KapCon 2019 Swords without Master
This game is one of those new-fangled "Shared Narrative" games where players collaborate on a story via a set of methods and mechanisms designed to simulate a particular kind of story. Whether this is still a "roleplaying game" is something that I've vacilated on since my original throw-down with Steve Hickey over The Lucky Joneses over a decade ago. I won't rehash those arguments in detail, but I think it's worth thinking about in terms of a player's field of vision - in the most rigidly "traditional" roleplaying game the player needs to worry only about their own immediate needs (what would my character do?), whereas in "shared narrative" games they more fundamentally need to worry about what the story system needs (what works for the other players, what works for the group). Implicit in this is the idea that for a "shared narrative" game the players must have more "buy-in" to what you might loosely term a "social contract". That's not to say a "traditional" game can't easily be broken by players disengaging with the premise - this is the absolute killer for most Call of Cthulhu, where players kind of opt not to play characters compatible with the basic story structure - but everything you have to do in a traditional game is applicable to shared narrative, plus a whole lot of other stuff.
2018 was the year for unsatisfying shared narrative outings for me, from my Dresden Files group whose pre-game world-building centred around Vampires only to decide mid-stream "wait, why do we even care about vampires?" and hence disengage; or the One Last Job game I abandoned after 45 minutes because it was clear the table just couldn't find a version of a criminal story concept to share, to the Apocalypse World game which just kind of drifted with no really discernable conflict or plot points. What I think was really at the heart of most of these failed collaborations was a lack of a strong well-understood story schema. When we think of "post apocalyptic" we think of a particular setting, an environment, but do we have a strong shared intuition about the story events? Now, add zombies in for something like Zombie Cinema and voila, we're into a well-defined and well-known set of stories about squabling over diminishing resources due to the pressure of flesh-eating monsters. I think similarly this is why it's much easier to run A Taste for Murder than Dirty Secrets, because the classic country-house mystery is a much more tightly defined story schema than its sprawling amorphous American cousin, the Hard-Boiled Detective story. A casual glance at the definitional works in Hard-Boiled detection shows almost no overt overlap in story schema (what does The Maltese Falcon have in common with The Big Sleep? Humphrey Bogart).
So when I say Conan-esque Swords and Sworcery (haha), what do you imagine? It's evocative, but I think perhaps in fact it's too evocative. I can think of 50 different characters and stories immediately, which makes the first challenge of this game getting everyone onto the same subset of 5 ideas. I think this is where the better Story Facilitators (not Game Masters) really shine - in pitching one unified and parsable version of the game that you could be playing. If you get this moment wrong, the game mechanics may be able to correct for you, but relatively few shared narrative games are well designed enough that they genuinely enforce the story schema they're loosely modelling. In much the same way as most of the traditional games exist "as written" but really aren't like that "as played" (anyone around for AD&D 1st and 2nd edition has painful memories of this disconnection). Sadly, I don't think this GM nailed that introduction, going so far as to say they hadn't really fully groked the system - that was not ideal.
Swords Without Master has a lot of moving parts. The character creation is a very free-form thing where you just grab a bundle of characteristics whose purpose is far from clear. Once the game is going every die roll could result in a change of game mood or require the players to create a new story element on the fly. There were a couple of players asking basic system use questions right until the last few minutes, which I think is fairly good evidence that the system is on the complicated side for pick-up-and-play style gaming. The story itself was a real mess, at least partially because some players really struggled to grasp previous story points and grow them via "yes, and". The GM did a fair job of helping out with that, but the result was still fairly incoherent and for me quite unsatisfying.
What this means is that Swords Without Master isn't a dependable, robust, reliable, game engine. I think if you had the right alchemy at the table it could really support a very fun game of over-the-top pulp fantasy fun, but it doesn't force you to have that experience. I think this is the big challenge for any KapCon GM, and it's the reason I have generally shied away from shared narrative games, preferring to play them with people already known to be similarly inclined and similarly disposed to story. Paradoxically, I think when you run one of these games you need to be more of a presence as a GM than if you're in a traditional game where the story schema will be second nature to people. As the example there, at SplatterCon I played an absolutely shameless Old School Revolution dungeon-crawl which could have been run by anyone in the world without really changing the experience significantly; the relentless formula of moving through spaces encountering skill and combat challenges leaves minimal room for personality or personal interpretation.
