Good Society: Some Thoughts and Questions

I’ve now facilitated four sessions of Good Society* and played in another four so I guess that qualifies me as reasonably familiar with the system given it is so relatively new. So I’d like to share my observations below:

    • I will note my facilitated games bent the material slightly to use Tolstoy instead of Austen as the reference works but I don’t think that changed the game mechanically.*

First: I like Good Society more the more I play it. The system really just kind of…works and if you have a table at all ready to engage with the material, it sings. It can even sing if people go slightly out of frame; one of my favorite sessions of GS had me and another player basically doing Dangerous Liasons while the rest of the group was doing Austen-by-way-of-Brideshead Revisited and the session was wonderful fun.

Second: The system seems strong enough to me to handle all sorts of 19th century fiction; I hesitate to go later than that as the high value of reputation would need to be modified for more modern works, I think, and also because modern fiction bends away from the kind of conflicts found in early works. But Tolstoy? No problem. Henry James? Pretty sure it’s not an issue. Eliot? Ask someone who’s read her :slight_smile:

For that matter, 18th Century fiction seems to me also within reach. Tom Jones or Pamela seem like they’d work just fine (as would Werther or even, heaven help me, Candide).

I think it could handle 19th Century drama as well, but I’m not sure. A Good Society The Seagull seems an interesting project to investigate :slight_smile: I’ll note in passing that it’s possible plays make a better model for one-shot sessions than novels.

Third: Oddly enough, however, the structure of the game is less good at modeling…Austen.

Less good than it models other authors, is what I mean. It’s not complicated why: Austen tends to focus almost exclusively on a single main character, very rarely letting us inside the heads of other characters; but in GS we not only have multiple protagonists, but the players are also playing the connections. This leads to a multiplicity of points of view that we don’t find a lot of in Austen, even if, as Bakhtin says, the novels are complicated polyphonically. (If that doesn’t make any sense to you, don’t worry, it barely did to me and I wrote my thesis on that damn guy.)

This is why I felt that War & Peace was actually a better match for the game than Austen; Tolstoy is the great poet of ordinary lived experience, and while there are five central viewpoint characters in the novel, we often zoom in on minor characters, sometimes only for a few chapters before never seeing them again. Likewise, Dickens (at least in his third person mode) would seem an excellent fit, with his enormous cast of quirky minor characters.

Fourth: It seems to me sometimes that there is rather…too much a muchness in the game. For this I particularly want to look at the token economy.

Every game of GS I have played has ended up with some players having piles of unused Resolve Tokens. When I ran my Tolstoy game, I tried to watch like a hawk for when a resolve token should be spent (especially the first two sessions) but even so we ended with players with more than 4 tokens. Heck, I had a connection with 4 tokens!

Now, I imagine this is sometimes a playstyle thing. I frequently play with people whose good time is to make their characters suffer :slight_smile: and so the negotiation of a Resolve token would be perfunctory. Also, many of these games have been very dialogue heavy, so after the initial frame there’s little need for the spending of a token. And maybe that’s the flaw; maybe even the scene frame requires the spend of a token. But I’m not so sure that’s either the intent or even particularly useful.

The muchness also carries over to the Rumours and Scandal. There tend to be a lot of Rumours as well, and many just never come into play. With no token scarcity, the urge to use one for the Resolve token is depressed. A similar issue exists with the Reputation tags: sure, you can spend them against somebody, but why bother if you have enough tokens? We mostly filled up our entire Reputation track in my Tolstoy run.

Likewise creating two connections at the start of game might be a bit much, especially since we don’t know if they will be relevant or interesting. This was one place I stepped in during my facilitation: I urged the players to create one at start, and if they wanted/needed to create another they could. In the end, both my connections got used, but only one was interesting and important; the other appeared in a few scenes but was mostly a one-note character quickly ushered off the stage.

So I guess my questions are mostly about: how has the token economy worked for you? Is scarcity desirable or necessary? How much do Rumours come in? And how have you utilized Connections?

For my own part, I’d probably either reduce the number of tokens (keep the Mains starting at 2, but only give connections one maybe), or require them to be paid for more mundane tasks. Spreading a rumor could cost a token. Resolve tokens could be used in place of monologue tokens–this might see more use of the Reputation tags, as they would be an excellent place for a token-starved player to find a Monologue topic. (Also, then you could hand some one a token to indicate that they have monologued making it easier to see.) I’m not sure. For a short run I’d like to experiment with decreasing the tokens for sure.

Fifth: The Epistolary Phase is the game’s killer app. Everyone loves that in the games I’ve played. :slight_smile:

I remain, gentle forumgoers, your most humble and obdt.

AviatrixCat

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The Austen point is interesting - when I’ve played I sometime feel more like I am playing Wilde than Austen. However - I think that because the romantic tropes have similarities. I’ve been doing something on how you take the structure and apply them to P.G Wodehouse as farce.

