[Sign in Stranger] this moon may not mean what you think it means
Callan S.:
Might be useful: Dragons Over Spaceships: Fantasy and Science Fiction as Cultural Prostheses
David Berg:
Ron, yes! This is my single favorite thing about the game, easily. Someone (Emily?) pitched the mechanic to me as "like Mad Libs", which is a convenient shorthand, but I find it misleading about the game's potential. Mad Libs are goofy absurdist humor and nothing more.
Sign in Stranger can be an overwhelming horror trip about the search for meaning in an environment devoid of familiar signs, symbols, and experiences.
Or, well, if you're into that like I am, anyway. I was the only player in our group pushing that angle and roleplaying freaking the hell out beyond brief moments of Panic on failed rolls. I'm not sure why my fellow players have been consistently disinclined to go there. Maybe sitting down to play a fun game about exploration impels people to assume that the exploration should be fun for the characters? Does "alien exploration" evoke brave adventuring and Indiana Jones and Stargate more than fragile prodding of the majestic and intimidating unknown?
Anyway, the need to interact with the results of our random word-inspired narrations kept our game from goofy absurdism, but it was as close to Mad Libs as an honest, by-the-book game of Sign in Stranger can get, I think. I tried to be tonally consistent and expand upon the planet-as-established, but I think a lot of the players felt strained to their creative limits just to connect each drawn word to the fiction. If they could do it, they were done, too bad if it was a non-sequitur. In the process of fleshing things out in their minds, they often introduced colors that weren't on our Color Table, and added new mysteries onto our already overfull plate. As a group, our responses to these out-of-nowhere narrations ranged from, "Huh, weird, okay, whatever, moving on," to, "Oh crap, that seems urgent, we should do something!"
I remember there were times when I drew a word to answer a practical concern of the characters, like, "What looks like our best place to rest?" and there were other times when someone just asked, "So when we exit the prism, what do we see?" In both cases, the asker just turned to me because I hadn't gotten to narrate in a while, or because I looked the most enthusiastic.
I seem to remember the rules being mute on all that. I know that on Actions and Investigations, my Medic character was supposed to lead the action and I was supposed to roll the dice. But for the word draws, I don't think we found any textual constraints on the freedom we employed.
I am trying to remember specific instances of "get asked, draw word, read, think, narrate". Hmm. The player who introduced the Tridlians had drawn the word "elevator". I can look through my folder from the game for something to jog my memory.
Feel free to zero in on a specific question to guide me!
Pardon the rambling. I think my brain has a pretty heavy backlog of things I want to discuss about Sign in Stranger.
Ron Edwards:
Hi David,
Another procedural question: I may be mistaken, but my little brain is telling me that the actual word drawn is not revealed. Is that in the game text, or am I making that up? And then, either way, whether your group did reveal the words - my impression is "yes" from your account, but I'm not sure.
I don't have other specific questions, but I can give you a musing or reflective take on my own (slow, delayed) process of gearing up to play this game.
I'm sort of bummed by your description of at least one or two of your fellow players' lack of engagement with the potential depth of play. That is, I'm glad you presented it here for discussion, but given your clear commitment to what the game has to offer, I'm bummed that you weren't at the table with like-minded folk. You can see from my handout that I'm very into that aspect of the game, that it's not a gimmicky self-contained amusement but rather a dedicated engine to finding out a lot about one another in an experiential, creative way.
So, without either a dedication to the various alienating or revelatory aspects of the plot events, and without the crisis aspect of how well or poorly the colony is doing (with a strong swing toward poorly as far as my understanding of the mechanics goes), I'm seeing a certain lack of ... well, of danger, or conflict in the Lit 101 sense. Those two absences, or perhaps the minimal group commitment to those things, appear to me to be at the heart of why the contributions were so often piling on mysteries or throwing in non-sequiturs.
OK, enough bitching. I'm still jealous you got to play at all, for seven sessions no less, and as far as the content you described in your first post goes, I think it's delightfully weird and well worth my time to read.
I'm trying to understand your point about narration - are you talking about who gets to speak/interpret a given drawn word? My impression is, the person who drew it, case closed. But I also am under the impression that general speaking is left unconstructed, letting certain things like NPC ownership and origins of adversity either get centered on a given person at the table or not, as an emergent property.
Best, Ron
David Berg:
Hi Ron,
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that keeping the word hidden is in the rules. I told everyone not to reveal their words, and our group kept to that the vast majority of the time. The only exceptions went like this:
"Okay! What do you see? You see..." (draws word, long pause, false starts, exasperated eye rolls) "Who wrote this?! Okay, uh, a long thing that, like, spins, and then there's some other things hanging off of it, and the big ones fly outward and the little ones go to the middle... Don't look at me like that! What do you want? I pulled 'centrifuge' as my word!"
But that happened only a few times in the early sessions, and never in the later ones.
Philosophical aside: Personally, I dislike it when people do stuff in play that snaps me out of envisioning this weird environment, and saying "I drew 'centrifuge', then I made up that!" qualifies. But if you're less picky than I am, word-revealing might not be a huge deal.
As for my point about narration, my question is about selecting a player to draw-and-narrate (you are correct in that "draw" goes with "narrate"). How is it decided when a word is drawn, and by whom? My current impression is that the system allows a lot of freedom on that score. We figured it out socially, and our solutions were good enough, but maybe short of optimal.
I should probably give some more context about our group, so I don't give too many false impressions here. That will follow shortly.
Ps,
-David
David Berg:
So, here's the group:
Me - played before, helped bring it to the group, attended every session
Matt - our host, played before, owns the book, read the errata, learned the rules well, helped me keep everyone else on track
Abel - liked the game and attended every session, though the draw-and-narrate thing was tough for him at times
Mendez - disliked parts of the game but liked others, only attended the first and last sessions
Marsha - hated the game, attended all but the last (2?) session(s)
Betsy - liked the game, attended the 5th and 7th sessions (I think)
Dan - attended the 5th session
When I say "the game" above, I mean "Sign in Stranger". This really wasn't Marsha's bag at all. She requested that we play something else, but was a good sport and gave Matt and me a shot to sell her on it.
Mendez had scheduling complications. Dan and Betsy joined late and then had scheduling complications of their own.
We all had well-defined characters with distinct personalities. Betsy was probably the most eager to grab the spotlight and show hers off -- much speculating, trying random stuff, reading her tarot cards, etc. Matt, Abel and I all played fairly practical characters focused on scientifically understanding the planet and how to survive and do our job there. Marsha did the same in a sarcastic and comic-relief-filled way. Dan was a Chinese spy, Mendez was a rapper escaping beef with the west coast.
So, y'know, not the ideal environment for intense psychodrama.
Hopefully anyone who's reading can now judge my other posts in a more accurate light.
Ps,
-David
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