In this second part I will describe the second part of our third session of Shell Shock in Gaza. I will also address a couple of points that have occurred to me during this play test. These are the influence of writing Actual Play reports on our games as well as the discussion on how our game has infuenced our views on the situation in Gaza.

I had prepared the following course of action as the action-oriented part of our third session: When the bombing of the police station would start, both civilians and Hamas fighters would try to escape from the station towards the locations of the player characters' group. The action would have (again?) consisted of quick decisions that would have to be less than perfect. Who to fire at, who is a civilian and who's a Hamas gunman etc.

The actions of the players changed this scenario. The more conservative line of Cpl. Spielberg which Sgt. Baruch also adopted resulted to the palyers' groups position to be revealed to the Hamas fighters and the police in the station before the air strike and the people tried to escape with more conviction and better planning that I had planned beforehand.

Yesterday I had quite a journey in teh interwebs and the archives of RPG theory miscellany. The highlights included me finally getting the concept of fruitful void and system as Vincent Baker describe it.

I started from an innocent-looking discussion on Story Games titled The Fruitless Structure. The main point of that discussion was that reward mechanics, in time, often make people blind to the actual virtue that is promoted but try to play the mechanics itself to maximum gain. Relating to RPGs it is not enough to follow the mechanics but to look and negotiate around them to find out where they are pointing towards. And also to have common goals and expectations related to the game at hand in your group. Seems pretty logical and many of my own early experiences with story games provide evidence of this effect.

From there I was directed to an anyway post about about The Fruitful Void (anyway is the blog of Vincent Baker of Dogs in the Vineyard and In a Wicked Age fame among other things). You'd best see for yourselves, the actual post isn't that long. I didn't get it at first. I mean I couldn't relate to it; my most recent experiences on playing RPGs was Shell Shock, and I couldn't pin-point the fruitful void(s) of that game even after a little thinking. It probably didn't help that the other game we are playing right now is PTA, which allows for a void but doesn't drive you towards a specific one.

The photo by Steven Fernandez (Creative Commons, attribution)