Casting Shadows

Over the last few weeks, I have been gearing up to run the first session of Hollow Earth Expedition for my game group here in Seoul. This past Sunday was our trial run, and the playtest of a one-shot introductory scenario based in Shanghai that I have been writing with intent to share with other HEX and Daring Tales of Adventure players. The result was an interesting week in gaming for me. It would almost qualify as a crisis of faith, were it more dramatic and affected more than just my entertainment and the entertainment of my friends. Still… it was a crisis… of sorts.

Running the Game

Even with novice players, one of whom was lukewarm about the whole thing, I was truly surprised at how fast everything moved along and how easily description translated into mechanics and back again for all concerned. The few things we had to look up were easy to find and easy to implement once found. Even a sudden discovery in the middle of ‘aggressive negotiations for a cessation of violence’ that a skill did not mean what the player thought it meant, was quickly and seamlessly dealt with without requiring a discussion or changing anything on the character sheet.

We had intended to play face-to-face, but due to circumstances beyond our control had to fall back on Plan B: Messenger. I really didn’t want to have a chat session be our first foray into Shanghai as while some games translate really well into text, and there is a lot to be said for more effectively using lurid language in a heroic pulp adventure to magnify the grandness of it all, I had really wanted to debut the game with the full palette of tools at my disposal. More than that, I did not want to be hamstrung by my typing speed – which is fast, but not nearly as fast as talking and face to face communication.

Even with that limitation the game moved like blue blazes and we got through a bar fight scene involving 10 combatants, a conversation (exposition) scene, a serious attack by villains outnumbering our heroes 2 to 1, involving 24 combatants (Thank Combos for Taking the Average), and a follow-up conversation in the three hours we had set aside. Had we been face to face, we could have easily completed the entire scenario and had our hair truly blown back by the glorious tempest of pulp action that is Ubiquity.

The Crisis

I suspect that the crisis was caused mostly by how little I have been playing live games and how much I have been thinking about how to improve my running of the pulp adventure genre. When I set out to type the opening lines to start play, I suddenly felt like the scenario I had prepared was nothing short of a massive railroad, and it put me off my stride. The first scene was not a problem as it begins in media res and that is a railroad everyone loves to ride, but from keystroke one I was worried about revising scene two and not seeing any good way to do that.

By the time we got to scene two I was alternating between amazement at how great Ubiquity plays right out of the gate, and massive frustration at my own idiocy for concocting this scenario in the first place. As we got to the final scene of the day, I just wanted to get the whole thing over as fast as possible. It was then that I committed what at the time seemed like just one of many GMing sins: I shut down a player’s creative attempt at input not once, but three times in a row. Yay me.

I realized what I had done as soon as I stepped away from the computer, but so what? I was already well on my way to a dark place. I sent off an e-mail of apology for the how the game had ended up, informed the players what revision to that final scene I wanted to make, and then in the hours in between, I revised the entire scenario to allow for more choices, and inserted massive amounts of details for each location giving a long chain of open-ended options for people to run with…

Those who are strong in pulp-fu will already be laughing at me. I can hear the guys at Campaign Mastery from here. I didn’t expect such giggling from them, but it’s okay. I deserve it. For the rest of you who do not get the joke, I essentially shot myself in the foot while dropping an anvil on my own head. By inserting so much open-ended choice into the scenario, I made it impossible for any kind of pace to be sustained, and as that was the very problem I had hoped to overcome, I guaranteed that I was going to not only hate the rest of the session, I was going to totally fail at running a good episode, and fail to represent the genre.

The result? The life was totally choked out of the game, the pace dragged, we completed half of a very short scene in about 2 hours, and I hated the session, totally failed at running a good episode, and failed to represent the genre. From triumphant high to abyssal low.

What happened next?

In a nutshell… I got better.

I wrote a massive blog entry which did not post as events moved on even as I was writing it, but it was useful to get perspective. Venting into the text entry window gave me the critical distance I needed to recognize that I hadn’t made a long series of errors, I had just made the one, and I had made it because I was too concerned about hitting a homerun on my first at bat. I also had a long talk with one of the players about the experience on the other side of the screen and that helped me find my way back to some semblance of normalcy. I made a long series of notes on how to *properly* revise the scenario to allow for the right kind of choices and the right kind of options. I also started in on writing out a full version of the piece in the spirit of getting back up on the horse.

I took a step back and really evaluated the elements of the scenario that I had suddenly felt were railroading once play started, reviewed discussions about the scenario with gurus like the wise man who lives atop Mount Mythic Eras, the armed and dangerous paragon who operates under the code name Black Campbell, and of course my own players, and came to the conclusion that I had overcompensated. I have entered into negotiations with myself to discuss possible forgiveness for the lack of cool, but in the meantime have just moved on with being glad I had this valuable playtest experience which clearly showed my habits in action and how what works well in a plan-heavy environment like an investigation game can absolutely and irrevocably kill a pulp action game.

What really happened was a combination of me trying too hard to get it right, compounded by a lack of genre buy-in from one of the players. While I was merrily burning down the house while standing in it, someone kept handing me gasoline and the occasional stick of dynamite. Normally, I would reject such gifts, but deep as I was in my delusion, I took them gratefully and set harder to work. Madness!

So?

The primary result is that we will finish the scenario as written, and then I will write two versions of it. One will be a one-shot, as originally envisioned, and the other will incorporate that one-shot and expand it into a full scenario for the launching of a campaign. When the one-shot is finished I will post it and the original version up along with a transcript of the play sessions for comparison.

The secondary problem of player buy-in will need to be addressed, most likely by expanding our circle of gamers and running our Shanghai campaign with those who sincerely wish to play in that genre.

This all leaves me feeling fit and ready to try again. I have stared my enemy in the face, and although let’s face it, I blinked, once it started to gloat, I gave it the bum’s rush right out the door. If it ever comes back it will find me waiting with my twin automatics and a mocking laugh, ready to unleash a beating the likes of which the world has never seen!

Stay tuned!

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