Good day!

I wrote up our play through of Jason Morningstar's game The Skeletons on my blog.

This was a 6 player free-form story game about being skeletal guardians.

Really good write-up, Eric. We did indeed talk about this game a bunch afterwards, so much of what I'm putting down is just recapping that. Joe, Dain, Eric V and Richard: If you have more thoughts, chime in. I know Jason (the author) is very interested in hearing this stuff.

First off, we would normally never start a table with six (even if the rules say 6 is fine), but we thought we would be fine with five and then had a late arrival, so we expanded to include them. That definitely made the game harder.

For me, the biggest pitfall was the fighting distracting from character. Because the skeletons were only sentient during invasions, which we were required to repulse, the action was inherently competing with character revelations for screen time. I think it was made worse by having one player control the intruders. That encouraged that player to keep putting the (unimportant, macguffin) intruders in the spotlight and distracting from the skeletons. We fell into a narrative combat dialog (sword porn), which didn't advance the underlying story of our past. Players did their best to interject revelations between swings and got some material on the table -- an A for effort, all around -- but the process made it an uphill battle.

We got a lot of fighting and only tidbits of story. A few solutions that came up:

a) Don't have one person narrate for the intruders. After the intruders have been described, each of us can describe our interactions with them (a solution we switched to later in the game). That de-emphasizes the story of the intruders. We know we're going to win those fights, so it isn't really about the fight per se.

b) Introduce a method for players to signal that they were "gonna do a thing" and have a character moment, freezing the action (a la LARPS like "The Upgrade") so one player could take their time and reveal without another player mistakenly jumping back to action, and/or

c) Extend the window of skeleton sentience. Explicitly let skeletons reflect or talk for a few minutes after the intruders are dispatched until they settle down for the ages

"I think as a table, we did not pick up the mantle of declarative action as well as the game required."

That brings up the other major stumbling block. The rules don't tell you how a lot of core bits of play should be handled. It points out that you'll need a method and proposes some options, but explicitly tells you to decide as a group. Avoiding the whole "mother may I" issue isn't something in the rules at all, it's just something we did (or didn't do).

Personally, if something is central to the game, I think there should at least be a default best practice you can use. Having several choices but no default method cost us because we tried one way, had sub-optimal results, tried a different way, etc. That ate game time and killed some of our fun. (Sure, "design as you play" could be an interesting experimental area to explore, but I don't think this is trying to be that game)

As a footnote, when I first read the rules I was concerned the Horror would put one player in a totally different story-space than everyone else -- we're all people, but this one character is not. I think that's largely what happened in our game. The Horror is just in a totally different kind of story.

The actual process of sitting with our eyes closed at the table I actually found kind of nice. There was chatter in the room, and it certainly wasn't as grave (heh, grave) as if we were in a private space with the lights out, but I still think it had value.

All that said, I really like the idea of the game, but I think the experience wasn't what we expected. Sifting through your long dead memories to discover the person you once were as the eons slide by is a cool premise.

I really like the idea as well. You get a cool take on a personal story as well as a bit of the themes behind Shelly's Ozymandias poem.

Okay, now I'm totally rewriting: Instead of playing the combats, I would open each scene just *after* the skeletons had slaughtered the latest intruders. We're looking over our victims and brooding about what just happened before we return to slumber.