- Kestral
- Nov 24, 2000
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Forum Veteran
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As long as we're feeling nostalgic, I'll repost my contribution to the last thread and add a new one that I just remembered from ages ago.
Kestral posted:Had one of my best moments from the player side of the screen on Saturday - one of those sessions where the game is over, you're turning out the lights, cleaning up the dishes, putting the chairs in order, and you can't stop thinking about the game. I woke up thinking about this scene today, and it's clear I'm going to have to write it down somewhere to get it out of my head, so it might as well be here.
For context, my group is playtesting a game for a would-be indie publisher friend, Jay. The system is one of those (wonderful) dirty hippy storygaming systems where your "stats" are more representative of how much narrative control you have at the moment rather than how strong, fast and tough you are on an absolute scale. The setting is that old sci-fi chestnut, a far-flung colony of Earth fallen from technological grace back into barbarism after some long-ago unspecified disaster, with enough handwavium to edge it into “science fantasy” mode. We're playing members of one of the many small human grasslands tribes who happened upon setting-shattering information during their rite of passage into adulthood which propelled them into Protagonist Mode.
We have three PCs in this game. Ihsan is a driven, uncompromising outsider who's become a hard-core convert to the religion of our enemies, but is still one of Our People. Sevilen is a tribal champion who leads the group of warriors who protect the shamans. I'm playing Sadri, the apprentice and designated successor to the shaman of our tribe. Due to the peculiarities of the setting, Sadri started play around ten years old when the other characters were in their late teens. He was – and still is – totally useless in a fight, but his social status makes him untouchable and he's the only character in the group who can communicate effectively without the threat of force. He's basically a good kid at heart, but he's been forced to grow up way too fast and has seen some Bad Things Happen.
We're sixteen sessions into this game. Ten or eleven sessions ago, Ihsan and Sevilen strong-armed our tribe's well-meaning but ineffectual shaman into stepping down prematurely so that Sadri could take his place. They wanted a pawn and a mouthpiece at a tribal war council, and Sadri was their ticket. It was a great scene – he begged and pleaded with them not to put him in this position, desperately trying to convince them that he wasn't ready, that his training was nowhere near complete. It went to the social conflict mechanics and I got absolutely wrecked. As a result he's been acting as shaman, but leaning heavily on his friends and former master for advice.
Since then, Sadri's been rapidly losing control over his life. His friends have enormous power over him, both because he badly wants their approval and because they deliberately engineer situations which force him to make choices – usually life-or-death choices - he doesn't want to make. We're all aware of this happening out of character, and it's been fascinating to play through. We've watched with varying degrees of amusement and mild horror as the quiet, happy, peaceful kid from session one turned into a deeply troubled war-weary youth with profound self-esteem issues.
Cut to Saturday. We've entered the Eternal City, stronghold of our former enemies and the only real bastion of civilization to arise post-apocalypse. We're there to talk to their “gods,” which are Lord of Light-esque reincarnating consciousnesses, plus one other thing which I'll call the Oracle whose nature we haven't quite pinned down yet. We're told that the Oracle will answer one question for any given person, and we've won the right to go and ask it our questions, one by one. I went last, so I got to see out of character what the Oracle's deal was mechanically: it assumes your form, interacts with you as your doppelganger, and gives you visions of ways in which you could have made different decisions and become a different person as a result. When it's over, you can cherry-pick elements from the alternate timelines to incorporate into your own, making them “real” to you. If you're familiar with FATE or other games that use descriptors or “tags” for your stats, picture being able to swap around Aspects you've acquired in play with an alternate version arising from making a different choice at some critical moment in the campaign.
Out of character, I knew exactly what my plan was here. This was the moment when Sadri would face his demons, take charge of his past, and turn the tables on the people who've been controlling his life. He would become a different person at a stroke, stronger, self-confident, able to defy Ihsan and Sevilen. It was going to be amazing.
I had no idea.
