Continuing on from my previous post about the one on one PBEM game of Solipsist I have been running, we have finally finished Chapter 2. This chapter took a lot longer than the first both because of practical considerations (holidays, illness, busy times at work and the like) and some of the limitations of playing by email, which made some bits laborious (as we went back and forth over what could have been quite simple discussions if held face to face).
The second session also threw up some interesting gameplay, some of it unexpectedly good, and a little of it less coherent than I would have wanted.
On the former side there was a very nice sequence where Toria (the solipsist) just did ordinary things, like taking her son to the movies, or talking with her neighbour, without changing reality. This had not been badged in advance as grounding (the Solipsist term for re-connecting with reality) but it was exactly how it played out, and I was really pleased with the interactions going on there.
On the later side there was a slightly incoherent moment where a new line of fiction was introduced, and then changed to something else, in the space of one scene, without the character actually having appeared in-character yet. Some people called her on the phone to help blockade a whaling ship, and by the end of the call they were instead calling for her to come and rescue a stranded whale. In the fiction the first reason had never occurred, which threw us for a moment until we got the hang of it. I think this was just to do with the slightly bitty nature of doing things by email though.