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:
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- 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
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 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 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.
I remain, gentle forumgoers, your most humble and obdt.
AviatrixCat