General Catch-up and Oh Wow We’re a Party Now
The game described in this post has made it through to the fifth two-hour session, playing about once a month or so. One of the four players mentioned above never ended up showing up for the next couple games, and when I came to an understanding that he wasn’t actually going to show up at all, things got a bit simplified as I could stop trying to keep in my head what was going on with that character and the people around her, and let her drop quietly, unseen, off the radar.
In the third game, the PCs all finally met each other; I didn’t push for this strongly to happen but I intentionally set up opportunities for it to happen. “Shyla’s tribe is menaced by a Chosen Warrior and has to seek asylum with another tribe! Well, the nearest other tribe happens to be the one where Zankar is located.” “Zaphod’s met a friendly tribe… who happen to have recently been challenged to a friendly combat-of-champions by Zankar’s tribe.” They exist in a context where people and groups have relationships to each other. I just placed those relationships close together rather than far apart.
Once they met – Shyla, the barbarian who’s been modified and enhanced by gifts from her mysterious father, Zaphod, the runaway technologist formerly employed by one of the Shining Lords, and Zankar, the nomadic scavenger former-technologist’s-apprentice — they latched onto each other and formed an alliance uncommonly quickly. Zaphod and Zankar clocked each other as technologists lying low, and threw in their lot together, and when Shyla arrived and they learned something about what she was up to, they got in touch with her very quickly. I was kind of surprised by how fast they started working together, and I’m not sure how much of it was in-character “well, this is what we’d do” logic and how much of it is habit from “well, we’re the PCs, we need to be a party” assumptions. It seems reasonably organic to me. They are the most active and capable agents in their own immediate vicinity, as it turns out, so it makes sense that if they get along they’d work together.
You’re Going to Overthrow the What Now
Also they have all decided, both in character during the game and in writing down the expansions of their stories, that they’re going to try to overthrow the powers that control the world – the Shining Lords, who have ridiculous, absolute, high tech control over the city states which are the only civilization on the planet.
This took me by surprise because it’s such a big swing, I never would have considered it. They essentially want to overthrow the entire order of the world. I have no idea if they can, or should be able to accomplish this. They have some ideas (uniting the barbarian tribes against them, collecting technology to equip an army, taking down those who are hunting them). They’re going to try to put it into action. I guess we’re going to see what happens.
This brought to mind a part of the Adept Play workshop I’d watched, “Story, Story, Story” where Ron pointed out that there are going to be things which can be changed, and things which cannot be changed, in any given game. The example is given of a crimefighter who can’t just telephone the president and ask for help, because they personally don’t have that kind of pull or reach. Some games may specify what is and isn’t potentially changeable, and in other cases it’s up to the GM to make that call. And players can be trying to find that out, and the GM should be honest about it rather than hiding “things you just can’t do” behind handwavy system manipulation “ooh, sorry, you didn’t roll high enough” kind of things.
So I’m asking myself. Is it even possible they could overthrow the Shining Lords? And I think the answer is, it’s not something they can do *now* obviously, it may or may not be something they actually ever do, but… these characters have some extraordinary abilities and knowledge, seem to punch well above their weight thanks to some creativity (and the know how to use a Monologue of Victory…). I’m not going to rule anything out. If events progress to the point where that becomes a plausible outcome of their actions, then let that shit go down.
Conflicts and Roleplaying It Out
Other notes…. One session we didn’t actually roll any Conflicts, a lot of it was roleplaying things out with NPCs, and things just went the way everyone roleplayed them to go. I thought about that afterwards and talked to them, and we all thought that was fine, there was no need to force a Conflict. The games are only 2 hours long so it’s possible that it doesn’t come up.
However, I had just re-read the rules before today’s session and there are notes about “anybody can call for a conflict at any time” and I took pains to remind the players of that, that it doesn’t have to be me saying “well, roll for it,” they can choose to make those rolls happen, esp. if they want a chance at a MOV or a die.
