Games for the Mind

I keep thinking that I want players to keep the narration focused on the action of their characters, to create a situation a little reminescent of a traditional rpg.  But that isn’t really what I quite have in mind.  I want the narration to be centered upon their character, not necessarily the action of their characters.  I just don’t want them narrating *over* each other.

I want a players to encounter a mysterious figure and have one of the players move a red / yellow stack out with a narration like “This person wants to hurt me” or blue / yellow “This person has been looking for me.”

I also want a mechanic for a player to make a ‘tentative’ narration–not that the narration itself is weak, but that it is the narration of an interest or doubt.  Things like:

“I fear he has some terrible secret.”

“I want to know what is underneath his overturned cup.”

It’s clear from seeing and hearing about play from 1001 Nights that this is a positive contribution to a game session, not just absent speculation.  It is a prize mechanic for a game that does not make conflict the driving engine of play.  It may make sense to just treat it like any other narration.  For those unfamiliar with it, though, it almost makes sense to have a ‘training wheel’ mechanic that rewards its initial use.

One option is that a player could spend a token directly into an adjecent player’s outer jewel by making a ‘musing’ narration.  Alternately, I could make the musing narration a key element of rotating the character sheet…I like that last one a good bit.

I realize that many of the people who will read my rules will be from a background that frames narration in terms of a conflict.  There is much awesome to be had from conflict driven games.  That being said, 3am tries to stake out a less oppositional terrain, highlight some of the dynamic dimensions of it.  While I don’t want to rule out conflict from narration, I want to make it secondary to this primary element.

To this end, I am thinking about including some developed guidelines for what happens when someone uses tokens to step into the narration.  Here are working ideas:

The one, two, and three breath pause: encourage players to take at least one deep breath before sliding a stack into an exposed outer jewel.  Encourage them to pause before jumping in, let them process, even briefly, what they will be contributing.  Similarly, allow any player to place one, two, or three fingers on their own mouth to indicate that everyone at the table take that many deep breaths together.

Add, add, add: make clear that you narrate to add to the narration already established, not to dismiss or overrule it.  Think of the narration as a thick, sturdy rope with something heavy attached to it.  Each narration is one player pulling that *something* closer, hand over hand, together, with the help of their fellow players.

One of the more interesting things a player can do is give another player a white token in order to remove their stack from the current narration, bumping it ‘down’ into a scene within the action going on.  The player giving the white token gets more control over their scene, thereby, but the receiver also benefits.

The player who gives the white token says to the receiver “This is worthy of closer attention.”  Every player with a stack in an exposed outer jewel (including the recipient) receives a single token from the cauldron which may only be played during the sub-scene.  The token is of the same color as their stack. 

If the appropriate color is not in the cauldron, they may take a non-contrary color instead.  If neither are available, they remove one token from their stack and set it aside for the sub-scene.  Unlike other tokens, though, when used these tokens are placed in the outer yellow jewel of the player who received the white token.

The player who gave the white token determines when the sub-scene is resolved during the main scene.

So the last post about the token economy (which I will probably just edit and post notice about if no big changes are involved) mentions narration more than once.  The tokens are, after all, nothing more than ways of accessing narration privileges.  In some way, this is not unlike how I understance Universalis to work.  The way in which tokens have an additive dimension does seem to take a different tact, though.

Anyway, let’s see how envision this working out in play.  First, I want to start with the most complex narrations, those that occur when players have moved stacks into exposed outer jewels.  Player 1 (P1) pushes out a yellow stack while Player 2 (P2) pushes out a (smaller) red stack.  P1 gets to set the tone for the narration, but P2 still has a number of tokens which they will spend to add details to that.  Now, before detailing what happens, let me describe the rules governing it.

When a player moves a stack into an outer jewel, they must also make a statement of intention.  This statement must correlate the color of the stack (the theme supported by the color) with the principle of the angel’s exposed outer jewel *and* establish the first action taken through their persona to bring this about.  This costs one token from the stack.  It is moved into the cauldron.

After every player who has moved a stack to an exposed outer jewel has acted, the player with the smallest stack may make a follow-up statement.  Oftentimes, this is just a different action that takes into account the changes created by the previous round of statements.  At any time, a player with a larger stack may interrupt a player with a smaller stack by playing a token from their stack and stating “but before you can do that…” and articulating a statement.

It is key that each statement after the first must incorporate the ‘theme’ [need better word] of the token’s (not the stack like the first token spent) color and the principle of the exposed jewel.  That helps to anchor description and maintains the underlying mechanical idea of this dream world being driven by very basic sorts of energy.