Maybe you haven't heard of it! It was released for free without warning earlier this week, which may make this a personal best turnaround time.
There were six of us playing in the end, though only three of us had read most of the document. The others were more or less willing to play on the strength of the author; Jenna Moran (until more recently published under the name Rebecca Borgstrom) is a name to conjure players with. She mostly-wrote Nobilis, probably the most beautiful fiction game like, ever. She mostly-wrote Weapons of the Gods, probably the best kung-fu fiction game like, ever. Her names have certainly sold me on more game products, sight unseen, than any other.
The short review is that we (male, in our 20s, enjoyers of playing, thinking and discussing games) had a great deal of fun, and all of us would be interested in playing it again. Several of us might, because there was at least one person who wanted to play but was busy doing something else. I look forward to any further opportunities.
The game rewards reading, and I recommend checking it out. But here's a summary of my impressions.
The text is 100 pages. They aren't numbered, or generally laid out for printing. If they were, they would probably be physically separated into a series of four books, one named "Everyone read" and the others each focused on one of the three types of characters - on which more later - so that more people could consult it simultaneously. And consult you shall!
The style is quite self-aware and at times tongue in cheek. There are no fewer than three separate flowchart-systems. One of them is a system on the different ways that one finds out that one is/has been playing the game.
The shadow node represents the willful ego that does not want to play WTF.Immediately following this is an extended discussion of exactly how players communicate with one another, including classifications for all the types of speech used when playing a game ("Statements Regarding the World," "Statements as Made by Your Character," "Statements as Made by Other Characters," etc). Complete with examples!
"It's unplayable!" you cry.
"She's gone off the deep end this time!"
All this entertains, but was also a bit edifying: the barriers between playing-something and not-playing-something are surprisingly porous. Talking things out is something that people seem to forget how to do when discussing game systems! Also, it taught me that WTF is a game where you see-saw rapidly between being light-hearted and being serious.
It is also a game about Wishers, Theurgists, and Fatalists, the three sorts of folks needed to save the world from its contingent ontological state. The characters are destined to join and quest for the Jewel of All Desiring, with which a Wisher (made worthy by Theurgist's testing, and empowered by a Fatalist's sacrifice) can make the world be and always have been real. The Jewel of All Desiring lets the Wisher create exactly the world they wish, which means, by definition, that everything that is narrated into the story is something that the Wisher wants or will want to be so. Which can be strange, because all the other players have a say in what is and is not a part of the world. If they are also the Weaver, then they are encouraged to make very bad things part of the world.
Let's talk more about these roles. Fatalists are savants, people who know everything about how the world is. They favor Knowledge, a stat that can be rolled in order to establish who gets to say what things are currently the case (including the past and destined events, and the rules of the game). Theurgists are Gandalfs, people who know the possibilities for change hidden to most. They favor Insight, a stat that can be rolled in order to change things (including the rules of the game). Wishers are charismatic unifiers of apparently opposing moral positions. They favor Harmony, a stat that can be rolled to say what's morally right and wrong, bring people together, and establish what things mean (including what position the text of the game supports, and what on earth the Wisher was thinking when he wished for whatever just happened).
So the roles split the powers of the traditional GM between them, but one player is also the Weaver, who has the responsibilities of the traditional GM, providing arbitrary and unending antagonism. The Weaver is whoever says that they are, except that it can change. In our game (yours might be different), someone decided that they could roll Knowledge to determine that I had been lying the whole time and someone else had been the Weaver the whole time. The rules do provide for a more standard change of Weaver status: the current Weaver can accuse a Theurgist of being corrupted by the Shadow.
The Shadow is corruption, paradox, a hungering evil. In the games own words: "The Shadow is a moral implication, but does not have one." That is, whenever things are evil, they are connected to the Shadow, but the existence of the Shadow doesn't necessitate you to do anything that you wouldn't otherwise. All of the characters have a risk of falling to that corruption. Anyone rolling Knowledge has to tell what they know to be the truth; they can decide that they are lying, in which case they have been corrupted and now can say self-contradictory things, making the world mutable and scary. Anyone rolling Insight has to change things to the way they think they should be; the Weaver can claim that this is not so, which starts a roll-off. If the Weaver wins, then the Insight-eer can now destroy things with their magics and live in a moral vacuum. Essentially, they become Saruman. If the Insight-roller wins, then they are now the Weaver. Surprise! This bit shocked the hell out of me: game roles that shift based on the results of conflict! Imagine if in Polaris, the Moons could become the Heart by helping the Mistaken get the current Heart to...I don't know, admit that they had made a mistake!
