Continued



I'll attempt to give an example, but it will be hard for me to do justice to the game here. I'm playing Olek, AKA Wit. Wit is 16 and grew up in the Ochta district. Ochota is essentially the university district so I decided Wit would be the son of professors at the university. At this point I also decided Wit's parents had been rounded up and killed by the Gestapo, but I chose not to share this with my fellow players yet. For chapter one, we decided the Germans were making a propaganda film at a cafe and we were taking it upon ourselves to carry out the executions ordered by Radio Lightning. The cafe is full of Germans and collaborators. My turn for the mission scene comes around and Jesse tells me that as our plan to bomb the cafe is set into motion I spot one of my Father's colleagues. I’m not sure what Jesse thought I would do with this, but he seemed shocked when I went off on the professor for being a collaborator. Wit said, "You are a traitor! If you weren't they would have taken you when they came for my family!" and shot the professor in the chaos following the explosion. This earned Wit the trait Cold.

Fast forward to chapter five. So far things have been going well for the uprising and our little band of Boy Scout partisans, on the personal front we are all starting to have some issues. For Wit, this means he was unable to convince his little brother, thing held dear, to stay out of the uprising. Colin reads the Radio Lightning broadcast and it mentions some professors in hiding who the Germans found and murdered. I look down at my grid situation elements and one of mine is a house full of German officers in Ochota. Wait a minute. It's like Jason saw into the future, read my mind and wrote this stuff specifically for me. I asked if anybody would mind if i was mission leader for this chapter and everybody immediately said go ahead. To introduce the mission I framed a short free play scene starting with us all huddled around the radio listening to the broadcast. I tell them those professors were my family’s friends and neighbors. I know a house in Ochota were a bunch of officers are staying and that we're going to get some payback by barricading them in and burning the building down with them inside. Colin, his character is also from Ochota, says "I know where we can get some petrol" and the mission was on.

We start Colin's mission scene which is about getting the petrol when Laura jumps in with here personal scene. She confronts Wit, telling him that it's wrong to kill, even Germans in cold blood like this. This attack doesn't serve the uprising and killing just for revenge makes Wit no better than the Germans. She rolls and succeeds. So Wit is in turmoil about his actions and feelings. Now Laura is reading my mind, because this was exactly what I was planning all along. I rolled horribly on the mission roll. Our target number was 20 and I think our initial roll was something around nine or ten. We all really wanted to succeed here so everybody’s thing held dear was either invoked or threatened and after the rerolls we pull it off.

The chapter closes out with Wit's personal scene. Up until this point, Wit has lived up to the cold trait and has been acting fairly ruthlessly and I wanted that to start to change. I frame a scene where Wit confronts a soldier who managed to escape from the burning house. The soldier is begging for his life, saying he has a wife and child and that he was conscripted and just trying to survive the war so he can get back to them. So the issue at question, is Wit still filled with hatred and kills the soldier or is he able to empathize and let the soldier live. I use the d6 from my cold trait and succeed, letting the soldier live. Wit is beginning to soften now. This will probably result in him being torn apart from the inside as he deals with the horrors of war. I can't wait.

Of course I'm skipping a lot here. Jesse, Colin and Laura all have incredible stories about there part in the uprising. We still have the final chapters to play, but Grey Ranks is already my best game of the year so far.

Hey Will, I'd love to hear from the other players as well - some questions for you:

How did you guys use the grid? Did you use it tactically, or thematically? Did position drive character motivations or scenes?

Was there any discussion or knowledge of the history and events outside the stuff provided procedurally (Radio Lightning/situation)?

Did you feel competing tension to succeed in mission scenes and to contribute to overall success?

Just curious. If you guys just wrapped chapter six, hard times are coming fast.

Hey Jason,

My computer science trained brained is always looking at how the mechanics and the fiction touch and in particular how the structure and output of the mechanics inform my next unit of fictional input.

One of the things I've been saying about Grey Ranks to people is that it has created a bit of a cognitive dissonance for me. If you look at my posts around here and elsewhere I'm a big proponent of the player being the fictional character's advocate. Even if everyone at the table wants the character to fail someone should be fighting for the poor non-existent bastard. The dissonance that Grey Ranks creates for me is that I have four axises of character advocacy none of which are causally related within the fiction.

Axis 1) Personal Scenes. Straight Up Roll The Die Achieve The Goal.
Axis 2) Mission Scenes. Die Chosen Determines Success or Failure.
Axis 3) The Overall Mission. Collective Dice Rolls Determines Outcome.
Axis 4) The Grid. Maneuvering Determines Character Welfare.

