Noah recently posted about our Lace & Steel game, and my response was to summon everyone for a video. We have me, Noah, Sam and David, but unfortunately Greg was sick and couldn’t participate — hopefully we can schedule some time to chat later, since his perspective is valuable and I fear we weren’t able to do justice to his participation in the game.
I spent a lot of time talking (less articulately than I’d like) about the difficulty I had figuring out how to prepare the game. With hindsight, it seems so easy: List the NPCs, list what they’re currently doing or trying to achieve, exposit this information to the players and ask them what their characters are doing, whether it’s in response or orthogonal to the NPCs, or whatever. As I discuss, I overcomplicated and, to an extent, fouled up this process by trying to pre-create conflicts and “grabby” situations. This sounds negative, but as you’ll hear (and as David states eloquently) we did what we did and we enjoyed it. I do plan to have a better start the next time around, though.
11 responses to “Lace & Steel, Continued”
Hi all. Thank you for that discussion, I would have loved to join.
I’ll separate my thoughts in two thread: the ties/antipathies and the duel.
I think that ties and antipathies are the “engine” of the game, this is really what the game is about. Shortly, I understood Lace & Steel as a game about characters who care about what others think of them.
I see ties and antipathies as having the same function than elements in a Sorcerer diagram. They are slightly different, because they can be more abstract (like values or institutions), but they can easily be connected to something material thing the fiction. The GM’s prep could easily be similar to a Sorcerer game: look at ties and antipathies, use those fictional entities and add your grain of salt with whatever excites you. I totally agree with David’s phrasing than once in play, you just play those characters according to their goals.
As a player, I treated ties and antipathies as central to what my character is going to do. I look at my ties and think, “how can I help them doing their project” (because I care about what they think of me, I want them to love me/respect me/admire me, whatever). I look at my antipathies and think, “what can I do to hinder their project” (because I care about other people will think of me if I do it). I didn’t treat the value of the tie/antipathy as intensity (I guess you could, but I don’t think it’s mandatory). I treated that value as a priority tool. Not in a pure mechanical sense “I have 2 in this antipathy so I have to do something about it”, but moment by moment when I’m considering what I want to do. “I have 2 in this antipathy, but I really want to work that tie before”. That why I think those traits are the “engine of the game”, because it’s a tool for making decision about what my character care, right now, and what he is going to do about it.
For instance, I had a tie of 1 or 2 with the Caïmans (Bustamante’s mercenaries). My thought at creation was that those guys were hurting people, and that’s something I despise. I want to stop them. But in the game, I interacted very little with them. Because of my first interaction with the Grey Ferrets (who were a tie), I have decided to invest my time about elevating everyone up the social ladder, by making this incredible play that would impress the local nobility. I cared for them. I wanted them to like me more, because I knew that we were going to lose our leader due to illness. I also wanted him to be proud of me.
I think it’s relevant for the GM prep, and that the GM job maybe easier than it looks. The GM has those fictional entities. He draw a card for each of them, which gives him a direction about how they behave and what kind of thing they could care right now and what they are up to. This crashes into what the players do with their characters towards those ties and antipathies. The game can’t work on relying only on the GM throwing stuff and crossing. I don’t think NPC have ties and antipathies in the rulebook, and I don’t think they should: it seems to complicate that simple process for the GM, but that still something to assess.
Once my character was created with his ties and antipathies, and once we were playing, anyone with whom he interacted meaningfully with could become a new tie or antipathy. I think it’s not trivial because that’s when the game accelerates. From my point of view of a player, I was playing in my own little story. Looking at my ties, looking at my antipathies. Very light crosses from Rod allowed my character to encounter the other’s characters ties and antipathies. And now suddenly, they become my ties and my antipathies. Now we have fictional connections between our characters that we care about, and upon whom we are acting. I think that if we play this properly, the “everyone has a different background” is a non issue. Rod you can ask yourself what you can do as a GM to improve that, and I would see: not that much, just make crosses, put player characters in the scene of other’s character ties and antipathies, like you did. It can’t rely solely on the GM, everyone need to be invested in crossing.
That’s what I tried to do when I confronted Bustamonte who was fighting Pierre. Bustamonte was one of my strongest antipathy, and I didn’t really act upon it the sessions before that, because I was so invested into the Grey Ferrets.
I’m a bit worry that I present this as something too mechanical. I think there is a lot of freedom: nothing constrains you to act upon your tie or antipathy. You don’t gain much if you do it. You don’t lose anything if you ignore some or most of them. They act like a reversed charmed roll where you roll to see if you are going to be a resource or an obstacle to someone’s plan, and you do it because you want them or some other people to see you in a certain way. Should the NPC have ties and antipathies, I would probably, as a GM, limit them to the PC, and treat them as a Circle of Hands charm roll (they see the PC as an obstacle or resource for their own plan). But I don’t think I would use that, maybe I would just treat the tie/antipathy of the player as an indicator for how they see the character. Again, that needs more play.
