Zac has not retreated from his call that IIEE (intent, initiation, execution, effect) is the "beating heart of the activity," and Manu - the very soul who prompted this discussion at the Forge fifteen years ago - is still on task. Armed with these stalwarts, we embark upon another Monday Lab to investigate best practices.
Zac began it with this message:
This post is about our experience with Blades in the Dark. The cool things, the problems we run with and the dialectics with the player's psychology.
Prelude
I've been working up a Design curriculum for role-playing for a long while, so when Justin Nichols approached me for a game design discussion that leaned toward mentoring, I accepted without reservation.
Here’s one of the two workshops I presented at Lucca. It was prompted by two short videos I posted here in the past few months: The role of the roll and Emergent plot techniques, which have led me to a generally larger argument.
Usually I wait a week to post Monday Labs, partly to get enough time to edit properly, partly to keep at least something on a regular cycle at the site. But this time I couldn't help myself, it's been only two days and here you go.
... Has This Been Goin' On? Alternative equally music-meming title: My Only Friend, the End. Or, wait, how about, Stop! In the Name of What?
This is about how long we play, in real time. It can refer to the length of a session, how many sessions relative to a given fictional situation, how long
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.
This discussion took place a while ago, at the end of February. I wasn't sure it had enough content to merit posting, but as it turned out, BPG found it to be a breakthrough. We've done an intense further session about that, which is tied into the Boiling Pitch seminar and you'll see it, or a text version, soon.
It’s given: “Powered by the Apocalypse” is an effective brand, and “Apocalypse Engine” is common usage for a presumed mechanics base. I’m not challenging either of these. I’m investigating what they may mean, and whether meanings differ.