And there was a point today where Zankar was having words with the tribal leader Baloth about his plans, which Baloth didn’t entirely like. We were roleplaying it out, and that was fine, but I did say “hey, if you want to, we can also roll a conflict here and see where that takes us, with respect to him respecting your wishes and plans, instead of *purely* roleplaying it out.” Zankar’s player agreed and we did so, and he succeeded, and I decided that Baloth actually got *enthusiastic* about Zankar’s plans because he’s touched on Baloth’s big dreams of power.
So what’s the difference between rolling that Conflict and “just roleplaying it out” like we’d done before? Both work. In both cases I was roleplaying out what Baloth did. In the one case it was just me reacting directly to what Zankar said. In the other, it was me reacting to what Zankar said *and* to the idea that what Zankar said really hit Baloth hard. And I could plausibly do that (Baloth is exciteable) so I did. It took things in a more extreme direction than they would have gone otherwise.
So yeah. Both ways worked. “Just roleplay it out” and “roleplay it out, but let the outcome of a roll inform your choices while doing so.” But in both cases I was reacting in ways that it seemed plausible that Baloth might do, in the case with the roll it wasn’t like he was on puppet strings doing what the dice said.
Just some thoughts on how things work with a roll is not fundamentally different from how things work without a role, when it comes to playing PC/NPC interactions. It’s just one more factor in the equation.
Prep Gets Easier
More thoughts…. as the games have passed by, I’ve had a much, much easier time prepping for games. There are a few factors here. First off, obviously, the characters are all together so I don’t need to worry about three (and a half) separate contexts. That makes things easier. Second, there is a lot of context that exists, and it becomes easier to say “X is going to do Y at this time” when you already have a ton of implicit information about who X was and what Y might entail. But also… I think maybe in the first couple games or so I was going a bit crazy coming up with everything that was happening and might happen. Part of that was including things for *four* different characters, one of whom was unexpectedly not there when the game started…. But also I think I just was loading up too much at the get-go? Trying to set up, at least in my head, *too much going on* that was going to spring into action as soon as we started and make things eventful. Too many complicated backstory connections between the three-and-one-ghost characters (who were all designed separately, so that was difficult to link). I’m relaxing before games now, and before I was working really hard. I might be getting better at this, in addition to the above factors making it easy for me. I guess to know for sure I’d need to start another game from scratch and see how it goes.
Changing The World in How Many Sessions?
(Returning to the “they want to change the whole world” theme…. I should think to myself a bit about what that would or could mean in terms of length of play. How many sessions do I want to run of this – is there a limit? If we want to have the possibility of changing the world *on the table at all* should I be considering that in terms of how much they can reasonably accomplish in a given session? At some point, will I be saying “well, in the months your character has had since last game, you’ve successfully raised, armed, and trained that army. In this scene you’re arrayed before the citadel….”? I don’t know, I’m thinking of these questions as I write this. The Pool is flexible and underspecified. Lots of things are possible. I will have these questions at the back of my mind for now as I see how things go.)
Escaping the Plan Hole
OK, pulling things back down from big-picture concerns to something specific that happened this past game. We were about three quarters of the way through the game and immediate dangers were past and the characters had made it to a hideout in a ruin, and they decided they were going to take action against an extremely dangerous NPC who was hunting them. They needed…. a plan. And so they started discussing this. As players. Spinning all kinds of possibilities, going down what was familiar to me – a Let’s Make a Plan hole. Disappearing from playing their characters or interacting with the world around them, because they were in a safe place and could do that, and just talking talking talking about what they could do next. I knew this well, I’d been involved in it many times, and I really really didn’t want it to happen this time. So I said something to the effect of “hold on, hold on. We’re not doing this. You three are in a room right now. You’ve just successfully created this device you were working on, you just improved your armor, you just fed your tame monster beast a rat, that’s what you’ve all done, now you’re face to face, exactly what do you say, to each other, about this?” And got them, at least to a much greater degree, to *say things to each other* about what they were thinking and hoping to do, and *react to what the others say,” and they did that (at least, far more than they had been doing) and honestly they came up with some ideas doing that that were better and more interesting than when they were just spinning plans as players in an abstract gray Let’s Make a Plan space.
