Archipelago Actual Play

[mashugenah]

Yesterday I went to a London RPG Meetup and played a session of Archipelago, a game whose name I'd heard but which wasn't familiar to me. It was pitched as a tale for telling Earthsea; style stories - a collaborative world-building tool with a story back-end. From the game introduction:
Archipelago is a story/role-playing game where each player

Comments

[thorog]

Wooooo livejournal account what even is this thing.

Man, a lot of this rings familiar to me as someone who's just read through Archipelago, never played it. There's so much I want to love about the game - the kind of whimsical way everyone's just-about-related, the ritual phrasing and conflict resolution, the per-player ownership of the game world - and so much that I look at and go, "Surely that's going to lead to a bunch of bumbling about, working what should happen? Perhaps the magic of the game will sort it all out." Interesting to hear that (at least in a convention situation) it plays out how I fear it would play out.

[mashugenah]

The more I think about it, the more the deliberate decision to keep the characters separate seems counter-productive.

[thorog]

Hmm. We had a somewhat similar experience with the board game Eldritch Horror recently. In the spirit of a good combatting-a-global-threat boardgame, each player is sent off in different directions to fight monsters, or close gates, or investigate rumours of cults, or what-have-you. Each turn you have an "encounter" where, depending on where you happen to be, you encounter a person or a situation or borrow a book or whatever - roll some dice, resolve situation, maybe gain an item, maybe take some damage. Which is cool and all, but we soon found out that we just didn't care about everyone else's adventures.

A lot of the Archipelago hacks I've played/read ditch this bit of the game almost immediately. For example, in Society of Dreamers (which also immediately gives you a nice scenario/setting/drive/etc.) you're all part of the same tight-knit group of freelance occultists, while Dream Askew (which is PbtA Archipelago, basically) has you as members of the same hold. Sure, you may never all going to be in the scene (someone is usually

[mashugenah]

I'm going to have to confess to the details of Microscope's mechanics being somewhat hazy in my mind - it must be about 5 years since I last played it. In general, that "get on the same page" phase is extremely tricky mostly for two reasons that I can't see how any mechanics can fix:

1. Most people don't know what they want
2. Most people will be too polite to ask for what they want if they happen to stumble on it

So in terms of "frameworks" - Archipelago provides basically nothing for having a fruitful discussion about what should happen in the game, or what the game should be about. Without having seen a hack of it, not sure I can go any further with that.

Along those lines, I think the focus that games like Apocalypse World and Archipelago put on drawing a physical map is unhelpful, inasmuch as it assumes people will successfully insert thematic synecdoches, where most people (and me more than most) are incapable of making that leap unless it's completely obvious. e.g. I think if someone inserted "Rotting Gothic Mansion" into

[thorog]

Microscope has this nice little thing at the start of the game where the group, as a whole, defines a palette for the game. The palette is basically two lists, each of which lists themes, things, topics, whatever: one "+" list (which is a way of saying "I expect/would like to see $TOPIC in this game") and one "-" list (which is a way of saying "We should never see $TOPIC in this game"). They're decided as a group, and it tries to make sure that people are on the same page before play starts.

In general, that "get on the same page" phase is extremely tricky mostly for two reasons that I can't see how any mechanics can fix:

1. Most people don't know what they want
2. Most people will be too polite to ask for what they want if they happen to stumble on it

So in terms of "frameworks" - Archipelago provides basically nothing for having a fruitful discussion about what should happen in the game, or what the game should be about. Without having seen a hack of it, not sure I can go any further with that.I think this is a pretty good