Tor Erickson – Powered by the Apocalypse G+ Archives

I wanted to share some thought about the Bryanna Hitchcock game we played at Big Bad Con last week. Bry has already done a great writeup (as Tony put it, “And that’s how you do an Actual Play writeup”) which I’ll link at the bottom, and Tomer Gurantz has touched on some of the cooler moments in play, so I won’t cover those. Instead, I’m just going to focus on the things that felt unique to me about the game system and our particular game. These aren’t in order, or even necessarily complete thoughts, but they all feel meaningful to me, even if I may not be able to express myself perfectly.

– Epic gameplay. I don’t know how else to put it. The Watch captures the epic feel of multi-volume, fantasy fiction like nothing else I’ve played. LOTR, Wheel of Time, Game of Thrones… take your pick. I don’t pretend to fully understand how it did this (and obviously our particular play group and Bry’s MCing played a big part), but I think it had something to do with the fluid way it played with time and space in both the war and downtime parts of the game. Bry kept saying, “Don’t worry about exact chronology, we’ll make it work,” and we did, and that freed us up to just create awesome fiction that just worked. Also, the ability to play through epic battles, just touching on the points of greatest character conflict, was critical. And the same with the downtime. I’ll talk about Bry’s MCing, and how it contributed, but the rules really encouraged this style of play.

– Rolling the dice drove the story. We rolled a lot of dice in this game, and it made the story awesome, putting a giant wooden stake in the heart of the claim that you’re either a “roll-player or a role-player.” Bry really pushed this: pretty much every scene was centered on a critical roll, and the results of that roll took the story in a new and exciting direction. This just happened again and again, and picking up the dice was a highly anticipated moment each time.

– Bry should fucking write the book on how to MC PBTa. There’s just no polite way to put this. I’ve been ruminating, trying to figure out what exactly it was that she did, and I came up with a few things:

1. She gave just enough detail to fire our brains up, and then let us take it from there.

2. She had an innate sense of when it was time to roll the dice or cut the scene. As soon as it became clear in a scene that we were floundering a bit, she would ask, “Okay, is there a roll to be made here?” This kept the story moving forward.

3. She placed a huge amount of trust and power in the hands of the players to frame scenes, introduce characters.

4. She kept the focus on the PCs, which made us all feel like bad asses.

– Thoughts about being a guy playing The Watch at a con. This is going to be a bit jumbled, but, whatever. Early on in the game it occurred to me that I was taking a seat in a game that could have been filled by someone who was queer, or a woman, or trans. In other words, I was doing that thing that straight, white guys do: taking up space that marginalized communities need. Maybe there was a trans person somewhere at the con who would have played in the game, and couldn’t because I did. That statement stands on its own, but there are two follow up points. First, I took a lot away from the game about gender identity and toxic masculinity, and I think that’s valuable. Second, if we’re seeing queer/female games fill up at cons, then maybe more people will be encouraged to run them. And that would be a good thing

– That scene between my character, Measho, and Jerry Ozbun’s character, Peale, when Measho tried to humiliate Peale in front of the commander, and it backfired horribly. Well-played, Peale, well-played.

– The romance scene between Measho and Tomer Gurantz’s character Ahjo. Wow. Wow. What was special about that to me, was how it played out moment by moment, with each bit of narration leading to the next bit of narration in a careful, focused dance. First, Measho reflecting on her brother and their matched swords (which Tomer did an awesome callback to in the climactic battle), then Ahjo reflecting on her spear, then Measho going in for a kiss but getting shut down. Timing was spot on!! Also: of course Measho falls for the one asexual character in the game. Figures.

– Adversity. I did find myself, as we got towards the end of the game, wanting a bit more adversity. It seemed like by the time we got to the showdown, every roll was at +3 to +6, meaning we were basically rolling 10+ the entire time. Also, I had a huge stack of +1 forward chips at the end, couldn’t use them fast enough. These bonuses took a lot of the sting out of Weariness (who cares about +2 history with another character? I’m rolling at +6 anyway) and made the final battle feel more like a slam dunk than a desperate fight with everything on the line. Even the death of Tony’s character was essentially a decision he made. I’m curious (to anyone still reading), does playing the game out over more sessions change this aspect of the rules?

Okay, that’s about it. I’ve decided to run a game of The Watch myself, and my players are already pumped. Thank you so much to Anna Kreider and Andrew Medeiros for creating this incredible game, Bryanna Hitchcock for running it, and Steve Moore, Tomer, Jerry, Alison, and Anthony for playing.

Bry’s Actual Play Writeup, which includes Tomer’s comments: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+BryannaHitchcock/posts/7BKNXxDZTnW

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+BryannaHitchcock/posts/7BKNXxDZTnW

Struggling With the Morality of the PCs in the Adam Koebel Roll20 Games Master Series Apocalypse World Game

Spoilers below…

So there’s this scene in episode 9.1 of the Adam Koebel, John Harper, Andrew and Avycyn Roll20 AW game where John’s character, Frankie pulls out a gun and shoots an unarmed woman to death. It’s a brutal killing, played up in the fiction: execution style while the father of the victim watches.

Realize this is around 30-40 hours into the game at this point, and I’d listened to every episode, meaning I had really been enjoying it. But at that moment I pulled out the earplugs and quit watching, without any real desire to find out what happened next.

Before saying anything else, I realize this is potentially an emotional topic, with a lot of real world feelings in regards to the players involved as well as the PCs and fiction of this particular game. So, to clarify, I’m not saying John, or Adam, or Andrew, or Avycyn is a bad person. I’m also not saying that they played the game wrong, or that anyone else who watched that same moment is required to have the same reaction I did. I’m also not saying that it was a bad game: as I mentioned earlier, I had really enjoyed it up to that point. I enjoyed it for the quality of the fiction and I learned an immense amount about AW and role-playing in general from the series. If anything, the fact that I had such a visceral reaction to the fiction should indicate how good the prior material had been.

But I just couldn’t get past Frankie killing Mercer like that (or, now that I think of it, the way the crew of the Vixen signed up to murder everyone in Mercer’s Hold).

Reviewing my mental record of the previous 8 episodes, I can’t think of anything that set up this level of moral desolation. Yes, Frankie and the others had killed before, but it was always contextualized as either self-defense, or deeply morally troubling (when Frankie kills Tao). And yes, we had the “kill anything that moves no sense of right or wrong” character of Navarre, but prior to she had been positioned in contrast to Frankie who provided some sort of moral backing. And yes, Gritch was nasty, and scary—like, legitimately scary—but again, he was contextualized and counter-balanced by Frankie (I think one could make an argument that the real heart and moral ballast of the group was Austin Walker’s character who bowed out early on, but not sure what else to say about that).

So did anyone else get to this point in the story and have a similar, or different, reaction? Is there something I’m missing? Like, why did Frankie do it after agonizing over the death of Tao for 6 episodes? And maybe more broadly, does anyone else find that these sorts of over arching morality questions as critically important as I do to the enjoyment of a game or piece of fiction?

Best regards,

Tor