The structure of play is its wonder. I’ve yet to play it on the drama setting, how about you?

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In the playtest I was in we were pretty good about spending our tokens once we got the hang of it. Love the idea of playing in Tolstoy’s world, or even better Dostoevskiy’s… Kudos to you for thinking of that.

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I’m planning to do Tolstoy/Good Society as a long-con at Dex right now :slight_smile:

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I’ve run a bit of these, and I think I’ve never seen token scarcity yet. I like the idea that a resolve token might also be used as a monologue token - once or twice I’ve really longed for one of these.

I’m not to sure on the tone, though. I’ve played one where the characters just were not very antagonistic towards each other, and that felt a lot like Austen with this very gentle, caring tone we had. (I have read two Austen books, seen the P&P series and watched Emma - not a real expert, but slightly informed?.)

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I might have created the wrong impression with the use of “suffer”; within the context of an Austenian romantic comedy, the suffering was appropriately gentle.

My Tolstoy game had sharper tone but even then, as brutal as the final confrontations were, there was a deep current of love underlying them and we ended with ultimate forgiveness which is…kinda Tolstoyan for sure :slight_smile:

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Not that anyone but me would actually try, but do you think you could do Ibsen with it, or is that too modern?

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Oh wow. I think I’ve only read Doll’s House. I…maybe.

I think there is probably a way to hit that late Victorian/preModern space, but it would be more of an overhaul than a mere hack; you’d have to take a serious look at the roles and probably write some new ones.

But that might be a ton of fun. You volunteering to collaborate?

Cat ponders The Iceman Cometh Society, decides that’s stretching stuff like taffy

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I’ve found that there’s a direct correlation to resolve token spending dynamics with player experience. I’ve played this game 20+ times by now, and every single campaign with someone (or multiple someones) who had never played it before; inevitably what happens is that there’s not a lot of spending in early sessions, and then at the end, tons of spending.

I’ve played in a modern setting with Vee, Yoshi, Agatha, and Nina and the game still worked, so I’m reasonably sure the game transports well to different settings.

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Hi @gene_a, would you mind sharing what your group modified (either mechanically, tone, or flavor-wise) to tell a modern-setting story? For instance, did you use role/background playbooks as is? Desire/relationship cards too? Did you make your own NPC cards?

I’m very interested to see how little I would have to change to tell a modern-day angsty CW series like Smallville, probably with the dual identity elements from Sense, Sensibilities, and Swordsmanship for secret superhero/villain identities.

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@AviatrixCat we are four sessions in and I echo your points regarding the token economy and rumors. The token economy reminds me of the compel in Fate; a mysterious appurtenance that serves no useful purpose unless your friends are playing to win, which no true friend will be. Tokens pile up and rumors do not matter mechanically at all.

Unrelated, I think my advice for people who want to try Good Society is to play with at least one fewer main character than you have players.

We’re still enjoying the game but there are pieces that truly give us pause.

Yours in Service,

Jn. Morningstar

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I was a player in that game, not the facilitator, but there was such a tight connection between campaign theme and Good Society that there was very little that needed to be changed in that instance. It’s sort of like doing “Clueless”, which is just a modern re-telling of “Emma”. Lots of those stories just work, since it’s basically Austen in a different context. @VeeHendro was the facilitator.

Once you start changing the type of story that you’re trying to tell, you’ll need to get under the hood and will have to change playsets, backgrounds, and desires. Lauren is working on a hack for this right now; I don’t know where she is with it.

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As another one of the players, I noticed that the options we had when creating the characters was focused, we didn’t have all of the standard options available. I don’t know, but I could see looking at some of the options and not really finding a way to fit them in a modern context. I don’t remember it being a problem at all. The options that were still there left us a ton to work with and most stuff just fit perfectly with the new modern context, there was a little bit of stretching for some stuff for “how does this look in modern time”, but none of it was hard stretching and we just did it on the fly.

Vee create a document for the specific modern setting background, and did the initial focusing of options, I don’t know how much work that was, but it helped give me, as a player, more than enough to work with.

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I’m curious what this advice aims to achieve. Do you mean that one of the players serves as facilitator (so 1 facilitator + 3 other players with 3 Main Characters), or that one player other than the facilitator foregoes a main character (ie 1 facilitator + 3 players with 2 Main Characters)?

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The relationship web gets very dense, very fast (a five player game as written will have 15 interrelated characters active at all times). Eschew the GM, who is not needed, and tighten up the number of characters. If you have five players and four main characters, that leaves eight interesting secondary characters to bounce around.

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My dear Mr Morningstar,

May I respectfully disagree about the number of members of good society one admits into one’s séance de rôles? I find that it is perfectly manageable to allow each player a main character while restricting somewhat the connections, who after all tend to clutter up the parlour most considerably.

