Things to look out for in longer games...

Remember that the last truism a character resolves means end of their story.

Remember you can pass consequences onto relationships and thereby write them out, and also that resolving truisms can reverse that too...

-Matt

Realms Publishing

That very question (regarding truisms and the end of the character story) came up last night, so it's something that people will be aware of and take into account when resolving truisms.

It will be interesting to see how the pacing of the game goes. In one offs, its been the pattern to hit the protagonists pretty hard with conflicts from the get-go, but for a longer game, there was certainly an anticipation that it would (initially) be something of a slow burn.

Oh, and I was noting down how people had used the 'factions' area of the crucible. the differing factions utnred out like this:

Stefan
Amanda
--Lance (lies between two areas)

The Mayor
Lance
--Lucinda (lies between two areas)

DI Sinclair
Clint
--Andy (lies between two areas)

Clint
Gavin
--Lance (lies between two areas)

I'm seing the Sinclair/Clint/Andy and Clint/Gavin/Lance factions as one larger, loose faction. The same goes for Stefan/Amanda/Lance and The Mayor/Lance/Lucinda - another larger, looser faction.

Cheers
Malc

Contested Ground Studios

What were the factions people chose or invented? Did they chose factions that subvert, overplay or re-enforce?

-Matt

Realms Publishing

Could you explain more about what you mean by subvert, overplay or reinforce in the context of the game?

Cheers
Malcolm

Contested Ground Studios

From the breakdown on page 40 for creating named factions:

1. Do they subvert, overplay or contradict part of the setting.
2. What is the Faction's agenda
3. Who gives the PC orders.

So, basically, no faction a PC belongs to ever follows the official society line. The faction is either trying to subvert the society, way too obsessed with a particular aspect or explicitly not what the "party line" claims.

Effectively, no faction is every disinterested. They want your PC to do something, it isn't what the society wants and somebody specific is asking.

-Matt

Realms Publishing

I've been somewhat remiss in writing up the AP for this Covenant game. We had our first full session of play two weeks ago, and I totalled failed to make note of it. I'll look at that session very briefly, then move on to the most recent session, which took place last night.

The game and character creation session gave us a really solid base to build the game on, but it seems that the first session didn't quite mesh with that. To my mind, there was a lot of feeling out of characters, who they were, what they were doing. This was reflected on my part in the establishing of NPCs. Some scenes were slightly stilted and awkward. That being said, it was a good session. There was a lot of establishment of character and laying the groundwork for really meaty future conflicts. Certain NPCs also established themselves really strongly. In particular, Frank came to the fore as a terrifying, almost supernatural force in the game. On to the second session!

I was nervous going in to this. There had been some slightly uncomfortable moments in the last session, some lack of certainty about the motivations of characters and so on. Needless to say, my fears were pretty much groundless. There were some excellent scenes and really gripping conflicts. Perhaps the best thing was that some of the most gripping scenes did not contain conflict, but mere established relationships between characters in the fiction.

However, I'd like to focus on three scenes that did contain conflict and what it was about them that made them important to the fiction and enthralling as a participant.

Amanda (played by Emma) found her daughter, Lucy, at her door, at night, asking angrily who Frank was. Something of a shock. The mysterious Frank had shown up at her place of work (she volunteers at charities and is something of a non-working rich girl living off of the wealth of her mother). There was some back and forth, but I really wanted to push for a conflict. Interestingly, this was the first that Emma would have been involved in, so there was a learning process at work here as well. The situation was really intended to push Amanda's truism "Victory is more important than love" and boy did it swing back and forth. Lucy wanted to know who Frank was and what his connection with her mother was. Amanda desperately wanted to keep Lucy out of all this business with the cell. The conflict swung back and forth until I had no choice but to admit defeat and let Emma have the win. Lucy collapses in tears, her mother having answered none of her questions (including a very pointed "Do you still love me?").

It was a scene that said a lot about Amanda; her status, wealth, personal views and relationship with her daughter.

