Fellowship 2e (Part 2)

A polished masterwork or burdened by over-design?

This is the second part and conclusion to our Fellowship 2e critical analysis. You can find part one here

5. Disassemble Engine

Games have a flow, which, when you hit, the game pretty much runs itself. It is extremely satisfying. After examining the interactions of game elements, we single out the most important - the one that sets the pace of sessions, or even campaigns. We focus on how that engine works, how it makes the game move along, and what to do to make it do what you want to do - and how to keep it running clean.

Ludo 

I don’t think Fellowship has an engine, or rather, any particular element that stands out as what drives action.

Alright, alright, this is neither useful nor respects the framework. Let me come up with a better answer.

Rather than relying on a single engine to plow through collaborative storytelling, Fellowship has multiple arrays of Stories, organized in tandem, with the narrative being explored as we play through them. That’s right, the famous PbtA “Conversation” is nowhere close to the driver’s seat. Moves happen within the context of a Scene, which itself happens within the context of a Story, which…

Something like this?

Alright, but how does this actually work? It goes something like this:

Look at what has happened in the game so far, look at the current context. Pick a type of Story which makes sense to play through.

Each story has its own procedure, which is resolved through Scenes. Each Scene is broken down into three processes:

• Setting up the Scene;

• Passing around the Spotlight;

• Wrapping up and summarizing the scene.

Setting up the Scene is self-explanatory, but Spotlight is the most crucial step; that’s how you make cool stuff happen and use your Moves (or not). Once the Spotlight has passed back and forth enough times to resolve the questions that drive this scene, there is a little recap of what just happened, then if everyone is satisfied you proceed to the next Scene of the Story or a new Story.

Ludo

There is something akin to the Thirsty Sword Lesbians’ approach, which is to have a metatextual support engine. Fellowship takes the familiar Agenda/Principle apparatus and uses it to drive a collaborative story in a more definitive way. Each playbook has its own extra Agenda, which also positions that culture in the world. The collective buffet of Agendas plays off each other, feedback into Stories and giving that extra push to not only keep things moving, tying them back into the player characters and their peoples.

Ludo

So, interesting sub-engines. I really like the narrative booster that is Level Up, it really drives character progression and plot pacing.

While Leveling up is not the only way for characters to progress, it assures there is an increased escalation of stakes and story, assuring the story is going to hit multiple “arc end” climaxes.

At the end of a play session, the player characters reflect if they managed to help a community, thwart the evil Overlord, and/or learn more about the world and its people. This gives them three refreshes for equipment or heals; alternatively, they may choose to Level Up. This is pretty interesting because gives such fine control of pacing; do we want to linger without advancing the evil plots, or want to stay at this “power level” for a big longer? We use this for other things besides Level Up.

But let’s see what happens when you decide to Level Up. All players -those of the fellowship and the one playing the Overlord - pick one character to level up. That’s it; you can only not be picked if you are already the highest level character and/or already leveled up this session.

Other players’ benefits of leveling up should be self-evident, but what happens when the Overlord Levels Up? Well, that is when you get one of those climaxes delivered next session: either a new Move that lets the Overlord spread evil in a new way, get close and personal with a member of the fellowship, or advance their plans substantially.

And all of this is democratically, non-hierarchically decided! And fine-tuned just as your table needs!

Brad

The fact that the players could make these calls could affect who got leveled up and when became a fun sub-game and source of out-of-character joking for my party. Every session ended with me giggling, asking if I could level up.

Ludo

While I am hesitant in calling this an engine, I cannot stop thinking about this. It kinda is? Close enough, I guess; some sort of sub-sub-engine that redundantly feeds into all the other engines we talked about.

I briefly mentioned the Overlord’s plans when talking about Level Up. The Overlord has two Plans going on. A plan always involves a source of power and a community they want to be destroyed; it has three steps once you start a plan: sending the Overlord’s minions to start the Plan, actually implementing the Plan, and achieving Victory.

Once a Plan is accomplished, the world is changed forever and the Overlord gets a permanent, substantial power up. So, how does this ties up with damage?