I have the honour to remain most respectfully your humble,

Miss Catherine Ramen
Yorkville-upon-East

More seriously, I’d probably want to restrict the number of connections than the number of main characters, at least with any group smaller than six players. What I would insist upon would be the joint creation of connections. A couple of weeks ago I managed to pull off a game of Good Society that aimed at and achieved a nice little slice of Chekhovian drama, and I think at least part of that success was the joint creation of the connecting characters. And even then we had too many! Most of them were so one-note they needed no real expansion (Marya Sergeyevna’s father was onstage a few times but had no impact on the story; Timofei’s publisher barely registered; only Kostya’s muse Irina and Ksenya’s bass-baritone opera singer seemed to make much of an impression.)

I will say this about Resolve Tokens. In that Chekhovian-hell-is-other-people game we ran, as you might expect we basically didn’t use them. Except at the beginning of what we called Act III (it was the third novel chapter); I slammed down two tokens and said, “What I want is that Masha arrives at Kostya’s gallery first and alone; and also that nobody has come all night to his opening.” Now, I could have just framed this or looked around at the table to see if it was okay–after all, this is what happened, since I needed negotiation from everyone. But still, there was something satisfying about taking a marker on such an extreme vision of the situation and saying “Hey, this is happening unless anyone objects and I have the right to say so because of the tokens.” I’m still not sure that needs to be gameified in the current manner…but there was something interesting going on in my head about the matter that I want to interrogate further.

Also, I think my next project after the Red Carnations KS finally drops is gonna be a “Make a Chekhov/Ibsen play” since I need to keep up my string of “games about 100 people want to play” going. :wink:

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We see resolve tokens used similarly (I slammed one down and said “Tell her how you feel!”). My design-y brain tells me this is what they are really for, and that they are not well implemented as a technology as a result.

Connections do take on variable weight in the fiction, and I think this is a function of having too many, honestly. The perfect number, perfectly chosen, would each get the ideal amount of attention and screen time I suspect. There’s probably a benefit in having a wider pool to draw from, since imperfection is everywhere.

Regarding character monogamy and the number of sparkling central personalities, there’s room for different approaches!

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Undoubtedly :slight_smile: I’m an old school character monogamist which is of course why I wrote a game that doesn’t include it :slight_smile:

I think with regard to resolve tokens that there is probably a deeper design goal there, in that GS has the possibility to reach non-indie gamer and even non-TTRPG audiences (there’s a whole environment of Austen forum rpgs out there that one day I hope to venture into and return with a report) that may mean that they cannot be all things for all people–for us jaded play to lose types, they seem redundant, but in other contexts they may well help facilitate play for players unused to such goals in an rpg.

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Spitballing a bit further as I ponder this, if Connections need any mechanical weight (they might? like if the token economy made better sense?) it probably would be better to wait until the story developed before giving them that weight. I agree that having a decent pool of connections to draw upon allows figuring this out (though I stand by my “create one during main character creation, leave the other slot open for events to unfold”) but not giving anyone mechanical importance until they had demonstrated story importance.

Or just skip the mechanical importance :slight_smile: Masha needed to have a father around since I built her around the oh-so-Chekhovian concept of the daughter of the estate manager but he really didn’t do much except stammer a bit and look confused. Very Chekhovian but not particularly necessary to stat up :slight_smile: (@shane was marvelous in the small amount of interaction we had with the character.)

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I hope it’s not taken as nit-picky, but wouldn’t the one player without specific ownership of a Main character essentially become a facilitator/GM in that case? I agree that the GM role is not vital, especially with a group comfortable with sharing authority.

I haven’t played nearly enough to comment about token economy, but I did notice that while fewer connections become important than are created, I think that significance must be emergent. The players won’t know at first which of the connections will become important, so just creating fewer won’t guarantee that the few created are the few that are most engaging. Creating a connection that compels other players’ engagement probably demonstrates admirable levels of player skill.

On the other hand, waiting for connections to earn mechanical importance (in the form of tokens at least) is a good idea. I wonder how they can have even less mechanical weight aside from tokens before they prove engaging: a lot of decisions go into making a connection, so which decisions could be ignored and still give a connection enough to work with? Or how could a connection’s basic concept be conveyed to all players in a more accessible manner than name, age, relationship, look, personality, etc.?

I like the idea in Smallville (which also has connection-like characters) that a side character begins as only an Extra—serving essentially as a handy prop for a main character—until another main character establishes a dramatic/mechanical relationship with them. Only at that point is the Extra promoted to a Feature with all the additional details and mechanical ways of engaging them that entails.

As an aside, I’m also intrigued to try out Smallville’s idea of treating dramatically important locations as another flavor of Connection in Good Society.

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