Anyone rolling Harmony has to actually unify opposites; any player can claim that the proposed harmony is deceptive. The players all pick sides. If the accuser wins, then the Harmonizer can now roll to argue for virtues they don't actually support (and that the shadow does). Also, if they wish on the Jewel of All Desiring, the players lose the game.
If the Harmony-roller wins, then the accuser is no longer playing the game. That is, when someone denies the true harmony of the group, they have thrown up a barrier between them and the rest of the group which has no place in this sort of game. Some found this controversial. Jason told me, "You are talking about high-trust designs, whereas I prefer low-trust designs." I wanted to say, "I trust you!" But my tongue was tied.
So there are rules for arguing (or rather, for limiting the amount of arguing you do) over what the rules are. And then there are even conscious omissions from the text in order to spark the need for consensus. The game tells you that you can make "Confidence rolls," and you can, but precisely what those are is quite up to you. The game tells you that in some games, players author their own kickers, whereas in others, they receive a call to action from the Weaver, but which sort of game this is is up to you.
I think its fair to say that, if we love anything, its that kind of discussion. So we did fight our way through phantasmagorical fantasy with gusto, but the excited discussion of what is and should be and what it all meant spilled out onto the streets and lasted until the first wee hour.
That reminds me, I believe that the most most-discussed aspect of the system turned out to be the Gifts. Their use and utility seemed obvious to me, but this may have been from my perspective as having read the entire text, and having been the Weaver.
A gift is like an aspect, except it is best to write them as a sentence about your character. For example, my character's gifts were "Trusting" ("I trust easily" might have been better) and "I'm better with a sword than anyone!" Gifts also have three properties - Truth, Mechanical Support, and Valence - which can each have one of three values - normal, strong or weak. Characters can have 0 to 5 gifts. They don't cost anything: you just choose how many you have. For that reason alone, you might think that their impact will be vague and innumerate. How clever of you! Personally, I found almost every other player taking the maximum number, assuming they were universally good things (actually, all of them except for one start of being disadvantageous).
The Truth of a gift is what it sounds like. A weakly true thing might be something that the character says, or even believes, but it seems unlikely, and easy to doubt, and anyone could introduce contravening testimony. A strongly true gift is axiomatic to the very fabric of the universe. Mountains may turn out to be illusions, but 1 equals 1 and my character is trusting.
The Mechanical Support of a gift is how good it is at solving problems. Weak mechanical support would means that whenever my character got into a sword duel, if anyone cared, they could claim that I lose. In fact, I'd be expected to. Perhaps I might say I had won duels in the past, but when it counts, I'm the plaything of fate. Strong Mechanical Support means that, if I can ever construe a situation as solvable by swordsmanship, as soon as that, it is solved.
Valence means whether, when you use your gift, good or bad things result. Weak valence might mean that my sword-skill will not win any wars, will not make me rich or famed, will likely make me a pariah or criminal as soon as someone could think of a good way it could happen. Strong valence means that my display of excellent swordsmanship is seen by the king and he bestows a knighthood on me, or even that my brave, loosing fight against impossible odds inspires the townsfolk to take up arms and drive the barbarians from their town.
Of these three, the use of Truth confused most people, and they found the distinction between Mechanical Support and Valence the least clear. As for me, I think this system is fantastic and I want it in my other loose narrative games. Just think: you can customize the way in which your aspects are problematic, and the way in which they help, and then they get out of the way!
Again, I very much recommend it. We may have been on the bleeding edge of group size: try it with three or four. Also, we might have been too eager to roll dice and then say what we want to happen/to be the case/things to mean. If I played again, I would encourage everyone to turn and ask the people playing the appropriate roles first, and then negotiate and seek consensus if you have a different idea, and then roll dice if you have irreconcilable views. Of course, that's what the game says to do, but it said it somewhere else than the big obvious "heres how you roll dice" section, so we couldn't find it. So that's also play advice: bind the books as actual separate books, because when you roll the stats is explained on their very first pages.