That in particular was the thing that made me want to post here, the interesting recognition that “hey, what we’re doing now is not play and is not really that fun” and thinking “well, what happens if we play? well, if we play then we play in a scene, what’s the scene, ok, here’s the scene *that’s* where things are happening, *that’s* the context in which they’ve happened, NOW you guys talk, and come up with plans by *playing.*
I don’t know if it changed things for everybody but it sure felt better to me not to have the players disappear indefinitely into Make a Plan Space.
Note About the Header Image
Shyla the Barbarian wrestled to the ground, cowed and dominated, and tamed a “Ruin Dog” -= a beast that looks like the one in the cover of First Edition Beyond the Supernatural by Richard Corben. And now she rides it around. Cause that’s how she rolls.
18 responses to “A Few Sessions Later in the Shadow of the Shining Lords”
A very interesting post (and a lovely Corben picture)!
When you talked about players disappearing down the Let’s Make a Plan hole, I fully expected you to zoom out (declaring the guy’s dangerous, so there’ll be a roll anyway, don’t maneuver for modifiers the system doesn’t provide) … and was blown away by you reminding people to play their characters, here and now.
(Dunno if/when to abstract/zoom in or out later – I’m grappling with this in general – but getting back to the here and now makes sense to me!)
Oh, that’s interesting! I hadn’t considered zooming out and taking it straight from the roll, which would also be a legit way to go and take us out of endless planning. Everyone involved including me has mainly been playing Fifth Edition D&D for the past few years, so it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that Conflicts can be big and strategic as well as small and tactical. I think in this situation, zooming in was the right thing to do, as they didn’t yet really have a very clear plan of what they were going to do at all and so there wouldn’t be anything clear to roll with.
But that is a good reminder that if we do want the players to have a chance of moving events on a grander scale, one way to open that possibility is allowing big things to happen via big rolls.
Hi Ed, this post makes me feel good about having conducted the Playing with The Pool course.
I have four (4) things in mind. Each takes something you brought up and runs a little ways with it. They’re numbered here in the order you mentioned them.
1. If and how characters meet, team up, “be a group”
2. The scope of characters’ actions and impact on significant (big) entities
3. When to roll dice relative to problems or conflicts at hand
4. How long to play (at all), and how that may relate to long-term goals or situational potential
There’s no criticism or correction involved in any of these; it’s not that kind of discussion. But they’re too much content to include in a single comment stream, and I’d rather do them one at a time. So, let me know if you’re interested, and if so, which one I should start first.
Thanks, Ron! I think #4 is the one I’m still most perplexed about, I’d be curious to hear your comments on that one first of all.
Oh, this is timely! I just yesterday played a game that disappeared into Let’s Make a Plan Space. Really insisting on the here and now (however broad or narrow ‘here and now’ is) does seems like the best way out of it. Maybe the only way, in some cases.
I’m finding this principle to matter greatly when playing The Mountain Witch, in past games and the current one. When we’re playing, we need to know what’s table-talk and what’s in-play, and “characters discuss what they want to do” is definitely eligible for, and more likely to be conclusive during, in-play.
Significantly to me, this differs from what is often called “in character,” because the playing itself may not be strictly in-character, as that’s a minor dial. What matters is that we are working with location, characters’ placement in it, other entities in it, conditions, and the passage of time, with the dialogue and decision-making as events within it. Also, table-talk may be involved; it’s just that we know which kind of talk is which.
Yes! Not being able to distinguish between table-talk and ‘real’ talk was a big problem in that game. Especially when one player would say something that sounded concrete and authoritative, and another would respond in a very speculative and abstract way.
We eventually go the ball rolling, but it was frustrating. I think sometimes people ‘forget’ how to accept authorities as such (including the GM’s scene-framing powers).
