We played the first three chapters of Grey Ranks last night – me, Clinton, Remi, and Joe. Our plan is to play a complete, ten chapter game over three Monday evenings.

I was a little nervous playing my game with these guys. We play every week, and we play short-form stuff, and they are all very, very good players. Clinton and Remi make games, too. So despite the fact that they have been with me through Grey Ranks’ creation and even playtested a bit, this was the first time any of them got to see the final, finished game in action. I know it doesn’t suck, but I still had a little anxiety.

We set up our crew without any trouble. Joe is playing Danusia, a pious and judgmental Catholic girl. Clinton’s playing Bogusław, an impulsive 17-year-old from a dirt poor family. Remi is Zygmunt, a farm boy and lothario. And I’m playing Robert, who contrasts nicely with all of them – he’s rich, he’s a city slicker, and he’s got no time for God. The thing I hold dear is my first love, who is Remi’s character, Zygmunt. That’s already proven really interesting and fun. For some reason the gay angle gets downplayed most of the time in Grey Ranks. We were happy to bring it into our game. I mean come on, they're Boy Scouts!*

We talked about the likely content – anti-Semitism, fascism, children getting killed and hurt, sexual violence – and agreed that we’d be open to what happened, keeping the worst of it off-screen. We all trust each other and agreed to check in often once things got crazy in the game. None too soon, really – in my first mission scene I outed a Jew and got him killed. This was a harbinger of bad things for Robert, who is turning out to be a real shit-heel.

There was a palpable tension as we played the days leading up to the Uprising, which was very satisfying. Everyone really brought their best game and we pointed our characters, and various NPCs, directly at each other. In chapter two, during the mission, I narrated a scene where I was stopped at a German checkpoint – alone but within sight and sound of my crew. I bribed the sergeant with a thick wad of Reichsmarks. Now Clinton had introduced the Bank of Poland as a situation element, where of course my father was a managing director. So he interrupted the mission to cut in a personal scene, where Bogusław and Robert went to visit Robert’s fat-cat father and beg for a loan for Bogusław’s impoverished family. He failed, my guy’s dad became this towering asshole we’ll definitely meet again, and he handed Robert a fat wad of Reichsmarks “to spend on something nice.” So wham! Back to the mission, here’s Bogusław watching me give away the money that would have turned his family’s water back on. Really cool. That’s how the game’s supposed to work.

The game’s opening, which is entirely freeform, was a little rocky, but it always is. Once we’d nailed down our reputations it really caught fire. Three chapters in, and Joe’s already invoked Danusia’s thing held dear. My guy Robert (thanks to mission leader Clinton, getting revenge for the Deutschmark thing with my wholehearted support) has already visited the nervous breakdown corner. We’re all super excited to play again, and now that the difficulty is ramping up we can all start to see trajectories for our characters.

*amusing anecdote: The very first version of Grey Ranks mechanically mandated heterosexual relationships. The boy/girl thing was hard-coded in for some reason. It was a contest entry, and Luke Crane's first comment was "what about gay love, dude? You said they were Boy Scouts."

I think the smash cutting between mission and personal scenes has emerged as my favorite technique after many, many games. We had a mission scene - we're on the Gdansk station platform, it's a gusty, windy day, and we're trying to hide a bunch of anti_German leaflets under altar boy surplices without much success. "It's too windy!" someone says, and Bam! I interrupt and cut to a personal scene on Zygmunt's farm in 1939, and it's a blustery fall day and we're out shooting a .22 at tin cans in a crosswind. We resolve that and bam! We're back to Gdansk station. There's a through-line of sense memory that's really satisfying and cool, and strong reincorporation across the game - Zygmunt's .22 returns, for example, and is going to be important.

It's definitely not unique and I want to use it more often. It'll be easier in some games - you could incorporate it easily into Dogs raises and sees, for example. For a game like PTA, where it would be a perfect fit in terms of storytelling, I think it'd actually be harder but worth thinking about. The rigid allocation of two different types of scenes makes it very easy in Grey Ranks.

Oh, you also get this effect when you disentangle character ownership from individuals, like in jeepform. If I can interrupt and play out a scene in the future or past, with somebody elses character currently in the spotlight, you get the same effect.

I'm doing something similar, but not at an entire "scene" level with Black Cadillacs. In my case, they're memory-flashbacks (like Grey Ranks), but there's no resolution per se.

However, what makes them neat is that over the course of play, you revisit them and expand on them.

They're based on the flashback-to-shooting-the-wolf scenes in Enemy at the Gates.

Darcy, that's really powerful. Sign in Stranger does something similar, with flashbacks to Why You Left Earth. You had to bring the scenes to a boil, but there was no way to resolve them. They gave a huge kick to whatever came after them and after you got a few under your belt they sketched out the life and troubles of your character really, really clearly.

