upon the conclusion of our ironic adventure, we, being Dave and I, have the option of each taking a character point, or adding a point of stuff to the chancel. well, nothing has come to mind from either of us as to how to enhance the chancel, so if anyone else has an idea, please let us know.
Psst! Classic Dave! They're talking about your estate on the Nobilis Mailing List. The post that starts the thread is by a grad student in biology. Several responses from there.
The story after "Scottish Play," was the first we managed to fit into a single evening's session. (Huzzah!) Mike, player of Timothy Hague, the Power of Accidents, got to pick the theme for that one. All he said was The International Space Station. As it happens, he had also just bought Tim's Realm score up to 4, and we hadn't had an in-chancel adventure yet. So naturally I wanted a story about the International Space Station that took place within the PC's chancel. Which is a ski resort. (And dude ranch. With beach access.)
SO! The PC's chancel is Important. (Why? They paid for it!) We've decided that since it is a resort, it's a place where Powers, but especially anchors can go to unwind when they're getting weary of the Valde Bellum. Plus assorted other mundane and mystical revelers. SO. I decided on the approach Bill outlined in his Bender-centric recap below: The Space Station is on vacation. That is, its spirit form appears in the chancel and doesn't want to leave. Since I felt the conspiracy angle overbalanced the previous adventure I was determined to have no wheels within wheels within wheels this time. Just your typical lonely, frightened space station, an attractive, engaging - if skinless - woman (Power, actually), and a contest: Get the space station back into space and get him to stay there.
Things I wish I had done better department: In my early notes, the Space Station was depressed at the halting progress of Manned Spaceflight and afraid that he was a prime target for the Excrucians. In actual play, the first component of his malaise almost entirely disappeared. That made the space station less engaging. Also: I realized the contest had "narrative structure" problems. Bill's post alludes to those too. I meant to have an NPC suggest a "pre-contest" to determine turn order.
Things I did that you might not have done, and I might not do again: Timothy, aka Realm Boy did indeed win. I let him use his Realm score as authorial power to find an appropriate ally within the chancel (The Power of Manned Space Flight, who acts and talks exactly like Flashheart from Blackadder). Needless to say, the Nobilis rules do not explicitly define Realm as in-chancel author power. The player seen his opportunity and he took it. It was getting late in the evening, and the players didn't seem to have an unhealthy investment in who actually won the contest, so I let it work. I've been encouraging the players to take more authorial initiative anyway, so this was a chance to put some force into the encouragement.
The Power of Manned Space Flight was the first high-Aspect character the players had the chance to deal with. He found the Space Station in line for you-know-which-ride at Disney World, and simply threw him back into orbit. This didn't represent a non-player character upstaging the PCs because in doing this, he was acting entirely along the lines that the player character intended him to act.
Session I
Playing the Loch Ness adventure took two three-hour sessions. Between the first and the second, I decided to stop worrying about the fact that we had never once made our goal to fit each story into a single session. (As every GM learns and relearns, it takes a lot less action to fill out a game session of a given length than you think it will. Ironically, the story after the Loch Ness adventure was the first one we fit into a single evening.)
The adventure began with a very pleasant Cammoran fellow asking the players to help the boy, Barnom, fulfill his dream of catching the Loch Ness monster on rod and reel. He allowed that Loch Ness was indeed another "familia's" chancel. He hinted that the PCs owed the Cammora a favor, and their Imperatrix, Claudine, confirmed this.
They agreed to his request. The terms of the request came up over and over again during the course of play. As the players considered various, well, dodges, they ended up rejecting them as not fulfilling their end of the bargain.
o Evolve a copycat Nessie for the boy to catch instead? Does not, by definition, fulfill the boy's desire to catch the Loch Ness Monster.
o Fish in some other loch for some other monster and just tell the boy it was the Loch Ness Monster? See above.
o Have Tom Bender drink the entire Loch and pluck Nessie wriggling from the mud? Again, that ain't fishing.
o Just cure the boy so there was no dying wish to fulfill? They considered and rejected this as well. Firstly, they learned that there was a spiritual component of the boy's illness. Second, they had absorbed enough of the ethos of Nobilis to sense that not everyone who could be saved should be saved, even from an apparently blameless fate.
