• Bacchanal plays very differently from a typical RPG
• It very deliberately introduces a set of constraints and unusual requirements that frustrated four out of the five people in our group
• Complaints included that the resulting stories lacked meaning; that characters' stories could end arbitrarily early; that it was difficult for characters to meet each other; and that the content we introduced was repetitive and immature
• This session was extremely problematic. Even so, I had fun playing Bacchanal, and I believe it can be fun for others. I'm intending to try it again, under different circumstances.

• Bacchanal is a game by Paul Czege (My Life with Master)
• It provides rules for telling stories that occasionally have sexual or debauched content in them
• There's no GM; all players are very much equal contributors as the game plays out
• Each player gets a turn to tell a scene in their character's unfolding story to the other players
• Part of the content of these scenes is pre-determined by an initial dice roll
• When it's your turn to narrate, the other players don't really do anything except listen. They are the audience to your story; it is your job to entertain them.

• Set in Puteoli, a city south of Rome, AD61
• The god Bacchus has come to Puteoli and intoxicated its residents with the madness of wine
• You play a character accused of a crime and who has to flee the city during this chaos
• But you've been separated from your Companion, and must find them before you can leave

• I've been fascinated by Bacchanal for ages
• I was determined to play Bacchanal this year

• Realised that you could make a bad roll early in the game and die in the first turn.
• Created a one-sheet filled with rules summaries and tips
• Collected together a bunch of Roman names and locations to flesh out the world.

• A two hour con-game
• Five players - I was slightly familiar with all of them
• I was slightly nervous because: (a) it's Bacchanal, and (b) the game I'd run in the previous round hadn't gone entirely well
• Spent about 20 minutes building up trust, creative engagement and running through character creation
• During character creation, I didn't place enough emphasis on being a stranger to the city and needing to escape. This may have had an effect on some characters' stories
• Momentum was derailed by my hunt for more appropriately coloured d8s when I discovered we didn't have enough for 5 players

• I had fun narrating, and listening to other narrations (in particular, Ivan's)
• I felt extremely invested in my character's story and was eager to see how it turned out
• However, I had a bad roll early in the game and died (basically) in my first turn, I still enjoyed being an audience member
• Ivan and Nasia's characters both got taken out (through Companion and Soldier dice) a couple of scenes after me. At this point, I felt satisfied that the game would draw to a swift conclusion
• As a group, I think we bonded over the deadliness of Soldier dice (after they killed my character).
• Changing scene or location is actually exciting! Your movements are so constrained that it's a really opportunity to open out the story.
• Things dragged on for Richard and Rohan - their narrations got stuck in dice loops (*); there was no certainty we'd end the game in the time we had available. So we agreed to have a final round of narrations and wrap things up.

• While we had lots of scenes, overall the events of the game lacked structure and meaning
  
• Similarly, people felt limited in their ability to create story or move components of the fiction towards a confrontation they "needed" (or want) to have, in order to make the story work.
  
• The early knock-outs of players felt unfair; the knocked-out players can't really influence the game anymore
  
• None of the characters met each other or interacted at all. It was actually DIFFICULT to interact with other characters.
• It was difficult to escalate decadence in a way that felt interesting or compelling (there were lots of frat-boy-esque 'getting drunker' narrations)

• Ability to take actions was constrained
• Not being able to change location
• Not being able to interact with other characters
• It required a significant shift in how we approached the game - from Bacchanal being a role-playing game, to it being a story-telling game.

• The goal of Bacchanal is to keep an audience engaged in your story while using unfamiliar subject matter (sex and decadence)
  
• Successful play will probably involve some self-revelation about things that you find thrilling, exciting, or transgressive
  
• Bacchanal was a Game Chef entry and (I believe) used the concept of Fortune-at-the-Beginning as one of its constraints
  
• Happy endings will be rare :)
  
• The "escalate, but don't change scene" effect is one of the game's two great creative challenges. You resolve the situation by working your glass toward a higher ratio of non-Wine to Wine dice. Players hesitate to do this when they have Soldiers or the Accuser in their glass. When this is the case, Bacchanal makes you choose between possibly destroying audience interest in your character with an overly-long scene of potentially repetitious escalations, and the undesirability of increasing the chance your character has an unhappy ending. This is a design feature, not a flaw. It aims to convince that dramatic progress is more important to audience interest in a character than a happy ending.
  
  

• What happened to my character (here)
  
• What happened to everyone else's characters (in progress, here)
• My experiences playing the game (here)
• Notes from post-game talk (here)
  
• Did I mis-read the rules? (here)
  
• Ivan's thoughts (here)
  
• My thoughts on Ivan's thoughts (the first part is here)

• What happened to my character (here)
  
• What happened to everyone else's characters (in progress, here)
• My experiences playing the game (here)
• Everyone else's experiences playing the game (covered below)
• Notes from post-game talk (here)
  
• Did I mis-read the rules? (here)
  
• Ivan's thoughts (here)
  
• My thoughts on Ivan's thoughts.

