To kick off, each of us chose a social theme for the game to focus on. We ended up with illiteracy+family ties+cycles of violence.

To tie those into a single sci-fi shock, we decided illiterate tribal cultures in our setting could empathize with each other to a supernatural degree. The empathy/telepathy strengthened with proximity to empaths, especially family members. Problem was, the empathy tended toward spiraling hate-cycles that drove folks into murder frenzies. It made society very violent.

We played a researcher who tried to save her mother from the tribal culture and failed, a hit man who tried to take his genocidal boss down and failed, and an empath who succeeded in boosting her empathy from feelings-only to true telepathic communication. Lots of people got gassed to death this game.

Forming the three-element Shock was fun and intuitive. The "praxis" mechanic, designed to dramatize our character's motivations, made for a stumbling block and made our story goals harder to achieve. Otherwise, solid system and good play.

I hadn't played in a while but that was some solid Shock. The brainstormed setting we came up with was really teeming with possibilities and we did a very good job of nailing down exactly the details we needed to get us on the same page about the setting (things like the quasi-post apoc setting with guns, the civilized Landing, the technology gap, etc)

The big problem (as always) was not enough time. We played straight to 11 and still had to do the last round quickly. We had good story closure, but it would have been nicer to not have to hurry the last bit.

On paper it seems like setup isn't that complicated, but there's something about character creation that always takes longer than you expect. I feel like maybe some of the elements could be jettisoned without hurting the game, or asked in a different way that helped players think of answers faster.

And yeah, Clint, I totally agree: praxis is a cool idea and it's nice to have those values as part of the story to show how people do thing, but the actual picking the values in each conflict gets vague. The idea doesn't connect to execution and mechanics in a way that helps play.

"You can sense what other people feel about you, but only the negative stuff like hate and anger."
"So it's the Internet."