In the first session, two anchors went to pick up the twins in Norway. A Power of Cold anchor, Analiese Grejbko, did duty as the make-a-wish "celebrity." This drew a peevish comment from the boy, since, while she's an Olympic skier, she's a low-ranked Olympic skier.
The boy was bitter, and his sister resentful.
The Powers did advance work at the Loch. Their goal was to convince the "familia" to cooperate in the fishing trip. They wanted to be allowed to "catch" Nessie, with the proviso that they throw it right back. The anchor they spoke to - I believe they thought her a Noble - refused the request and suggested they leave.
Much of the rest of the first session was filled out with divinations and IC discussions of possible plans. I initially described Barnom and Norma as looking very similar, except that Barnom looked a lot thinner than Norma. I was thinking "wasting disease." One of our players, though, the Power of Time, expressed a hunch that perhaps the boy's illness was that the girl was somehow draining his essence away. The player seemed to like the idea, so I rolled with it: his divination showed him that the "twins" were making do with a single soul, a condition that the boy's "death" would rectify.
I overcomplicated somewhat on the Cammora end. The Power of Evolution did a major divination - causing ferns to evolve in the shape of the Players and arrange themselves appropriately. He wanted to know what happened when the boy and Nessie meet. What I showed him was the boy sneezing. The players decided that this meant that if the boy and Nessie came together that Nessie would somehow catch the boy's wasting disease, which was true. I also decided - and this to was an in-play improvisation - that this was what the Cammora wanted, and silently ginned up a motive for their wanting to discreetly use the PCs to bump off Nessie, the baby Aaron's Serpent. This would enable them to draw off Nessie's power into the girl, Norma, and hopefully tap it.
All this happened in the first session, and it was between the first and second that I began to regret both the specific plot point and the idea of reliance on the Cammora and Lord Entropy generally. On the specific issue, I felt that adding the extra level of Cammoran treachery was not just superfluous, but actually diminished the rest of the story. A dying boy trying to catch the Loch Ness monster. His resentful sister just wishing the stupid trip and the stupid dying would get over with so she could get on with her life. Nessie's guardians trying to preotect the monster at all costs while keeping their secrets from getting out. That's a story. The Cammora plot reduced it to a conspiracy. On the larger issue, I've long sympathized with an early RPG.Net reviewer
My intention is to use a lot less of the Cammora and Lord Entropy in future play.However. Where would I be without a complaint? I have really only one: Lord Entropy. Entropy is the Big Bad Imperator in charge of our Earth. He makes the laws, he enforces the laws, and he's mean and tough and has a serious attitude problem. He's also a game mechanic. He's a deus ex machina for gamemasters who need a crutch to keep unruly players in line. Much like the various arbitrary and annoying rules of Immortal, Vampire's "Masquerade", and the Quaesitoris in Ars Magica, Lord Entropy is arbitrary authority to check the vast powers of the players; a beat-em-up stick for GMs who need to say to their players "Don't disrupt my plot by killing off NPCs or 'll sic Lord Entropy on you!
By the end of the first session, the players had decided on a general approach to the task of catching the Monster, whose nature they still didn't know for certain. Bill, who plays Tom Bender and has read more of the rulebook than any of the other players, took the lead in organizing an approach based on the Group Miracle rules. This was not an approach I had considered, but it seemed valid.
Bill figured that one approach to the problem of a boy catching Nessie was simply to view it as a high-level aspect miracle, probably 7 or 8. Since we had five players, if everyone performed a contributing level 4 miracle, the group miracle level would be 8. (Group miracle rules: Take the level of the actual miracles performed and add the number of extra nobles performing miracles. We had five players, which is 4 "extra." Subtracting 4 from 8 gave 4 as the miracle level needed.)
The end of the first session and several e-mails between sessions were devoted to figuring out the component miracles of the group effort.
