Stomp!

[Title supplied by Naomi Rivkis, who read this before I put it in my zine.]

Back during the end of the first Cthulhupunk game, Naomi Rivkis and I had a couple of communication issues that led to some "WTF?" moments for me. I think I now have a bit of a better idea of why.

Naomi joined the game late, and her main character was Lozen, the War Shaman. I was gearing up for a final sturm und drang confrontation with the Outer Gods, with the fate of the world depending on it, and a lot of the burden fell on Lozen's shoulders. Naomi felt that much of the burden was on her own shoulders as well. This is not a hypothesis; we talked about this, and she explained it explicitly.

Now, this wasn't actually a problem. I tend to run more pulp style than I prefer to admit, and, with Josh and Avram Grumer in the game, there was enough cleverness that the Outer Gods winning was highly unlikely. And we haven't even factored in Naomi's own cleverness or Matt Stevens's.

But, Naomi seemed constantly to fear Completely Terrible Things would happen that would scar her PC emotionally. I'd make it clear that whatever she was worried about wouldn't happen, and then, she'd find something else to fret about. This confused the heck out of me.

Would Lozen have to kill Firemaker, her own father? The spirit of War himself assured her that even corrupted coyote shamans and the spirit of Coyote himself would do far more harm to the enemy than to the good guys.

Lozen accepted this, and Naomi seemed happy. If I could whistle, I would have whistled to myself with the satisfaction of a job well done.

But, wait! The Native American forces fighting in the final battle against the supporters of the Outer Gods were Doooomed!

Huh? This was news to me. But, Naomi explained, via Lozen, that they'd only be willing to fight on one particular battlefield, believing it to be the critical one, and dying to protect it from the enemy, never realizing that this was to divert the enemy from its true goal.

[Josh (reading this over my shoulder): This is the point where you should have Caught On.

Lisa: Well, yes.]

Oh! Not to worry, said a clever NPC. Look, the Native American armies were traveling by gate box to a place they'd never seen before. Just direct them into a second gate box, and they'd wind up where they needed to be to be effective, and, yes, take casualties, like everyone else, but not be doomed to die to the last man. (Or woman.)

Whew, I thought. I would have hated to mess up Naomi's fun by maneuvering her into a position where her PC had to destroy all of those brave fighters. Well, we've fixed that!

Then, we got to the final battle, which actually almost didn't happen because Naomi was clever. But that's a different story. (Summary: She made a brilliant tactical decision. It just would've killed the drama, so we worked out how it could be maintained without anyone being stupid.)

Firemaker was likely to fight on the wrong side, but one of the NPCs could control him via his measure -- freely given, by Firemaker himself (to a different NPC, but that's also a different story). Naomi told me about the NPC who had it, an old Apache woman named Shadow.

This was before I knew Forge terms like Actor and Author Stance, and possibly before I knew about GNS. I assumed that I was controlling this NPC, and I was watching the timing carefully, planning to do the reveal at my idea of the appropriate dramatic moment.

Naomi assumed that she was controlling the NPC, and revealed her before I thought the timing was right. This made me antsy -- another player controlling an NPC with a mcguffin to control someone else's PC. And Josh was trying to do stuff with freeflowing magic, narrative, and dramatic timing in response.

At one dramatic point, Naomi said that if the dice fell a certain way, Shadow would be killed by whatever it was that was going on. (I forget exactly what that was.)

The dice did not fall that way. Shadow survived. "Hurray!" I thought. And Firemaker and Coyote were cleansed, and the Outer Gods were banished, and the other players had cool stuff to do.

So, it was a complete surprise to me and to Josh when Naomi said, some time after the session, that Shadow was dead, having been trampled to death during the final battle.

WTF? I thought.

Again, I didn't know from Author stance. But, I think what was going on was this:

Naomi wanted loss and angst and high prices for victory.

She had told me she'd feel awful if the PCs lost and feel it was all her fault.

She had not told me that she wanted high prices for victory and that this didn't contradict the rest of her position.

Therefore, I kept undercutting her attempts to create angsty drama for Lozen. (This is an oversimplification, but accurate as far as it goes.)

Naomi was, I would assume, feeling a certain amount of frustration as I stomped vigorously on any hint of the dramatic angst she wanted. <STOMP!> <STOMP!>

Therefore, she made sure some would happen, even if only off camera.

To the degree there's a moral or a conclusion, it is this: It's hard to ask the right questions when you think you know what's going on.