The way I ended up fighting against Sam’s character is interesting to illustrate how I feel in the same time constraint by the antipathy I had with him, but not in a behavioral stimulus-response sense. I had an antipathy of 0 or 1 with Conrad. So I didn’t consider this a very high matter or priority. At some point, I said to myself “I think Conrad is annoyed by the fact that he dislikes Conrad. Maybe he just don’t know him enough.” So every of my action towards Conrad was trying to make with friend with him. That’s why I went to see him to confide of what happened with Eulalie (the meeting I got with her). I thought that confiding in him could build up our relationship. The rolls decide otherwise, and this antipathy only went got worse every time.
That’s very clear, especially regarding my earlier questions about how prescriptively the Ties and Antipathies were played.
I recognize that the learning curve is full of steps and slides, and frankly, I think the Ties, Antipathies, and Self-Image rules are a little bit muddy (much like Passions and Traits in Pendragon), so it is a real process to arrive at understanding them and perhaps editing them somewhat. So please don’t interpret this question as a criticism: at any point, did someone attempt to do something opposed to a Tie or Antipathy, and therefore had to test Drive?
The only such event that I remember was Pierre rolling Drive to deceive Bustamante about the location of a hidden treasure, in the face of a Tie strength of 3. He failed and told Bustamante the truth.
That’s exactly what defined the relationship of my character Hans-Jacob, with Sam’s character, Conrad… If I understand well the question. At least, that was me trying to process how to play the tie in a more open way than “it’s an antipathy, so I’m going to be conflictual”.
I rolled an antipathy with Conrad when I met him. I decided that I didn’t want to accept it. If I remember well, I tried to make friend with Conrad two times, as a direct opposition to my Antipathy with him. Both time, I failed my Drive test. This led my character to indirectly insulting – for instance, the moment where he tries to confide in Conrad about a secret night meeting with the Governor’s new bride, which ended up being indirectly insulting, and Sam interpreted this as Conrad being offended.
I agree that it’s muddy – and it’s easy to get distracted by the duel rules, and define the game by those. They are clearly interesting, especially when you use them for something like “fighting to get your paperwork done against the bureaucratic maze” or non fighting duel. But the game needs to find a way to find a way for those ties/antipathies to work.
A recurrent mistake that I made is to forget to invest in self-esteem when I interacted with my ties. You really want that self-esteem bonus to get things done, it really matters on any dice rolls. To do that, you need to risk the bet of self-esteem points in actions involving ties/antipathies – including the Drive roll when working against them. I was so focus on experimenting with ties and antipathies in a non-widgetry approach that I kept forgetting to bet those points.
Greg, your play of Hans-Jacob toward Konrad was really strong, and those moments where you had to make Drive rolls to act against your antipathy (I remember one very vividly, where the roll was for Hans-Jacob to be cordial and not to let his dislike of Konrad bleed through) were really fun to watch..
Now about the duel between 1 vs 2 players.
I think a simple solution for that is just to make 2 duels. Player A fights Player B + Player C.
We have duel 1 where Player A fights against Player B.
Then duel 2 where Player A fights against Player B.
Player A has two different hands, one by duel. Then some choice to make: either we really treat them as separate and if Player A lose one duel, he lose the other too. Or we connect them: any penalty gained in one duel is applied to the other too (drawing card limitation, fatigue, etc).
I actually suggested to do that but I think my non native English didn’t help, because I was convinced that everyone approved this suggestion. Then I realized that we were not doing that.
I don’t think anything in the rules say that players should join hands against another (it’s mentioned against the NPC) – but maybe because the game does not assume that the players will fight against each other. I don’t even think that player are supposed to have tie between each other? I would surely play without PC tie/antipathy should I gm it.
Greg, if you get a chance to play Lace & Steel without PC tie/antipathy (and it’s not a game I’m playing in) I’d be really interested to hear about it.
I’ll start a new thread about the magic system.
I was extremely lucky to roll the highest value possible in Magic Aptitude, so I made a mage. But magic is treated like a mere skill. I had Illusionism at level 2, which gave me Beffudled and Illusion (I chose visual), and 2 in Sorcery, allowing my character to fight in Sorcery Duel (which didn’t happened). Honestly I found the magic system a bit boring.
The Designer’s notes in the text itself suggest to try your own non numerated magic system. On her youtube channel, I’ve asked her if she either tried another magic system, and she answered:
“We did try the game with a magic system similar to Runequest, and another time with a magic system that was far more free-form, with magic being based more on curses and unseen forces.”