Session II
It's true enough that a roleplaying adventure that goes like this
would be a pretty dull game. But that's not actually how things went. What the group miracle rules did was allow the players to think about their efforts in a coherent way.GM: Your task is to catch the Loch Ness Monster.
PC: Okay, that's a level 8 miracle. We do five level four miracles in a group effort.
GM: Okay, you caught it.
Then they only had to deal with the opposition.
But first, a wrinkle. New Dave, who plays the Power of Time, was not able to attend session 2. That meant the players had to recalculate their plans on the fly. New Dave's planned role was, frankly, suspect anyway. He had a spare anchor slot and was going to anchor the boy so as to do aspect miracles through him. The more I htought about it, the less plausible I considered his claims that his character hated the boy enought to do that. (Love was not in the picture.) We also have a hard and fast rule for the Nobilis campaign: Only those PCs whose players are present materially participate in the session. You can't use a PC as an NPC, even with the player's permission. The player can't give permission.
I had decided that the appropriate group miracle level was 7, not 8. Thor's catching the Midgard Serpent looked like an 8 to me, and Nessie was just a baby. Here were the miracles they settled on:
o Timothy Hague, the Power of Accidents, is also Realm Boy. He used a Level 4 realm miracle in the chancel to create a superb rod and reel for the boy to use. It would fade out of existence within a day, but that was more time than they needed.
o Evelyn used a Lesser Creation to evolve a minnow into the tastiest darn baitfish a seamonster ever saw. Now they had bait.
o Paul Grejbko, Power of Cold, messed with the water temperatures to narrow the depths in which Nessie would want to hang out. That made it easier to troll for her.
o And once Nessie took the luscious bait, Tom Bender made the monster falling-down drunk.
All PCs were working through anchors, for two reasons. One: Since Team Ness had already marked two of the nobles, they wanted to be discreet. Two: more cost-effective use of Spirit MPs. The players assumed they would have to penetrate fairly heavy auctorita to accomplish these things. In fact, unbeknownst to them, they ended up with a bit of a cushion. And to make it easier to reel Nessie in, Timothy had a Russian sub crash into her.
No, there are no Russian subs in Loch Ness. The Russian sub was in the North Sea. That's what made it a Major Creation of an accident.
Warning: It looks like "so-and-so gets hit by a Russian sub" is already well on its way to campaign tagline status.
The only remaining worries were a Cameroonian maid, a retired Cuban fisherman and a marine biologist - that is, the anchors of the dead Noble, Embla. This was our first big Miraculous Combat of the campaign. We had four PC nobles working through on-scene anchors versus a single noble switching among three anchors, albeit right on top of his chancel. (The chancel is the water and lake bottom itself, not the shoreline or the air above it.) In the terms of the old DC HEROES RPG, this constituted "inferior opposition." But especially with a new game, you don't need to overwhelm the players with raw power to provide an adequate challenge.
Many miracles got tossed back and forth. The players held their own nicely. There was an anxious moment when they, wrongly suspecting that their own guide was one of the anchors attacking them, began attacking him with miracles, and they pushed the fellow close to the point of dementia animus. But the Emblans were on the point of having to really dig into their MP slush fund and unleash some major realm miracles. Before it got to that point, though, the PCs accepted a cease-fire request from one of Embla's anchors. During the parley, the PCs grew to believe that
a) Nessie really would die if the boy managed to bring him to the boat.
b) If Nessie died the PCs would earn the enmity of All Serpentkind. Not Good.
c) If they could convince the boy that he didn't want to land Nessie after all, they could plausibly claim to have fulfilled their part of the bargain with the Cammora. Doing so would frustrate the Cammora's secret motivation for the fishing trip, but the players classed that as a feature rather than a bug.
Paul vouchsafed the boy a view of Nessie by raising an iceberg under her. Evelyn managed to convince the boy that Nessie was far to impressive to kill, and that that's what boating the monster would do. Embla and her anchors were satisfied with the resolution. The PCs went home. The Cammoran managed to be polite.
I've skipped some non-negligible stuff, like Bender's intervention in the life of a fisherman who lost his son many years ago, and some pre-dawn shenanigans at the hotel. (At one point, the two most unpleasant NPCs - Young Norma and Bender's anchor - fell into the Loch and Embla spent a miraculous action throwing them back.) But overall, that's how it went.