I haven't seen any other debriefs from this game yet, but I think it got decent scores over 3 or 4 runs at the convention, so this is a case where other opinions are definitely available.
2018 was the year for unsatisfying shared narrative outings for me, from my Dresden Files group whose pre-game world-building centred around Vampires only to decide mid-stream "wait, why do we even care about vampires?" and hence disengage; or the One Last Job game I abandoned after 45 minutes because it was clear the table just couldn't find a version of a criminal story concept to share, to the Apocalypse World game which just kind of drifted with no really discernable conflict or plot points. What I think was really at the heart of most of these failed collaborations was a lack of a strong well-understood story schema. When we think of "post apocalyptic" we think of a particular setting, an environment, but do we have a strong shared intuition about the story events? Now, add zombies in for something like Zombie Cinema and voila, we're into a well-defined and well-known set of stories about squabling over diminishing resources due to the pressure of flesh-eating monsters. I think similarly this is why it's much easier to run A Taste for Murder than Dirty Secrets, because the classic country-house mystery is a much more tightly defined story schema than its sprawling amorphous American cousin, the Hard-Boiled Detective story. A casual glance at the definitional works in Hard-Boiled detection shows almost no overt overlap in story schema (what does The Maltese Falcon have in common with The Big Sleep? Humphrey Bogart).
So when I say Conan-esque Swords and Sworcery (haha), what do you imagine? It's evocative, but I think perhaps in fact it's too evocative. I can think of 50 different characters and stories immediately, which makes the first challenge of this game getting everyone onto the same subset of 5 ideas. I think this is where the better Story Facilitators (not Game Masters) really shine - in pitching one unified and parsable version of the game that you could be playing. If you get this moment wrong, the game mechanics may be able to correct for you, but relatively few shared narrative games are well designed enough that they genuinely enforce the story schema they're loosely modelling. In much the same way as most of the traditional games exist "as written" but really aren't like that "as played" (anyone around for AD&D 1st and 2nd edition has painful memories of this disconnection). Sadly, I don't think this GM nailed that introduction, going so far as to say they hadn't really fully groked the system - that was not ideal.
Swords Without Master has a lot of moving parts. The character creation is a very free-form thing where you just grab a bundle of characteristics whose purpose is far from clear. Once the game is going every die roll could result in a change of game mood or require the players to create a new story element on the fly. There were a couple of players asking basic system use questions right until the last few minutes, which I think is fairly good evidence that the system is on the complicated side for pick-up-and-play style gaming. The story itself was a real mess, at least partially because some players really struggled to grasp previous story points and grow them via "yes, and". The GM did a fair job of helping out with that, but the result was still fairly incoherent and for me quite unsatisfying.
What this means is that Swords Without Master isn't a dependable, robust, reliable, game engine. I think if you had the right alchemy at the table it could really support a very fun game of over-the-top pulp fantasy fun, but it doesn't force you to have that experience. I think this is the big challenge for any KapCon GM, and it's the reason I have generally shied away from shared narrative games, preferring to play them with people already known to be similarly inclined and similarly disposed to story. Paradoxically, I think when you run one of these games you need to be more of a presence as a GM than if you're in a traditional game where the story schema will be second nature to people. As the example there, at SplatterCon I played an absolutely shameless Old School Revolution dungeon-crawl which could have been run by anyone in the world without really changing the experience significantly; the relentless formula of moving through spaces encountering skill and combat challenges leaves minimal room for personality or personal interpretation.
I haven't seen any other debriefs from this game yet, but I think it got decent scores over 3 or 4 runs at the convention, so this is a case where other opinions are definitely available.