What do you think caused the discomfort? The nature of those specific antagonists, or the general responsibility of playing an antagonist?

I think Joe (Prince) would be best placed to answer this particular question. From my point of view, I think part of it was a slightly adverse reaction on my [part to the presented conflict.

We were all slightly unsure of how the game was going to go and what to expect from it. When the conflict was thrown in, it was quite far from what I was expecting and threw my off-balance to a massive degree. I was unsure where to go with it or what purpose it was serving in the ongoing story of the protagonist. It also didn't see quite 'big' enough as a conflict.

I think my confusion and consequent lack of interest in playing the protagnoist until I has sorted out where they were heading served to make Joe slightly uneasy and unsure about playing the role of antagonist in the game.

Going from the 'traditional' RPG model of 'GM as antagonist figure' to game with a 'any other participant as antagonist figure' can be something of a sea-change. Certainly for most of my gaming career, I've been used to being the antagonist, as most of my time has been spent GMing. Having to take that role as a generalised participant makes the game take on a markedly different character.

Shock is very 'open' in the way it handles scenes, with the outline and content of the scene being up to the protagonist and the insertion of conflict up to the participant taking the role of the antagonist. it places a responsibility on the participant playing the antagonist to introduce a conflict of appropriate weight and relevance to the story of the protagonist> I think this is, perhaps, where Joe found himself to be place in a unwanted situation.

Then again, it's probably best for Joe to relate his experiences rather than ascribe motives and reasons to him.

Cheers
Malcolm

Contested Ground Studios

>Going from the 'traditional' RPG model of 'GM as >antagonist figure' to game with a 'any other >participant as antagonist figure' can be something >of a sea-change

How would you compare it to, say, Polaris, which has a similar setup, so that everyone takes turns as the antagonist to the other protagonists? Is it an issue unique to Shock: or does it compare to other games with similar setups?

I've never played Polaris, so can't really comment on the similarities or otherwise.

I can potentially compare it with other GMles games that we've played, Contenders being the obvious one. In Contenders you have a defined selction of scenes to choose from, which helps focus play. In Shock, the scene structuring is very much up to the participants. The structuring in Contenders also helps to point towards what kind of conflict will be taking place. With Shock, the responsibility for conflict lies with the player of the antagonist.

Cheers
Malcolm

Contested Ground Studios

I'll be interested in seeing what you make of Six Bullets, as that has a similar approach to antagonists.

Just for information, the shocks in our game were:

Souls as commodity

and

Reality is mutable

Cheers
Malcolm

Contested Ground Studios

Shock, Shock, Shock.

It's a whole lotta Dick.

I did feel at a disadvantage lacking the encyclopedic sci-fi knowledge of the rest of the group. I'm a casual sci-fi fan - I see fictional science as science fiction. I didn't think it would be a problem but it was in play.

We had a whole session of planning the game (pre-play pseudo play I think Ron calls it)which was fine but very slow. All the technical terms make it more difficult. Matrix, praxis, fulcra... We eventually filled the matrix and came up with protagonists.
They didn't really seem to inhabit the same world - but hey Reality is Mutable.

Unfortunately the mechanics don't really seem geared up to do anything. All the Shocks and Issues seemed to be ignored once play started.

Reality is Mutable was a problem for me, nothing really matters if everything can change in an instant. I was playing a goth band The Obsidian Brotherhood (maybe I was channelling Umlaut).

I'd only listed to the Gamestas podcast on Shock. Malc and Per had both read the book but we struggled for mechanics quite a lot - I think some only appear as errata on Joshua's site. The best parts of the game were the in character system-doesn't-matter parts. There was a problem as soon as we engaged the mechanics.

I was playing Malc's antagonist The ABC. The first conflict of the game I stepped in to antagonise Zuchev and stop his credit card. We role-played out the conflict but Malc was thrown by it. Which led into a big debate about where it was going in terms of his protagonist's story, whether it was a good conflict and whether Malc wanted to play his PC anymore. Not the best start for my first role-playing exchange with a new group...

Going by the mechanics I was totally in the right. The conflict was vetoed at the social contract level, the most sensible thing to do. Mechanics need to resolve issues like this not cause them!

The counter-stakes are quite problematic I think. Deciding on a conflict didn't come easy for several scenes.

Also to achieve your story goal, it's best to fail every conflict until the final one to build up lots of Features. That felt weird to me.

I never got into my protagonist at all - I didn't have any clue where they were going - the story goal was to become god poets.

Shock gives you lots of interesting things but no guidance on how to combine them into a story - each of the protagonists felt totally isolated there was no crossing over.