I'm behind on contributions to this weblog. (But not this one.) Rather than post a couple of logs of the action, I'm going to post a man-behind-the-curtain account of the construction of the adventure before last, which I have chosen to call "The Scottish Play." My hope is that this will be useful to other Nobilis GMs who read this site, as well as, one way or another, interesting to the players in our campaign.
We have five player-characters. Their Nobles represent the estates of Time, Cold, Vehicular Accidents, Evolution and Benders. The Power of Benders, aka the "Chivas'-Regal," recently bought a secondary domain in Really Bad Decisions. Nobilis' GM sections make the point that adventures should be about the PCs rather than the NPCs. This is sound advice, but it's difficult to make a three-hour session "about" five characters at once. Our campaign is actually a "small emergency backup campaign," and only runs on nights when our "real GM" is not available to run our real Amber campaign. (Heh heh. "Real Amber..." Get it? Hunh hunh hunh!) In theory, we could go months between Nobilis sessions, so our idea has been that we'll construct adventures that can be completed in one evening. In practice, our adventures ("stories") have been stretching to two sessions, and we've actually been playing Nobilis at the perfectly respectable rate of twice a month.
The external constraints drive a format of largely self-contained, tightly-focused stories. The number of players militates against any given story theme simultaneously engaging every player-character's estates or projects. And in the early sessions, most players have still been feeling out the game's potential. I've also been interested in encouraging the players to take some authorial power, because since Nobilis play opportunities come irregularly and sometimes on short notice, it's too much for me to do all the world-building and story-construction myself.
Since the conclusion of the Lana Lang adventure, I've been using a rotating focus method: Ask one player to provide the theme for the next story; then, when that story is completed, ask the next player. I have told players straight out, This is your chance to shape the direction of play, so if you toss out a theme that doesn't grab you personally, you've wasted your chance.
Classic Dave, who plays the Power of Evolution, got the first theme turn, and he chose "The Loch Ness Monster."
Now comes the GM to make something of his choice. I started the same way I started the previous two adventures - sit down with a legal pad and do word association. The only difference is that instead of working from my own idea (the Winter Olympics and the destruction of the concept of superheroes, respectively) I was working from someone else's. I wrote:
and I circled the last one because I like fishing and know a little about it, and because I've always loved the Roger Zelazny story, "The Doors of his Face, the Lamps of his Mouth." That story seemed an especially pertinent model: the narrator is not officially the angler, but the angler's guide. While it's the angler's desire to catch the Venusian trophy that initiates the action, the story is still very much the guide's story. What matters is how he deals with the angler's desire.What you can do with the Loch Ness monster:
kill
capture
protect
photograph
stock
fish
That struck me as having everything to do with "Ianthe's" advice to GMs in Nobilis, that it has to be the player-characters at the center. The player-characters would be at the center because everyone else's desires and capabilities would be fixed absent the PCs' intervention.
Once I had "fish [for] Loch Ness Monster," I still had almost nothing. So next in the notebook came Who What When Where Why. I try to write down at least the initial answers to those questions quickly. The outcome of that was
Why delicate? It was easy to decide that Loch Ness was another Imperator's chancel. I had the idea that the need for discretion would encourage the PCs to work through anchors, something they had not yet had much chance to do. So it was an opportunity for us to familiarize ourselves with one more aspect of a new and very big game. I knew I would want to populate the shores of the Loch with eccentric characters, some with secrets directly relevant to the characters' mission, some not.A Cammoran approaches the PCs in their chancel requesting a favor. Through the Cammoran equivalent of the Make-a-Wish Foundation, a terminally-ill boy has expressed his desire to catch the Loch Ness Monster before he dies. Obviously, he admits, such an undertaking is a delicate matter...
What kind of Imperator? There seemed an obvious association between Nessie and Aaron's Serpents. I immediately discarded "Nessie is the Imperator" - seemed to obvious somehow. I considered, Nessie is one of a multitude of her kind that Aaron's Serpents prize as tasty snacks. This I discarded only reluctantly.
