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) 

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.