We cut to Frank and Lance (played by Steve) walking down Courtenay Place on a busy Friday night, crowds of pub-goers, students and tourists crowding round them as they walk down the street, surrounded by noise, light and revelry. Again, there was some back and forth before the conflict kicked in, but when it did, it was undoubtedly the most tense of the night. Lance wanted to break the hold Frank had over him, to get away from it all and be his own man. Frank wanted to break his will. And Frank crushed Lance, utterly. As the dice went down, I kept rolling sixes while Steve just couldn't get anything higher than a five. I ended up with three sixes staring up at the me from the table. As the conflict began, I had been unsure about what the bets outcome might be. But what this really did was establish Frank as not just terrifying, but invincible, almost a force of nature. And it gave a lot of great depth to the character of Lance, a man so self-assured, in control and manipulative of others, yet so broken by someone even more callous and hard than himself. A story level consequence was inflicted on Lance, but it also allowed the resolution of the truism "I always get what I want". Great! The first truism resolution of the game!

I hope Steve can pop in and give his thoughts on what went down in this conflict.

Finally we come to the only non-social conflict of the night. Poor Gavin (played by Simon), possibly the most human and affected of the protagonists, estranged from his wife, embroiled in a situation he just wants out of. he's working on renovating a house when someone taps him on the shoulder. Bang! Punched in the face by his wife's angry and slightly drunk brother. Now, I was expecting a bit of a fight here, it seemed in the nature of Gavin not to back down from using his fists. The outcome was far beyond what I expected. Simon dominated the conflict, having Gavin pound Kev (the brother) into a pulp, only eventually being hauled off by his colleagues who had initially been cheering their mate in his fistfight with a stranger. A colleague checks out Kev: "Christ Gav, I think you've really done him in." An ambulance is called.

Simon was very clear about what had happened: Gavin had put Kev into the hospital, inflicting a story level consequence, keeping him there for the rest of the game. It was a great story decision, impact on the relationship with his wife and the ongoing trauma that was causing. There is definitely going to be a scene in the hospital, Kev hooked up to machines, his sister by his side, Gavin coming in. That should be really good.

What else went on? It was established that Lucinda (the cell overseer) was unaware of her brother David's machinations and that David is actually the leader of the splinter cell that the protagonists have been tasked with hunting down. Lucinda also appeared as an on-screen character in a great scene with Amanda. Oh, Gavin went to Frank's farm out in the foothills of the Tararuas to ask if he could get out of all of this. For the first time we see Frank in his natural environment, an old farm with racks of dead possums, the stink of sheep, bad home brew and rotting carcasses. Frank showed Gavin the way out: the offal pit out the back of the farm. Man, Frank really is a horrible character. A real, scary bad guy.

On the whole, I thought it was an excellent session. IT really kicked the game off in a major way, taking all the stuff that had previously been established and amplifying it. Thoroughly looking forward to the next session, which we have brought forward to next week in order to get stuck in to it.

Cheers
Malcolm

Contested Ground Studios

I went into that first conflict with Kevin totally planning on calming the guy down, or at least seeing him off the building site with a verbal argument. The he said "She's too good for you" and Gavin just had to punch him.

I actually found the scene with Frank out in the country to be one of the most effective of the game. It was nicely understated, creepy, and felt very New Zealand cinema.

We're not using the conflict mechanics as intelligently as we could, I think. I'm going to try to back out of conflicts and start new ones in different arenas more often, I think. Actually we could use some guidance on what happens when you pull out of a conflict in terms of goals and consequences.

The key thing about bowing out is the conflict is technically over.

This means you get to merge down consequences and resolve truisms if you wish. The convention/motif limits are reset (or they might be used up) and you can assign empty slot relationships.

So, then all this means: If the goals from that conflict are really that important to your character, you can reframe in a new arena and go in with more chance of success.

-Matt

Realms Publishing

Right. So, if you withdraw from a conflict, who gets their goal? Do you still inflict consequences if you were winning when you withdrew?

The other side is the winner and gets their goals. They also get to inflict any consequence they have built up.

If you bow out when technically winning, you lose your goals and don't get to give out any consequences.

-Matt

Realms Publishing

(Crossposted at the Forge)

There were things I really liked and things I really didn't like about this. The game itself was a really intense experience. We were playing the remains of a cult based in Wellington, New Zealand, and we drew on a lot of New Zealand cinema references to inform that, the "Cinema of Unease" especially, with kind of gothic trappings, lots of long-buried secrets, themse of lonliness, missed communication, silence, the unsaid. There was a good splash of kitchen sink drama as well, with a lot of our conflicts focusing on the relationships between individuals, family members, husbands and wives.

