Crescendo Design Journal: The Weaver Has to Play

 

An introduction

Should be made for people who have never seen my weird little game. You need to know two different mechanics in order to appreciate the post: Hitting the Books and Beliefs

Hitting the Books

The big unique thing  about Crescendo is its usage of journals. Everyone has either a notebook or a word processing program where they can randomly search whatever they write.

To Hit the Books, everyone opens up their journals to where they know there's writing, closes their eyes, and randomly select a passage from the page. Everyone reads their random selections out loud, and the Weaver (think GM) free associates what he hears into a piece of infromation, like a plot twist or an answer to a question he didn't expect. Everyone then writes down what their character would think of that plot twist or piece of information.

Example:

Alex, playing Warlord Bastien, and Danny, playing Sir Mal, are fighting a troll, and one of them scores a hit on the troll via rolling dice. That requires Hitting the Books, to see what weird plot twist comes up. Paul the Weaver tells everyone to Hit the Books. They randomly search their journals.

Alex: "Without a horde, you're nothing"

Paul: "Everyone dies alone."

Danny: "And when I saw Genevieve, everything changed."

Paul, based off of those readings, decides that a small woman comes running to the defense of the troll: "Leave Stravlkin alone! He wasn't hurting anyone!"

There's a young woman who thinks the troll that was roaring at Alex and Danny is lovable. Is she right?

Notice how it was just what Paul felt like doing in the moment. He could have come up wit ha totally different answer to those prompts, and it would have been fine. That's what he wanted in the moment. That and he was keeping the Beliefs of the players in mind, see the next section.

Beliefs

The core of your character are three Beliefs, statements your Hero is willing to burn the rest of the world down for. If you act in accordance with your Beliefs, you usually succeed in your actions during the game. You gain power from acting upon your Beliefs.

The Weaver normally tries to make situations that challenge Beliefs, pitting them against each other. If the Weaver does his job right, a lot of the game is centered around trolley problems pulled from the players' Beliefs.

Warlord Bastien

1. The Horde has always been my home. I will never be at home without them.

2. We used to beat our women and children, to our harm, and I put a stop to it. I owe my ability to hope to this.

3. Our Horde is constantly fighting. My rage (and purpose) are fed because of it.

Sir Mal

1. King Julian knighted me as he lay injured on the battlefield. I don’t owe him anything I think important.

2. The queen Madeline took me as her toy. I owe her many a good time.

3. One day a knight, Sir Alain, came into the slums where I picked pockets, and told me that he was my father. He taught me what kindness looks like.

The above example 

is actually a pretty good poke at both the Heroes. The young woman is dedicated to the troll, something that both Sir Mal and Warlord Bastien respect. But it also rubs against the fact that they're facing the troll in combat. Sir Mal is fighting because he is a knight, that's a troll over there, and it's threatening people. Warlord Bastien very much conflates rage and purpose, so if he stops what he started it's not going to go well for him.

They're going to have to pick a way forward, and it's probably not going to be clean.

That's the heart of what makes Crescendo.

I have made

 a ton of changes to Crescendo over the years. It's a criticism leveled at me that I have no choice but to own. I like to tinker, what can I say? Game design is a hobby. It ain't my job. A lot of the changes are also what I think of as "periphery": stuff that goes around the core of Crescendo.

Here's the old formula for a single Chapter Session:

• A random event happens, drawn from the journals
• Players, one at a time, respond to this random event, using their Beliefs and the Setting's Myth to succeed at their actions. This is a verbal puzzle. You have to solve the metaphysical and material aspects of the problem in order to win.
• Players can roll dice to challenge what's going on. It always randomly resets the situation after rolling, whether you win or lose.
• The randomness is determined by everyone's journals, when they Hit the Books. This means that the randomness begins to converge after a long, long long time.

And, so long

as Crescendo was a 1-3 player game, without 1:1 time, this setup worked. A smaller game meant the story sorta meandered but was deeply meaningful. As the Weaver, I somewhat focused on Beliefs, but it was a small enough social environment that I didn't have to really focus on Beliefs. We could essentially run the Epic as a series of one-shots that have indeterminate time skips. Which was a really fun setup, and I loved doing it.

But the goal has always been 

to emulate the kinds of stories Gene Wolfe, Christopher Ruocchio, and C.S. Lewis tell. And something was  missing in the above set up. It was close, but this is my hobby and I don't have a deadline, and therefore I can turn on the 'tism all the way up, and say "No, not yet." Wolfe isn't about characters who are only tangentially connected to each other, but who are connected even when they aren't in the same room, and they may not know it. This is shown the best in Book of the Long Sun and The Wizard Knight, where Wolfe puts his philosophy right up on his sleeve.