There is room for design there which makes me want to review my notes about Heartbreakers Magic seminar.
Ron, your comment made me think of something else that I think was overlooked.
Each player character draws a tarot card at creation, which gives them a disposition. I dont have my sheet but I think mine was the star. His disposition was to take inconsiderate risk to achieve impossible thing, or something like that. The text states that when you are acting against your disposition when interacting with a tie/antipathy, you have to test Drive.
I remember trying to play around that but forgetting most of the time. But that disposition informed how I played in terms similar to the ties/antipathies: playing as a bold idealistic risk taker by default, and thinking about when I want to break with this disposition. I also wondered how to play this. When exactly do you “act against your disposition” ?
Thinking reflexively, two thoughts come in my mind.
First, when Conrad insulted Hans-Jacob as a result of feeling offended by Hans-Jacob trying to make friends against his antipathy. Conrad reacted by drawing his sword and he attacked Hans-Jacob. Hans-Jacob had no weapon and no skill in fight. I considered using his sorcery but didn’t want to use it publicly and so openly. The way I played Hans-Jacob was cautiously, and now that I think of it, against his disposition. Which is fine as a decision, but that should have called for a Drive test.
So, acting against your nature (disposition), in terms of having to make a Drive test, happens when you act in a conflict that requires to roll. I dont have the rules with me right now but it’s worth to double check if this Drive test impacts ties or self-esteem.
Second, this whole thing makes me think of Silence in The Clay that Woke. Ties and Disposition in Lace and Steel seem to play the same function than Silence in The Clay that woke, where you “break silence” when you “break” the fictional principles which have no numerical value. Say the name of a woman or witness injustice without acting against it and you break silence, which will lose you a silence token. And it you don’t have silence anymore, you may go into a frenzy and hurt people, including yourself. So the game is not about following Silence religously, but to know when a character wants to break it. When someone does, the players generally shudder at the breaking of a moral code, because the reason is always very strong and personal for that character, and this, that player.
So maybe that’s a model for how to play Disposition and ties/antipathies could leading to Drive test. Disposition as an internalized default behaviour against you which you may (and will) act. Relationships, in real life, also embody moral principles: I generally like or dislike People because they are implicit embodiment of values signaled by who I think they are and how I interpret their behaviour. I have an antipathy with this person because I think they are racist, or dogmatic, and I like that one because I think they are kind, or humble. All those personality trait that I assign to those people reflects more my own value system (I dispised dehumanization and discrimination and I value kindness and humility because I value solidarity and dislike a Society based narcissistic individualization in competition) than their real subjective experience and disposition. Most of the time, we experience those relationship not in rationalized moral terms but at the level of emotions. I hate that person, not sure why, I can’t stand her. I really love that guy, we had such good time. This emotional level at which we experience relationship are based on the unrooted implicit assumptions of our value system that we internalized all along our life since childhood.
So, both disposition and ties/antipathies are internalized behaviour and social expectations based on a value system, like Silence is.
This leads me to that question (which I think is the same you asked, Ron): what should happen when you break with their default assumptions (aka failing your Drive test when you act against their nature) ? I can’t remember what the rules say, but an obvious answer seem to be that it impact deeply your self esteem.
Which seems to be a bit unsatisfying that it dépends on a dice roll, or at least there is a risk for it to become a widget. In the clay that woke, there is no roll. You break silence, you lose your token, you do your thing and People will take about it at the end of the sessions. “ah you failed your drive test so you can’t do it” seems dumb. “you fail your Drive test so you lose self esteem” seems a bit punitive. “you failed your drive test so that tie/antipathy you are acting upon about reacts negatively/in a way you dislike to what you Just did and it affects your self esteem” seems to make sense. But I wonder, should it be only based on a dice roll?
I hope I’m not muddling the discussion here as I think this is a key element of the game.
I think we overlooked that relationship between disposition and ties/antipathies. I Wonder if you Rod, Noah, Sam, David thought about this during play ?
Again, I think it’s a strong argument supporting the idea that the game can’t work based on the idea of “the” GM doing the whole work. If the players carefuly internalize the disposition of their character and care about their ties and antipathies, the game should bounce with the GM just playing their characters based on the disposition he drew (which will signal the kind of motivation they are trying to achieve in the moment).
I’m afraid this is all going into weeds which might not be useful. You wrote a great post recently about the urge to dive toward better preparation and better design instead of focusing on the learning curve and skills of play, and halfway through reading this comment, I groaned, “Greg! You just said not to do this!”
All right, I’ll try to be more positive and stay with your topics. I want to break down the behavioral rules as I see them into some kind of order, keeping them isolated at first.
