[Ophian] A first actual session
ejh:
Mullet-boy here.
I hadn't read through more than a couple pages of the rules beforehand, so I was coming at this with just what Ron described at the table, which is the overview of what the source material is like, what play requires and doesn't require, some Ophian background (BTW, Ron, to me, "Ophite" sounds WAY more badass than "Ophian"), and a little about angels.
The game pulls a little personal religious background into your starting character, and the descriptors I pulled didn't do that much to knock me out of that mindset, so I ended up playing an "alternative self" character; "a younger me with a few differences in character and circumstance."
I don't know if in general alternate-autobiography roleplay is a good or bad thing but it did do a good job putting me back a couple decades into a college-age, what the fuck am I doing with my life mindset.
I'm not sure in retrospect if play was really short, or if it just seemed short because play is so low-key you look back on it and don't think a whole lot happened. In fact, a lot happened without very much happening. We got to see the Sylvie-Christopher-Mark dynamic, and know that there was something going on there and that was going to have to go one way or another. The way we'd set up the fiction, my character Basil ended up unable to logically be in the same place as the other characters, so we spun off to him going home from work. The "petty theft" card was what inspired me to have Basil supplementing his income with the theft of a bunch of Slim Jims, and talking about Inventory Shrinkage led me to spin a story about getting robbed at work, and the disappointing and bleak way that situation played out suddenly made the Slim Jim theft take on another character, and that was "zing" enough for the wrap to work great when Ron called it.
I don't know if I would have had the "meta" sense of story to have made that call on my own, though it works great in retrospect. I wasn't seeing everything in Basil's own story that Ron was seeing in it as it happened; I was looking out of the story from the inside to a great enough degree that I don't think I had a good sense of what was being "said" by it even as I was "saying" it. I guess it's valuable to have the attention of the other players to bring that kind of attention and make that kind of call.
Disconnected, "not much happened," a certain amount of aimlessness, but definitely a feeling that this stuff was real, these were people's real ordinary lives, partly *because* there was so little inherent drama to the situation. The small dramas of life loomed large.
I'm not super familiar with the source material but from what I do know this seemed like a successful attempt to plug into that vibe. The cards made things go ways that might not have been expected otherwise, and the "wrap" came from an interesting combination of inspiration from the cards, memory, and embellishment, and -- as I mentioned -- needed a perspective outside my own to realize they were going somewhere that had some significance to it and could constitute a "wrap."
Are there any other questions I could answer about my experience playing hte game?
Callan S.:
Hi Ron,
I'm just puzzled - perhaps the idea of 'a game about religion' is the really bad title? It doesn't seem to be there? Some web comics I've read that are fairly down to earth, but generally have some splodge of weird in it, like a talking animal or a talking cactus (??). Generally the weird seems to be about helping shift perspective where it normally wouldn't flow, rather than it being important that a dog talks or such. And so often it gets ditched when perspective is flowing down a track of interest (like, hey, your web comic has a talking cactus in the banner - but I've gone through about thirty comics and not seen him once? (thirty comics indicating worth paging through that many times or more)).
Your account has me puzzled about the role of the semantic field of 'religion' in the game?
Here's a web comic I blundered across that might interest given what hate/beg the question/etc sound like, just as a side thing (possibly including a subjectively a bad title as well?): http://cheapthrills.xepher.net/archives.html
Ron Edwards:
Hi Gregor (whew!),
Your initial proposed ambitions were first, "to move to the big city," and second, "to have a family." The problem with these is that they are not professional ambitions. The ambition is supposed to be a career goal directly linked to why the character is going to school. I need to make that clearer in my text; maybe "career goal" is a better term. You eventually hit upon, "make designer drugs," at which point I sort of groaned inwardly and gave up, rephrasing it at the table as "go to pharmacy school."
There may be a class issue at work in reading "ambition" as a generalized, relatively distant goal in life, but that may be too heady a topic for the internet. I was thinking strictly in working-class and lower middle-class terms about ambition as conceived by the only child in the extended family who's going to college, which would definitely mean a specific next-step career statement.
Another layer at work in this part of the character concept is that in my experience, not only career goals but stated majors tend to hit a serious blender in college, which most students don't know is coming, and their families even less. As in, the character is at the family holiday dinner, and all the uncles and so on are constantly calling him "the college boy," and talking as if he's about to graduate pharmacy school instead of struggling through first-year college chemistry.
Still another is that this part of the character description doesn't correspond at all to "goal" as usually stated in the RPGs you and I play most of the time. In those games, a character's goal is stated in order to focus his or her energies and to become problematic. Whereas here, it's merely a handle on the ophian character's current concepts of life and his or her place in it, as well as a subcultural indicator at least as far as his or her peers are concerned.
Hi Ed,
I have no doubt that you would or will be the one to say "wrap" sooner or later in play. I'm actually glad that we hit one concerning your character without you contriving it; that's actually one of the big payoffs of playing this game, as I conceive it.
It would be especially cool for you to sketch our characters!
Hi Callan,
I can't help you with the puzzlement. The religious content factored beautifully into play, especially for James' character Mark, and I was excited to play my character Jude sooner or later on that basis. The fact that it's not overt but potentially present in small ways is exactly what it's for. That's what observance and practice are all about, as I see it.
If you have certain expectations based on the word "about," as in, "about religion," then those expectations may not be the same as my goals in writing the game.
Thanks for the link! I like what I've read so far. It reminds me a little bit of Matt Wagner's Hepcats, a college strip turned into a comic and the beginnings of a graphic novel, which took off with a bang in the 90s but unfortunately went unfinished.
Best, Ron
Callan S.:
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If you have certain expectations based on the word "about," as in, "about religion," then those expectations may not be the same as my goals in writing the game.
Fair call!
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Thanks for the link!
When I first came across it, the author was depicting a crack smoker talking to a guy. The way he was depicted, neither clean cut yet neither beneath human pariah, stuck with me. He was talking with another character and it was so natural, even as the crack sort of needled in on that normality.
Emily Care:
I'm curious to see how development goes here. Meg, Vincent, Eppy & I did a session, but haven't gotten back to it. Things that came up were that if you play the Ophian (I also dig Ophite a bit better), it's really necessary for you to have some prep. We chose randomly and Meg wasn't sure how she should bring it in. I think Vincent and I had more opportunity to read through the rules, so if we'd been thinking, we'd have chosen one of us for that character.
You don't have to bring in the created characters? Surprising!
The section of the rules where you describe "playing out a scene", in terms of following the normal action and interactions of the characters, not trying to find a conflict, and building upon what each of you said simultaneously made me laugh and made me sad. It's funny because, how odd to have to put this into words. It's sad because, no, really, we have to describe how to do this and put this into words. What a very strange state of affairs.
I had forgotten the angels had specific associations. Knowing that makes me think it would be easier than I'd been anticipating to bring death into play when they come up. If I'm remembering how that works, correctly. Of course, it's not hard to think of some way that you death crops up in someone's life, but having some detail or varying element about it seems like it would make it easier to find different ways for it to crop up.
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