400 independent bathrooms

FOLK REALIS play report: session negative-one

some manifesto type shit for ya

I made some new IRL friends recently and there's talk of playing TTRPGs.

Often when a game text instructs/encourages/begs me to modify it for my own ends, I delay doing so. I need to first experience the baseline, I say to myself. Only by understanding how the game works can I know what modifications to make. And anyway, don't I want to see that it is fun on its own before I go investing effort into modifying it?

I've come to grips with the rules-lawyer side of me. I'm a designer, I'm interested in how these things work and I want to give them a fair shake, so I have found myself dragging down the fun of a session by insisting that actually, you already used your bonus action or technically, there's no inventory slot smaller than 1/3rd, or whatever. Recently I made the active choice to shut the hell up about this and it improved not only everyone else's experience but also my own.

Designers by and large understand that referees have plenty of leeway to rebalance around extra actions and stuff like that. And anyway, when the text smooths over a rough patch, it's things working as they should, but when a person does it, when someone you know does it, it's care. You should let people care for you sometimes.

I've played a small handful of what's known in my circles as "black box" sessions, where the players don't actually know the rules of the game, but the referee does. (In 1977 I guess they called it Kriegspiel. See Tamlyn's letter in Issue 10 of White Dwarf. Can you tell I recently read The Elusive Shift?) I love this. It really curbs my rules-lawyer instincts, and it strips away the abstract tactics of "playing the system," leaving you nothing with which to play but the fiction itself.

Realis is a game about Sentences. When I first read FATE, what struck me most of all was the notion of just writing down the important things, be they tactical objectives or character traits, on a shared document for all to see, and then leveraging those things either as a referee or as a player, to achieve some goal or other. And Realis is this idea taken to its most elegant form yet.

Realis is so straightforward with this, that I genuinely expect to be able to teach the basics within about 5 minutes and then barely if ever actually have to elaborate on the rest. It does have one thing that bugs me though, called Honing, and if we were playing a version of this where everyone has the book and references it then it'd be a harder sell for me to just excise this from play entirely, but we're not!

So: Black box Realis? Well, that's not really possible. The game does require a degree of player interaction with the mechanics because the mechanics are the fiction. That's fine but we can do something like folk Realis. As of right now, I'm the only player in my group-to-be who has the book, and I mostly intend to keep it that way. I don't even want to reference the thing at the table if I can help it, and I think I can.

One of the pieces of advice the game gives is to run a Session Zero before you really build anything and I intend to do so. Nevertheless I've gathered some inspirational material, and in so doing I've realized (heh) that I've been intaking a lot of media lately that falls broadly into this genre of space fantasy, planetary romance, whatever. Here's some of the stuff that's going in, probably!

So yeah! I don't know what shape this might take, but I should be finding out soon!