Games from the Wild Wood: across the endless sea

Showing posts with label across the endless sea. Show all posts

Tuesday, 23 May 2017

Across the Endless Sea: Second Playtest (#5)

So, the initial playtest with my housemates had proved that the game, at the most basic level, worked.

The resolution mechanism was functional; the game produced interesting play; and the flavor of it was interesting to a group of people broader than just me.

I took away the feedback from people and made several changes: some major, some minor.

Being able to ask too many questions when investigating encounters was breaking the game a little - allowing players to work out a plan that would certainly succeed rather than having to take chances – so I revised the number down. The wording of some of the moves was confusing; as was the layout of the moves on the sheet.

There was also a request for more substantial information about the People, which was coupled with an observation I made during the game: not having all the choices made about the People centrally listed was slowing play.

So, I also created a playbook for the People as a whole, intended to be printed A3 to everything else’s A4.

It has space to record choices made about the People; a list of evocative names (drawn in equal parts from proto-Indo-European syllables and Pacific Islander cultures); some basic details about the technology levels and beliefs of the People; and a listing of the twelve months of the People’s journey and their traditional names (for flavor).

Thus armed, I was ready for a second playtest.

I was lucky enough to get in contact with EricVulgaris of Once Upon a Game, a Twitch show that streams storygames and indie RPGs, who kindly agreed to host a playtest.

Eric was a phenomenal to play alongside, as was our third player, and if you’d like to see the tragedy we unfolded you can watch it here.

Some really useful feedback came out of the session, as did a deepening confidence in the game seeing how enthused two experienced storygamers were by what we created as a group and the way that the system facilitated that.

Unsurprisingly, one major piece of advice was that the game needed to include mapping.

Storygamers seem to really love their maps. I think the craze might have started with Avery’s The Quiet Year, but I don’t know the scene well enough to be sure. Regardless, they were right about the coolness of mapping the People’s voyage and so that advice is now in the game.

The session also highlighted the importance of reincorporation to the game, and so I’m now slowly building a “player advice” document to help ensure groups have the best experience.

What really became clear during the session, though, was the issue of timing.

I’d written the game originally to assume 12 – 24 encounters per game, but what both playtests had made clear was that encounters take far too long for that to be viable. Even playing with just 3 players, we only made it through about 6 encounters over the course of 3 hours. Of course, that includes a bunch of extra time costs unique to doing a Twitch show, but still.

Something had to give.

So the year-long journey is now a half-year, meaning there are five standard encounters (one each for the first five months, which also allows every player to take a turn as the Endless Sea) plus an extra three: one for the Voice’s choice of what has changed since the People last made the voyage; one for the Eyes’ choice of what sign reveals that the People are coming close to their destination; and one for the Hands’ choice of the final challenge that awaits the People.

Eight encounters seems like a much more manageable number, and the option to play an extra encounter per month is still preserved if a group really wants to settle in for a long game.

Of course, this was all theory. It needed testing, to check that the game could fit into 3 hours.

Luckily, my workmates and I had a PD trip coming up and an evening set aside to play a game of some kind that they agreed I could commandeer…

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Sunday, 26 March 2017

Across the Endless Sea: First Playtest (#4)

(Across the Endless Sea is a storygame I’m writing, blogging the process here to entertain and hopefully get some advice/feedback. For the introductory post that lays out the design goals of the project, look here.)

It's been a while since I've last written about this project, and in that time a fair bit has happened!

After finishing up the Aspect playbooks, I press-ganged my housemates into service as additional sources of ideas and rolled right on to designing the Threat playbooks.

At the present moment they're fairly barebones: some open-ended options for the aesthetic and the dangers that can be chosen for each encounter and then a summary of the Threat player's side of the encounter rules.

I then spent a leisurely afternoon going through the various choices presented by the Aspect playbooks (the tales known by the Voice, the warnings known by the Eyes), some randomly-selected inspirational tweets from @str_voyages, and the imagery that's been coalescing in my head around this setting for years to extract a list of 35 encounter prompts.

As it stands I think that number is a little thin, but I didn't want to force ideas.

In the end I think I'll probably end up aiming for 50, ten from each Threat (Dwellers, Islands, Travelers, Waters, Weather).

More importantly, with all the basic elements needed to run the game in place, I ran a playtest!

My housemates and I sat down after dinner, and we ran through the game. Nothing caught fire, no friendships were destroyed, and everyone seems keen to play again and actually finish so I'd call that a rousing success!

To be a little more serious, it was a very enlightening process.

There's certain things that didn't occur to me but that it's clear the game needs: a list of names (to establish a shared feel), a sheet to summarize the resources of the People, a more detailed outline of exactly how the encounter process works.

