Trail of Sky and Fire

The Indie Hurricane Game: the Reach of Ages

The Story:

Treasures

XV 9 9 Minor, 0 Major

Observations

This game was a classic case-study of over-preparation. Over thinking, too.

I did a test 'dry-run' with DRDrake before the actual con, running the game by coming to every decision point and telling him what would happen with max hits and zero hits, while assuming it would be somewhere in between.

The funny thing is, he called it. Said, straight up, that one of my plot points would 'alienate the players.' And it happened. Players: Alienated.

I went into this game with a sort-of front loaded fear of the whole "Arcane Check" and "Perception Check" improv issues that had troubled me in the past. It's funny, actually, cause Ben emailed me last week saying he'd talked to Vincent Baker, who told him that if there's nothing to learn then i'm supposed to just say "Don't roll. There's nothing to learn." I wonder how that would have spun this whole thing?

Basically what happened was simple. Any time David wanted to make a check he would say it like it was a right. So i'd immediately start to throw down hits (wanting this game to be thorough). I had so many lists of hits to explain what was going on that it was crazy. And you know what happened? They didn't get to most of them, and i still had to improv half the Arcane/Perception Checks that they wanted to roll. So either i'm suck at prepping this (kind of) game. Or there is more work to be done on it's system. Or the theory that supports it, maybe? Don't know. All i can say is, people can make demands of the GM in this game with Command, Arcane, and Perception. And the GM has to deliver. But the GM also has to prep before he comes to the table. So how do i sit down and map out facts to give them, and truths for them to discover, without inherently creating a railroad?

The way the game happened had this going for it: The players made it rock. All four of the guys i was storytelling this adventure with really, really got into it. They loved it, even the flaws in the system. And they made their characters alive with only a few minutes to flesh them out and a super-generic character sheet for a skeleton. Despite my over-cooked plot, and my blatantly rail-roading when trying to drive the story, they all made the game rock.


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