KapCon XXX - Game 1
When writing my KapCon preamble, I browsed my back-catalogue of KapCon summaries. I was amazed by two things which have completely left my customary approach - I named every player in every game, and I made a lot of really snappy declarative judgments about anything that struck me. How times change.
Round 1 - The Tribute [EPOCH]
I think traditionally Round 1 at KapCon is the toughest, with the highest rate of games that just don't really fire; followed at a near distance by Round 2 on Sunday, the middle-child of rounds. Last year I ran my very very complicated almost straight-up espionage game, The Rabbit Snare, and that was quite hard work although it did work. This year I decided to take an easier option and go with a game designed for single-session play, designed to kick-start creativity and which demands engagement: EPOCH. I picked pre-published scenario The Tribute because it was, I think, the only published EPOCH scenario that I've never played and never read. If it's not going to destroy my GM mystique too much, I'll admit that I didn't actually read the scenario until the day before the con - I just copied Donna's blurb from when she ran it.
When Dale wrote EPOCH I thought it'd blow up at conventions, because of its reliability and its versatility. Essentially the game needs a GM to think of 6 challenging encounters, preferably of increasing intensity, while the players don't need to do any complicated plot assemply or problem solving - they just need to really inhabit their characters, keeping an eye on making them interesting so they'll win audience ballots. Once you've got the basic set of result cards, you should be all set. I ran it a few times at the Oxford gaming club when I lived there, and even absolute newbie players with the imagination, life experience, and emotional maturity of a typical fresher (i.e. none at all), seemed to really grok the idea quickly and I don't think I ever had a session run flat.
This KapCon run was really no exception. There was a pretty high energy level and engagement level, with a couple of inter-connected backgrounds quickly emerging through play and through the flashback mechanic, and those paid off unusually well in terms of delivering a rationale for behaviour in the present-tense of the game. I quite enjoyed the high drama of it - EPOCH isn't a game that necessarily thrives on subtlty, so I always try and deliver a big experience and I try hard to almost subliminally reinforce the core player mechanic, which is: make your character interesting.
A couple of unusual things happened during the game. We had quite a few ties in the audience ballot, which is surprisingly rare, and the eventual "survivor" opted to try and join with the horror rather than win the scenario in the traditional way. And also very unusally, we rarely had all possible flashback cards played. I think typically there were 3 rather than 5 flashbacks each round, whereas I've generally seen one or two go unused in the first round and then after that their power for advocating for your character's survival becomes really apparent and flashbacks come thick and fast. I think the reason was the sterility of the game environment combined with its obscurity. Bronze-age Greece isn't as well-known and loved a setting as, say, the modern world where most games are set.
It's been a long time since I played EPOCH (I left Oxford mid way through 2015), so even though I was an early participant in the design discussions with Dale and I've written one of the published scenarios, I think I was able to come back to it with a fresh GMing brain to re-evaluate what works and what's odd about the game. I'm going to fairly quickly run my thoughts through three pretty familiar, though variously controversial, frameworks: GDS, Task v. Conflict, and Morgue's Hidden Goblin.
Dale's published a lot about running horror over on his blog, but I think the most complete statement was in his 5 Tips for Horror, and the most important bit that made it into EPOCH was that "[t]he essence of horror is the impact on the character". (Tip #2) EPOCH puts this decision-making in the hands of the player, via their selection of a "consequence" card, where each time a character are challenged, the player must decide themselves on how affected the character is. This presents as a pure Dramatic construction in the GDS conception of gaming, because there's no complex system to manipulate, and nor is there any idea here that reality might intervene. Your character is exposed to a nuclear blast - are you mildly sunburnt, or deep-fried? Up to you.
Lurking behind that however, is that the dramatic outcomes available to you are determined by an explicit competition between players for the love of the audience. The game you're playing is "how do I manipulate the emotions of my fellow players", which means reading the room, but what experienced EPOCH players do at the table is dial every emotion up and search for deeper and more elaborate backstories to expore via their flashbacks. I played one session where the backstory ended up having two of the characters as immortals locked in an eternal struggle, in which their surival of the horror was a mere footnote. Absolutely bananas - but compelling viewing. Conversely, I've seen a player eliminated in the minimum time because nobody cared about their imaginary squirel companion's hijinx. Read the room.