If you're going to have game mechanics, they should not just facilitate play but generate it. (Remember, we're Amber players in this campaign! We consider game mechanics strictly optional! Though among our number are players of D&D3 and even, gulp, Rolemaster.) A couple of sections in Nobilis 2 helped do just that.
First, I've been intrigued by the section on "one-player Nobilis." From there I drew the idea that Loch Ness was the chancel of a single Noble, not an entire Familia. That Noble I named Embla. Then I killed her. That is, then I discovered the limit "Dead" in the section on limits. That meant that Embla too would be working through anchors, as I suspected the players would be. I built Embla on 30 points, and built her chancel, Loch Ness, on points equal to twice her realm score, per the "one-player Nobilis" rules. I used real points for this and did not cheat, giving the chancel two points of auctoritas (Defender's Blessing), a 25 miracle-point slush fund, a technology barrier (cameras, of course!) and the open borders disadvantage. I also paid for "Important," for reasons that will soon become apparent.
There was the big question still of, So what is the Loch Ness Monster? The answer I settled on: The Loch Ness Monster is a baby Aaron's Serpent.
We know that the Serpents hatch in the World Ash itself, and drink its sap for sustenance. But I decided that the Serpents were afraid that the Excrucians might make that impossible at some point, maybe by conquering their home of Serpenthane, and they wanted to be prepared. Loch Ness was an experiment in rearing a serpent outside the Tree itself. Experiment results: Looks like it will work, but it takes a damned long time.
That meant: Nessie was largely mindless; tentative descriptions of her as "plesiosaurlike" were wrong; Embla and her anchors would be almost fanatically devoted to protecting their charge. Since they had a big secret to protect, their chancel would have a reputation as secretive. They would not want it to get around that it was the home of but a single, dead Noble guarding one of the most important secrets of Serpent kind.
Which would make them ill-disposed to someone coming around with adequate miraculous power to actually land Nessie, even on a catch-and-release basis, because you just never know.
Our player-characters, whose chancel is Important, wouldn't know these secrets going in. The gossip would have it that Embla was a full Imperator whose familia was famously unsociable. But they would know that Chancel Embla, aka Loch Ness, was secretive, and know that the fact that they knew less about it than about other chancels was material.
Since Embla would be working through anchors, she needed anchors. I'd already created a bunch of bartenders, fishermen, biologists and hotel workers on index cards, so I picked three anchors out of the crowd. I fleshed out their stories to paragraph length - how does an aging Cuban fisherman straight out of Hemingway get to Scotland anyway? - and went from there.
I named all the NPCs, including many that are still waiting around to be used, by mixing and matching given names and surnames from the list of playtesters and contributors at the front of the rulebook.
That left the little fisher boy. I started playing with anagrams of R. Sean Borgstrom and came up with two: "Norma B. Storreg" and "Barnom Storreg." That meant the boy was now fraternal twins, and Norwegian fraternal twins at that. I was vague as to his illness, and mindful that, in a world of Nobles, most illnesses can be cured if someone really wants them to be. That meant that either his illness was not really physical, there was a good reason (to someone) why the boy was supposed to die, or both. I was also not wedded to any particular reason why the boy was so important to the Cammora.
And that was the windup. The pitch - how the story played out - will be a separate item.
Entries with parentheses are in the format Player (Character) and are out of character comments. Entries with brackets are in the format Character [Player] and are in-character comments.
Bill (Bender): Just because a whore hires a fisherman, we have to fish on Loch Ness?
Mike (Tim): Our plan would've been successful, if not for those damn kids!
Kid [Jim]: You're all lazy and none of you are real celebrities.
Analise Grjebko [Greg]: Well, if you had a better disease, you could've gotten Walter Payton.
Greg (Paul): It's not like the head of MADD hates Tom Bender...
Bill (Bender): Actually, [Bender] slept with her daughter...while driving drunk...and crashed.
Jim (HG): Are you anchoring the lizard?
Greg (Paul): This is pretty much a one-way lizard mission.
