioners out in the jungle who follow that sort of variant path. Why pray so hard when you can just trip out to catch the spirits, after all!
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My wife (aka Hrishikesh) is running it so I'm trying to coach her in the ways of the Story Guide and she's pretty terrified (it's her first time running a real game). I'm coaching her but any advice for an up-and-coming SG would probably ease her zamani-obsessed spirit. ;)
My best advice in this regard is probably the one about attitude: Being the GM/SG of a roleplaying game is a bit of a craft, and while we traditionally try to make the player's life as care-free and playful as possible, the Story Guide does things that are truly based a little bit on skill and vision, which makes it the slightest bit more responsible and difficult as a role. This can be intimidating because it's more "play" like playing a musical instrument than "play" like playing a game, but in truth it's not a difficult skill - I believe that everybody can do it. The most common problem I see with first-time GMs is that sometimes a person comes to the table with strong preconceptions of what they should do, perhaps because they're modeling their actions on somebody else; this can cause choking and aimlessness in guiding the game as the GM doesn't know why they're doing what they're doing - for this reason it's much better if you can relax and only do things you understand the reasons for instead of trying to blindly copy what a cryptic book or a more experienced GM is doing. Often that more experienced GM is merely following their own unique muse, which is not something you should or could replicate, anyway.
Of course, the second-most common difficulty I encounter is when the prospective GM is too self-absorbed and listen to their own inspiration a bit too much. This mostly causes difficulty when the GM/SG starts ignoring the systemic procedures of the game the group is playing in favour of directly forcing the fiction to accord with their vision of how things should be - turning the game into GM-controlled freeform, in other words. The reason might be because the GM finds the game's system intractable or indimidating. In these situations it's a very good idea to ask the group for help in understanding how to go about things, or to simply play some simpler game you feel you can respect; people shouldn't play RPGs they don't respect as things to play, I think, as that just leads to in-game murk and ignoring parts in a haphazard manner. Seems obvious, but often it isn't when the group is deeply committed to playing that one game whether it be D&D or Vampire or whatever.
Fortunately I've never seen either of the above become a serious problem when the group has had good communication. If players dare to simply ask the GM/SG what they're doing when the inexperienced SG seems to be going off the rails, discussion will straighten out almost anything. Just don't let your own creativity get to choked by external pressures, but don't let that creativity override the framework of the activity you're guiding for the other players, and in my experience you'll be just fine. Also, read the Story Guiding section of the Solar System rules, I like the list of "Story Guide responsibilities and tasks" there :)
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Key of Cat's Curiosity
The character is distractible, dangerously so, and imperils himself and society to sate his curiosity.
1xp: your curiosity distracts you from the task at hand
2xp: your curiosity inconveniences you or your allies
5xp: your curiosity endangers you or your allies
Buyoff: stay focused and overcome adversity
That one was for Hrishikesh (the walozi).
She was a very fickle character all through the campaign, I gather; a real agent of chaos. I imagine that her being the SG will be quite interesting; the GM position naturally makes you take things more seriously and forces you to worry about the cohesion of the fiction, so it's a very different role. I could see a joyful, impulsive player like that having some trouble developing interesting NPCs and situations over the long term, but I believe you'll get a lot of unique interpretations out of it, too. A real treat, I'd expect.
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Also, if I read the xp flow correctly, you might consider upping the Advance cost from 5xp to 10 if you haven't already done so. Not a necessity by any means if you like the pace you've been setting, but it's an option to keep in mind.
I'm interested to hear the reasoning for this.
Would it mainly be to draw out the story? Require characters to specialize more?
Mostly that came to mind because the characters seemed to be collecting Secrets pretty quickly and routinely in the campaign description. If I read it correctly, the style of the group was that Advances were spent relatively quickly and decisively on all sorts of character-candy. This is absolutely fine and certainly better than making character development painful, but it occurs to me that you might want to try emphasizing the character development more, too: I myself tend to get a lot of mileage out of new Secrets when characters only learn at most one of them per session (in addition to the Abilities and Pools they develop), as I can introduce new NPC teachers and bring out consequences and possibilities of using the new powers more. Slower development also makes buying high Abilities less of a no-brainer, which ultimately slows down accidental Transcendences, which is useful for players who don't have a lot of self-restraint about it; their characters get a slight bit more time to mature before they're written off, which might be more enjoyable. Or not, I can certainly see the virtues in getting really powerful characters really quickly, too, especially for a group that enjoys cavorting through the setting and making a mess of things.
As a comparison, I'm myself currently in session 13 or so of a Solar System campaign set in Glorantha, and it's much more staid and minimalistic about the crunch than the average TSoY game. The characters take in an average of five xp per session or so, and they each possess only a couple of Secrets, most of them pieces of equipment. They tend to only get new toys out of complex, deeply setting-rooted interactions such as new religious insights. I play every piece of crunch for everything it's worth, basically, to the extent that acquiring each is almost like a mini-adventure. A really enjoyable campaign, and very different in resource dynamics from the wild stuff you have here.
John H:
BTW - I changed my forum name to something more personal (from Galwinganoon) since that seems to be the standard.
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Mostly that came to mind because the characters seemed to be collecting Secrets pretty quickly and routinely in the campaign description. If I read it correctly, the style of the group was that Advances were spent relatively quickly and decisively on all sorts of character-candy.
Thanks for the response to the 5xp vs 10xp thought process.
I examined the character sheets and at the end of 10 meetings (usually 4 hours each), I noticed some trends:
1. The characters had 5-9 Secrets
2. All characters had one ability above 2. Some had 2 at 3, others had one at 4 (and they ended up transcending in the final meeting).
3. Everyone ended with 2-4 Keys.
4. No one invested heavily in Pools (one character ended up with the total pool combination at 13, most ended at 10)
Going into the game, I expected that people would end up pouring more into Pools so they could power some wicked Secrets (Secret of Creation, I'm looking at you here) and get bonus dice at will, but that never really happened.
I'm not sure if this sort of distribution is normal / high / strangely aligned or what.
John H:
Eero,
As promised, I've added the cast bios and adventure log from the first meeting of our new game. It was a pretty wild time and I'm glad that I've finally been able to play TSoY.
http://toasty-fish.com/tsoy/
-John
Eero Tuovinen:
Epic yet picaresque, with horror and humor elements. Seems like playing that was fun, even if the story tends to meander with so many player characters all in one situation. It's the story of a young ghoul-in-training being egged on by a Gandalf-like figure intent on stopping the rise of the undead by the way of specialized anti-undead goblin cracktroops. A high-concept game, if any. I like how dark and twisted your Maldor is, arena fights and all. It's a decayed post-apocalyptic society.
It occurs to me that your vision of Three-Corner magic is very mystical, it reminds me of psionic mysticism, sort of like some Taoist magic. This is something I've done a bit lately myself as well, moving away from candles and incence and other traditional paraphelia of wizardry. Perhaps you'll have an opportunity to explore how it all works and whether it has some sort of hidden cost, or if it truly is the nature of the world to be moved by the minds of men intent on balance of the Foci.
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After hearing Catha'ir's so-called Truths, the Historian looked particularly wise and unimpressed. Belfrius simply responded, "sir, our Lord will protect us from any sort of 'undead tsunami.' The events in your song are impossible. Have you even been to our library?"
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