Sept 16
players: Jamie, Kelley, Cy, Ben

First play Polaris was a little heavy on the rules learning, as usual. I think Kelley and I got some fun and unexpected results out of the conflict phrases, but I'm not sure Jamie and Cy had as much luck.

One of my favorite exchanges was just after Kelley succeeded in getting the people to flee their doomed city and escape South:

Me, the Mistaken: And so it was, your people are wandering in the wintery wastes after abandoning their city, without food or shelter. The situation's desperate and they're close to giving up and returning North to certain doom.

Kelley, the Hero: Good news, the scouts found a barbarian city just to the south of here! We're saved!

Me: Barbarian city! No way! (starting conflict) But only if your people won't follow you. They give up and go back North.

Kelley: You ask far too much...

Me: Hmm, okay. The city's hostile. You'll have to fight them to live there. Which one do you want.

Kelley: I'll take the hostile city. But only if we win.

Me: But only if your people enslave the natives.

Kelley: It shall not come to pass!

Dice rolled, hero fails, the beautiful noble people become oppressive tyrants. Yea!

I'm pretty sure that was the exchange, or close enough. There might have been an And Furthermore towards the end instead. The whole exchange was pleasantly fast, about as long as it takes to read it. The dark spiral of the people going from refugees to oppressive dictators was pretty sweet, and fed right back into the knight turning against his own people (who he had led to this corruption, when you get right down to it).

Points to Kelley at the very end for backspinning the whole "the city's doomed! flee South message" from his brother at the start of the game to really be after his brother died, literally post his dying breath instead of with his dying breath, meaning it was a message sent from the Mistaken all along, tricking the people to go South and take the Mistaken with them, spreading their influence. Very cool.

What did the rest of you guys think of Polaris? I really suspect it takes at least two games to get comfortable with the conflict system and have some fun with it.

I'm very opinionated for someone so new to this kind of gaming, but:

The bad:
- multiple independent storylines. This chafed both because I felt less engaged when playing the Moon but also because it seemed hard to get momentum going - when 4 people are building on a story things just move, but this felt more like a 2-player RPG with an audience, it was work, like playing S/Lay w/Me.

- the complexity. I probably shouldn't have attempted it without reading the rulebook first. Things didn't flow. Whereas Lady Blackbird, Geiger Counter, and Fiasco all just work right out of the box, even if only 1 person has read the rules.

- I haven't crunched the numbers, but when we were hovering at 1 zeal / weariness and Cy said "the slow middle-game" I thought, of course - spending some number of scenes trying to roll a 1 is going to give you a really variable result. Surely Ben Lehman has some idea what an optimal number of scenes to spend in the mid-game is, but the randoms are only going to hit that sweet spot a fraction of the time.

The good:

Cy did a really good job of coming up with tough situations for my character.

Cygnus's hard choice: "My father beats his servants, leaving permanent scars. He refuses to change his ways. Do I use the power of my office as Knight Arbiter to bring him to court, or what?

Me: I refuse to see him again unless he changes his ways.
Cy: But only if he never changes his ways.
Me: And so it happened.

Usually when I play these games I don't contradict or challenge what other players create, following the advice of *Play Unsafe* and almost every time there's something in the story I just don't like, whether it's the CIA agents wearing Mickey Mouse ears, or getting fish high on acid, or the supernatural being is vulnerable to liquor so we pour brandy on the sword... That emphatically didn't happen with Polaris, probably because of the "Yes, but only if..."

As much as it chafed having two storylines, it was great seeing how different the two stories turned out. We have manor houses and estates and local politics in one storyline and the other is fighting demons in the wastes and conquering barbarians.

Bottom line:
I think I'd like to splice Polaris's setting and "But only if..." into In A Wicked Age and see what happens. Who wants to play that with me?

I had a blast. So far the most fun I have had with the story games group.

I really felt like I was getting into the groove in the end, and felt like the banter was flowing more and more smoothly every scene.

The setting is awesome. Demons, knights, and star-light swords. Yum. I liked using the names of stars for everyone, that was cool, and really set the mood for me. I think too in the end, the style of Mars's story...leading his people into exile and fighting for survival against demons and outsiders...is something I find exciting.

If I played again, I would try and give more opportunities to make use of the people at my side playing others in the scene. I thought Jamie did a much better job at this than I did. I had fun playing Leo and Corvus in Cygnus's story.

I also would really push hard on the banter (I dont know what the real name for the conflict mechanic is), to get more of the story I want. Now that I understand how the dice check works and relates to checking off items on the sheet, I think I could really push harder for what I want in the scene.

Maybe you guys have seen this already - Johnzo mentioned "fluency play" a while back and I was looking deeper into it and just now discovered it was invented for Polaris!

http://www.mythic-car...­

I don't totally understand what he's doing here, like I'm not sure how you practice “Long Ago, The People Were Dying at the End of the World…” But the idea of not learning the entire rules set in one night, but rather building up as far as we get, is pretty appealing.

Also, combining the "I don't see it" improv exercise for warmup with character creation sounds pretty cool.

I'm very opinionated for someone so new to this kind of gaming, but:

Opinions are great!

- multiple independent storylines. This chafed both because I felt less engaged when playing the Moon but also because it seemed hard to get momentum going

This is an issue in a lot of story games. It's a design trade-off for focusing on the story of single protagonist, but not necessarily an ideal trade-off...

- the complexity. I probably shouldn't have attempted it without reading the rulebook first. Things didn't flow. Whereas Lady Blackbird, Geiger Counter, and Fiasco all just work right out of the box, even if only 1 person has read the rules.

Polaris uses a pretty unique conflict system, instead of any of the usual "high roller gets to narrate" variations. It's hard to wrap your head around at first, because it isn't like most other games.

I think I'd like to splice Polaris's setting and "But only if..." into In A Wicked Age and see what happens. Who wants to play that with me?

Absolutely. I wish more games would experiment with conflict phrases like Polaris.

The fluency movement is a cool trend, but I think it's really highlighting failures in the original rules of most games: they are not written procedurally, or in a way that teaches. That falls on the shoulders of whoever decides to introduce the game to other players. Or to put it differently, there shouldn't be a second step of deconstructing the rules in a teachable format, the original rules should be written that way. Hopefully more games are moving that direction.

Sweet Kelley! Yeah, the story of Mars was wonderfully tragic.

Now that I understand how the dice check works and relates to checking off items on the sheet, I think I could really push harder for what I want in the scene.

Yeah, that happens a lot when playing a game for the first time: you can't stretch your creative muscles as much because you don't know how to use the system. Plus you're busy just absorbing how the whole thing works.

That's one of the reasons I really encourage repeating the same game at multiple meetups, rather than just playing a game once and then never playing it again (unless people hate it of course).