I posted bite-sized AP to story games and didn't do here -

On Saturday, Paul, Colin, Xander and I played a quick game of Ghost/Echo and a quick game of That's Drama - both of them somewhat anticlimactic, and talked for a while about how no-prep games tend to be anticlimactic in general whereas a railroad will at least end with a big boss fight or whatever.

Ghost/Echo:

Kilo was the one who set us up, and with a name like Kilo we knew he had to be a stone junkie. Coil channeled the ghost field to perform a supernatural feat - cut Kilo off from his source of stone.
"So you're going to cut off his stones," Paul said.

That's Drama:

In a dystopian future far above the corrosive atmosphere of a ruined earth, the General's student steals a top-of-the-line airship and tries to bring it to his brother, a member of the mercenary Legion in the war-torn no-man's zone. One of the General's military police has stowed away on board - but only because he wants out of Xanderia. The airship is damaged by a nearby air-mine and starts to sink towards the corrosive atmosphere below .. and the crack-pilot General in his catamaran-of-the-sky races to get there before the Legion ...


I noticed a problem with That's Drama that theoretically should be a problem with Misery Bubblegum, Microcosm, Archipelago, and any other "win the narration" conflict mechanics - whatever the win condition is, you can just narrate it, and you've got a good chance of ending the game right there. I wonder why I've never noticed it before with any of these games. Even with In a Wicked Age you could achieve a best interest if you're answering in a conflict ... because answerer narrates, right ...?

Re: Ghost/Echo:
It felt really rushed; I think we should have spent more time fleshing out the world. That having been said, the idea of flipping a card over so we have the Ghost world on one side and the real world on the other.

Here's a link to the inspiration for the filament shotgun: Graphite Bomb

Re: That's drama
Again, I think pacing was a problem. Maybe you need a certain amount of elements in play before you can go for an ending? I think it needs something like Fiasco's # of dice but nothing comes to mind right now.

I loved the that the higher ranked cards were more useful elements and having to make the decision between playing them and nullifying their ranking or saving them for conflict in order to use them as trumps. Very cool.

The cheats-sheets were kinda confusing, unfortunately.

I noticed a problem with That's Drama that theoretically should be a problem with Misery Bubblegum, Microcosm, Archipelago, and any other "win the narration" conflict mechanics - whatever the win condition is, you can just narrate it, and you've got a good chance of ending the game right there. I wonder why I've never noticed it before with any of these games. Even with In a Wicked Age you could achieve a best interest if you're answering in a conflict ... because answerer narrates, right ...?

There's a big difference between having a goal and having that goal end the game. Getting your best interest in IaWA definitely does not end the game. It may just cause more trouble.

I haven't played Misery or Microscosm, but most games that have concrete "story goal = end game" mechanics also forbid you from getting that until X criteria have been met (Shock, Remember Tomorrow, Geiger Counter, the reverse case of destroying the protagonist in Polaris).

My voice was giving out toward the end of That's Drama, and I felt my goal had been reached so I was quieter. I was a bit put off by how the contest between the characters turned into a contest between the players. Even if one is well into character, I would think one's overall goal would be interesting resolution of the story, rather than interminable back and forth. I suppose there's a limit on cards, so eventually all but one person would be able to turn the tables, but it was hard for me to see where that point was. I'm sorry if my final action was an anticlimax, but I didn't see a climax on the horizon.

I suppose I'm biased since I was the GM, but I thought we had an almost perfect amount of world established for GHOST/ECHO, i.e. very little and that on the fly. It was a bit much to keep track of even then, but I didn't feel like anyone's ideas about the world dominated. Also, it's a game that I think benefits from momentum and any time spent explicitly worldbuilding would have plunged us into quite a well of detail from which it might have been difficult to extract ourselves.

I have an email in to John Harper, creator or GHOST/ECHO. It's very focused around dangers, and as a result, I don't quite see the point to attempting to accomplish goals. The players in this episode hotwired a car to get to a location, but if they'd just said they'd run there I don't know what difference it would have made. I haven't heard back from him, but if I ran it again, I might do something like encourage rolls with the explicit goal of eliminating a preexisting danger - since otherwise the dangers that have come to pass don't necessarily have an effect on the game either.

Oh, no need to apologize, I wasn't trying to blame anybody, other than myself. Yeah, that last conflict was too long and diffuse. The game doesn't do what I thought it did. I'm deliberating on how to overhaul it.

I wanted more flesh in the Ghost/Echo scenes (which you could probably tell by all my "what does that look like?" and attempts to describe stuff) ...

I'd guess that the difference between hotwiring a car and running is all in-fiction - you might describe us stalked by dogs if we run or describe a roadblock if we hotwire, and the story could go in very different places from there. Having the fiction matter as much as the rolls & rules is a new idea for me.

Getting your best interest in IaWA definitely does not end the game.

Hm...

p. 25 - "End a chapter when ... most of the characters' best interests are resolved, one way or the other."

Which is only different from That's Drama in that you have multiple best interests instead of just the one...

Read the rest:

End a chapter when...
•Most of the characters’ best interests are resolved, one way or the other; or
•One character has emerged as the chapter’s clear protagonist, and her best interests are mostly resolved; or
•You’ve been playing for long enough and now you’re at a perfect cliffhanger; or
•You’re plain out of time.
Everyone together has to end the chapter, but GM, you have special responsibility to notice when circumstances above come true.

It's not a mechanical "oh you got your thing, so game over" it's guidance to recognize when it feels like the chapter is over. You stop when everyone wants to stop.

But probably everyone wants to stop once most best interests are resolved?

I'm now thinking a thing about IaWA is that you only narrate what your character does. So you won't have anyone saying "Then I'm crowned king" - at best you could say, "I talk you into crowning me king." Slows it down.

The cliffhanger rule is amusing since you don't begin the next chapter where you left off - I've never played more than one chapter but it totally reminds me of Gene Wolfe's Torturer series where the book would end with a cliffhanger and the next book would start with a big time jump and you'd have no idea what happened...

I posted a longer summary over at Story Games: http://story-games.co...­