RE: “in character” — absolutely, I wasn’t asking them to necessarily talk as their characters in the first person, just to ground the talk in some kind of diegetic specifics, in an actual scene.
That’s clear from how you described it – it’s a great example of not getting distracted by the familiar historical phrasing.
This comment stream is dedicated to one of the four topics I raised above:
We talked about this in Monday Lab: How Long … and Monday Lab: Long-form Play, which are pretty good but I’ll extract this point to use here.
Play itself often rebels against a prior understanding of its real-world, how-many-sessions length. Something intended and accepted as a single or very few sessions may become years of continuous play; something intended and accepted as a long-term commitment with a lot of content changes and development may become a single or very few sessions, and not necessarily in a bad or failed way. Therefore, in a very real sense, who cares? Let’s presume a functional experience so no failure or external disruption is involved: say what you think or hope at the moment for how long we’ll play this, but play length will be whatever it will be.
For relevance to your exact situation – here I’m presuming a bit as I’m not there – I think that the players’ comment “hey, let’s bring down the Shining Lords” is not being well socially and creatively placed, and therefore triggers confusion.
Was it a diegetic comment made by a character? Was it table-talk casually tossed out without commitment to diegetic content? Was it a contractual offer made toward you? Did you even have to respond or take a position in any way? (And less important, but to reference possible hobby-culture hassles, did you feel the need to demonstrate that whatever they said, you would assure them that you had it well in hand?)
The non-parenthetical questions above are not rhetorical! They have answers for you and the others with this game and at this table. Given those answers, every scrap of doubt or problem-solving or “how do I do it” disappears.
The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the only way any of this is a “concern” for you specifically (problem, decision point, et cetera) appears if you don’t know which type of talking it is, or think that it’s deceptive in some way, e.g., presented in-fiction but expected to be contractual, or whatever. That’s also why it wraps in all the concerns about the first topic you raised, about what they can and cannot actually accomplish at all, as a feature of this particular fiction. I submit that the confusion about the type of talk is triggering this topic, which is another topic entirely, so clearing this confusion first is a good idea (in your own mind, not some tedious committee meeting), and lets the capability topic be resolved on its own, absent concerns of contractual thinking, for example.
My final thought concerns a common phrase I see a lot, in texts and dialogue; I was reminded about it from the comments at one of the posts I linked to. It is, “Talk to the players and find out what they want.” This is yet another hobby mantra which causes a lot more problems than it solves. I mean, at a very basic level, obviously, we aren’t going to accomplish anything ever unless we’re communicating well about what we’re doing. That’s not controversial. But in terms of planning and requesting and delivering? Not so much.
I struggled with it for years when running player-polls during my long-running Champions games; sometimes, or in little spots per poll, it helped a lot, but in a lot of cases, it ruined the dynamic of merely everyone playing things as they lay, i.e., as we brought things to the table as priorities via play itself. At its worst, it makes one person into the others’ bitch, endlessly trying to please them and make things turn out perfectly for them as they requested … the unenviable position of a content-provider trapped by the fanbase. That can appear in terms of polling, as I tried, or in terms of what many texts instruct, basically to eavesdrop or over-listen to what players “say without knowing it,” so effectively mining their casual dialogue to find “what they really want” and thus delighting them when it appears in play. Which is pretty gross in a lot of ways and, I submit, is about as successful as the constant polling, i.e., not very.
Let me know if any of this helps or makes sense.
It is helpful, yeah, especially the idea that you don’t have to know for sure how things are going to go in terms of “amount of future play” any more than you have to know how things are going to end in a given play session or interaction.
To explain why this gave me pause: I’ve been in a couple longer D&D 5E campaigns recently which were played with store-bought off-the-shelf material (more or less adapted to purpose by the GM). And in both cases the characters were a group of random PCs who ended up more or less saving the world by the end (having progressed to high levels by means of the GM handing out new levels every two or three games per the “milestone” system). While those games were fun in many ways the idea that we were on an inevitable path to become world-saving heroes just because we were the PCs, I was not fond of. So it was a bit jarring to have several PCs plan spontaneously to “save the world” (for some definition of “save”)! It made me immediately compare the situation to those D&D campaigns.
