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

Thoughts

[anarchangel23]

I've played a game derived from Archipelago but I haven't played the game itself.

Do you have a sense of how many of the players had played the game before? Certainly as someone who has played a bunch of narrative games like that, that setup seems weak. I can't think of too many of my fellow story gamers being excited about a setting that none of the players were able to articulate. With 90 minutes of setup, I would have thought you'd have a better idea of what the table was thinking about the setting.

The game I've played that derived from Archipelago is Love in the Time of Seið, which was excellent. (And your account throws a lot of light on one of the comments in that blog post!)

Re: Thoughts

[mashugenah]

I think it was the first time for this specific game for everyone at the table.

Nevertheless, I think the things that weren't going well for me were symptomatic of a more general divergence in what's important to know about a story at the outset; I think I would have struggled with most blank-slate games...

RE: Re: Thoughts

[anarchangel23]

My experience of these games in heavily coloured by playing them with people who run them at Game on Demand or similar venues where they expect to encounter people of varied familiarity with the game and the style of play. In that experience, I can't think of a "blank page" game that shouldn't be a clear genre/story type/setting by the time play actually starts. I think PTA actually says that you should keep discussing story ideas until everyone is onboard. And if that means you don't play, well, you don't play.

"Play to find out" works best (only?) when the genre and setting are clear.

[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

[steve_hix]

I've played a lot of Archipelago, ... and so: some thoughts:

1.

Unless a setting element is super-important in the premise of the game, I've found it's better to leave it until you're playing to decide who has ownership over something. The conversation usually goes like this:

"I cast a spell to bind the demon."
"How does magic work in this world?"
"No idea. Anyone want to take ownership of it?"

2.

Jamie Fristrom's In a Wicked Archipelago hack solves all my problems (similar to yours) with Archipelago's soft premises and non-intersecting characters. It uses Archiplego's resolution system but uses In A Wicked Age's oracles and best interests to establish a situation and character relationships.

It's available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a-s0pzd2ECeohysfpEJDhU38JUfSlCJEriBfH5jV9Y4/edit?pli=1#

I've never had a bad game using this set-up. I tend to play it with Ivan and Karen when we get a chance.

[mashugenah]

Thanks. Pro-tip about indie RPGs - go to the pro. :D