It certainly is nice to have Miss Moran rejoin us after her long silence! And she brought wonderful gifts! This was actually only one of a series of products serially dumped on us from her blog this week. There was also an incomplete rpg called Dreaming Waters, an alternate psychadelic kung-fu hero setting for Nobilis called A Soul of Your Own, the second free supplement for Nobilis named Creatures Clothed in Strangeness, a nameless system-independent system for corruption- and madness-driven scientific or social projects (which I think could be made into a game itself), and even a teensy supplement for WTF, Thus Languidly Dreamt Raif (also acronymmitable). An embarrassment of riches I will do my best to deserve through happy use.
-Nick
8 comments:
Any flaws that stood out as needing correction? It sounds as if the Gifts section might need some descriptive changes to try to bring average player reaction to them closer to your reaction; anything else?
I think we all had a blast playing it! I thought it was awesome when my "I am loved" Gift got bumped up to Strong in Truth, Mechanical Support, and Valence! Suddenly I was seen as a threat by the very people who were helping me find the Jewel!
I think there are some unspoken bits in WTF that we were just discovering, like the ability to "change" my own gift's wording at the end of the session being usurped by Sam because everyone can get in on a roll... But in a game where the rules themselves can be changed by the players, I'm sure there's lots of interactions that will remain unseen until someone goes... wait a minute, I can just do this!
In regards to rewording the Gifts... I think we just weren't sure when and where they applied... Like Mechanical Support. Since the only mechanics we had were Attribute rolls, I wasn't sure where that Support came in. Is it purely narrative?
But it really was fun, and I am absolutely up for playing again!
Thanks for a great game, Jenna K. Moran!
We were Roll happy. We were Roll drunk. We had six players, and if you would sniff up two dice then you were more than likely to want to roll and add detail to the setting. this had some consequences:
1. We rolled allot. too much? i don't know.
2. The Setting did not feel unified as a Judgment on the W,T, and/or F. It was a mishmash of interests.
3. The gifts, though used to define the fiction and Inform the Narrative (I like the idea of a personification of a story in that saying), were swallowed whole by the power of Dice. A power of Dice that never faded, never dulled, and really, it was 5 on 1. The gifts were eaten and had little direct concrete effect. (this is something me and Nick disagree on, i think; the effect of the Gifts on the story as developed).
4. The Insight Attribute became less a tool of Moral judgement and correcting the vision of the Wisher, and more of a hmm.. I lost the Knowledge Roll, now I will use Insight. the players held back from this, but the two of us that had Insight as our main stat, found that with many many of the facts defined by fellow players it seemed bad form (to steal a phrase) to just undo what they had done without allowing it to develop and be addressed.
I would say that we made our Gifts with the Idea that they were not really Benifits in mind. I took four, with the knowledge that three of them had Weaknesses that should be exploited. and that the fourth should be a case of twoo much of what you ask for. but they did not come into play much as narration or as rules.
However, with 6 players, unless you are very sharp it is hard to maintain all the Gifts out there in your head. maybe with six players the players SHOULD have less Gifts, even if just t help focus the game and allow for us average joes to remeber whats in play.
Some of my initial responses.
It was a fascinating game. I would play again. I thought up a number of "fixes" but most of them make the game just slightly more complex and may not fix anything. and I liked the simplicity of the system tied with the unkindled nature of the world.
Jason L
It's probably worth noting that one of our group joined the game an hour or two in progress, without even having read the book, and he seemed to catch on fine once we explained the basics of Harmony, Theurgy, and Fatalism... and of course, the underlying conceit of being able to roll them to call BS on anything anyone said ever.
The only thing in the text that leaps out at me as genuinely muddled (as opposed to a deliberate lacuna) is the Gifts. As I understand their qualities, Truth is essentially color (if you have the Gift "Master of Warfare" with weak Truth and strong Mechanical support you'll always win a battle, it's just that no one will believe you when you tell them, and/or it might be through dumb luck) and Mechanical Support and Valence overlap somewhat confusingly. The issue Nick and I had was that, from a purely ends-oriented perspective, it seems to me like Valence is the only thing that matters. If a Gift has poor Truth and/or MS, it colors the narration, but by my reading Valence and Valence alone affects whether or not exercising that gift will resolve any problems. Using a high-Valence Gift might "fail" in narrative terms, but it will always "succeed" in terms of getting some kind of unambiguously positive result... which is, I presume, why anyone would ever want to use a Gift.