When one PC had gone in to see the Oracle, the other two players would get up from the table and just mill around in the room behind them, letting the GM, Jay, have a more one-on-one interaction with them. When Sadri's turn came around and I got into the hot-seat, I had this poo poo-eating grin on my face from confidence in my ~*~ master plan ~*~. Then Jay starts talking.
I have certain mannerisms for Sadri. It's a particular way of speaking, inflection, tone, words and phrases that crop up repeatedly, that are my way of getting into the mindset of a character I find very difficult to play. Jay, playing Sadri's doppelganger, nailed them all. It was startling. It felt like a slightly more innocent version of the character, one from closer to the beginning of the campaign, but at the time I didn't put much thought into that. We go back and forth for a bit, until the Oracle mentions regrets. That prompts Sadri to spill his guts. It was the first time the character's issues had all been laid out in detail, from his perspective. They were things we all knew, but to spell them out like that made it clear just how damaged this character is. In particular, it brought out that Sadri doesn't believe he is the person he's supposed to be, and that he is deeply unhappy with the way his life has turned out.
The Oracle's visions start with the scene where our shaman abdicates in favor of his apprentice. In the original timeline Sadri broke down and begged for this not to happen. In the visions, I have him flatly refuse. He takes a stand, refuses to accept the title, and tells his friends that they may get the shaman to step down, but it isn't right for Sadri to take his place. It works. There's a delicious Aspect-like trait on the table now labeled Decisive that I can take from this timeline which would solve his problems all by itself. I can already taste victory.
Then it falls apart. We go deeper and deeper into the new timeline, aggressively framing one scene after another where we revisit major events of past sessions from a new perspective. Decisive Sadri gets to make his own choices, and each one digs him into a deeper hole. Part of it is my deliberately choosing things that I know will turn out poorly for this timeline but which should represent a “healthier” version of the character, and part of it is Jay twisting the knife. Thirty minutes later, we've left the timeline in ruins. Sadri is crippled, his people are scattered to the winds, his relationship with his friends is destroyed, and the cause they're fighting for in the primary timeline is lost. At the end there's a list of amazing traits, things I would kill to have on my character sheet right now, and each and every one of them represents tragedy, failure and despair. If I want them, all I have to do is embrace that.
When it's all over, Sadri is a complete wreck. He knows now that all his fears and doubts about himself are true – that his decisions really do lead to disastrous ends, and that he doesn't have the wisdom to lead. Nearby, I hear Sevilen's player murmur “Oh god. We broke Sadri,” and I know he's right. Then the Oracle tells him that it envies him. Oracle-Sadri, all kitted out with those amazing traits, envies the person he's talking to because he was never challenged by his friends, was never forced into hard decisions that changed him and those around him for the better. Somehow, as bad as Sadri thinks he has it, and as badly as he wishes he could be someone else, that isn't possible. He is living in the best of all worlds. All Sadri has left is to ask “Why? Why isn't there anything better?” To which the Oracle replies, “Because you don't believe that there is anything better inside of you.”
And it's true. And it's heartbreaking. Jay has my character dead to rights in a way I hadn't even considered.
We end the session shortly thereafter. It's been the better part of two days now, and I still can't get it out of my mind. Possibly because I've never had another player or GM climb inside my head so perfectly that he has insights into my character that I've completely missed, which turned into knives for him to twist.
We've got a while until our next session, so I have time to think about where I'm taking the character from here. I didn't take any of the traits the alternate timeline offered; literally tearing the page of proffered traits to pieces was strangely cathartic. There's only one thing I'm sure of so far that has to go on the character sheet: a trait called ”Hates Himself.”
This next one is from almost six years ago, under Exalted 1E. I've posted it on RPGnet before under an old ID, and it's been making the rounds there and on a couple of other forums ever since whenever Exalted comes up. Needless to say I'm proud of it, but mostly I'm proud of my players since I had almost no hand in it whatsoever.
This was originally posted in a thread called "[Exalted] Actual Play Atrocities"
Kestral on RPGnet posted:Hoo-boy. Guess it's time for this.
