[Bacchanal] My thoughts on Ivan's feedback (Part 2)
I've almost finished posting about the Bacchanal game. Again, this isn't an actual play. The next post will be me starting to draw together the most significant points from everything I've written about over the last few days; I'll be creating the SPINE of an actual play reort.
Things I need to get down include:
Ivan had a few problems with the accuser and companion subplots:
A couple of observations before we get to Ivan's fix for this. First, I don't think there's anything actually stopping players from bringing the Companion or Accuser into their narration, and developing those subplots. It's probably easiest to justify if their dice are in your cup; in that case, you case simply incorporate them into the overall narration you're delivering. But even if you don't have their dice, I'm guessing that you can introduce rumours and other information about your Companion and Accuser via other characters who are in the scene.
Secondly - and please bear with me; I'm about to realise something and then immediately change my mind to the complete opposite opinion - it just occured to me, you could have the accuser and the companion played by different players.
But my thinking hadn't developed much further than that before it occured to me that this might be a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the game. Bacchanal is about your story-telling ability rather than having in-character conversations. It's a game about being a writer and director rather than an actor (*).
(*) In technical terms, you play the game in director stance rather than actor stance.
This is so important (I think) that it goes into whatever my new pitch for Bacchanal turns out to be.
Anyway, moving back to Ivan's fix for the lack of impact the Accuser and Companion subplots have on the game. He suggests having an accuser and a companion die for each player character. These dice could be in each player’s cup from the start, have certain consequences associated with using them, and increase in dice size in a certain pattern. (Click here and scroll down to Point 2, for more details/)
I like this. I wonder what would happen if you (a) kept increasing the size of the Companion and/or Accuser dice (which puts a clock on when the end game occurs), while (b) retaining the threat that you could lose the Companion and Accuser dice from your glass (which would probably reset their dice size). It's an interesting variation that (as Ivan says) makes the Companion and the Accuser more relevant to the story.
I do wonder what you lose by doing this. I felt there would be quite an emotional kick if you'd developed your character's story and their search for their Companion - and then finally got the Companion die into your cup. I guess I'm saying that starting with the Companion die seems to defeat the point of narrating your search for the Companion.
I'm not really going to address Ivan's final two points (about figuring out how to describe the escalation of sex and decadance in the game in interesting ways, or alternatives to using a round robin structure) (*).
(*) Although I did wonder at how awesome it would be to use a 'telling stories after it had all happened' structure, and then discover that your character hadn't survived.
--- --- ---
Some final reflections and memory jogs:
I've had experiences where I've misread the rules and misapplied them in play. I can't remember having an experience where I've so fundamentally misrepresented the nature of the game to potential players.
Part of our beginning to play the game was to roughly map the city. I drew a coastline, and each of us added one setting element. A marketplace, a necropolis. I thought this went well.
After my introduction to the game, which I thought went pretty well too, we had to interrupt the handing out of dice, when I realised we didn't have enough appropriately coloured d8s. Total mismanagement on my part - it interrupted the flow will I went on a d8 hunt (*) - and basically led to a late start to the game that defused all the creative momentum we'd built up during setting and character creation.
(*) It totally didn't help that I decided to spend a couple of minutes with Sophie, advising her on her rapidly-disintegrating Capes game (that I felt somewhat quite a bit totally responsible for).
Death or escape are the only two options for the fate of your character. (Although, what happens if you drain all your wine? I believe that's technically possible.)
In play, there wasn't much emphasis on being a stranger to the city and needing to escape ... That was my fault in the character-creation phase; I didn't insist on it as much as I should have. Would it have had more of an effect on, say, Richard's story? I don't know; I suspect so.
I did find it telling that both Rohan and Richard FORGOT about their Companions for a long time in play.
I need to create a new pitch for this game - one that I'm comfortable with. After talking with Richard, it also occured to me that this game uses techniques that are unfamiliar to some people. Perhaps my running of the game (or the game text itself) could benefit from gradually introducing techniques and improv exercises to get the players into the right headspace for the game. This stuff could be built into developing a shared understanding of the setting and character creation, as well as the first (or first couple of) scenes.
The group needs agreement on how they contribute to other people's stories during play. The game needs to address what people do after their stories are finished. But (as per my 'fundamental misunderstanding', above), perhaps they do nothing; they are the audience to your story, and that is all.