Ultimately I think this is all in character though. Expressed in-game and through additions to their Story and traits. The characters can want what they want, and we can see if they can achieve it sooner or later as long as we all want to keep playing. Maybe they will achieve it; maybe their plans will change.
Which is, more or less, where I was at. “Huh. Big dreams. We’ll see how that works out for them.” It was just the mental comparison to the other games, where “saving the world” was both planned out and was intended to happen over a long arc, that gave me pause and made me think “wait… SHOULD I be thinking about where this all could go in the long term and the big picture? What even IS the long term?”
I’ve been thinking about this a bit now. Apart from the main topic, about length and scope of play, the thing that’s kind of hitting me is you expressing how crummy a dynamic it is, the GM trying to figure out what his players want and give it to them.
(insert mental image of Gromit eavesdropping on the passengers so he knows where to lay down tracks to bring the train to)
I think I’ve struggled with this in other contexts, outside of the question of how long to play.
Like, even if I’m not coming up with “a plot” or foreseeing outcomes, there can still be a sense that I’m trying to imagine what challenges and developments will most dramatically engage the characters, in a puppetmastery way?
I’m thinking about some of the fairly tortured and elaborate early prep I did and wondering if it was made more difficult by thinking in terms of how I imagined it would affect the characters (and by extension the players). Thinking in terms of putting on a show for the players, consisting of interesting challenges and conflicts for their characters… (which are going to actually be less interesting to the degree that they are perceived as contrived)
I just read/watched the “Slaying the ‘The’” post, and I’m thinking about the problem of, as a GM, taking on all kinds of responsibility of different kinds, and implicitly taking *responsibility for people having a good time*.
Like, hey, hold on, what if I’m not there so they can have fun? (and so I can be pleased with myself for how good a job I do at arranging that)
What if I’m there to have fun?
You’d think this stuff would be obvious to me at this point but apparently I’m still holding on to some GM-as-entertainer assumptions.
I’m very glad to read this. If you want to continue in discussion, then I ask that you start a new comment at Slaying the The, so we can stay focused on the Pool game here.
That is, assuming you want to go to another of those bullet points. If so, let me know which and you or I can start a new comment stream.
I would be interested in your thoughts on
“1. If and how characters meet, team up, “be a group””
… that’s one where I was a bit surprised by how quickly it happened and a bit suspicious about whether it happened out of expectations from other roleplaying games about “being a party” or because damn it, that’s what those characters wanted to do.
(I’ve landed more or less on “damn it, that’s what they wanted to do” – as I mentioned before, they all have some similar animus, and they have clocked each other as powerful and capable, so it’s entirely in their interests to work together. But I’m still a bit wary about them being too ready to always act in concert as “the party” with fused goals and intentions. I want to be careful about that possibility)
I’ll paraphrase a little to make sure I’m clear on what’s going on. I think you understand that people playing together isn’t the same as characters teaming up, and you’re concerned with whether the players understand it too.
I have three very close-connected points to make in a highly specific order.
#1: Let’s just throw out all talk about guessing what’s going on internally with anyone. It’s not your problem, not possible to do anyway, and probably tied up with all sorts of “oh no, what are they really thinking, am I giving them a good enough time.” It’s also a direct hellride to reflexes of control, so you can get ahead of them and assure them a good time (so they’ll like you, et cetera). So let’s lose that entirely.
#2: Clearly, the part about people playing together is what matters. If the players commit the age-old error of substituting diegetic proximity + acting in concert for playing together, that’s a problem. It would be evident in their lack of listening and reincorporation during play. But from your account, it seems that they are in fact playing together and with you, and it’s evident in attentive and active play. Therefore, if they are indeed being habitual and uncritical in teaming up, well, if so, so what? It’s not a make-or-break issue for good play to proceed, and it’s not your job to instruct them about every possible nuance of how they could be playing instead.