Besides Level Up, Plans also advance when the fellowship decides to Recover or picks A Little Downtime as a Story. You need to do those to recharge resources and recover damage reliably; so, damage, and how you manage it, feeds back into the progression of the shared narrative. You may continue adventuring with lean resources or seriously hurt, abdicating of Level Ups to keep going so you can get time to stop the ongoing Plans; or you can take some breaks when you are unsure of what the Overlord is going to do, letting them get enough of the plans going so you know what is your call.

And at the same time, pushing yourself also strains Bonds; this keeps Bonds central to the game, always forming and breaking, keeping the cast of characters expanding and rotating as the narrative proceeds.

Damage and its management, just like Level Up, is an important tool for horizontal collaborative storytelling.

Brad

I am going to hone in, for a brief moment, on The Overlord and Their Plans, and how they affect dramatic tension. In my home game, the very first move my Overlord took gave them an extra standing plan, and this changed the entire pace of the game. My party began to skip rests, focus on fighting fires that were cropping all over the world, and making each moment to rest a rare treat. This absolutely transformed how the players felt, it sold the idea of their particular villain as a master planner and serious threat. I loved every minute of it.

6. Essentials For Session One

So, you got this game, you going to play it, but you don’t have the time to read everything. Or even worse, your have read it and now it is all jumbled together. Here we break down the things that you absolutely want to try to get right and/or hit during your first session, so you get the feeling of what makes this game stand out from similar art.

Ludo

This was not supposed to happen.

Sure, many games have some prompts and instructions to how to lay down the first session and get the game to the table; I have yet to find one that has such a detailed procedure to do so.

So, well for Session One? Follow the guidelines of the structure laid in the Fellowship core book from page 120-128. Then, use the other types of Story structures depending on what happened in your story. Passing this ball to Brad as I recalibrate.

Brad

GM’s, this little bit is for you, feel confident in what you want to do, Fellowship, more so than most other games treats you as a fair member of the party. You should say things you would like to see, also feel comfortable in asking some playbooks to remain off the table if it’s your first crack, most PbTA’s will let you run all the existing playbooks with any level of system knowledge, Read Over the Powerful Playbooks. They each say something about the setting as well as being mechanically powerful.

But otherwise, Ludo’s right.

Ludo

Alright, the procedure presented in the book will take care of you. This frees you to focus in ways to get the best of the procedure AND experience what makes Fellowship so unique.

• The Spotlight. The game is the Spotlight! Keep it flexible, and keep passing it. Someone in danger? Get them the Spotlight and see how they deal with that. Someone’s actions put them into trouble when they have the Spotlight? Pass the Spotlight for a short cliffhanger. Someone has an idea? Spotlight. Someone speaks? Spotlight. Someone has not have an opportunity to shine in a while? Spotlight. Your Principles and Agendas will have suggestions how to use Spotlights, and if you are playing your Overlord, look at your Moves and Cuts - those let you interact with the Spotlight in interesting ways that can be missed during a short first session.

You may forget everything else, but will be fine as long as you have the Spotlight

• Learn how damaging stats work, what each stat means and how they establish the current narrative positioning. Damaging a stat is how you defeat any threat, from an obstacle to your journey to the overlord. When a stat is damaged, the text of that stat does not exist. What this means to your Companion when Fearless is damaged? Or to the giant robot when the Power Limiter is damaged? As a player character, you often take damage as part of “paying a price”. Player stats are more permissive - their text still exists, you may use them, but you roll three d6s and pick the worst two dice when rolling them. While many Fellowship Moves require you to roll with a specific stat, the most interesting let you choose - and this choice has a powerful narrative effect!

To make the most out of the damage mechanics, check Generous Fellowship version of Pay The Price!

• From the previous points you may have been aware of how shared and non-hierarchical the collaborative storytelling is in Fellowship. While this is rewarded and supported by multiple systems and relationships, the most obvious element that you will encounter in your first session is Command Lore. Use Command Lore and use it often; it downplays the hierarchic assumptions about the GM/Overlord, and empowers players to take ownership of the game and use the narrative control given to them. It is simple, but really eases people in to normalize this early on.

When someone asks something about your character or your people, tell them. When you ask about another character or their people, they will tell you the answer. When you ask about the Overlord, they alone may choose not to answer.