Jason: Yeah, Chapter Two was sandwiched in between my seduction of Anna, as well. That 'sandwich' is made of goodness. I'm just trying to figure out exactly what it is we did, and how to keep doing it (and hopefully modify it for future use, the crosscuts are super-effective).

Wow

I just bought a copy of Grey Ranks and have just really gotten into the way the game is played and seeing this AP report makes it really tempting to try to play soon...pretty sure I won't...more or less I'm a game collector and reader then player these days but Its exiting to read in action something I just read through on the weekend....

In terms of technique, you can play the game in straight "turn taking" mode, without using interruption at all, and it works fine. But off the top of my head, here are some good uses for disrupting scenes:

You can interrupt to edit - if a scene is looking a little directionless, your counterpoint can punch it up, add meaning and definition. This is awesome. The example with Clinton and the bribe, above, did this.

You can deliberately interrupt at the point of maximum tension. By cutting immediately before any sort of resolution (in mission scenes this will be purely narrative, but you can still do it) you leave everybody in a state of suspense, and the energy level zig-zags wonderfully.

You can deliberately interrupt at a point of thematic potential, which is really, really interesting and fun. I recall a game in which someone had established that it was pissing down rain, and our crew was holed up in some basement in Wola under fire. Emily Care Boss took her cue from the rain and called for a personal scene where she pulled in the situation element "a bound stack of love letters, soaking in the gutter" and a flashback to a miserable day during the occupation.

I was definitely playing a young man (I chose 17 as my age) with more bravado than sense. The game definitely enforces a certain level of helplessness. For example, the beginning missions are totally stuff that teens could do. Handing out leaflets, delivering food, etc.

Our characters are 17, 17, 16, and 15.

I feel like my guy is still very much a kid being forced into adult things. I think by the time it is over he won't be a kid any more, at all.

There's no mechanical weight to age in the published game. In earlier versions you'd increase your mission die and reduce your personal die size if you were 15 and the reverse if you were 17. Turns out that isn't necessary at all.

Jason:
so, is there any mechanical difference between, what's the youngest player age, 15 and the oldest of 17?

Posted By: Nateis there any mechanical difference between, what's the youngest player age, 15 and the oldest of 17?

No, none.

Both!

It's not new, as John Harper pointed out up-thread. Just give everybody permission to interrupt, look for the right moment, and see what happens.

I played in a game at Viking Con (A Day in the Life) where the GM, Mikkel Bækgaard, would edit scenes whenever a player brought up an evocative image, starting the new scene by juxtaposing that image with a new character in a new context. That was very cool. Disconcerting, but cool!

Does anyone ever 'cut-in' on a scene that was already cut-in to another?

Weirdly recursive.

We finally got our second session in, after a couple of weeks of illness and other commitments. The session suffered a little because of the lapse - it took us a while to get up to speed and we surely forgot some of the details we'd created earlier. But the clear through-lines emerged and advanced, all pretty sharply focused on things we hold dear.

My guy, Robert, is in love with Remi's guy, Zygmunt. By the end of chapter six we were lovers, Robert's mind was more or less broken, his twitchy nervousness subsumed by an eerie stillness and a slavish devotion to the drunk, horrible, amoral Zygmunt.

Clinton's guy, Bogusław, lost his eldest sister to a horrible mistake, fell in love with a well-connected Russian, got beat nearly to death and executed my cousin.

Danusia, Joe's girl, is hard aground with her Catholicism and in love with the devoted Communist Bogusław. It was a night of clearing out traitors and informants - Danusia also shot a Catholic priest at the Polytechnic. She's definitely at the breaking point.

So it was grim and often moving. We're set up for a vastly tragic third session with plenty of remaining resources to guide the story as we choose, if we elect to give up our precious stuff. Everyone but Clinton has invoked out thing held dear, so there are a lot of free dice available. We've all agreed that he's getting no love from us until he frees up his little sister for us to pick off! We've definitely played the grid very tactically and cooperatively thusfar. Robert, my guy, is in the most danger at this point.

There's something a little unexpected about Grey Ranks' collective missions, in that players have free reign in their description, guided only by the die size they contribute. This can lead to talky, descriptive scenes where the spotlight player merely says what happens. Occasionally this is perfect, but groups should take care to ensure that mission scenes involve multiple characters and include some interaction. We fell into this trap in chapter four and corrected later on.

Jason,

Can you expand on the "edit" concept a bit? Perhaps an example of how a player should do that?

Okay, so edit here is just a shorthand for interrupting scenes with scenes. Got it!