Some recent games

Coup de Main, Tuesdays.

I'm getting burnt out on big groups. Also, I think I need more visual stimulation while I play; ideally I'll be using video chat for most games in the future.

The Bloody-Handed Name of Bronze, take 1 

Bloody-Handed Name of Bronze, Codex Edition cover

A cool game about bronze-age swords and sorcery heroes; buy it here. 

Jay and Simon. Not very good play. A failing of dramatic coordination. We created a situation, in which all the characters were present, but failed to involve them in an interesting way. I had some pretty good takeaways for future games, though.

When you're playing, you should always give a name to every single entity that acts in a scene, and you should be expansive about your sense of "acts". Feel free to switch around who plays what entity. 

The Lover of Jet and Gold (name of bronze take 2, 2 sessions)

TBHNoB started life as three pamphlets: The Lover of Jet and Gold, about Namedealers, Heart of Bronze, about Fated Heroes, and Name of Bronze, giving clarification and some rules tweaks to the pamphlets. While the full game has more interesting parts, it's also well over 200 pages. The pamphlets are compact and eminently usable, triumphs of focused game design. I decided to play the pamphlets.

We only played with the Namedealer, restricting rules to Lover of Jet and Gold (plus the patch from Name of Bronze). The Namedealer is the more interesting role anyway.

Other players: Paul, Dave, and Kyra. I knew Paul from the Finnish RPG Theory discord, and I had played a session of T&T with Paul and Dave. I didn't know Kyra. 

Really good. In the hands of skilled players, who drive towards themes, play is effortless and joyful. Every procedure is tight and impactful. I wanted to roll, couldn't wait to see what I would have to give up.

In our game we gave names to a mountain, the noonday sun, an oasis, a house, the moon, and a lost fragment of song. We played through a negotiation with the mountain, defending the oasis from a fiery god-monster, and asking my character's girlfriend's father for her hand in marriage.

In the second session things got a little more phantasmagoric; we've birthed an undying fire and journeyed to the edge of the world to find and kill the sun.

The game gives no rules for pacing. Our play has mostly moved the characters away from each other and piled up more and bigger complications. I guess part of player skill for this game (and many others) is knowing when to stop pushing complications and driving characters apart, when to start wrapping things up. 

Shock "What is a Roleplaying Game?"

Abby, a coworker, asked me to introduce her to roleplaying. We talked about the kind of fiction she wants to create; she's explicitly interested in creating stories with themes. No interest in competition. She likes sci-fi so I suggested Shock. We gathered up two other coworkers, Indigo (with whom I played Zombie Cinema) and Gene, both of whom had some experience in roleplay. For some reason Indigo invited Josh, another coworker, at the last minute, and didn't inform me until we actually met up. Josh had no experience roleplaying.

Absolute disaster. Indigo and Gene of the players realized they didn't want to play a game about politics so I had to either end the social engagement or quickly pivot to something else. I chose What is a Roleplaying Game? since it was free, had short, easy rules and required no prep.

Play was practically nonexistent; I had to drag Indigo and Gene back to the situation at hand, actively request them to use their authorities, and still I got bupkis. They were more interested in commenting on the situation than creating fiction, and when they did actually play, they usually deprotagonized themselves and other players.

It was a relief to be done.

I won't play with Indigo and Gene again. Josh on the other hand pleasantly surprised me. He understood the task at hand, as it were.

I drove Abby home. Happily we were both on the same page, that play was really bad, that it didn't have to be bad, and that it was bad because of specific disruptions. We'll try to set something up for the future. 

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