Enter the BROSR 

and their discoveries in 1:1 time and interlude scheming. Immediately I knew this would fulfill the core conceit of Wolfe: everyone is the tip of an iceberg. Everyone is connected, and their actions affect each other all the time, they just don't know it. And this game tech would allow me fulfill that core conceit.

So I committed to testing another two years after putting in 1:1 time and entirely player-driven scheming into Crescendo. I'm here to make a good game that emulates Wolfe faithfully.

And it works!!!  It requires some more work from the players, but it more than pays back what they put into it. Players could take a great deal of effort and care and get amazing results out of Crescendo.  The rules support the players as close to perfectly as one can get. This has been proven, over and over and over again. The players are really happy! Each session is part of a continuum of story that's going on around it, an iceberg of drama.

That, right there, is Wolfe in a nutshell. Disagree with me at your peril.

And yet, as we get 

to the end of the first Book of The Fall of the King of Sota, I know, intuitively, that something is off. I have learned when to trust this feeling, and to know when to put it aside. I have the time to look at it, so I decided to let it through the gates.

And boy, did I get a mainline of intuition that was pretty self-damning.

Crescendo is based

very openly upon merging storygame and oldschool principles, especially the BROSR. I've never been quiet about that. And it works like it should: oldschoolers find the game focused on story in a way they appreciate, while storygamers like the structure and how it helps generate unexpected outcomes. The logic of Crescendo is extremely old school. The results are pure story.

And nowhere is this more obvious than the role of the Weaver. When I first named the role, I thought of it as an old-school judge with a slight twist: it was his job to interpret all the journal entries read out loud during Hitting the Books. His primary job was to weave the random journal entries from everyone into something coherent. The general shape of the story was not the Weaver's business. So long as we were at this more intimate scale, that was fine.

But then

I added in 1:1 time, interlude play, and I opened the game up to twelve different people. I am currently running the game for nine. Which is absolutely crazy! I've never done anything like this for a storygame! Crescendo scales the additional players really nicely, and the interlude play sings with 5+ people. Some of the best gameplay I've ever had in my life has been in that in between PBP stuff. It's amazing to see how people cook up these situations, and it's been a real genuine pleasure to be the Weaver for these moments.

As it turns out,

scale matters. Crescendo's Hitting the Books mechanics, which create manageable chaos at 1-3 players, absolutely balloons at anything higher than three. Which means that what was originally a somewhat meandering story goes completely chaotic. The players are doing what they're supposed to be doing. The story should cohere, and the thematics, I found, were lacking in a specific way that I knew was not the player's fault. They have been going at 11 the whole freaking time, and it's been beautiful.

The fault should

be obvious: The role of the Weaver has not adapted to the new ludological environment. The players are not going to naturally cohere at the scale that Crescendo now operates in. The Weaver does not live up to his name, now. The Weaver originally was meant to be much more similar to an oldschool Judge.

With the increased scale and the addition of between session play, the Weaver has more material to work with. And it is his job to do so.

And it can all be fixed very simply.

Here's the new formula for the Chapter Session:

• The Weaver picks a player and uses the consequences of their actions during interlude play to challenge their Beliefs.
• The player uses their Beliefs and the Setting's Myth to respond to the Weaver. It's a verbal puzzle. You have to solve the metaphysical and material aspects of the problem presented by the Weaver.
• Once the player is done responding, the Weaver uses the consequences of their actions to challenge another player's Beliefs, possibly using SEEN and GOSS.
• Players can roll dice to challenge what's going on. It always randomly resets the situation after rolling, whether you win or lose.
• The randomness is determined by everyone's journals, when they Hit the Books. This means that the randomness begins to converge after a long, long long time.

• Once the session is done, it is wrapped up by Hitting the Books, to see how the actions of the session have created unexpected consequences.

The benefits

of this are powerful. The players' actions from between sessions are validated because they are directly addressed. This creates a loop between interlude play and its chapter session. You now have a unified story going on, across the weeks. And then... the journal pull creates consequences none of us could have seen coming, forcing the players to go address the fallout in the next week of interlude play. The players have to go address the consequences of their actions in the next week of interlude play. Which then blows up in the next chapter session.

This will make the Weaver inherently start drawing the threads together, before the game explodes it back out again, twisting the story into unexpected directions... which are based upon the players' journalings!

By making

the Weaver the active bridge between Interlude scheming and Chapter friction, Crescendo doesn't lose its old-school logic or its storygame heart. It finally lets nine people sit at a table, spin their own threads, and watch as the tapestry builds into something totally unexpected, new, and hauntingly beautiful.