7. Playing The Game Wrong

Games are played wrong. Rules will be misunderstood, interactions will be confused, the importance of certain tech disregarded; etc. This is good, and it is good to acknowledge for: you cannot have the designer at your time, and even if they were, they would be just another player - and entitled to play it wrong. After identifying stress points of the game, things that don’t connect that well, we think of the things that are more likely to be (our have been) “played wrong”. What happens when you forget a line in page 273 clearly saying this is impossible?

Ludo

The biggest problem with Fellowship is that people used to more orthodox PbtA will get to Fellowship and will try to run a “vanilla” PbtA, engaging in auto-pilot while using Fellowship’s Playbook/Moves; this is quite a different experience from playing Fellowship. Overcome “muscle memories” when it comes to rules and systems can be difficult, but may be worth the effort for this game.

I really cannot think of something else that may come off as a consistent stress point; I tried to break this game apart into its working compnents, but it has broken me into a sobbing mess instead.

Ludo

It is pretty easy to “powergame” in this game; it is kinda pointless to do so in well-designed PbtA games, so it is never a fulfilling experience. There is a special type of fun that comes from understanding the mechanical components of the systems that make a game and getting it to do the things you want, the fun of mastery over a skill. Fellowship does more than most PbtA lineage games to acknowledge this, with Powerful playbooks. However, I don’t know if this is enough to bring fun to those players. It is not really my kinda of fun, do you have an opinion on it?

Brad

I briefly touched on the concept of Powerful Playbooks, these will appeal supremely to players who enjoy confident, competent, powerful protagonists, but, I don’t think they will appeal to players who enjoy “powergaming”. Powerful Playbooks make you much mightier, capable of terrifying and wondrous abilities, but they are narratively powerful instead of mechanically powerful.

8. What to Steal

Experiencing good art is the most important step in making good art. We look back at the things that worked and did not work about this game, see what we learned for design work, interesting tech and just a general overview of things that we will take from this game and bring into others. Or more honestly: since many of us may not play this game and we have it in our library, this way we can get some use out of it.

Ludo

Everything that is not nailed to the ground and then the nails and the ground?

Seriously, Liber Gothica must have the most generous license of TTRPGs, specially when you take into account it covers over a thousand pages packed with game tools and art palettes. Covered by a CC BY-SA-4.0, you can:

• Share the content in any way

• Transform the content in any way you see fit

• Commercialize and distribute shared content as well as transformed content.

The only limitations are:

You must credit Liber Gothica/Vel Mini, and why would you not do that?

Your additions must be covered by the same license and you cannot impose any additional restrictions .

Like, have taken a good look at this? I’m cursing at myself.

How much time I have spent working on entirely original design? Or begged for scraps at corpo that keep IP behind lock and chain for rent-seeking licensing and other predatory practices? Or say, a ill-conceptualized SRD that I have spent more work trying to kinda do what I want to do than building something from the scratch? Or see auteurs geniuses lay claim to the general intellect because they made the tiniest contribution to it? How this growing enclosure of what you can and cannot use has parasited over the last decade of labor in this art form?

Me, spending my silly little time making the silly little games as you build your silly little brand and claim your silly little enclosure in a silly little platform economy

Look at the generosity of Fellowship. Imagine if I had, dunno, used Fellowship its accumulated labor and contributions to general intellect. Maybe then I would have some I can actually bear to play, that people want to play, and will not be snatched by some of the Five Persons that Matter. Or at least, it would not take me years to get anything done.

Don’t be me. See the bounty shared with us all for what is.

Brad

Fellowship’s license is generous, it has something for anyone, don’t be afraid of it.

Ludo

The idea of Pbta-As-System (colloquial, derogatory meaning of system) contrasting with PbtA-As-Framework is demonstrated by Fellowship, and may be an important thing to take to other PbtA designs.

PbtA always been interesting as design currents go, but has become really interesting in the last three/four years. As people move to the newest “fashionable systems” (I want to say BoB and FitD, but that may not even be true anymore, Paragon and Wandered by Home may be the hot shit at the time of this writing), if you are designing a PbtA, it is because what you are trying to do is pushing the limits of PbtA - either as “system” or framework.

PbtA, especially PbtA-As-Framework, is not a “done” design space. Fellowship is joining Flying Circus and Legacy engine games as proof that there is still a lot that can be done with it today.

It’s a good day to play Fellowship;

It is a good day to design in new directions within familiar spaces.