Covenant was excellent at really drawing out those conflicts - at promoting really harsh calls in conflict. Working traits and consequences into a conflict can be a really powerful engine for discovering new things about characters, and about their relationships. The best conflicts were between characters who cared about each other, and seeing how much they'd hurt the other to get what they wanted. My character, Gavin, threw his wife's failure to bear them a child back in her face. Emma's character told her daughter that her father was only remaining close to her because he hoped to repair the marriage. These all drew groans, cheers and indrawn breath around the table. I found the conflict resolution system was a good prop to support these conflicts. Looking at traits, consequences and so on, and figuring out how to bring them into the conflict was a great prompt for inventing these kinds of details. That aspect of the system worked really well.

There were other aspects that didn't work so well.

Cell creation, I thought, didn't really fire on all cylinders. I could see that it was trying to set up internal conflicts and start the game with an interesting situation, but for our game at least, that's not how it worked. In game, we referred to our "faction" very little, and our orders not at all after the first session. What the game was actually about went in a very different direction. I would have liked to see a more explicit tie between truisms and relationships, and the situation creation system. The conventions and motifs, on the other hand, were fantastic, and did a really good job of getting us all on the same page in terms of tone and genre. I found they were actually much less important during the game than they were at the beginning of the game. That was tied to some of my problems with the conflict resolution system.

Maybe it's because it's still fresh in my mind from reading it, but I was thinking a lot about Vincent's recent "Rightwards Facing Arrows" essay about the relationship between mechanics, players, and the fiction. If I understand him correctly, he's saying that what a lot of "Story Games" lack is opportunities for the fiction of the game to mechanically affect the procedures of play. So, for example, in My Life With Master, you roll the appropriate dice for the scene, and then describe what happens in the scene based on the result. What I interpret Vincent as saying is that games like this can sometimes drift (non-technical sense) away from their fiction - that the dice game takes precedence, and soon you're barely justifying your mechanical actions in the fiction, and the fiction begins to feel like a millstone. I could feel the mechanics and the fiction kind of tugging apart at points in Covenant.

In a physical conflict with Frank (the monster who ran a large part of the cult), I didn't feel very invested in the actual events of the fight, though I was very invested in the actual outcome. I found myself scanning the character sheet for traits I could bring in, and then justifying them after the fact. It began to feel like what was happening in the fight didn't really matter - it was an afterthought. What mattered was getting those traits ticked off and staying in the fight. Going back to Vincent's essay, there was no "moment of judgement" where my contribution the the fiction was assessed for its impact on the mechanics, it was purely the reverse - my use of mechanics translated directly to the fiction. Narrating in conventions and motifs was especially susceptible to this. It was easy to invoke one of these with spurious or weak justification. In social conflicts I felt this effect less keenly, because we were more invested in the actual fictional events. What people said really mattered.

A lot of this was exacerbated by what I saw as a pretty serious flaw in the conflict mechanics: The number of relevant traits you have is a far bigger determinant of success than what you roll on the dice. Because you have to bow out if you have no further traits to roll in, you're encouraged to scrape to find any relevant trait you can. Sometimes this led to interesting and powerful new content, but sometimes it just felt like scrambling. I felt like rolling the dice was superfluous to what really mattered in the conflict. It also led to a lot of conflicts spreading beyond their original arena. A fist-fight usually involved a lot of trash-talking, just to use the traits. I usually found these uses of traits far more interesting anyway, and I felt like there wasn't a lot of usefulness in the seperation of "arenas" of conflict anyway. Similarly, the rules for bowing out of conflicts and intiating them again in a different arena weren't very useful to us. We didn't use them at all.

So it was a mixed bag, I guess. There were things I found really amazing about the game - things that I really enjoyed. I think the mechanics of the game did help us to produce something that wouldn't have been possible with a different system. Other times though, I wished we'd been playing Sorcerer or something instead. Definitely an enjoyable game though, and it's made me really excited to play more games with the same people.