The other major Game-focused aspect is the Horror Track. Theoretically, if you collect a certain number of story tokens, you can defeat the horror and whoever's left lives out their life haunted by a tragedy but isn't killed. A group that genuinely tried to focus on exploration and problem solving, and was "into survival" has at least some chance in at least some scenarios, but in practice most horror tracks are not really possible to actually traverse. For example, in Road Trip, 8 of the available 20 points you need for defeating the gang of bestial motorcyclists comes from "Kill all the Beasts", which is a bit self-reflexive at best. Quite a few of the victory points in various scenarios mean devoting huge effort to uncovering NPC storylines, and hence are not remotely player facing. There is, in theory, a whole task-based conventional Game running alongside the main focus of experiencing in-character horror.
In practice, what this means is that there is an unusual synergy between the Dramatist elements and the Gamist elements. What EPOCH encourages in the successful player, who wants to "win" is to be interesting, and that means that probably the most overall effective strategy is to be playful. That is, to experiment with approaches, to be creative, to be imaginative. It doesn't necessarily mean be amusing, or funny - but honestly, that is generally a fairly adequate strategy in and of itself.
What's also really unclear about achieving some of those goals is the mechanism by which you decide whether it's possible or not possible, because the only mechanic in EPOCH is the way you reflect injury, everything else is by GM Fiat. Indeed, the Fiat extends very much into the possibilities for story. The story in any EPOCH scenario is prescribed as a series of 6 challenges, and while the rulebook talks a bit about "Lockbox" versus "Sandbox" games, the reality is that you're in what Matt Cowens used to describe as a "Tunnel of Fun". The best EPOCH scenarios lean into this requirement, where there is no "success" or "failure" other than required by the scenario constraints, there's just how badly mangled the characters are in the process. In the Tribute, there's narrative points available for "Killing the Minotaur", but ultimately whether any characters can accomplish this is just down to how persuasive they can be in narrating an attempt - the GM will always just make a decision on whether they succeed or fail.
Which brings us to Morgue's Hidden Goblin. The 10 posts cover a lot of ground, but for my purposes I tend to envisage the Hidden Goblin as a kind of gate-keeper between the GM's Imaginary Space (GMIS) and the Shared Imaginary Space (SIS). This use of the Goblin pre-supposes that the GM has in their mind some kind of narrative for the things out of the players' sight, and the job of the goblin as Morgue explains it is to decide how that narrative is affected by the action inside the SIS:
That goblin just watched these bloodthirsty maniacs casually incinerate his big cousins with enormous flaming murder bombs. No way is he going to stick around! But what does that mean? What happens next in the game? What do you, master of the game, actually do next?
EPOCH sort of avoids this as a logistical concern for the GM by completely decoupling what happens in the narrative of the scenario from what the players do, especially in the nicely constrained lockbox mode of The Tribute. Almost all the drama in EPOCH comes from players dramatising their characters in a way that they hope others find entertaining, and their only real effect on the narrative comes from finding the Easter Eggs that form the Horror Track.
It could be fairly stated that a lot of the purpose of the GM advice in EPOCH, which Dale terms "Player Activation" is really to establish buy-in to the premise of the scenario, and the scenario design must be such that it never violates the terms of that buy-in. So far, all the EPOCH scenarios manage to do that one way or another, but it is entirely possible to imagine a scenario badly designed where at some crucial mid-point the players simply decide that they don't want to engage in the obvious story trajectory. Because the GM has all the narrative power in EPOCH, they can always just force the issue, but that's no fun for anyone.
Returning to EPOCH after a 5-ish year break proved a few different things to me. Firstly, it is incredibly robust as a game engine. With a single read-through of the scenario and a pack of consequence cards I was able to facilitate 6 people to be very entertained for three hours. I don't have another game that forgiving. Secondly, as a game where "winning" is an objective, I don't think it works as well as I did last time I ran it. I like to think my own scenario does a better job of that... but I'm way too scared to actually open my contributor copy and check. And lastly - there's a line in Pope's Essay on Criticism that "The winged courser, like a gen'rous horse, | Shows most true mettle when you check his course." By completely constraining the narrative but while still providing a strong narrative, EPOCH really allows players to fully concentrate on their characters, and that's got a lot of merit.
