Free Form RPG
The free-form D&D intro session was a success. I won't go so far as to say that everything worked out the way I expected or that things went smoothly. I WAS able to come away with some interesting observations that will help me refine the concept some for the next game. Unfortunately, as I expected, one of the players was again very, very late showing up, and once he arrived at the store showed little to no interest in actually playing. Fortunately I had essentially written him off by that point. We went ahead with the three players we had.
My first observation was that the players seemed agitated during our initial discussion with what we(I) hoped to accomplish with this different method for bringing the characters together. Everyone agreed that they understood and pressed that we should get started. It quickly became apparent that there were some pretty fundamental misunderstandings concerning how the play would take place. One player initially began making recommendations that the token system needed to be changed to allow players to hold conversations with each other. It took some time to get across that the conversations could be had with the rules as they were now, just that the player involved wrote both halves of the conversation, leaving it up to the other players to jump in using the change tokens when necessary. We played a pre-pre game session just to try things out. My intention was for it to last 20 minutes. After my brief introduction, we quickly got to the point where pass tokens began being passed around rapidly with nobody actually taking the full three minutes minimum of tell time. That is probably a flaw, allowing everybody to continue to not participate, as long as everybody passes it can keep going.
We had to stop briefly. The players were getting quite frustrated and didn't seem to be having a good time. I encouraged them to be more descriptive. Rather than focus on telling the story as a series of plot point outlines, hold the conversations. We started again and things quickly improved. It was a lot easier to hit the three minute mark.
I noticed that only the player with some GM experience was inclined to make actual plot decisions. There seemed to be a marked discomfort with deciding who might actually be responsible for one or more of the murders. It really seems like the players involved were very trapped in reactive role playing. This became quite apparent as we went through layer upon layer of misdirection as to who was actually responsible for various incidents in the story.
In this instance I tried hard not to make use of my referee's pool of change tokens and simply left the story up to the players. One only one or two incidents did I do so. One was to change the idea that two murders took place in order to get access to a life insurance policy. I tried for a moment to figure out why inhabitants of a giant castle would need or have access to life insurance, and since I could not come up with a good reason changed it to a dowry.
I recorded the session and will be trying to put together a coherent transcript/interpretation of the story so that the players have a solid footing to work from during our next game session.
In the future I would like to see how it plays with a larger group and with a group of less reactive style gamers.
My first observation was that the players seemed agitated during our initial discussion with what we(I) hoped to accomplish with this different method for bringing the characters together. Everyone agreed that they understood and pressed that we should get started. It quickly became apparent that there were some pretty fundamental misunderstandings concerning how the play would take place. One player initially began making recommendations that the token system needed to be changed to allow players to hold conversations with each other. It took some time to get across that the conversations could be had with the rules as they were now, just that the player involved wrote both halves of the conversation, leaving it up to the other players to jump in using the change tokens when necessary. We played a pre-pre game session just to try things out. My intention was for it to last 20 minutes. After my brief introduction, we quickly got to the point where pass tokens began being passed around rapidly with nobody actually taking the full three minutes minimum of tell time. That is probably a flaw, allowing everybody to continue to not participate, as long as everybody passes it can keep going.
We had to stop briefly. The players were getting quite frustrated and didn't seem to be having a good time. I encouraged them to be more descriptive. Rather than focus on telling the story as a series of plot point outlines, hold the conversations. We started again and things quickly improved. It was a lot easier to hit the three minute mark.
I noticed that only the player with some GM experience was inclined to make actual plot decisions. There seemed to be a marked discomfort with deciding who might actually be responsible for one or more of the murders. It really seems like the players involved were very trapped in reactive role playing. This became quite apparent as we went through layer upon layer of misdirection as to who was actually responsible for various incidents in the story.
In this instance I tried hard not to make use of my referee's pool of change tokens and simply left the story up to the players. One only one or two incidents did I do so. One was to change the idea that two murders took place in order to get access to a life insurance policy. I tried for a moment to figure out why inhabitants of a giant castle would need or have access to life insurance, and since I could not come up with a good reason changed it to a dowry.
I recorded the session and will be trying to put together a coherent transcript/interpretation of the story so that the players have a solid footing to work from during our next game session.
In the future I would like to see how it plays with a larger group and with a group of less reactive style gamers.