[Ophian] A first actual session
Ron Edwards:
For the background, see Three games about religion, the Adept Press page for a direct link for downloading the current document, and anxieties about death at the core of ophite.
I'm calling it "Ophian" now because I think it sounds cooler, but it's still just a working title. I'm a little bit intrigued by the tendency in the source literature (semi-autobiographical comics) to name them poorly - Hate, Box Office Poison, and Beg the Question are all terrible titles despite being outstanding comics, and Dykes to Watch Out For meant something very different when the strip began than it came to mean later. So I'm waiting for the moment when a totally "wrong" title seems right.
Ed, James, me, and one other person; Bill was there but didn't play. I do not understand why, at this moment, I am totally blanking on who played the Ophian character. I apologize to you! Remind me!
In addition to the textual requirements of being slender, 20, light-skinned Levantine, working-class family, needs a haircut, bright; we found that our Ophian was male, a part-time security guard, in school full time, living in his own apartment, with a romantic partner, and a virgin. His name was Christopher, and his ambition was to go to pharmacy school to design successful drugs. The social context for the group of characters is a coffee shop they all frequent.
Jude: Unitarian Universalism, mainly for political protest and hot older women; better not to ask and Christopher's lab partner in chemistry class (played by me)
Mark: Roman Catholic, paint by numbers and rote practice; everyone's pal and Christopher's fellow lackey at work (played by James)
Basil: Lutheran, ignore community and ritual worship, but intensely devoted to it as a philosophy and worldview; hyper-intellectual and the mullet*
Making these characters also yielded a bank of slips with further character descriptors, contents unknown, to use for characters in play if we wanted.
The feel of play and the events worked wonderfully, as good as I'd hoped and at times better. There were a few minor stalls as people got used to it, realizing that the lack of conflict and driving-forward was actually a feature, and that it was perfectly all right merely to add a bit of color here and there with "nothing happening." I did my best not to respond to a certain tendency to look toward me for "what happens next" once in a while.
So, understandably, not much happened. Christopher's girlfriend Sylvie drove him and his friend Mark to work, they managed time for a coffee with Basil on the way, and goofed a bit at work while Basil ate a Slim Jim by himself. Dialogue concerned things like buying a sister's birthday gift, whether it's a mullet if it's not Jheri-curled, skating past whether Sylvie and Christopher are having sex (assumed as a given by the friends, mm'hmm'd by Christopher), and a bit of discourse on whether one can or cannot see Rebecca Romijin's actual genitals at a certain moment in X2.**
Yet there was a lot of humanity to see! Mark's everyone's pal, but a certain passive-aggressive anger seems to burn in him. He and Sylvie do not like one another, or there's something between them anyway. Sylvie may or may not be concerned about all-the-way sex with Christopher, but we are all interested in seeing what she says when they're alone. And best of all, Basil began as a bit of a target for his friends at first, with his goony haircut and not obviously at school, and maybe a bit of a prick as he "shrinkaged" from the Slim Jims at the 7-11 ... but then he became profoundly sympathetic in the last moments of play, with a flashback to his frightening encounter with robbers there not long ago, which he has clearly not disclosed to his friends.
I didn't bring in my character Jude, who seemed to me better suited to a one-on-one with Christopher to start, being the academic friend. Plenty of time for that later. I should emphasize in the rules and in introducing the game that lots and lots of characters can be brought in all the time, and that the initial non-Ophian ones aren't sacred. Next time Sylvie showed up I was going to grab a couple descriptors for her.
We went through about six or seven cards, I think, past the six-card no-Angel buffer, but not enough to see any of them, nor any Mornings either. The short-form goals for play meant we found the "wrap" after Basil's flashback and therefore stopped playing.
So, was it over too quick? Yes and no. On the one hand, we didn't get to any Angels. On the other, the wrap was awesome. I'm thinking that the best thing to develop next is how to formalize playing again, especially outside the con context and the booth context of me having to jump up all the time to talk to people arriving there.
Best, Ron
* The mullet is a haircut. Run a Google image search if you are wondering what it is.
** .... What?
Callan S.:
Hi Ron,
Is your design intended to arc over a few session? Is there a rough idea of how many (your angel card progression seems to indicate...progression towards something)? I'm not saying a set in stone number, just is there a 'round about this many, sometimes more, sometimes less' number.
Without seeing a full arc, I'm guessing I'm not seeing a full actual play (which could be said for D&D sessions as well - it's no big deal to say so).
