Consulting for Tales of Entropy has become almost a way of life, considering the multiple sessions, the length of the sessions, and the processing throughout. Especially for a game which is entirely finished and published, thus system development isn't the point, and for a game whose typical play-time is single-session and relatively short, in the two-hours-plus range.
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"Let's try it out" became a genuine hydra of extended play, especially for a game conceived as a swiftly-coiling drive into final conflict. We ended up with five sessions, some pretty long, and here are the last two.
My judgment calls, consulting thoughts, analysis, whatever you want to call it, are reserved for conversation with Petteri, but here are some things to throw out for general discussion.
The question being, what is the anchoring procedure for playing Tales of Entropy? When it is so easy to go awash and awry when one's character twists into what you didn't anticipate, or when one is now cast as Narrator with no idea of where to go.
Something has to make sense, to begin, to change, and to end. And that is the Grains. Neither "my character" nor "the plot" will work.
We met again to keep playing Tales of Entropy, and I think we're getting a good look at how "story" happens, or perhaps, an exercise in whether fictional events are or are not a story. It won't surprise anyone to know my position: that the more we anticipate and compose a story, the less we do create one.
With great thanks to Petteri, Santiago, and Paul, we enjoyed diving pretty deep into the game, with more to go. Given four briefly-described choices from Petteri for our starting short-story piece, we used From the World of Old, which concerns a dragon who wakes into the developing civilized world (not really historical, but symbolic thereof) and decides to make his way there in human form.
I've stitched together two consulting sessions with Petteri Hannila, the author of Tales of Entropy. The first part is audio only, but please view rather than listen, because I've filled it all with visual content. I'm beginning to make these sessions work both privately and publicly.