Between The Lights: My Retrospective

[liquidcitrus]

Today, I'm going to talk about the experience of running the game, and why I made some of the decisions I did.

Almost all of this post is under the readmore, but I want to present this bit up-front:

On "Early Installment Weirdness" And Realistic Expectations

Now, the thing about BTL as presented here is that - even though it is an Actual Play, even though it is my best attempt to summarize - it includes quite a bit of after-the-fact editing. The quotes scattered throughout only include what I consider to be the most brilliant of quotes from the session - they're the best 5-10% of the words everyone wrote. I editorialized, sometimes quite heavily, backfilling my own explanations of things that nobody really realized or aimed for at the time.

I, personally, think that Between the Lights hit its proper stride in session 6, at the deathday party. But I don't recommend skipping. The events from before then were important, because they introduced many of the characters and places that were focal to the campaign.

It is completely normal for characterization to skip around inconsistently, especially in the first few sessions and double-especially in a game that runs in real-time. Maddie was already more or less established because her player had been running a Maddie variant for months in another campaign beforehand; the other characters were created for the campaign, and so the voices took a while to settle down. Often, I did not even bother making the voice of an NPC particularly consistent unless and until the players decided to pay attention to them.

It is the nature of a roleplaying game to leave hanging plot threads all over the place. Not even an expansive epilogue like the one I did could totally resolve them all. It would take far more editing than I have done to tighten it up to "literary" standards. That is how a roleplaying game goes. It is - to borrow one of the aphorisms that Sonja of Metaphors loved to use - a journey, not a destination.

---

On Why I Didn't Just Recruit Another Ice Cream

After Ice Cream's player left, I was tossing around the idea of adding someone else. Then Maddie made a move for the Estate of Ice Cream, and I decided to stand aside and let her try. Why? If I wanted, I could have just thrown another player in. It would have mildly disappointed Maddie, if I'd done it immediately after the previous player left, but there would have been no significant consequences.

But, after a bit of disorientation, I realized that the game felt correct and complete with just three. I found there didn't need to be another PC in the character dynamics. So I just left the seat empty.

I think next time I run Nobilis, I will cap it at three.

On My Approach To HGing

I come from a background of freeform GMless systemless roleplay. From this I acquired this habit of seizing control of the environment and narrating it into being around me before the GM could tell me not to. For the longest time, I was told that this was an extremely bad habit, and I thought that meant I couldn't play tabletop roleplaying games. Then I read in Chuubo's that the responsibilty of the HG is to play the world, and something clicked.

And so, instead of approaching this as "GMing a game", I freeform-roleplayed anywhere between 5 and 12 characters simultaneously (depending on the immediate needs of the plot) and let the rest of the world fall naturally out of that. I would have characters bouncing off each other both onscreen and offscreen. That's the secret to how I produced the look of a living world outside the PCs' immediate sphere of influence: it's because there was one. I mean, I was only really meaningfully moving around Familia Liana and Diane and Rumor and Rhonda and Soil and a few others in the background, but that was enough.

(If you don't understand why this is a big deal, some GMs have this thing like in video games where, if the PCs aren't currently actively working on a situation, it just unloads and doesn't change until the PCs come back to it.)

To the untrained eye, this looks like me playing a GMPC. The distinction between my "playing a dozen characters" and a classical GMPC is that I was perfectly willing to add or drop anyone on the docket depending on who the players wanted to focus on. If for whatever reason they decided to remove Diane from play entirely, that would have been fine, and I would have brought in other people to deal with the consequences.

Many other people - possibly even most other people - might not be able to do it this way. That's fine. But "literally just playing twelve characters simultaneously" is a GMing style I have not seen documented anywhere, so I wanted to write it down.

On Anze Torquil

I'd originally planned for this game to be about the Society of Flowers, with any Excrucians playing bit parts at best. But then I scrapped something like half my plot and threw Anze Torquil onto the stage. Why?

You might have noticed that Sasha has this tendency to monologue... and monologue... and monologue... This is something I like as a characterization point - it gives me plenty of material to chew on - but it often shut out the other players. Meanwhile, I saw Maddie and Sonja receding further and further into the background as the plot progressed. Maddie was getting left out because the social intrigue was all going over her head, and Sonja was getting left out because Sonja wasn't actively going around antagonizing almost all the characters I ever introduced.

So I introduced plot hooks that were more accessible to them than to Sasha. I had Megan only trust Sonja. I had the social shenanigans remain centered on the Powers of Heaven, rather than shifting towards (say) the Council of the Light, a group I'd originally planned for a central role. Then I gave Maddie a straightforward antagonist that she could understand and beat up.

At the time I introduced her, I had absolutely no idea what Anze Torquil's powerset was, where she'd come from, or what she was Dying of. I was just borrowing from an offhanded comment Rhonda made very early on, about having betrayed Incandescence to the Excrucians. But as I thought about this during the downtimes between the next few sessions, I figured out that there had to be a reason Rhonda wasn't getting any help, and the character concept began to emerge.