Things I need to get down include:
- What happened to my character ( here)
- What happened to everyone else's characters (in progress, here)
- My experiences playing the game ( here)
- Notes from post-game talk ( here)
- Did I mis-read the rules? ( here)
- Ivan's thoughts ( here)
- My thoughts on Ivan's thoughts (the first part is here)
Ivan had a few problems with the accuser and companion subplots:
- They seemed totally disconnected from each other and from the broader narrative about the bacchanal.
- Because players had no control, we couldn’t be influenced by fear of the accuser or desire for the companion.
- The mechanics made the subplots hard to introduce (and, as Nasia noted, practically impossible to introduce for more than one or two players over the course of the game) (*),
- If you did manage to introduce them, bam, it meant there was a good chance you’d be out of the game before you could develop them into anything interesting.
A couple of observations before we get to Ivan's fix for this. First, I don't think there's anything actually stopping players from bringing the Companion or Accuser into their narration, and developing those subplots. It's probably easiest to justify if their dice are in your cup; in that case, you case simply incorporate them into the overall narration you're delivering. But even if you don't have their dice, I'm guessing that you can introduce rumours and other information about your Companion and Accuser via other characters who are in the scene.
Secondly - and please bear with me; I'm about to realise something and then immediately change my mind to the complete opposite opinion - it just occured to me, you could have the accuser and the companion played by different players.
But my thinking hadn't developed much further than that before it occured to me that this might be a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the game. Bacchanal is about your story-telling ability rather than having in-character conversations. It's a game about being a writer and director rather than an actor (*).
(*) In technical terms, you play the game in director stance rather than actor stance.
This is so important (I think) that it goes into whatever my new pitch for Bacchanal turns out to be.
Anyway, moving back to Ivan's fix for the lack of impact the Accuser and Companion subplots have on the game. He suggests having an accuser and a companion die for each player character. These dice could be in each player’s cup from the start, have certain consequences associated with using them, and increase in dice size in a certain pattern. (Click here and scroll down to Point 2, for more details/)
I like this. I wonder what would happen if you (a) kept increasing the size of the Companion and/or Accuser dice (which puts a clock on when the end game occurs), while (b) retaining the threat that you could lose the Companion and Accuser dice from your glass (which would probably reset their dice size). It's an interesting variation that (as Ivan says) makes the Companion and the Accuser more relevant to the story.
I do wonder what you lose by doing this. I felt there would be quite an emotional kick if you'd developed your character's story and their search for their Companion - and then finally got the Companion die into your cup. I guess I'm saying that starting with the Companion die seems to defeat the point of narrating your search for the Companion.
I'm not really going to address Ivan's final two points (about figuring out how to describe the escalation of sex and decadance in the game in interesting ways, or alternatives to using a round robin structure) (*).
(*) Although I did wonder at how awesome it would be to use a 'telling stories after it had all happened' structure, and then discover that your character hadn't survived.
--- --- ---
Some final reflections and memory jogs:
I've had experiences where I've misread the rules and misapplied them in play. I can't remember having an experience where I've so fundamentally misrepresented the nature of the game to potential players.
Part of our beginning to play the game was to roughly map the city. I drew a coastline, and each of us added one setting element. A marketplace, a necropolis. I thought this went well.
After my introduction to the game, which I thought went pretty well too, we had to interrupt the handing out of dice, when I realised we didn't have enough appropriately coloured d8s. Total mismanagement on my part - it interrupted the flow will I went on a d8 hunt (*) - and basically led to a late start to the game that defused all the creative momentum we'd built up during setting and character creation.
(*) It totally didn't help that I decided to spend a couple of minutes with Sophie, advising her on her rapidly-disintegrating Capes game (that I felt somewhat quite a bit totally responsible for).
Death or escape are the only two options for the fate of your character. (Although, what happens if you drain all your wine? I believe that's technically possible.)
In play, there wasn't much emphasis on being a stranger to the city and needing to escape ... That was my fault in the character-creation phase; I didn't insist on it as much as I should have. Would it have had more of an effect on, say, Richard's story? I don't know; I suspect so.
I did find it telling that both Rohan and Richard FORGOT about their Companions for a long time in play.
I need to create a new pitch for this game - one that I'm comfortable with. After talking with Richard, it also occured to me that this game uses techniques that are unfamiliar to some people. Perhaps my running of the game (or the game text itself) could benefit from gradually introducing techniques and improv exercises to get the players into the right headspace for the game. This stuff could be built into developing a shared understanding of the setting and character creation, as well as the first (or first couple of) scenes.
The group needs agreement on how they contribute to other people's stories during play. The game needs to address what people do after their stories are finished. But (as per my 'fundamental misunderstanding', above), perhaps they do nothing; they are the audience to your story, and that is all.