HG [Jim]: Miriam and the girl fly into the drink.
Bill (Bender): Miriam always knew that drink would be the end of her.
(Miriam is the head of MADD)
I didn't have my notes with me last time, so I couldn't actually remember how many MP's it takes to travel through time. Finding them, it takes me 2 MP. The problem is, that if I want to use any of my other gifts, except the gatemaker ones, they are all under my Domain and draw on the same MP pool if I want to add any penetration. So if I want my Sovereign's Gift to overcome any Auctoritas, I need to spend my possible time travel points on it..so I run out of them quickly...
One last unresolved question continues to nag at me: Of all possible comic book supporting characters, why Lana Lang?
1) Well, there was that bit where she was working with the Excrucians to manipulate us into destroying the concept of comic books. And "villain" fits the metaphor I was using better than "dupe". Besides, if "villain" is perhaps unduely harsh, "dupe" gives her too much credit. She knew what she was doing was wrong. Otherwise she wouldn't have gotten so defensive when I brought up Clark...
2) Largely because she didn't. At that point, while we were certainly aware of the possibility that she was working for the Excrucians, we were also considering the possibility that she wasn't. More to the point, we had no good ideas as to how to figure it out. Even with our suspicions, she still had a 50-50 shot that her plan would succeed. Or, at least, she would have if she hadn't admitted her villainy and stalked off in a huff. I guess it's true what they say. You can take the girl out of the comic book universe, but you can't take the comic book universe out of the girl.
Greg, your message inspires two immediate questions:
1) Why do you refer to Lana as a "villain?"
2) Why do you say she had no real reason to tell everyone about her plans?
I don't seem able to use the "comments" feature, thanks to MT's poorly implemented java. So, here are my comments:
My point wasn't that we hadn't realized that Lana was from the superhero universe. My point was that we failed to appreciate that since A) she was from the superhero universe and B) she was a villain, therefore C) she was compelled to reveal her evil plans to us for no real reason. Because that's just how things work where she comes from.
As for abuse of Tony's power, this appears to be a concern in theory, but not in practice, so far. We've talked a lot about using Tony's power in abusive ways, but it's never ended up working out that way. In the Lana adventure, for example, all we ended up doing was retroactively creating a comic book convention. And then the plot was resolved before the convention took place, anyway (although Bender will be pleased to learn that we invited Frank Miller). Hardly pivotal to our success.
Plus, it's my understanding that it takes all of Tony's miracle points to do a single time jump. At worst, then, that gives us one "do over" per story. That doesn't strike me as too much for the GM to plan for.
We've now had four sessions, and everyone has made at least three. If you don't feel your character is working for you, this would be the time to change it. Most of you seem pretty happy with your PCs, but I want to put the option out there just in case.
It was all very confusing. Tony got back from his tour through the ages to find the rest of his Familia embroiled in something sinister with one of Superman's girlfriends..
Much time was spent rehashing What-Went-Before to try and bring some of us up to speed on the whole matter. We skirted the issues and came up with several perfectly plausible (and mutually exclusive explanations) scenerios. In the end we talked to Lana trying to clarify matters and bumbled our way into frustrating her by our lack of action into exposing herself and revealing her whole plot.
Along the way we did do some investigation: talked to the spirit of a statue in Central Park who (sorta) witnessed a couple's arrival (he'd like a nice wishing well built), examined Lana's life history to see that there was something weird there (she did used to work for Perry with Lois and Clark), and did a history scan at Ground Zero to see where the Kryptonite came from (Lana placed it there months after the fact, just about when Evolution started having weirdness).
The Darius Sousa never appeared at all, but the conclusion we came to was that the Excrucians won in Lana's Realm..and Darius brought her along to use as a tool/anchor here. He convinced her that our Realm's Comicbook Superhero's were the reason her Realm's real Superhero's were undermined and her realm destroyed.
At the convention, we told Willy Wanka? about the whole thing so he can pursue the matter more if he chooses.
...Lana was willing to get drunk even without Bender there.
with Bender called away for some kind of emergency inter-dimensional octoberfest, we need a new idea for getting Lana Lang to spill her guts. perhaps a jaunt to the past would be in order?