It turns out that to someone who isn't living in my head, the procedure I wrote isn't quite as clear as I thought. Who knew...

On the plus side, the core game is great. The resolution mechanic works great, and won over even those who were skeptical about a lack of dice; the game seems to have some real replayability given that I knew all the prompts ahead of time and was still engaged and surprised, and the setting and mood of the game was a real hit.

To return to my original design goals for a moment, here's where things are at:

I want it to be GMless, not least so that I actually get a chance to play it (unlike anything else I write).

Done! It's definitely GMless, though I do want to see other groups run it or my group run it with me taking a back seat to figure out if it's clear enough without me to explain.

I want it to be inspiring, the text capturing a mood to put the players in the game’s tone and mood.

Big success here. Everyone was very invested in the setting, and adding in some great stuff.

I want it to be invisible, a framework that helps create great stories and guides creativity in organic and unobtrusive ways.

This is where a lot of work still needs to be done. There's the promise of an invisible system, but the explanations of mechanics need a lot of clarifying/expanding to get there.

I want it to play with ideas of collaboration and opposition in RPGs/storygames, allowing fluid movement between the roles of environment and explorers.

Another big success. Everyone tonight got a turn at both, and seemed to enjoy moving between the two roles.

I want it to leave a space open for groups to shape their emotional landscape: longing, or bittersweet, or joyous, or desperate, as the group deems appropriate

Assessing this will have to wait on more playtesting and more folks playing it. Early signs are good?

I want to be able to release it for first-stage playtesting on my Patreon by the end of April

On this last point I'm actually a good month ahead of schedule!

Even though there's work still needed, I'm happy to say that the game in its current state is already complete enough for preview playtesting on my Patreon. Hopefully by the end of April I'll have the entire thing done!

Next steps: write the new material needed, playtest a whole bunch more, and talk to my dear friend John about layout and making it look nice.

Stay tuned for another post sometime in the next fortnight...

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Thursday, 9 March 2017

Across the Endless Sea: Mechanics and Playbooks (#3)

I’ve had a week to think about last week’s draft for a resolution mechanic for Across the Endless Sea.

In that time, I’ve reread my Patreon preview of Vincent Baker’s The King is Dead. I’ve reread my copy of Jason Morningstar’s Skeletons. I’ve rewatched some of Adam Koebel’s games of A Sundered Land.

On Monday at work I sat with a bunch of kids making up stories: about their characters, about the campaigns, about key NPCs they admire. After a particularly beloved mentor died of old age, one kid very sincerely told me that “nothing happens to me, because I’ve died of a broken heart”.

Seeing the strength of the narrative moments that can be generated just through using commonsense/fairness and asking provocative questions, I’ve come to a decision:

There will be no randomization or dice in Across the Endless Sea.

They just feel unnecessary. There’s an existing body of storygames that demonstrate that diceless non-random games can be done, and done well.

I want Across the Endless Sea to have something of the feel of traditional storytelling, to lean into Vincent Baker’s model of “roleplaying as conversation”. I want, as I mentioned in my design goals, for the mechanics of this game to seem invisible.

I also want this to be a game that requires and teaches trust of the other players at the table.

(Trust in their integrity, trust in their creativity, trust in their support as you imagine and improvise.)

So, with all that in mind here’s another attempt at that core resolution mechanic, and one that I am much happier with:

Time passes, triggering an encounter. A random encounter prompt is drawn.

The group determines which Threat the encounter belongs to. The Threat player gets to answer some questions and maybe ask some leading questions to flesh out their vision of the encounter.

They then give an initial description of the encounter.

The rest of the group determines which Aspect player will meet the encounter.

The Aspect player gets to interrogate the fiction of the encounter before they resolve it. Each playbook gives them a list of questions to choose from; this lets the player signal what about the encounter interests them. It also lets them steer the encounter a little: creating openings or weaknesses.

The Aspect player then begins the encounter.

They choose (from a playbook list) how the People meet the encounter, and then draw on their earlier questions and the established resources of the People to describe what that looks like.

The Aspect player asks the Threat player if their course of action works. There are no mechanics for this; the Threat player considers what was described and what they know about the encounter and answers according to what seems fair and truthful.

IF the course of action works completely, the People win something.

IF the course of action works at a cost, the People win something and lose something.

IF the course of action doesn’t work, the People lose something and then the Aspect player has to choose a new course of action.

Whenever things are won or lost, the Aspect players gets another player to choose them; (either off a playbook list or from scratch, as that player chooses).

So, there it is!

