Saurashtra - Actual Pull Play Examples

So. Actual Play.

For the moment I'm going to stick with one particular game, because it's a Nar game, even if it didn't use a good system to support it's Nar (Brand found it a pain in the ass, but frankly, I think it made us innovate), and because, well it's full of examples, and I'm a lazy ass.

Part the first: Kika

There's the (apparently) infamous one that Brand talked about on The Forge, and that is written up here in more story-like style. In this discussion, I'm going to talk about one critical pull transaction, but it will be important later in the blog to discussions about using pull techniques to create satisfying and functional immersion play in Nar games. So if I've referred you here from the future, this is the example I mean. If you're reading this in the present, the previous sentence has nothing to do with the droids you're looking for.

The critical pull, is, of course, the moment that I had Kika set aside her weapons and charms and put herself at the mercy of Jerzom. Over on 20x20 when we were talking about it today, Brand helped to explain that we were in what Polaris calls "freeplay" when I did these things. Brand was all expecting a war, either physical or manipulation-verbal. I did not need a conflict for Jerzom to come to me, I knew he was coming. Brand wasn't sure what I wanted and so he asked what I was trying to accomplish, and I pulled.

In that moment, Kika was the hero I'd always hoped she'd be. I was happy with what she'd become, and nothing that Jerzom did to her was going to change that. I had complete trust in Brand, in the group, and in the story we'd made together. I opened up the space for Brand to fill up. It wasn't a passive move, it wasn't that I didn't care, wasn't engaged or was being passive aggressive. I'd brought it hard in this game for two years. I'd addressed the premise of the game to the fullest extent every step of the way and in the last moment I put her and everything I worked for on the table to be judged, for Brand to come in and tell me what it was that I'd accomplished, to agree with me that this is what the story was all about, and fill up the space I'd given him with everything he wanted Kika and Jerzom and their story, and the story at large to say.

Part the second: Taree

This one is not my character, its one of other players in the game, who played the flawed hero striving to live past his flaw to become a truly noble scion. By this point he had faced off against his family, against the Realm, against himself a lot. Throughout the game, Taree's player pushed and pushed and pushed. He pushed exceedingly well from within the system - he killed everything that came in his way. He told a great story, and this was the end of it:

In his last scene, he faced off against his cousin, possessed by Malefeus, the biggest Yozi of them all. He pushed and pushed, speaking with the Yozi inside his cousin, and it was all really heartbreaking. Finally, he used knives that could suck the souls of their victims driving one into her gut and one into his own. Doing so, he trapped both himself and the Yozi within his body, and at last, he spoke the Rune of Unconquerable Self which, when invoked, kills the user instantly, ending both his life and the Yozi's with him.

Sound like push play? It is. What came next wasn't. Brand pulled Taree's player. He asked him to roll his virtues and gave him the opportunity, for each success he earned, to describe the legacy that his life had brought to the world. Taree's player accepted this, and described several, but what Brand offered him was a wealth of opportunity and a little overwhelming. Rather than just laming off the extras he couldn't think up, or putting anything less than the game deserved, he turned to me and the other player and said: "You tell me. What kind of person has he been? What good or ill has he brought to the world?" and invited us to make strong, lasting statements about what he'd given to the story. He pulled his fellow players to have the last word on who his character had been.

There's a couple.

I'm sure I'll do more as I think of them, but I wanted to get something out.

One more note: I can't say if this has anything to do with the pull examples above, but I think it has a lot to do with the pullish kind of social dynamics that we'd encouraged around the table over the entire duration of the game. Even if it's irrelevant, it's a cool success story about a former Sim junkie in her first Nar game, so I think you'll like it:

The third player played Dae, a barbarian warrior woman who becomes the protector of the civilization she once despised. Her player had real trouble initially in the game with some of the concepts of Nar. She had problems authoring directly to the fiction, thinking of the story in terms of premise, and she had real trouble asserting desires or demands to the GM. At one point in the beginning, she even had brought some notes in on a piece of paper that she gave to Brand with some things she wanted because it made her so uncomfortable to tell him about it, and Taree's player, (her husband) had told her that she must ask for it when they were discussing the previous episode. She even at one point pretended to lose the sheet to stall in giving it to him (though this may have been done comically). She's definitely never been a particularly push player.

In her last scene, she realized in a fight with the Ebon Dragon, that she couldn't kill him, and he couldn't kill her, and that they couldn't exhaust each other. The fight would be endless, her life filled with nothing but the endless, un-winnable war. In the entire two years of the campaign, the character had never walked away from a fight. She had only ever lost two fights, and those were when she was beaten so badly she really had no choice. She had to choose between letting him go free or giving up any chance at happiness, or a life. She chose life.

At the end of the game, all of our final scenes had ended, it had been brutal and beautiful and brilliant. Brand said "I think that's it, unless there's something else you need?" and (which, come to think of it, can be seen as a pull, considering where we were and how open it was, and what came of it.) Dae's player, who had had such a problem asserting narrative desire, nevermind narrative control didn't tell Brand what she wanted, she just started to narrate, giving the story the denouement that she needed it to have, that frankly, we all needed it to have and that none of us, Taree's player, Brand or I could have given at that time.

Neat huh?