At first the "isolation and betrayal" angle was the only thing I'd nailed down. I had no clue that my making her Anchors references to other media could have been a characterization point until my players pointed it out. I did not even have a firm grasp on Anze's Bane until session 22, and that's... 9 sessions after I introduced her, now that I look back at all my summaries.

I wrote Anze Torquil backwards - usually you start with the thing that kills a Strategist before you work out anything else about them - but it seems to have worked out.

On Thematics and Preachiness

So, when I was conceiving of this game, I wrote down a handful of postulates for how I was going to run it. This was on some random piece of paper that has probably long since been recycled by now, so I don't have the exact wording, but they go something like this:

• Power cannot be taken by clean hands.
• The more a Noble pursues their Nobility, the less human they become.
• Many Nobles have alien value systems and skewed assumptions about the world, but their morals and worldview make a lot more sense if you use their axioms instead of yours.
• The results of the Robbers' Cave experiment, aside from having an apt name, apply to Nobles as well.

This was more than just an exercise in creating Campaign Conventions or mission statements. Whenever I was uncertain about which direction I should take the plot, or whenever I wasn't sure how an NPC would react, I used these as tiebreakers.

Does this kind of approach result in "preachiness"? Maybe, sometimes. But every single time I put one of these things in, I make sure to ground it in the context of a character, with a social environment and a history and a motivation more complex than these statements alone.

Even the Digital Cleave, who might look like caricatures at first glance - they had backstories. These backstories were like two sentences long and never came up, but the practice of coming up with these backstories made me see and play them as people. Were they exaggeratedly hostile props that served a plot purpose? Certainly. But they were also people, and they would respond in more nuanced ways if influenced by the right sort of experiences. If the PCs had bothered to look further they would have unfolded like fractals. I would have liked for that to happen, I think. But the PCs moved on, so I did too.

Later, I put Punctuation in front of Sasha, and Sasha talked to her and found a person beyond the Raven-and-Robber mask. I gave Toby Houston to Sonja, and Sonja found that the more she looked the more alien he became. Sasha took Diane Spinnaker and forced her heart open with a Destiny bubble, but even if she hadn't, Diane would still have those motivations... they would just have been far harder to find.

On "Being Mean" To The Characters

I love the characters my players made, and that is why I killed one of them.

Taken on its face, this statement is completely absurd. But it's three or four tiers down one of those galaxy brain memes, and it's very much informed by how and where my storytelling instincts were trained.

When I killed Sonja, I spent the next few days wandering around in a haze of feeling like I'd done something I should not have been allowed to do. (Because the freeform roleplays that I grew up in considered "godmodding" an unconscionable act.) But then I looked over the logs, and realized that Sonja had, over and over again, refused to escape, chose not to defend herself. She'd spent the last few moments of her life desperately pleading for an Excrucian to stop being an Excrucian, hoping against hope that Anze's heart was not so hardened as it was. And that taught me so much about her.

(I think this would have worked in Chuubo's. It is the sort of thing that counts as Making Answer to the Bleak. But Nobilis is far more black-and-white.)

There is advice floating around that GMs should be the characters' biggest fan, rather than an enemy. I think this is helpful because few games are improved by making the GM more adversarial. However, there is another, more subtle thing that I implicitly believed was a corollary to this statement, until someone pointed out that it wasn't:

That the best way to show off a character's truest and most brilliant colors is to push them to the point of breaking, showing the strength of whatever it is that they can't compromise on.

But something about this attitude wasn't working right in BTL. Every time I tried to push Sasha, she responded by escalating further. She used her Immortality to work herself far past the point when anyone else would have collapsed from exhaustion. She interpreted the Society of Flowers rejecting her as evidence that she was doing something right. She stared Lord Entropy down and spit divine fire in his metaphorical face. This is a type of character I have theorized - Katan Givengi, in specific - but this is the first time I have seen it face to face.

Maybe that's because most of my experience has been from Replay Value.

On Impossible Problems

Here is something I have found about running Nobilis: don't even bother coming up with problems that have solutions. Come up with impossible problems, see how the players try to semantics their way out, and accept whatever answer they eventually give you. Nobilis gives players and characters so much that impossible problems can be solved... as long as you say yes.

Then I extended the idea of an "impossible problem" to the entire campaign premise. The seed crystal of Between The Lights was the idea of Noble society being unfixable in a way that was terrifyingly human. How would the PCs try to change a society whose rot is far deeper than can be excised by individual actions? Would they try to change it from the inside and make themselves complicit, or would they try to topple it from the outside and destroy the good parts of the system as well as the bad?

Of course, later events put a kibosh on that particular angle. Ultimately, my Nobilis game is for my players, as much as it is for myself, and so I had to set aside what I thought things were going to be about. But that's where it started.

Incidentally, if you've gone this far, here's something fun that was pointed out to me: Between the Lights literally started with light and ended with light.

Comments

[l33tminion]

Good stuff!

I think the "impossible problems" bit gets at a central conceit of Nobilis pretty well, what separates miraculous powers from ordinary abilities (even supernatural "ordinary") abilities. Unstoppable force demands an immovable object.

Also, I think it's great narratively to let characters lean into their doom, if the player is into it. If their story is about legacy, that's satisfying. Can't really put a bow on your legacy until you're dead.