Jiburi: because when Shannon fails, she fails with gusto

[pooka_madness]

This quote is excerpted from this Tuesday's open gaming session (the same one euchaotic already quoted.) We were playing Jiburi, a system based on Ron Edward's Trollbabe, and as in that game players describe the negative outcomes of failed rolls while the GM narrates the positive outcome of successful ones

Comments

[euchaotic]

Y'know, the whole game was like that until that point. Everybody was describing these catastophic failures as if they rolled all 1's in a White Wolf game. The whole idea of describing your failure rather than suffering the consequences of GM discretion was really foreign to everyone. Similarly, when the players succeeded we were prone to jump immediately into narrative rather than letting the GM wrest control of the scene (although the Chun Li style headstomp was pretty sweet). Once we warmed up to the system, it seemed to temper the story into a nice linear prgression. Characters could succeed the way the GM wanted, and if they failed, they could still stick to their original plan with a bit of creativity.

[pooka_madness]

Yeah, its a nifty system that way.

I have to admit that when I saw the number of people I was dealing with I got very nervous. Story gaming is not necessarily intuitive to a lot of roleplayers, and Jiburi lacks some of the collaborative framework found in other games that helps to get people into the right mode. Still, it seemed to work out alright in the end, so I'm happy.