I'd also appreciate printed page numbers, since looking things up in our hardcopies during play was very hard.
"If they were, they would probably be physically separated into a series of four books, one named "Everyone read" and the others each focused on one of the three types of characters
Mmm... not really! I had that same thought as I started reading, and the chapter breaks certainly make it look that way, but you honestly should read through the W, T, and F sections no matter what you intend on playing. The info in each section is incomplete without the others, and if nothing else any player can jump into any attempted use of Harmony, Theurgy, and Fatalism so it's a good idea to be familiar with what they do.
Oh yeah, I should also mention that we didn't touch on Shadow or Corrupted Insight/Knowledge at ALL, and actually are still a little fuzzy on the concept. Perhaps if we play again we can chew on that a bit.
Sam is having a bit of trouble posting. Here's what he wanted to say.
I was a little confused about Insight.
What is happening in the fiction when I roll insight? Is my character saying "I want the world to be this way, so I'm using my insight magic to change it?" In other words, is it a conscious choice on the part of the theurgist character? This is problematic for me, because it seems like the character KNOWS the world is one way, and uses magic to make it the way he WANTS it to be - this would make all insight corrupt.
Alternatively, perhaps what happens when one rolls insight is that I, the player, am using Insight to make the world shift to match the beliefs of my character. The character's mental state then would be very similar to what happens when one rolls knowledge.
Presumably there's a third option I'm missing?
Actually, I blame myself for that. Sam was one of the people who had not read the text. As I understand it, Insight is corrupt when the character uses it to change something in a way they don't really think it should be. And that's called by the Weaver. So, since I was Weaver when the party was lost in the desert, and someone rolled insight+law to make it so no one in the world needed to drink fluids to survive any more, I'm quite sure I should have said something. Instead I was filled with fear and a desire to signal friendliness with capitulation. I guess I should have seen saying "Okay, now defend your epistemology" as a type of "Yes and" rather than a type of "No but."
In fact, the three roles get a little book about their deal, so something equivalent for the weaver would be great..."If you are also the Weaver, do all this stuff, remember these things."
@Joe: I agree that reading one of the books gives you an incomplete picture. My thought was that would encourage you to defer to the other players as sources of information, to haltingly work together...Although, partial duplication might be good, at least when it comes to information on corruption, which I don't recall as being located in the W, T, and F books. It would have helped to say on the "use of stat summary page" something like "You can NEVER override someone and call it harmonious," "You can NEVER change things into a way that you think makes the world worse," and "You can NEVER tell a lie."
I thought that my position as Weaver did make the effect of gifts more obvious, but when almost everyone took three or four of them (which surprised me), that was far beyond my ability to track.
As far as rolls: I noticed that when a player called for a roll, that was one of the few times they could nearly guarantee everyone else at the table to listen to them. So that's a beam in our own eyes, I think.
So, since I was Weaver when the party was lost in the desert, and someone rolled insight+law to make it so no one in the world needed to drink fluids to survive any more, I'm quite sure I should have said something.
Hmm... I can go either way on that. We were pushing the pilgrim's progress metaphysical journey aspects pretty hard, so it seemed totally appropriate that the noble sacrifice the Wisher's animal friends made by letting us quench our thirst with their blood would have had such a sweeping metaphysical effect. Plus that also led to the cool bits later about us all being "vampires" and hence automatically citizens of Raif, and the argument on whether the destruction of "thirst" returned the city's undead vampires to grace. I don't think letting that one ride was a bad call.
I noticed that when a player called for a roll, that was one of the few times they could nearly guarantee everyone else at the table to listen to them. So that's a beam in our own eyes, I think.
Well, again, there were six of us at table, and I think any game tends to groan under the weight of that many players.
I think you're right, that gifts are definitely trumped by rolls, both in terms of mechanical effectiveness and in "coolness"... someone using an interesting, or even supernatural skill isn't as dramatic as everyone at the table suddenly jockeying to reshape a slice of the setting.
Thank you for the feedback!
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