Round 1 - The Tribute [EPOCH]
I think traditionally Round 1 at KapCon is the toughest, with the highest rate of games that just don't really fire; followed at a near distance by Round 2 on Sunday, the middle-child of rounds. Last year I ran my very very complicated almost straight-up espionage game, The Rabbit Snare, and that was quite hard work although it did work. This year I decided to take an easier option and go with a game designed for single-session play, designed to kick-start creativity and which demands engagement: EPOCH. I picked pre-published scenario The Tribute because it was, I think, the only published EPOCH scenario that I've never played and never read. If it's not going to destroy my GM mystique too much, I'll admit that I didn't actually read the scenario until the day before the con - I just copied Donna's blurb from when she ran it.
When Dale wrote EPOCH I thought it'd blow up at conventions, because of its reliability and its versatility. Essentially the game needs a GM to think of 6 challenging encounters, preferably of increasing intensity, while the players don't need to do any complicated plot assemply or problem solving - they just need to really inhabit their characters, keeping an eye on making them interesting so they'll win audience ballots. Once you've got the basic set of result cards, you should be all set. I ran it a few times at the Oxford gaming club when I lived there, and even absolute newbie players with the imagination, life experience, and emotional maturity of a typical fresher (i.e. none at all), seemed to really grok the idea quickly and I don't think I ever had a session run flat.
This KapCon run was really no exception. There was a pretty high energy level and engagement level, with a couple of inter-connected backgrounds quickly emerging through play and through the flashback mechanic, and those paid off unusually well in terms of delivering a rationale for behaviour in the present-tense of the game. I quite enjoyed the high drama of it - EPOCH isn't a game that necessarily thrives on subtlty, so I always try and deliver a big experience and I try hard to almost subliminally reinforce the core player mechanic, which is: make your character interesting.
A couple of unusual things happened during the game. We had quite a few ties in the audience ballot, which is surprisingly rare, and the eventual "survivor" opted to try and join with the horror rather than win the scenario in the traditional way. And also very unusally, we rarely had all possible flashback cards played. I think typically there were 3 rather than 5 flashbacks each round, whereas I've generally seen one or two go unused in the first round and then after that their power for advocating for your character's survival becomes really apparent and flashbacks come thick and fast. I think the reason was the sterility of the game environment combined with its obscurity. Bronze-age Greece isn't as well-known and loved a setting as, say, the modern world where most games are set.
It's been a long time since I played EPOCH (I left Oxford mid way through 2015), so even though I was an early participant in the design discussions with Dale and I've written one of the published scenarios, I think I was able to come back to it with a fresh GMing brain to re-evaluate what works and what's odd about the game. I'm going to fairly quickly run my thoughts through three pretty familiar, though variously controversial, frameworks: GDS, Task v. Conflict, and Morgue's Hidden Goblin.
Dale's published a lot about running horror over on his blog, but I think the most complete statement was in his 5 Tips for Horror, and the most important bit that made it into EPOCH was that "[t]he essence of horror is the impact on the character". (Tip #2) EPOCH puts this decision-making in the hands of the player, via their selection of a "consequence" card, where each time a character are challenged, the player must decide themselves on how affected the character is. This presents as a pure Dramatic construction in the GDS conception of gaming, because there's no complex system to manipulate, and nor is there any idea here that reality might intervene. Your character is exposed to a nuclear blast - are you mildly sunburnt, or deep-fried? Up to you.
Lurking behind that however, is that the dramatic outcomes available to you are determined by an explicit competition between players for the love of the audience. The game you're playing is "how do I manipulate the emotions of my fellow players", which means reading the room, but what experienced EPOCH players do at the table is dial every emotion up and search for deeper and more elaborate backstories to expore via their flashbacks. I played one session where the backstory ended up having two of the characters as immortals locked in an eternal struggle, in which their surival of the horror was a mere footnote. Absolutely bananas - but compelling viewing. Conversely, I've seen a player eliminated in the minimum time because nobody cared about their imaginary squirel companion's hijinx. Read the room.