In our last Solar campaign we had agreed beforehand that the game was about a Circle of three Solars rising to power in the Eastern fringe of the Hundred Kingdoms, establishing the beginning of a new Solar Deliberative, and taking Creation to task in the name of the Unconquered Sun. Little did we know that the in-character dynamics of the party and a number of spectacular Limit Breaks would eventually cause a series of atrocities ending in... well, we'll get to that. I know I'm going to miss a few out of a 25+ session campaign, but here are the three critical events which can be grokked outside the context of the game:
1) The first big warning sign was in the third session, when the Circle, badly injured after a fight with a Garda Bird (all deep in the -2s at least), demanded from the local god of spring and renewal that they be regrown just as she regrew the trees of the forest in an ancient pact fueled by the prayers and blood offerings of the nearby city. They agreed to offer up the Essence in the lives of the very old and the very young of the city they had chosen to protect, and watched those lives be snuffed out in a rain of emerald arrows. Casualty count: Around four thousand - I never put an actual number on it, being too shocked (although hardly displeased) by the turn of events.
2) The Limit Breaking Night Caste with Deliberate Cruelty chained together two hundred captured Imperial soldiers and marched them deep below the earth, then spiked the chains immovably into the stone. He left them alone in the utter dark, but not before tapping on the stone to attract the unspeakable carnivorous monstrosities that they had found the session before...
3) Ah, the big one. For about six sessions the PCs had been aware of a growing Realm military presence in nearby Greyfalls, and that a powerful Wyld Hunt was approaching from the west, although they didn't have its exact position. Knowing that time was running out, they formed a plan to wipe out the garrison at Greyfalls before it could move against them.
The plan: infiltrate the city in disguise, summon the souped-up Garda from the first story arc which still longed for vengeance, defeat it, and allow its suicidal conflagration to obliterate everything around it while they employed Perfect Defenses to avoid harm. It had previously been established that the ancient bird's death throes could devastate a good-sized city or army - employing it here would, in theory, wipe out the garrison, the river fleet, and pretty much everyone inside the walls.
It took two sessions to pull off, mostly because the Circle was bitterly divided as to whether to carry it out, particularly when they discovered that some of their assumptions were incorrect; specifically, that the majority of the Realm soldiers were stationed in an enclave by the waterfalls rather than inside the city. The Zenith browbeat the kind-hearted but rather meek Twilight, and the Night was eventually convinced that it was the most efficient way to go about things. The Night's ronin Sidereal companion abandoned them in disgust, betraying them to the Bronze Faction and reappearing girded for war and fighting alongside of the Garda when it was summoned; they ended up cutting their ronin friend down, and would likely have killed her had the Garda not gone nova at the end of the round. In the end, the bird's dying fires consumed Greyfalls, its entire citizenry, about a third of the Imperial garrison, and the anchored warships.
Every Solar underwent Limit Break over the course of two scenes, giving rise to the second-most intense roleplaying and dialogue I have ever seen or participated in. The phrase "We are horrible people," which had been bandied about out of character as a half-joke several times, became "we are the utterly irredeemable monsters that the Dragon-Blooded say we are". It was true, and everyone at the table realized it. That, I think, is the precise moment when we realized what the Solar Great Curse was really all about.
To cut a long story a little shorter (and cutting out a great deal of background and story which would be better suited to a full-fledged Actual Play thread), the Solars ended up returning to their newly constructed temple to the Unconquered Sun and sat in judgment over the Night Caste by his request after his dark past all came spilling out (including the feeding of helpless prisoners to monsters, and the murder of the Solar who was the UC's High Priest before the party Zenith). They condemned him to death, as they would any of their citizenry, or else they would become tyrants who were above their own laws.
They shortly thereafter realized that, although the Night Caste had done horrible things, so had all the rest of them, all in the name of the Unconquered Sun. Eleven solid hours of play culminated in the Circle laying mass condemnations upon *themselves*, and, convinced that only the Sun could judge whether they were fit to live or die, they plunged knives into their hearts.
It took us another two hours to decide, out of character, whether the Solars lived or died. In the end we realized that it was the best ending we could have ever wished for, and we let them redeem themselves in death.
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Jan 14, 2012 19:45