[For anyone reading this who isn’t familiar with my point about the error of mistaking diegetic proximity and acting in concert with playing together at all, there are extensive and possibly exhausting discussions in Keeping them all together, this section of the comments in Star Wars: Dark Times, and Where little situations come from. One of my future workshops about AD&D vs. B/X includes this topic’s history.]
#3: Finally, assessing intrinsic plausibility within fiction is vastly overrated. I get that if something is very stupid, then it’s bad. But the grey range outward from “makes perfect sense, that’s exactly how things are” to the zone of very stupid is vast, and in fact it includes just about everything that makes a fictional plot possible. Realizing that some coincidence or a possibly over-convenient decision to trust someone is in the grey zone is not grounds for fears about plausibility. Contrived, sure: enough to put your table’s work in the same room with William Shakespeare, Mary Shelly, Homer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Dorothy Sayers, and Umberto Eco, if that seems like a problem to anyone.
My apologies if this reads a bit brusque. I hope it reads as entirely supportive of you, the others, and your enjoyment of play as you’ve described it. I’m not well-situated at the moment to smooth and polish the delivery.
Without yet having read the links you posted, that response makes sense. (How many questions on this post are me saying “…is this OK? It seems like it’s OK. But is it OK?” and you saying “YES ED YOUR INTUITIONS ARE CORRECT, IT’S OK”)
The note about “intrinsic plausibility is overrated,” is helpful too. When you try to avoid “I’m manipulating things into happening in a way that I think will please everyone or be the Cool Thing to Happen” it’s possible to mistrust anything outside a kind of mechanical, disinterested, computer-simulation-like objectivity is preferable.
Point taken about mind-reading too.
(I didn’t read it as brusque, btw, no worries there)
If you’re ready to keep on going with the list of responses you had in mind, let me suggest “2. The scope of characters’ actions and impact on significant (big) entities”
For this one, I’ll break with the pattern of saying, don’t worry, whatever, it’s fine. Not a big break, just a bit different, because it includes recommendations.
I’m also worried I’ll over-complicate it by bringing in two different variables, so help me by focusing on each one.
The first is easier: the concept of backdrop, things which are referenced in and out of play, might even be nominally causal, but aren’t active or even actionable in the played situation at all. One might call this “the rest of Glorantha.” Or if we were playing these mean streets in Jersey City in the 1930s, it would be the solar system, or perhaps just anything outside the city or New York harbor region. Or more relevant to your situation, the totality or big picture regarding the two churches, Law and Chaos, in the Advanced D&D game I played last year. Because in that case the characters were very much “in” those churches, with lots of active components right there with them, but the big identity or purpose for either were simply not reachable nor did they trouble themselves with anything at any player-character or NPC or even situational context for them. They were too big. Oh wait! An even better example is Nibenay, god-sorcerer king of the city, in our Pool game using Dark Sun. We never saw him, and I submit, if you watch us play, you can see us enjoy that very fact in full knowledge that he was “there” the whole time.
Take-away from the backdrop concept: if your Shining Lords are backdrop, then the whole question is moot and relegated to the role of in-character speculation and motivation, which will only be touched in play in a much smaller or remote way.
However, it’s not a fixed status. Playing multiple situations not only validates and heightens attention to backdrop elements, there is nothing stopping something which was backdrop from being situational at some later time. One might say “it’s backdrop now,” and then a while later, look, meet this actual Shining Lord right here in our situation, as active and actionable as can be. If you do that, it’s a totally different issue and folds into the second concept. For purposes of this part of my reply, however, if the thing is backdrop, then it’s untouchable, and critically, it does not do anything either, or at least not in any played-in-play way. The Shining Lords are up there in their towers or whatever, we can’t even get to the towers let alone to them, and they don’t care a bit about what we do or who we are. Even a glimpse of them is merely to celebrate this status.