We now have five basic moves that are going to part of every Aspect playbook-

One that determines the investigative questions you can ask
One that determines the courses of actions you can take for resolution
One that determines what may have been lost
One that determines what may have been won
One that establishes some fictional resources the People have access to through this Aspect

and then choices that design the encounter that occurs when the People reach their destination.

There needs to be a clear trigger for what sets off the encounter at the destination: at this point, I’m thinking that the game happens over the course of an in-fiction year.

Each month, there may be one or two encounters (at the players’ discretion) and once they come to the twelfth month the next encounter involves their destination and what happens there rather than the normal deck of prompts.

I loved the chapter on little cultural details that John Harper wrote for Blades in the Dark, so I might do something similar with the months and their traditions of the main rules sheet.

That’s about all for today, I think.

I’m currently halfway through drafting the Aspect playbooks, and things are looking promising. I’ll probably post some of that next time around, along with some thoughts about what the template of the Threat playbooks should be.

And then there’s the question of the encounter prompts…

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Wednesday, 1 March 2017

Across the Endless Sea: Structure and Game Resolution (#2)

So, what does Across the Endless Sea look like as an actual game? This is the first and most important question that needs answering.

Every other mechanic and piece of writing must flow from this basic place: What is the structure of the game, and what is the resolution mechanic?

Let’s begin with structure.

Some years ago, I read Avery Alder’s Dream Askew: a GMless hack of Apocalypse World that presumes a slower-motion apocalypse and the formation of alternative and queered societal models to cope with this advancing frontier of weirdness and apocalyptica.

I haven’t yet got a chance to play it, but one thing stuck with me: players with multiple Playbooks to run.

In Dream Askew, every player is running two Playbooks at once: a character (slightly different from the normal AW list, but essentially similar) and a part of the world’s apocalyptic state.

The fictional tapestry controlled by the GM in Apocalypse World is carved up and parceled out among these “GM Playbooks” that give narrative authority over the aspect they describe: the world’s Psychic Maelstrom; a Warlord leading other survivors, violent and opportunistic; Grotesques and their cultists and believers.

Every player controls an aspect of the world and generates antagonism that originates from that thing. Every player controls a character who can confront the aspects of the world’s badness, except for one.

(Sidenote: The idea of making thematic statements by pre-determining these links is an interesting one. Whoever plays the Gunlugger must also play the Maelstrom; guns have no power over the bleeding psychic hole at the heart of the world. Whoever plays the Brainer must also play the Warlord; psychic fuckery cannot stop a soldiers well-led and armed with bullets. But this is a thought for another time…).

So: in Across the Endless Sea each player controls an Aspect of the People whose journey we tell the story of and a Threat of the Endless Sea upon which they travel.

This idea has been part of the game since very early on. One of the earliest things I wrote was:

One set of them [Playbooks] represent the Aspects of the People (that’s what they call themselves). You might be the Heart of the People, the Hands of the People, the Eyes of the People, the Memory of the People, etc.. Your sheet offers choices that define some of the cultural practices and values of the People, and your Moves provide ways to interrogate the fiction regarding things that the Endless Sea presents and ways to overcome them.
One set of them [Playbooks] represent the Threats of the Endless Sea. You might be the Weather of the Endless Sea, the Tides of the Endless Sea, the Islands of the Endless Sea, the Dwellers in/on the Endless Sea. Your sheet offers choices that define the environmental aesthetic of the game and the world the People move through. Your moves provide ways to flesh out and elaborate the randomly-generated prompts for what the Endless Sea presents, and establish challenges for the People to overcome.

As mentioned in the text above, inherent also in the design of the game has been the idea that the encounter that the People have on the Endless Sea are drawn at random from a deck of prompts.

There is a Twitter account that I dearly love called @str_voyage, a bot that generates an “endless nautical story” using random procedural generation.

The content it produces doesn’t always make sense, but more often than not is evocative and provokes the imagination. If a simple bot can produce coherent consistent story using procedural generation, I’ve always wondered, what could a table of creative and cooperating players do with a similarly-limited set of basic building blocks as their source material.

All that being said, then, here is the basic structure of the game:

There are playbooks for the People and for the Endless Sea. Each player runs one of each.
The structure of the game involves a series of encounters, prompts for which are drawn from a deck.
One player, controlling a suitable Threat, fleshes out the encounter.
One player, controlling a suitable Aspect, leads the People in confronting the encounter.

This is basically all there needs to be.

I have an idea that there’ll be some special mechanics for the end-game, when the People arrive wherever they’ve been going, but the overwhelming majority of the game’s rules and play are going to rest on having these encounters.

