I’m running a short Sagas of the Icelanders campaign at the mo, and I’ve noticed a problem with the female moves. Two out of four of them (Raise your Voice and Talk Sense and Entice a Man) have their only mechanical effect (besides risking an MC move) as a bonus/penalty to a roll. Which means that, mechanically speaking, they don’t affect NPCs at all.
This leaves women, who in theory are good at achieving results by talking and working through others, with exactly one tool to get an NPC to do what they want: Goad a Man to Action. (The fourth and final move is Lie with a Man to Conceive a Child, which is interesting but rather specialised, not to mention infrequent use.)
They are at their most powerful when influencing male PCs, therefore. So what do you do if your game has very few such characters? (Or maybe none?)
In our case we have one Godar (not sure how to do the funky nordic characters here, sorry), and that’s the only man. He’s quite old and not that physically ept. So what I perceive as the normal model, of men going off and doing physical deeds or falling out with each other, and the women kind of herding cats to stop them from getting killed, doesn’t seem to work so well here.
In this situation it feels a bit like the engine of the system has lost all its friction. The parts are still there, but they’re not engaging with each other, and I’m forced to fall back on MC moves, which is kind of exhausting, or fudging the two PC-oriented moves to work on NPCs as well, which feels like it’s probably not how things are meant to work.
Anyone come up against this? Any advice?
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Yeah we stumbled also on that problem (“wait… you mean I cannot talk sense to male NPCs?”)
Gregor gave an answer here : plus.google.com – Does anyone know if Speak Up and Talk Sense has any alternate rules for use w…
I know we ran into a few moves with that issue and took a stab at reworking them. Let me see if I can find the document.
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Listening!
I believe the intent is that the game should be about PCs. If you need an NPC to do a thing, you gotta get a male PC to get them to do it.
In the case of your Gothi (the thorn is roughly a th sound, so I write it that way), in Viking culture, they’re still supposed to be “manly” and have pride and honor and all that. A physically inept Gothi will not hold is position for long.
Idk what is intended to happen here but I think a cool story would be if the women were forced to use masculine moves (I’m just going to pretend that the gender moves are restricted in a “Gender X is the only gender allowed to do this” way and not in some way that implies a difference of capacity) and that turns out to be effective but there’s some kind of social fallout for stepping out of accepted gender roles, even though it’s clear there are no capable men available to perform masculine moves.
Thanks everyone. I’m still not sure about this. I sometimes take an approach similar to one person in the thread Tiburce Guyard linked to, of essentially applying the logic of the move to the NPC as though it were directed at them. Not sure if that’s “right”, definitely feels clumsy.
I’m not at all sold on the “the game is about the PCs” way of thinking – I think you need some external nudges to make the conversation between the PCs interesting, and I’d like the PCs to have more ways of interacting with those external characters. (Plus my group, as I say, is three people with one man, so it could get pretty 2d if it was just focused on them.)
I’d ordinarily love Shreyas Sampat’s suggestion but I think the whole idea of Sagas is precisely not to defy historical stereotypes, but to embrace them. (Which is not to say women can’t do male stuff and vice versa, but it won’t reliably work for them as well as having social consequences.) I don’t know if that’s a fun game, but I’d like to at least try to play it the way it’s designed!
Keith Stetson I’ll be interested to hear more about your approach.
Is it possible you don’t have enough male PCs?
Aaron Griffin it’s possible, for sure. I take a slightly dim view of a game which has such a state (especially if it means a 3-player game must have max one woman), but it’s possible.
Joshua Fox I believe, being based on viking sagas, that you need at least one male mover-and-shaker. It sounds like your only male role is more passive.
Perhaps the gothi needs someone challenging his position or something to get him in non-passive motion. I heard Magni Saltbeard was grazing his flock on his lands!
Welp, the godi bit the dust last session, murdered by the apparently honourable and impressively manly huscarl Grim Heldenhammer. He has been replaced by his apprentice, who is a much more stereotypical Sagas dude. So far this seems to have somewhat improved the game, though I worry slightly that this is only because the new character is going to get all the real fun. There’s only one full session left, so I’m not going to worry my pretty little head about it too much.