The second concept is a lot harder: when we are dealing with some entity which is in fact right here and in our face, maybe doing things, maybe having things done to it … but which is not subject to change in some ways which other things are.
To some extent I think we (people) make this distinction effortlessly when it comes to certain variables. After all, in our hypothetical Jersey City game, my guy can punch this goon, but he can’t punch through the concrete wall. I submit that this is not because “the rules give walls more armor and structural points than the goons get, therefore he can’t do it,” but the other way around! We know he can’t do it, so if this game has armor and structural points for things like walls, then we make sure they outclass anything a guy can do with his fists. Otherwise, we’d say the rules are stupid (and we’d be right).
The trouble is that not all variables are that intuitive. A good example is whether, if we see a Shining Lord pass over our heads in his mighty chariot, whether some gunshot or psychic power or techno-beam we may levy against him can possibly, say, kill him. And yes, I think it is fair to say that fiction includes the answer “no,” as a feature, for some things. Cardinal Richelieu is unkillable and cannot even be in circumstances in which anyone can try (hence he need not be bulletproof), full stop. We know he’s there to define actionable situational components, not to be one. Is this Shining Lord’s presence here in our scene like that?
Let’s say that’s our answer in this case. How do we do that? In some games, people try to use the concrete wall logic in reverse and bloat the guy with every defense in the book, but frankly, the inherently false logic will almost always fail in the pinch, given a critical hit or a very sensible maneuver or set of circumstances. Going that way invites the slimy fingers of control. It’s better to admit the working logic as such and either play or state the case in some way that’s honest. (Exactly how, well, I have no advice to give. “Sort of like the concrete wall,” is about it.)
Obviously, if the answer goes the other way and we can shoot the chariot down or brain-blast him or whatever, we proceed accordingly. That’s not really the topic here.
In other games, like The Pool, these issues are bit more exposed to view, because they lack fine-grained components of effect like armor points. So that’s all the more reason to clarify … and here is where things get confusing for a person who is struggling free from habits of control. Because I’m saying it is an aesthetic call and it is you who is saying so, with no text, no emergent-rules logic, and no in-fiction causal justification. But this is not about overriding outcomes (a control method), it’s about the constant working parameters of certainty and uncertainty, within any scene whatsoever. You’re not spitballing it to prevent or permit an outcome you’re angling toward; you’re laying down how we, you included, will address different fictional components here in this game we are playing. What is uncertain about a Shining Lord? What is certain? It helps a lot to remember, again, that we do answer this question at all times and in every way regarding anything in the fiction, Shining Lord or not. So it’s not wrong or special to apply it to him. In fact it’s absolutely necessary.
As for any methods toward clarifying and enjoying this status (as opposed to it being simply annoying), at least one simple thing comes to mind: that such contact is infrequent, remote, and fleeting. And also to have anything that it does be indirect, so that anything which hits our characters in system terms is coming from some intermediary who can be affected in turn. But these by themselves aren’t enough. I think it’s right, fair, and honest, when we see the Shining Lord pass over us like that, to say up-front, “And it’s untouchable, you know that, because it’s true.” So you’re not dangling a target to snatch it away, but saying how it is. (Maybe it’s also good to lay out some of these things at the start, but I am wary of tedious contractual pre-play activity of this kind. In practice I typically reserve it for just one thing, like, “we will not see Nibenay in play,” or whatever.)
It felt good to lay down these points clearly. I feel like I say them or reference them a lot without having done this.
Here’s my concluding thought: none of these issues are consensual, not for The Pool. The other players rely upon you to know your own mind and to apply it. It’s not good to wobble and spitball in play, and saying, “I’ll decide later” is frankly just kicking the can down the road, even weakening play in the present. Since you stand naked before them in this regard, without a 300-page book to hold before anything that feels vulnerable, you don’t really have any other option except to communicate it successfully.
I’m sure you can see how this topic goes hand-in-hand with my #3 point as well, the one about when you do or do not roll dice, especially for a game like The Pool.