Ron Edwards:
Hi Callan,
The vision for play is outlined in the first page of the draft, so if you want, review that to accompany this reply.
It's supposed to be, or at least allow for, short-form play. At any time, if someone perceives an emergent punchline, an impending dramatic shift in circumstances, or anything else along those lines, he or she simply says "wrap!" and if anyone else confirms it, then play must end. How long it takes to get there, and how much happens before then, is entirely up to play itself. I want sessions to be unpredictably variable in length. Going on for too long without a wrap strikes me as unsuccessful play, but I can't dictate that "too long" point in terms of actual play-time or play-content.
On the one hand, our session was not quite ideal because of the context: at my booth, during a convention, subject to the arrivals of people I had to jump up and interact with. On the other, we did in fact achieve a totally satisfying "wrap" both in terms of my intended standards for it and in social/procedural terms among us. So we did, in fact, play a full session of the game exactly as I'd conceived and hoped was possible.
What strikes me as the next design step is to say what to do with the cards at the end of a wrap, and if a wrap does not designate the full closure of play (i.e., people want to play some more with these characters). My thinking is to leave all the cards exactly as they are, and get back to play at any time. If we weren't at the con, and if this were a game held at one of our homes, that might be feasible.
I'm even thinking of designing a tray for laying out cards, which would be somehow physically designed such that the cards wouldn't be easily shifted by moving the tray. So you could physically pick it up and put it somewhere with a good chance of taking it down for later play, with the cards reliably remaining where they'd been.
Best, Ron
Ron Edwards:
H'mmm, it suddenly occurs to me that I'm not addressing a key point of your question: the Angels.
OK, first, the Angels are scattered randomly through the deck following the top six cards. They do illustrate a hierarchy, with Michael demonstrating "God's" essential arbitrariness regarding death at the top, and the ones toward the bottom being associated with various forms of more "in-fiction" or "personal responsibility" death. But that's not the order in which they will appear, probably.
Second, the fact that we didn't hit an Angel means that certain levels of tension and situation were not brought into play. And that's OK. In the source fiction I'm using, a lot of strips and stories are nothing more than "the day we went to beach," full of portraiture and illuminating moments about the characters and relationships, full of observations about the larger culture, full of satirical knee-strikes at their subculture, but with no heavy issues intruding.
I'm thinking about the story in Beg the Question when Rob and Sylvia join her brother and his wife, plus their horny thirteen-year-old son, at a beach house for a weekend. A lot of it is about ordinary stuff, letting us know how people interact, seeing their thought processes, vicariously getting into their normal lives. Some of it is about how a couple who haven't been together long and can't keep their hands off one another manage to get their urges relieved in such circumstances, and some of it is about the nephew's opportunistic use of the circumstances to add to his treasured store of masturbatory imagery. But it's mainly funny, human, and ordinary life-documentary.
So combining these points with what I posted above about formally preserving the deck-as-played for re-visiting, seems like a neat context for a game to me.
Best, Ron
Gregor Hutton:
Oh, the other person was me! I had to shoot off afterwards to catch lunch with a pal, so I wasn't around for the debrief!
You know, I really struggled trying to think who "he" was, and what his goal in life was at the start of the game. I'm sure that was frustrating when everyone had to wait for me, and I got there at the third attempt.
I thought about that a lot during the con afterwards.
I realized why I didn't need to think so much, since in play everything was "...mainly funny, human, and ordinary life-documentary." And the ophite character, as it turned out, wasn't even the punchline for our session. Just play along and see where it goes, find the moment, and call wrap.
But I also wondered why the two weak goals I came up with were weak. Given the short-form sessions and (hopefully) long-form repeat play that stuff will come out in play, right? I mean, do I need to know the goal absolutely at the start? And I wondered if we could thrash out the other goals and why they're not optimal. The nixed ones should be on the sheet and scored through (but readable).
I think one was "moving to the city" or something. That came from something my friend Martin and me perceived in our gaming group from years ago. Most of them are still in the town, not having fallen far from the tree. Only a few of us have moved on. Anyway, I wondered if the reasoning behind the "no, because..." could be in the rules (like the Bad Goes stuff in SLwM).
I struggled with the background to serpent worship and the ins and outs of the various religions. I guess I really am ignorant of this stuff (and might explain why the most religious people I bump into are LDS missionaries sent here from Utah, or the occasional Jehova's Witness). I've subsequently been on the Gnostic and religion wikipedia pages reading away.
In play all that didn't matter, we played away and reached a good space, and a moment none of us could have predicted before play. Then called wrap.
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