My friends and I started trying it a couple of weeks back. The first part of the game, the worldbuilding, is awesome—different players ‘own’ different parts of the world, so while you throw a lot of ideas back and forth, specific players have final arbitration over which details do and don’t get included. The character building is also interesting—you collaboratively pick a couple of axes that the characters will vary along. For our session we picked corruption/integrity as one axis and personal responsibility/lack of as the other. Then each player creates a character that will explore the theme/issue that the person to their left owns, deciding where they fall on each axis and some details about their character for other players to work with. Then the person to their left creates the antagonist for that character who will oppose their goals.
Unfortunately, we ran out of time after that, so I can’t really comment on the mechanics of the actual roleplaying, only my impressions from skimming the first couple of chapters of the manual. The dice rolling mechanics seemed a little clunky, a poor attempt to incorporate randomness into a framework that’s really all about the collaboration.
Shock: Social Science Fiction seems interesting, but I’ve never read the rules or played it myself.
My friends and I started trying it a couple of weeks back. The first part of the game, the worldbuilding, is awesome—different players ‘own’ different parts of the world, so while you throw a lot of ideas back and forth, specific players have final arbitration over which details do and don’t get included. The character building is also interesting—you collaboratively pick a couple of axes that the characters will vary along. For our session we picked corruption/integrity as one axis and personal responsibility/lack of as the other. Then each player creates a character that will explore the theme/issue that the person to their left owns, deciding where they fall on each axis and some details about their character for other players to work with. Then the person to their left creates the antagonist for that character who will oppose their goals.
Unfortunately, we ran out of time after that, so I can’t really comment on the mechanics of the actual roleplaying, only my impressions from skimming the first couple of chapters of the manual. The dice rolling mechanics seemed a little clunky, a poor attempt to incorporate randomness into a framework that’s really all about the collaboration.