Nobilis: Session Design Revisited

One of the reasons people worry about blogging is that they're worried about making mistakes, but as Game in the Brain blogger +Justin Aquino  likes to say, "Better to open your mouth and be thought a fool and corrected so that you are no longer a fool, than to keep your mouth shut and remain a fool" (or something to that effect).  I said something a few weeks ago, and I was very illustriously corrected.  Curious about the new data, I did some hunting, learned about even more tools available to me, and then re-evaluated how and why I wanted to do session design the way I did.

Today, we're going to talk about Nights Black Agents, Blowback, Lady Blackbird, and Nobilis itself, and the tools all of them give for session design, and why I want to use the tools that I do, and how, exactly, I'm going to use them.

Lady Blackbird Extended

So, with Cherry Blossom Rain out of the way, what is my next big project?  Well, some time ago, I discovered Lady Blackbird and handed it to Bee (Go ahead and look at it.  I'll wait.  Done?  Great!).  In my experience, Bee doesn't want to plan a session.  She hates that!  She just wants action and adventure and awesomeness now.  She comes to a game with vague ideas of what she'd like to see happen, and then she simply lets the pieces fall where they may, improvising with her players to guide them to her scenes, but if something else awesome comes along, she plays with that too.  She doesn't like to play systemless, though.  She enjoys throwing the dice and seeing how pretty they are, relying on unusual results to feed her story and, in a habit she picked up from 7th Sea, she loves to hand out drama dice or action points.

Lady Blackbird is perfect for this.  All of its rules are literally printed on every character sheet, and Bee, as GM, needs to know none of them.  All she needs to know are these three rules:

• The difficulty of the roll is between 1 and 5 "successes."
• If players fail, she has the option of hitting them with one of the 7 problems listed on their sheet (Hurt, tired, lost, etc)
• She can hand out drama dice in the form of a pool of dice players can use to boost their rolls (actually, that's not a rule, but Bee does it anyway, and it works well with the game).

That's all she needs to know.  The players take care of everything else on their own.  Even better, the game is, in fact, a standard adventure that she can play through, complete with suggested difficulties for various problems the players might encounter.

However, if you want to do anything but run the game with those 5 pre-generated PCs, or do an adventure other than that listed in the book, then you're basically on your own.  Thus, while Bee loves the system because it suits her so well, she has no interest in tearing apart the mechanics to make her own characters or to create her own adventures (she's refined the art of the lazy GM, and lazy GMs do not redesign systems from the ground up).  So, I'm going to do it for her.  I promised this as her birthday present, which coming from a published writer, is worth quite a lot ^_^

You know, presuming I actually finish.

Now, I'm not the first one to try to expand Lady Blackbird.  The writer himself took a stab at it, and other people have done their own work, but I think most of them are going about it in the wrong way.  Lady Blackbird has a few key features that appeal a great deal to its audience.  

First, it's very simple.  You don't have to shuffle through a giant skill list to figure out how to make your character.  This is the first place I think the Lady Blackbird Companion goes wrong: It lists every Trait its writer could come up with alphabetically.  How are you going to build a character like that?  Will you sort through the entire book, looking for something to build your character?  

Second, Lady Blackbird doesn't really describe its setting.  John Harper very cleverly gave us some common tropes, and then implied the rest of the setting.  He tells us in a few paragraphs that the world is shards of land orbiting a pale star, and instead of space, we have sky, plied by steam sky-ships.  Beyond that, we only know there are imperial nobles because Lady Blackbird is one.  We only know there are slaves because Naomi is an ex-slave, and we only know about goblins because of Snargle, and we only know about Flamebloods and Sky-Squid because they are mentioned in the potential challenges.  The Lady Blackbird Companion tries to fill in the blanks for you, but the whole point of Lady Blackbird are those blanks.  Do we really need to know, say, the culture of the goblins?  We can guess well enough on our own, thanks.

Finally, the real beauty of Lady Blackbird is the fact that it already includes all the challenges you need to run your adventure, and these challenges double as scene-seeds.  Because it includes the challenge rating for a fight against a flameblooded sorceror, you find yourself pondering how you might get the players to a point where they would battle a flameblooded sorceror, for example.  None of the works I've looked at (which, granted, hasn't been exhaustive) do this.  Instead, they expect the GM to come up with all of that on their own because most people who are writing Lady Blackbird material, other than the original author, come at this from a work-intensive, traditional GM perspective.