Hope this makes sense I just splurged my brains out.

+++
JoE
+++

Prince of Darkness Games
Rock N' Role-Play....

Look at Ron jumping on my Shock bashing bandwagon - he's so derivative! ;)

Unbaked games thread

+++
JoE
+++

Prince of Darkness Games
Rock N' Role-Play....

Yea, I got pointed to that thread this morning, and hell, Ron is indeed bashing Shock. And here I was trying to be all diplomatic and touchy-feely.

Ron does have a very good point:
"Shock as a game is the only science fiction RPG ever published. It's innovative, fun, and powerful. Shock as a book is an ashcan, despite its physical design. It should have been presented as an ashcan, under whatever business model, and treated [...] as an ashcan.

Spot on.

Per

This echoes everything I've heard about the game in real life, but no one seems to say that online!

Wow, nice to see I'm not alone in what I thought about this game.

I loved the idea, but no matter how many times I read the book I couldn't figure out how it was supposed to _play_ nor what this much discussed matrix added to anything.

Many reviews I read/listened to seemed to include somewhere "getting a demo from the game designer is useful" which I'm sure is true, but left me wondering if the book really stood on its own.

Just flicked through that thread, and I really like that the community is finally realising that this is happening. Games are being released on a wave of hype but when you actually get to playing the thing you hit a brick wall. I hate to put the boot in here and name names, but I am going to.

Capes is the example I use when I talk about this phenomenon of 'Emperor's new clothes' kind of game publicity and production.

I went to Gencon in 2004, fresh faced and full of entusiasm for Mob Justice which was in development at the time. I met lots of cool people, got my game ripped apart by Luke Crane and Jared Sorenson and heard about lots of cool games. Some of these I bought including capes.

Now I had a demo of Capes that left me no wiser as to how the game worked, but was fun cause Tony made it fun. I bought the book. I read it. I was confused. I read it again. I was more confused. When I got back to UK i lent it to a mate of mine. He read it. He was confused.

Capes is awful. Its badly written, confusing, forward refrences all the time, like 5 or 6 times a page, and I can't actually make head nor tale of it to actually run the thing.

From what I have heard of it, Shock suffers from a similar fate. It has come in a wave of enthusiasm form the community such that no one seems to have checked if there was a useable game in there. Apparantly not.

Now I don't claim to be perfect but I do extensively playtest my games and I am getting better at writing them up so that they are good useable documents.

I also have no problem with a game getting a lot of hype if it is good, but if that hype is to be believed by the public then it must be in some way based off the published version of the game, not the rough ideas floated round the forge, story games and our own site.

I know that we, as a group, produce good quality games that are well written and that when we hype something up we are doing it out of genuine admiration for the product.

More on this once I have gathered my thoughts a bit more.

For those going to Spodley, I would very much like to make this a topic of discussion some night.

Cheers
Iain

Lead Developer Mob Justice RPG

Check out my home brew games like 'Reel Adventures'

We had a one-day session of Shock yesterday and it is, indeed, an ashcan. I only borrowed Scott's copy in order to play it with some friends at our monthly meeting, but if it had been mine, I would be expecting to be able to redeem it for the finished product at some time!

That aside, of the 3 other players who took part, none of them ahd ever played Shock ebfore or seen the rulebook and 2 of them are strongly traditional role-players who were open to giving an indie product a go. At the end of the day, everyone agreed that though trying to bend your head around the rules was a struggle (especially the 'mutually independent dynamic outcomes of conflicts') we all enjoyed the story that emerged. The main comment was that it didn't turn out the way they thought it would at the start, e.g. their ideas for their own personal narratives got twisted around by the other players (in a good way, that is)

Sounds like your game went a lot smoother James - had you been taught the rules previously (I know Scott is something of a pro now), or did you work it out yourself?

I was in the game that Scott arranged at the MK-RPG last year, so it was more my memories of that than anything else. If I hadn't played in that game, I'm sure the rulebook I'd borrowed from him wouldn't have helped in the least. Everytime I tried to look up some detail I wasn't sure about (e.g. what ranges to assign to the fulcrums of praxis scales, what having ownership of a Shock or Issue entailed, how to implement minutiae) I couldn't find a definitive answer in the rulebok.

Its possible to say that these questions and others like them are dealt with through forums and FAQ available on-line, but then I feel the rulebook ought to carry a statement on the cover such as 'This is not a complete game: access to the internet is required for play'!

Or perhaps thats just my snide, cynical side manifesting again... Down boy! Bad Id! Go to your kennel!