So a couple of weeks ago I was at the Concrete Cow convention in Milton Keynes, England. This is a very small con (really a large games day) organised by a local club, where folks turn up, offer to run games in the three slots and play away. Great fun and a good day all round.
I had the opportunity to play Matt Machell’s ‘Covenant’ during the afternoon slot, something I had been wanting to do since I first saw the game a couple of years ago in its early development stages.
There were four of us in the game: Matt (GMing), myself, Rich and Claire.
The thrashing out of Motifs and Conventions for the cell was good fun and in hindsight, it seemed to be the most fun we had as a group during the play experience. There were already a couple of suggested Motifs and Conventions on the cell sheet and it was suggested to Matt that in future he might want to leave it entirely blank and give people total freedom of choice in these, as the enjoyment level was high when taking part in the creation of these elements. To my mind, allowing complete freedom here gives the players greater investment in the situation and in there characters. In a convention situation, where you have a limited time to get people involved, it’s a great way of bring people together and getting them invested in things.
The Motif that sticks in my head the most was one entitled ‘wilted flowers’, which seemed entirely appropriate to the fin de siecle atmosphere of Venice. What the conventions and motifs really managed to do (aside from giving mechanical impetus in certain situations) was to help enhance the bleak, slightly desolate feeling of the city. As we brought them into the game, they served a great function in bring place to life.
Thrashing out Motifs and Conventions is, for me, one of the best parts of Covenant. It really does encourage the collective creation of elements that the group wants to see in the game and gives these importance in the resolution of conflicts. So, we had wilted flowers, spires, water flowing underground (I can’t remember the exact motif in this case) and so forth all appearing in the creation process and being used to great effect during the game.
For my own part, I thoroughly enjoyed the game and had a great time playing. Out of all the characters in the game, mine experienced the greatest change in terms of what was on the character sheet: racking up Consequences from various conflicts and eventually converting them into a new Edge. If memory serves, I also managed to resolve at least one of the Truisms that the character believed in (or ended up not believing in, as is so often the case with Covenant).
There was, however, some friendly debate over the mechanics of the game in relation to the way conflicts played out (Rich and Matt had an interesting discussion about these matters in this thread on the Collective Endeavour forums). Needless to say, mechanical questions around the table did slow play down slightly at points, but certainly didn’t take away from my enjoyment in playing the game.
At the end, however, despite my own personal satisfaction, Matt did seem disappointed in the way the game had run. I’m sure he’ll be chipping in to this thread shortly with his thoughts on the matter. It certainly raised some topics over the conflict resolution mechanics between Matt and Rich.
Malcolm, what sort of things were conflicts over? How did they play out? Were all the characters on the same side? What was the story?
Matt mentioned your Covenant game when we played at Conpulsion. Same scenario, but we must have played very differently: our game was bloody great and the resolution system worked superbly. So well, in fact, that I barely recognise the resolution system that Rich is talking about as the same one.
I get the impression that what went right, when we did it at Conpulsion, were:
1. There was lots of player-against-player stuff. This might have been down to me: I do player-against-player at the drop of a hat, so I became a traitor, and the other two had fun chasing me over Venice's rooftops. And then torturing me.
2. The conflicts were, almost always, three way, and everyone wanted different things out of them. That worked really well.
3. Matt's scene framing, and cutting between scenes, was good. We'd get to the conflict of each scene very quickly.
Matt also mentioned that your game had an investigative tone: let's find out what happened. Does that sound right?
Ours wasn't like that, partly because it was player-against-player: there was one conflict with the stakes "I want him to confess he's a traitor", I think, which was as investigative as it got. Apart from that, it was chasing across rooftops and Holy Snipers all the way.
Oh, yes, we set up all the Conventions and Motifs ourselves. We each suggested one of each (which meant, of course, that Matt suggested one). That worked well and sparked off a lot of discussion.
There were a few oddities about the Concrete Cow game. Most of which could be compressed down to "follow your own damn rules". Which probably isn't helpful, but is a lesson in how easy it is to drift into old habits. I definitely dropped the ball. Pre game prep without players was part of this.
I think also a lot of it was in how I presented the game, and how I managed scenes. On a presentation level, I was still in my headspace of 15 minute demos and possibly a bit complacent. I didn't set the groundrules well enough from the start, which cause problems later on in a longer game where some of the players didn't know the rules well. I should have stressed the mutability of the fiction and moments of truth more at the start, they are what the game is about ,and I think only Malc hit one during play. I did redraft the truisms between games, to make sure they were more easy to hit, and it paid off at the Conpulsion game.
Some of my scenes were just crappy. Looking back I missed some key opportunities, mainly by not pushing faction or society agendas hard in the PCs faces. The tug of war over loyalties was less obvious and probably contributed to the "us vs them" feel.