Rough notes on why tantanea didn't work

[jeregenest]

• HeroQuest sucks
• Too number driven but the numbers don’t even mean much
• Extended contests suck
• Different goals and agendas may be causing a set of problems (talk about entry behaviors some more in a post).
• Disconnect between the players on what it means to initiate in the Sephiroth
• What does it mean to initiate in the higher ones?
• Entry behaviors and knowledge causing difficulty here
• Working through the sephiroths as ambitious it is too ambitious for the pacing
• General technique of non-scene framing games is throwing lots of stuff at players and seeing what sticks. But that seems to be causing difficulty here.
• Possible fragmentation here from entry behaviors and knowledge on goals and settings
• What exactly is required for player prior knowledge? Do we have a failure in communication of the rich setting?
• Sephiroth for dummies? Was the wiki utilized successfully?
• What has been presented in game has been presented in a codified jargon laden way that has been easy for trying to say one thing and being heard by different flavors by the people hearing it.
• Jere’s technique here was to set a baseline and allow personal interpretations to drive new complexities. This seems to be happening but not necessarily in a constructive group fashion.
• Emily feels that it’s too difficult to determine what her character is supposed to do.
• Harmonization of group goals was never successful.
• Never successfully integrated vision on the player and character level.
• Perhaps this game required more out of session stuff than folks bought into social contract wise.

 

Conclusion: The mechanics don’t work and there is no sensecontinuing to try to get them to fit our objectives with the combination ofsocial contract unable to pick up the slack.

General feeling was that this was not a failure in the group (players or gms) but more a failure of the chosen rules to expressively match the objectives and that several of the objectives were difficult to achieve with the chosen communication tools.

Immediate thoughts: Consensus and communication as tools of the system.

Comments

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

Sounds like some definite problems, but I don't think you can say that a game that runs, what, 30 sessions or so over a year (spanning multiple incarnations and 1000s of years no less) "didn't work". And I know you guys have been having fun along the way. I know I'm sorry to have missed out on it all.

[princeofcairo.livejournal.com]

Knowing nothing about the specifics, another part of the problem might be that Nephilim, at least as presented, makes a fairly bad framework for group gaming; it takes all the flaws of multi-clan Vampire games and adds cross-temporal incompatibilities and character concepts that just beg for spotlight hogging. I remain proud of the work I did on the line, but I'm not sure I really mitigated any of those problems during my time as developer, and may well have made some of them worse.

[bruceb.livejournal.com]

That's interesting - not being flippant there, either. Do you think it would work better as a single-player game?

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

While this may well be true, in our case it was in fact a nonissue; the bulk of the player-characters incarnated together, over and over again, and so character concepts were necessarily relatively complementary.

"Necessarily relatively complementary" ought to be more fun to say than it is.

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

I said it before, and I'll say it again: I have this vision of HeroQuest, and what it's trying to do, and how the Extended Contests are supposed to work, and how augments work, and everything, and it's amazingly cool, what it's trying to do. It's the awesomest game system ever, my vision of HeroQuest is.

But in point of fact I've played with HeroQuest in several different settings under several different GMs (or been the GM myself) and I've never had it work quite right. I've never had the perfected gaming experience that I feel ought to be easily accomplished with the HeroQuest rules.

So it is extremely frustrating, to keep trying like this. I am beginning to wonder if this platonic HeroQuest game is a mere phantasm that flits away as we approach it, taunting us with its distributed narration and customized character development and smoothly-focused conflict resolution rules.

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this was certainly our thought: it was a learning experience. No one was especially interested in just packing in the group and going our separate ways.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I'm not all that surprised. Nephilim is tough to run with anything resembling the default assumptions - which I why I've always advocated running it urban-fantasy (as I recommend here in Urban Legends.PDF (http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/nephilim-ascendant/files/)). However, my guess is the inherent suckiness of HeroQuest was a huge factor. It's a system I initially wanted to like, but instead of being either relatively transparent (like Unisystem of nWoD) or rules-light (like Everway), it was a complex system where the rules and contests had absolutely no obvious connection to what the characters were actually doing - my description is that a contest felt like playing a hand of bridge to resolve a fight, which from my PoV, is simply annoying. Also, the rules never made any clear sense to me. It's definitely on my avoid-at-all-costs list, as is pretty much everything Robin Laws did after Feng Shui.

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

We got over that by utilizing a circle framework that incarnated in every incarnation. Incarnation play was am important arch in the game.

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

Most of our issues had to do with HeroQuest and the cosmology over the Nephilim material we adapated.

Of all the failure points I don't even think I'd put the Nephilim material on the list.

[peaseblossom.livejournal.com]

I would. I think that Nephilim is too vague for players to actually get a handle on actually playing one.

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

One thing that came up among me and Emily and Dan in the car was the amount of information presented in the Wiki, and the lack of clarity regarding what the player should be expected to know to ensure that everyone is on the same page, versus what you Jere happened to be thinking of while fiddling with the wiki.

This is one reason a theme of exploration and limited implicit knowledge appeals to me. Less "oh, yeah, Monster Island, the PCs are all up on their Monster Island lore, right?" and more "it's this weirdly monstrous island we've never heard of before and are exploring in play."

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

Okay. I guess I have to concede that in all honesty.

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

I feel this issue was a frustrating one for me ebcause I usually thought I was pretty clear about the importanc of the wiki as being the "peer into Jere's brain" aspect of the game.

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

Not disputing that, but it's not well-organized: what, if you're coming in to it cold, should you read first? What should you try to remember? What can you safely skip over? Plus there's again a lot of jargon and shaded meaning.

[ewilen.livejournal.com]

This is very interesting stuff, not that I was ever able to figure out what you all were doing.

I'd love some pointers to help me get a better understanding of what you mean by "entry behaviors".

Also, your implicit contrasting of "non-scene framing games" with "scene-framing games" sounds like stuff I've been struggling with. Has this been discussed at greater length anywhere?

[princeofcairo.livejournal.com]

I would agree with this, as well.

[princeofcairo.livejournal.com]

I think that, with a GM and player who were on the same wavelength about what the Nephilim are, it would make a pretty snazzy one-on-one game, yes.

[bruceb.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Now if only Chaosium would PDF the main rulebook along with the supplements.

[princeofcairo.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure they still have the license, so I'm not sure they could even if they wanted to. (Or even PDF the unpublished Jason Factor campaign I developed.)

Of course, it's not the hardest game in the world to find used or on Ebay.

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

Also, your implicit contrasting of "non-scene framing games" with "scene-framing games" sounds like stuff I've been struggling with. Has this been discussed at greater length anywhere?

Not sure if it has to the degree that interests me. There seems to me to be an axis in gaming where you can place narrative economy. Some gaes make sue of tight scene-framing (usually mechanically handled) to force a tight narrative economy, where nothing is introduced which is not essential to the overall trajectory of the narrative. Others don't. I often find this to be one of the tensions between Forgeites and immersonists for example.

This is one of the reasons why I'm currently thinking about Commedia Dell'arte.