What do these encounters look like, mechanics-wise? Here’s the current draft:

Time passes, triggering an encounter
An encounter card is drawn
The group determines which Threat the encounter belongs to

The Threat player should get to answer some questions (define some things) and ask some leading questions (force others to define some things)

The group determines which Aspect player will meet the encounter

The meeting of it should be a group effort; the lead Aspect player directs the confrontation, but choices/moves of the others may be involved

Mechanics happen – roll dice? draw runes? look at Blades & Sundered Land for inspiration –that resolve how well/badly things go.

Possibly modified by whether the Aspect was a good choice to meet the Threat in question?

Consequences occur as a result of the encounter; something is lost, something is gained, something is learned

Are these the choices made by other players? Maybe?

Recently I’ve been watching Adam Koebel play Vincent Baker’s forum game A Sundered Land on his Twitch channel (slightly adapted), and a lot of the way this resolution mechanic is shaping up is inspired by that.

I’m loving the way A Sundered Land uses leading questions as a central mechanic: it’s entirely functional, it emphasizes those old AW ideas of “make the world seem real” and “always say what honesty demands”, and it leads towards fiction that is both compelling and non-generic/unique.

Interestingly, it’s the dice mechanic for combat in A Sundered Land that I find least interesting.

The most evocative confrontations in the several games Adam played were when he and Twitch-chat went slightly off-script and forgot about the combat dice.

So maybe the resolution mechanic for Across the Endless Sea should involve no dice or randomization at all.

Hm. A thought to return to in a future post, I think.

Tuesday, 21 February 2017

Across the Endless Sea: Introduction (#1)

When I was around 11, my mother brought me a compiled edition of C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia.

It was a thing of beauty: tall and hardbound, and very heavy indeed to my child’s hands. The front cover was blazoned with a watercolour map of Narnia, giants marching and Aslan’s great head peering out at me. I must have read it a dozen times cover-to-cover as a child, my insatiable hunger for fantasy latching on to the world presented within.

I loved all of the Narnia books, but my favourite was the Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

These days my relationship to Narnia, and Lewis’ work, is more complicated. The sheer transparency with which he parallels Christian motifs and symbols I find jarring; his treatment of Susan (and Lucy) I find uncomfortable. But still, I find a magic in reading about the Dawn Treader’s voyage across the sea into the East: about the islands encountered along the way and the mermaid kingdoms just below the surface of the ocean.

It’s a magic that’s far from unique to C. S. Lewis, of course.

The closing chapters of A Wizard of Earthsea, as Ged departs to chase his shadow and sails the Archipelago, have the same wonder (as do parts of its sequel The Farthest Shore).

Terry Brooks’ trilogy The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara spends the first and third books telling of an airship voyaging across strange and distant seas, sailing amidst the clouds and stopping at strange and enchanted islands, and captures the same essence.

The ancient Irish folktales of Immrama concerned the same motifs, as do animated films like Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas and Kubo and the Two Strings.

Even works like Moby Dick and its many cousins have something of the quality in question about them.

There is a long and proud tradition in storytelling of this motif: the surreal fantastical voyage across uncharted and dream-like seas. Bizarre creatures lurking in the deeps below, savage weather raking the deck, islands and impossible encounters delaying the journey’s progress.

And so, Across the Endless Sea

Across the Endless Sea is a storygame, a collaborative experience for up to five players chronicling the voyage of the People (as they call themselves) through the Endless Sea.

I’m going to be chronicling the design process publically here on this blog, opening the refinement of this inchoate game up to outside scrutiny and hopefully starting a dialogue of commentary and feedback that will allow me to make this game better, stronger, and stranger than I could have on my own.

Mechanics-wise, I’m going to be borrowing from the Playbook/Move structure of Vincent Baker’s Apocalypse World, and the innovation of having each player take on both a protagonist and an aspect of the story’s antagonism from Avery Alder’s Dream Askew.

My goal is to create a game that captures that feeling of wonder and dream-like reverie that I loved in Voyage of the Dawn Treader as a child.

I want it to be GMless, not least so that I actually get a chance to play it (unlike anything else I write).
I want it to be inspiring, the text capturing a mood to put the players in the game’s tone and mood.
I want it to be invisible, a framework that helps create great stories and guides creativity in organic and unobtrusive ways.
I want it to play with ideas of collaboration and opposition in RPGs/storygames, allowing fluid movement between the roles of environment and explorers.
I want it to leave a space open for groups to shape their emotional landscape: longing, or bittersweet, or joyous, or desperate, as the group deems appropriate.
I want to be able to release it for first-stage playtesting on my Patreon by the end of April.