Disposition seems like the “big” one. It’s designated as the character’s core self, but it is absolutely not directive: one can act against it at the cost, or lack of cost, of feeling not like oneself. It is also the least formally constrained, affecting procedures only in a couple of spots during play.
Self-Image seems like the next “biggest,” and it is arguably the most formally constrained, or rather, constraining toward other things. Every roll based on Charisma or Drive is modified by it, as are improvement checks. It’s also changeable, both reactively and actively (investing). The reactive version uses Disposition as its reference for whether an outcome feels good or bad for that character. Therefore Self-Image is best understood as operating only in the context of Disposition.
Let’s just stop with those two alone, without getting euphoric about Ties & Antipathies. Forget them. What does play look like with just Disposition and Self-Image? Well, it looks pretty rich! It also seems clear to me that Disposition is the more inclusive, stable, or referential concept whereas Self-Image is the volatile one which gets squeezed by events all the time, and you can even squeeze it yourself.
[One rules bit is terrible: when the GM is supposed to hit Self-Image with a decrease that does not recover, due to the character committing a despicable act. That’s odd, isn’t it? If the character’s Disposition is despicable? Are we supposed to reverse the “despicable” concept for appropriate characters? If I’m playing that kind of character (having drawn a card that says so), then do I get a hard Self-Image penalty of this sort for doing something admirable? If, if, what if, how about … OK, that’s where I stop. Hard pass. Using Disposition and the feel-good/feel-bad criterion is totally sufficient without this mess. Moving on.]
Now for Ties & Antipathies, the “smallest” of the three. I have tried to write a few times and don’t really feel that it’s been acknowledged, that they do not typically act as modifiers to ordinary actions and interactions. They are instead “resistors” in terms of acting against their content, requiring a Drive check to do so. They also set a current rate for investing Self-Image in regard to actions taken toward the relevant characters. Those are their main roles, “little shapers in the moment” within the bigger context of the first two in their own, more fundamental interaction. However, I think the details for how they interplay with Self-Image beyond that point are almost word-salad throughout that section of the rules, and I’d save it for a later learning step if ever.
That’s as far as I get. I haven’t played the game, and bluntly, you’ve only bumped against it a little bit. Although this game you’ve played has been a heroic endeavor, a very welcome return of Lace & Steel to anyone’s table, and by any criteria, well worth the time, it’s very much a first, basic step.
To finish with another point, I also see too many big topics at once: preparation, setting concept, aesthetics and literary inspiration, GMing at the table, NPC construction, and more. Maybe it’s useful to acknowledge that these things all do affect one another, reinforcing my point that “system” isn’t an atomic concept, but to try to account for them all at once is like trying to catch gnats, as it is for any role-playing. This is why I prefer system diagrams which isolate variables rather than try to represent their overall physiology in action.
First, I really appreciate this conversation, and I feel my analysis are the result of many seminar, classes and dialogue at adeptplay. I want to aknowledge that.
Now, there are part in the text, including bits of design, that are clearly written to prevent “bad” players behavior on the assumption that some of them will be dysfunctional. This has been confirmed to me when I asked the author if a specific skill rule was ever used (because it didn’t make sense to me), and she answered :
“If someone moved far away from a life where a skill was used (EG retired from a life at sea), we just sort of let the skill level drop after a few years (but it would come back after being back in use for a while). We mainly did this to put some realistic constraints on a particular power player that plagued us a the time! It is strictly not a necessary part of normal play!”
Let’s not open a new conversation about skills, it’s just another confirmation that the text can’t be dogmatically followed.
Ties and antipathies. Let’s aknowledge your description of how ties and antipathies work. I didn’t feel it need an emphasis because I thought it was obvious. All your description of ties and and antipathies are exactly as I understood it priori and during play, and how we play it. They are not modifiers (not sure where this idea comes from, but definitively not from our game), but “resistors” and “little shapers”. I thought my examples were illustrative of that, and if they are not, clearly that’s how it has been played in our game. So we agree on their function, and this whole paragraph is the best summary I can think of.
Disposition and self-esteem. You say “Therefore Self-Image is best understood as operating only in the context of Disposition.” That’s thought-provocative for me. I don’t remember if it’s from the text or how I interpreted it, but I was sure the Drive Test for Disposition was related to acting upon ties and antipathies. Thus, the hypothesis of looking at the disposition/self-esteem pair instead of focusing on ties/antipathies is fresh. I don’t have much more to contribute without playing the game again with that idea in mind.
I agree with you (and I think all the other players will agree), that we just bumped against the game. Our mutual feeling was “we want to play more!” which itself is always a worthy achievement for a game. Starting in fall, my plan is to play the game again in the original setting, maybe with some thoughts about the role of horsemen, which just feels to be humans with four legs.