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I've had a flu for over a week now so I haven't gotten into writing an actual play report until now. As I wrote the original piece I still had fever but I'm feeling better now as I'm translating this to English. My aim was to change the report format a little bit. We've already played a couple of sessions of Shell Shock so the basic mechanics have been tested and found to be working so I'm not focusing on those if there isn't anything special there to mention. Plus, there's a couple of meta-game-level notes that I've been meaning to write about but haven't really had time and space until now. So here's the first part of my actual play report of our thrid session, the second part will follow suite:
First of these notes is the demographics of our gaming group. I think this is of importance at least to Kobayashi, who can then put the rest of our comments into perspective :) Most of us players are so-called lapsed role-players meaning we have been playing role-playing games actively some years ago (5 to 10) and then the hobby has been faded. I being maybe the strongest exception to that case. With the exception of myself, most of the group hasn't had experience on so-called story games or indie rpgs for that matter (Simo and Laku have palyed some 3:16 though). My recent playing history includes 3:16, Dust Devils, PtA, D&D4E and In A Wicked Age. In our group most of the players probably have played most games of the 90's such as oWoD (meaning old World of Darkness products like Mae and Vampire) (A)D&D, Gurps or older games such as RuneQuest and ICE's MERP / RoleMaster.
Otherwise we are a motley crew: Three of four are about thirty, one being a bit younger, three working, one studying. One is a teacher in history and social studies, other is a researcher and the third takes executive studies. I myself am an IT consultant for those who didn't already know it. The gender distribution is absolute, we are all more or less male.
Events of the session
That's it about background. We played the third session on a Saturday (darn, it's over a week ago, I really got to get this published soon). The session was the second part of the second episode of our game. In Shell Shock you are advised to divide the events of the game into three episodes, the first happening at the beginning of the conflict, the second inthe height of it and the third in the end of it. We had started the second episode covering the ground assault of Gaza in the second session and we continued it now.
I had planned to have a couple of more tranquil scenes at the beginning of the session. I also wanted to experiment with offering players to players order scenes from the GM just like they do in Primetime Adventures. I told that the player characters' group arrived at its destination a couple of hours before the action would start and would have to wait there in position. We listed the most important events in the last session and went over differences and changes of relationships between the members of the group in that session. Then I asked each player in turn to ask for a scene concerning a specific issue and including the characters he wanted in it. As an alternative I said that I also had some ideas if they hadn't any requests. Fortunately I did not have to rely on those.
As a conclusion we played two scenes: In the first Sgt. Baruch and Cpl. Spielberg argued about the leadership in the group and its priorities (and besides that I got to test the trigger-happiness of both Spielberg and Epstein as a Gazan Police and two civilians appeared). In the other Raanan used Lewandowski's guilt to make him try persuade the sergeant to get him out of the front line with a medical transport. Baruch complied to Lewandowski's request but failed to convince his lieutenant to organize a transport for Raanan.
Conclusions
The scenes were excellent as far as everyone of us were concerned. I had prepared possible moral challenges to the players and they were realized as a result of the players' scene requests. Everyone liked the fact that we got to focus a little bit in the intra-group relationships for a change. At the same time we realized that the game mechanics at least in our case seemed to put a lot of harm on the sergeant. Baruch was involved in a lot of conflicts as he was in the middle of the leadership dispute and also a target of the group's requests. In the process, he got a lot of stress points. In our opinion this reflected the fictional situation well: the sergeant was in the verge of mental breakdown as the action was about to start.
I don't know if it should be a general rule, but I think that I had hard time to think how to make the R&R scenes interesting before we started to play out intra-group relationship stuff there. Now that I've done that once, it seems like a perfect match: It's really the only time that the soldiers have time to talk to each other a little more and maybe be a little more in control of the situation. The combat scenes for us at least have been pretty hectic and not centered so much on the characters as the situation and pure survival.
This ends the first part of the third session actual play report. In the second part I'm planning to recall the events of the rest of the session as well as our evening after the session. After we were done playing we grabbed a couple of beers and talked about the game, the situation in Gaza and all kinds of things that arose from that. Then we went to sauna (of course, thanks Laku!) and even later we headed to downtown Helsinki for a couple of more beers. We had a great time and that's reason enough to write about it too.
All the photos used in the entry are licensed and used under Creative Commonsin. Big thanks to photographers Michael
Ramallah, Andreas H. Lunde ja Pesterussa for publishing these excellents photos under CC.If you want to know more about the photos our their photographers you can click on the photos to get to the photos' Flickr pages from where you can also get more info on the photographers.
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