So, we're going to take a two pronged approach to our task.  First, we're going to research the traits, tags, keys and secrets, cobble together our own, and create a list.  Unlike in the Companion, though, we're going to sort them by categories: Professions, Qualities, Backgrounds, Magic and Races.  That way the player can look through, for example, the profession list to find what his character's job might be, the backgrounds to explore what his history is, and round him out with a few Qualities.

Then, we're going to make challenges for everything I can think of: Different regions mentioned in passing in the book, The various houses, the different kinds of sky-ships, the different races I come up with (including Goblins), the various conditions the book lists on the character sheet.  These challenges will be sorted together in themes.  For example, I'll find a large, beautiful picture that might represent Nightport, then create a list of challenges that one might find in Nightport, with possibly a few keys, secrets and traits that might be unique to Nightport.  In this manner, I'll offer the reader not only the potential skeleton of a story, but I'll also tell him a great deal about Nightport implicitly, rather than explicitly.  That is, by reading the challenges associated with Nightport, he'll get an idea of what Nightport might be like.

In this way, players should be able to construct their own characters quickly, and Bee should be able to simply flip the book open to some interesting part of the world or some interesting concept, start grabbing challenges, and just run the story.  If I play my cards right, it should be the great book of pick-up games.

Allegria is already pregnant

I just finished the Spring Weekend, and I'll tell you more about it when I'm better recovered.  Spoiler: It went great.  Probably one of the best weekends that I remember.  But with the weekend over, and Cherry Blossom Rain revealed to the world, it's time for me to let that field lie a little fallow, lest I burn out, and to focus on my next big project: Extending Lady Blackbird for Bee, her birthday present.

Bee plays very differently than I do, and so expanding Lady Blackbird involves thinking very differently than I generally do.  What does this have to do with Allegria and why she's pregnant?  Let me explain:

Desiree ran a game about "Steampunk Gypsies."  I'll tell you more about it later, but for now, I want to tell you what I discovered after the game was over and I peeked at her "notes."  She had a few pictures of NPCs, a list of a few names, and a small list of events, including "Allegria is already pregnant."  Allegria was one of the NPCs, a beautiful dancing girl who fell for my character, and at no point was she pregnant.  So why had she written this fact down? Because, as Desiree explained, she didn't know how the story would play out until she actually began to run it.  She had listed numerous little "ideas" to draw inspiration from on the spur of the moment.  Perhaps a romance bloomed with Allegria too quickly and she needed conflict, and thus, it would occur that she was already pregnant.  Or perhaps Desiree would need some other complication to keep the game spicy, so she'd draw on something else.  Or perhaps, as was the case this time, the player would feed her a neat idea that she could run with.

In some ways, as I said to her, that's really not different from how I run things.  She notes interesting ideas as a sentence, I note them as a full paragraph, but in retrospect, I don't actually think that's true.  When I put together a game, I envision it in great deal.  I can see scenes playing out in my mind.  For example, I ran a scene in Cherry Blossom Rain where the Witch of Jukai offers to "free" Yukiko from the terrible grasp of Ren.  I could see her fox, could smell the scent of her swamp, see her j-horror features looming in Yukiko's mirror.  I write those paragraphs because I can see them, like a movie, and I need, very much, to make those scenes more likely, more probable.  I come in the game knowing, more or less, what I want.  I still need to be surprised, I still need the game to flow and change based on what the players do, but those scenes often drive my inspiration like no other source.

What she does, what Bee does, is ultimately different, I think.  I believe they simply walk into a game with no expectations.  They have a premise and little else, and what happens, happens.  They want to have a fun game, and like me, they want to drive the action, though they drive it less towards actual, concrete scenes and more towards general themes that they enjoy: Desiree drives her game towards romance and tragedy, and Bee drives her game towards action and adventure.  What they need isn't details, but inspiration that they feed into the game like one feeds tinder into a dying flame.  They guide the flame, they stoke it, but they don't truly control it.

Returning to Lady Blackbird, what I think Bee really needs amounts, essentially, to a giant book of lists containing things like "Allegria is already pregnant."  Lady Blackbird, in particular, excels at this.  The game master needs only supply the difficulty level and, if necessary, the consequences of the players' action.  It presents those difficulties in the form of story-ideas: "A sky-squid attacks! Difficulty X to defeat it, with the danger of being lost or wounded if you fail!"  It gives you a difficulty, yes, but mostly, it just suggests that Sky Squids exist, and offers the idea that, perhaps, one might attack.  Instantly, you have a potential story idea, one that's useless for many GMs, but one that's rich fodder for one like Desiree or Bee.  I need more, but they need less.  Simple, small and beautiful, little seeds that bloom into full stories.

That's what my book will be: Little seeds.