One of the things I was very afraid of was being put into a position where playing the character's advocate on one Axis would mean playing against the character on another. And while this is, in fact, part of the design I simply do not enjoy strategising for character failure. However, Grey Ranks has pleasantly surprised me as I do make a distinction between strategising for failure and simply not working very hard for success. At no point, so far have I had to put effort into my character's failure. If it is in my character's best interest to fail due to the state of the grid I simply do not have to fight so hard for success which is more akin to simply not spending fan mail on a conflict that you're not very invested in, in Primetime Adventures. I don't mind passively letting the cruel wheel of fate land where it may. I feel unclean if I'm actively undermining my character.

The scene that really drove this fact home for me was in Chapter 6, I think. Everything was wrapped up except for my personal scene. Looking at the grid I wanted to fail my personal scene. Looking at my sheet I had a d4. And I thought, "Oh, I've already failed my personal scene. I don't have to *DO* anything." That was a very important distinction for me. So I narrated my character attempting to break his sister's religious faith which I'd already established in the narrative is pretty much impossible to do.

Jesse

Jesse, that's super interesting. I know you've articulated your preference before and it is an important distinction in general - I really think of Grey Ranks as a game in which the characters are not as important as the collective fiction. The framework is pretty deterministic and the choices you make are not always oriented toward character success, as you have noted, by player design or by merciless fate. I think it works best when everyone is in the mix all the time, meddling with the relationships and fates of the other characters as well as their own, with an eye toward service to the overall narrative. I'm really glad that the line between actively pushing toward failure and passively allowing it is working for you!

The grid has mostly been a thematic inspiration for me. I have been spending most of my time up at the love end of the grid. This has been a big influence on my personal scenes. It shows up through Wit's concern and love for his little brother and his courtship of Rivka, a female NPC member of our crew. The only tactical choices I've made have involved singling people out. I singled Laura out so she would not bounce straight from one corner to another and I asked to be singled out because i f I was going to be on a corner I would rather it be martyrdom than nervous breakdown, both thematically and because of the d12.

I know a fair bit of WWII history in general, and I have held my tongue a couple times when I some historical inaccuracies were suggested. We're there for a game not to nitpick minutiae of history. I've read a little more about the uprising on the net. But my knowledge of the uprising doesn't extend too far beyond what is in the book.

The mechanic of contribute big dice and fail or small dice and triumph can really hit you in the gut at times. This really seemed to be true for us during the mission to burn the house in Ochota I talked about above.

Posted By: Jason MorningstarI really think ofGrey Ranksas a game in which the characters are not as important as the collective fiction. The framework is pretty deterministic and the choices you make are not always oriented toward character success, as you have noted, by player design or by merciless fate. I think it works best when everyone is in the mix all the time, meddling with the relationships and fates of the other characters as well as their own, with an eye toward service to the overall narrative.

Which is what a lot of people say to me when I'm so assertive about character advocacy which makes me think there's something I'm not saying right. When it comes to the overall narrative, I'm as bird's eye as they come. I'm constantly editing, angling and assimilating based on the narrative. But to me, the pivot points of a strong narrative is when it's central characters encounter adversity. I enjoy games most which have legitimate forces representing the parties in that encounter and don't leave one to be a straw-man/facade to simply illustrate something about the other.

I think this dovetails with Vincent's blog post about rules introducing the unwelcome and unwanted such that even if we're all committed to one particular outcome or another there's always the chance that some feature of the game will take that away from us and we'll be forced to evaluate that commitment in light of the unwanted flow of the fiction.

Jesse

More Random Thoughts:

Everyone else is kind of up near the top of the grid, I'm near the bottom. Which is funny because I'm very good at playing moody, broody, emo characters. However, I remember saying, "This corner of the grid is easy to play but man is it hard on the dice." D4 for Suicidal-Depression.

Also, because of my preferences I find myself wanting to keep my scenes, short and sweet and focused on whatever the key mechanical pivot of the scene is whether that's the success or failure based on donated die in a mission scene or the goal in a personal scene. I tend to try and side-step other conflicts in the scene because there's no way to resolve them other than just to keep narrating.

For example, I've been playing my character as very, very protective of girls. At one point it was Laura's mission scene and she was about to run out into the street under heavy fire. I narrated my character grabbing her hand and insisting that the mission had gone bad and we need to escape. I remember then IMMEDIATELY thinking, "Oh fuck, I've initiated a conflict." Now it was Laura's mission scene so I just deferred to whatever she said next which was fine but I did have that little internal hiccup. :)

Jesse