The other major Game-focused aspect is the Horror Track. Theoretically, if you collect a certain number of story tokens, you can defeat the horror and whoever's left lives out their life haunted by a tragedy but isn't killed. A group that genuinely tried to focus on exploration and problem solving, and was "into survival" has at least some chance in at least some scenarios, but in practice most horror tracks are not really possible to actually traverse. For example, in Road Trip, 8 of the available 20 points you need for defeating the gang of bestial motorcyclists comes from "Kill all the Beasts", which is a bit self-reflexive at best. Quite a few of the victory points in various scenarios mean devoting huge effort to uncovering NPC storylines, and hence are not remotely player facing. There is, in theory, a whole task-based conventional Game running alongside the main focus of experiencing in-character horror.
In practice, what this means is that there is an unusual synergy between the Dramatist elements and the Gamist elements. What EPOCH encourages in the successful player, who wants to "win" is to be interesting, and that means that probably the most overall effective strategy is to be playful. That is, to experiment with approaches, to be creative, to be imaginative. It doesn't necessarily mean be amusing, or funny - but honestly, that is generally a fairly adequate strategy in and of itself.
What's also really unclear about achieving some of those goals is the mechanism by which you decide whether it's possible or not possible, because the only mechanic in EPOCH is the way you reflect injury, everything else is by GM Fiat. Indeed, the Fiat extends very much into the possibilities for story. The story in any EPOCH scenario is prescribed as a series of 6 challenges, and while the rulebook talks a bit about "Lockbox" versus "Sandbox" games, the reality is that you're in what Matt Cowens used to describe as a "Tunnel of Fun". The best EPOCH scenarios lean into this requirement, where there is no "success" or "failure" other than required by the scenario constraints, there's just how badly mangled the characters are in the process. In the Tribute, there's narrative points available for "Killing the Minotaur", but ultimately whether any characters can accomplish this is just down to how persuasive they can be in narrating an attempt - the GM will always just make a decision on whether they succeed or fail.
Which brings us to Morgue's Hidden Goblin. The 10 posts cover a lot of ground, but for my purposes I tend to envisage the Hidden Goblin as a kind of gate-keeper between the GM's Imaginary Space (GMIS) and the Shared Imaginary Space (SIS). This use of the Goblin pre-supposes that the GM has in their mind some kind of narrative for the things out of the players' sight, and the job of the goblin as Morgue explains it is to decide how that narrative is affected by the action inside the SIS:
That goblin just watched these bloodthirsty maniacs casually incinerate his big cousins with enormous flaming murder bombs. No way is he going to stick around! But what does that mean? What happens next in the game? What do you, master of the game, actually do next?
EPOCH sort of avoids this as a logistical concern for the GM by completely decoupling what happens in the narrative of the scenario from what the players do, especially in the nicely constrained lockbox mode of The Tribute. Almost all the drama in EPOCH comes from players dramatising their characters in a way that they hope others find entertaining, and their only real effect on the narrative comes from finding the Easter Eggs that form the Horror Track.
It could be fairly stated that a lot of the purpose of the GM advice in EPOCH, which Dale terms "Player Activation" is really to establish buy-in to the premise of the scenario, and the scenario design must be such that it never violates the terms of that buy-in. So far, all the EPOCH scenarios manage to do that one way or another, but it is entirely possible to imagine a scenario badly designed where at some crucial mid-point the players simply decide that they don't want to engage in the obvious story trajectory. Because the GM has all the narrative power in EPOCH, they can always just force the issue, but that's no fun for anyone.
Returning to EPOCH after a 5-ish year break proved a few different things to me. Firstly, it is incredibly robust as a game engine. With a single read-through of the scenario and a pack of consequence cards I was able to facilitate 6 people to be very entertained for three hours. I don't have another game that forgiving. Secondly, as a game where "winning" is an objective, I don't think it works as well as I did last time I ran it. I like to think my own scenario does a better job of that... but I'm way too scared to actually open my contributor copy and check. And lastly - there's a line in Pope's Essay on Criticism that "The winged courser, like a gen'rous horse, | Shows most true mettle when you check his course." By completely constraining the narrative but while still providing a strong narrative, EPOCH really allows players to fully concentrate on their characters, and that's got a lot of merit.