Looks like we were partially successful...
well... this and this. but that's not relevant.
been stalking Lana Lang, trying to get information from her to get a better clue as to who is behind the removing of superheroes, and where she and the krytonite came from. Best plan at the moment, get her drunk.
Mike (Tim Hague): anything fun or interesting happen in last night's session?
Dave (Evelyn): It's a miracle Tim is still alive.
It's a miracle we managed to succeed in our objective.
It's a miracle the PCs haven't been totally corrupted after being
exposed to the moral degradations of the Cammora.
It'll be a miracle if Tony's anchor ever speaks to him again.
We still don't know what happened to Paul. (Turned into a walrus?)
Other than that it was a straight textbook operation.
Greg (Paul Grebko): Who cares about that stuff. How'd my sister do?
Dave (Tony): Don't you just love it when a plan comes together?
Greg (Paul Grebko): I don't know. It's never actually happened.
Bill (Tom Bender): Unfortunately, the most we've had of a plan was the following:
> Bender: "Alright, here's the plan. We split up. Evelyn,
you... um,... ok, I'll go find Bob Costas and have a drink
with him. Evelyn, you,... uh,... Bye!"
Greg (Paul Grebko): We're not responsible for Bob Costas dressing like he's in
Psi Corps, are we?
Bill (Tom Bender): No. The Bob Costas stuff was a little disappointing. I
never found a good way to work in the whole
Bob-Costas-buys-a-round-of-drinks-for-everyone-in-Vermont-two-nights-in-a-row
thing. On the other hand, Bob was very helpful in getting
Gregor Gregorivich out of the competition, so there is that.
Greg (Paul Grebko): That's too bad. Because that was so clearly your influence.
Bill is very interested in the rulebook and play example's suggestion that players take on the roles of NPCs in scenes where their player-characters are not present. (Hm. Are they really NPCs while that is happening? My brain hurts!) Bill points out that the single drag about our Amber games is "waiting fifty minutes for your turn to come around again." How do people feel about that? Under what circumstances would you or wouldn't you feel comfortable quickly adopting a character you didn't create? (Use comments or make a new post.)
I thought that the first session's quick-cutting worked pretty well, and plan to rely on it rather than a timekeeper in the future. That opens the risk of one player or another getting neglected in the course of an evening. If you think the evening is going by and you're not getting the time to do what you want to do, please speak up then and there. We'll adjust.
My subjective impression from our single session of Nobilis (next one this Wednesday) is that involved anchors equal player activity. One thing to keep in mind is that since players in this campaign are meant to have a considerable amount of author power (to get all theoretical for a moment), you have considerable leeway to involve your own anchor(s) in events, which means you have considerable ability to set your own activity level. IIRC, the only anchor I threw into the adventure was New Dave's Valerie, whom he created for Tony. Greg and Bill added their characters' anchors into the mix themselves - I had completely forgotten that Greg's Annaliese Grebko was a world-class skier, for instance.
In a case of perfect timing, Thursday afternoon Washingtonpost.com held an online chat with the alternate from the U.S. men's skeleton team. Particularly relevant were the following two posts:
Herndon, Va.:
I have to ask -- other than one sport has the slider laying on his back feet first, and the other has him laying on his stomach head first, what's the difference between luge and skeleton?
Also, since you're an alternate, are you able to "party with the Jamaican team?" (If you know what I mean.) (And I think you do.)
Thanks!
Brian McDonald: The difference between our sports are as different as night and day. Our sleds are totally diffent. We have no steering mechanism on it where as Luge does. Plus skeleton athletes are cooler. As for the Jamaicans. I wont be partying with them too much but I do know some of the athletes on the two man team and Im sure they will be doing plenty of it. Being in the same room may get me in trouble(if you know what I mean)!!!!
Atlanta, Ga.:
If not skeleton, what other Winter Olympic sport would like to be involved with? I hope not figure skating!
Brian McDonald: No not figure skating!!! I was always into track and field so If I could be in any other sport I woyld have loved to be a long jumper