• What happened to my character (here)
  
• What happened to everyone else's characters (in progress, here)
• My experiences playing the game (here)
• Everyone else's experiences playing the game ()
• Notes from post-game talk
• Did I mis-read the rules? (here)
  
• Ivan's thoughts (here)
  
• My thoughts on Ivan's thoughts.

• What happened to my character (here)
  
• What happened to everyone else's characters (in progress, here)
• My experiences playing the game (here, obviously)
• Everyone else's experiences playing the game ()
• Notes from post-game talk
• Did I mis-read the rules? (here)
• Ivan's thoughts (here)
  
• My thoughts on Ivan's thoughts.

• I was pleased that it happened to me; if one of the other players' characters had died this early, I think the game would have completely crashed and burned right there
• At least one player (Richard? Ivan?) was really apologetic about giving me the Soldier die in the first place. I tried to make them feel okay about that, because ...
• ... Dying genuinely didn't bother me. I knew it was a highly probable outcome of playing the game (*)
• I knew I could take the sting out of dying (for the other players) by suggesting I create another character. This isn't in the rules, but it seemed possible. I decided against it because (a) it isn't in the rules, (b) I felt that adding extra characters in would detract from telling a story about THESE people in THIS Bacchanal, (c) it might make the game run long if everyone could do it, and (d) it felt like a cop-out -- let's take death seriously, I thought.

• Ability to take actions was constrained
• Not being able to change location
• Not being able to interact with other characters
• It required a significant shift in how we approached the game - from Bacchanal being a role-playing game, to it being a story-telling game.

• What happened to my character (here)
  
• What happened to everyone else's characters (in progress, here)
• My experiences playing the game (here)
• Everyone else's experiences playing the game ()
• Notes from post-game talk
• Did I mis-read the rules?
• Ivan's thoughts (here)
  
• My thoughts on Ivan's thoughts.

• What happened to my character
• What happened to everyone else's characters
• My experiences playing the game (and everyone else's experiences)
• Notes from post-game talk
• Did I mis-read the rules?
• Ivan's thoughts (here)
  
• My thoughts on Ivan's thoughts.

• What happened to my character
• What happened to everyone else's characters
• My experiences playing the game (and everyone else's experiences)
• Notes from post-game talk
• Did I mis-read the rules?
• Ivan's thoughts
• My thoughts on Ivan's thoughts.

- 1 -

... in retrospect my biggest issue with "Bacchanal" was that as players we had no choice, no impact, no control.  You roll your dice, and that tells you what happens and what dice to do next.  I felt pretty much superfluous to the entire story-making process. 

Possible fix:  a minimal fix for this would be to have multiple options for each die outcome, so that the player could choose between them.  Another idea would be to give the player more control in the die rolling mechanism, e.g. the player chooses which dice to roll, presumably with certain constraints and perhaps with costs or different outcomes depending on what they have chosen to roll (the risks they have taken) and what they have left in their cup (the things they’ve refused to confront).

- 2 -

The second biggest issue was the accuser and companion subplots.  These seemed totally disconnected from each other and from the broader narrative about the bacchanal.  I’d assume that the point of these subplots was to give people something to worry about and something to aim towards, so that the game didn’t devolve into undirected narration of revelry, but because we had no control, we couldn’t be influenced by fear of the accuser or desire for the companion.  Additionally, the mechanics did their best to neuter the subplots, making them hard to introduce (and, as Nasia noted, practically impossible to introduce for more than one or two players over the course of the game) (*), and if you did manage to introduce them, bam, it meant there was a good chance you’d be out of the game before you could develop them into anything interesting. 

(* As only one person can have the Companion die at any one time.)

Possible fix:  have an accuser and a companion die for each player character.  The accuser might be in each player’s cup from the start (and could not be removed except at significant cost, e.g. burning the companion or a benign god), representing an ominous threat rather than physical presence.  Obviously in this case the accuser would need to be a smaller die.  Or perhaps the accuser starts as a D4 but goes up a die size in each scene. Perhaps also soldier dice are weak but the accuser can keep adding more and more of them. 

Not sure what the challenge would be for bringing in the companion die: or perhaps the companion die also starts out in the cup but weak, and there is some sort of challenge to make it grow.  In either case, the challenge should probably be a player choice thing, and related to the accuser subplot, the bacchanal story or both, e.g. if we hypothesise the “choose which dice to roll” example above, perhaps making a riskier choice – e.g. including a god or the accuser in your selection – is what invokes the companion (and/or making a conservative choice invokes the accuser – you are more likely to be in the place they’re looking!).

- 3 -

Finally, the business about having to roll the right dice to move to another location.  This rule seemed to achieve little except to make it well-nigh impossible for our characters to get together and create a truly shared experience.  I propose Towlson's Law: any RPG rule that acts needlessly to prevent players from communicating should be removed from the game, written on something fragile and flammable, and shot out of a cannon.  (Exceptions are permitted for games such as "Geiger Counter" where isolation and ignorance are part of the shared experience, on receipt of an application in triplicate on Form A11/17.) 

Possible fix: most die rolls should allow the player to choose whether to stay in the same location or change location (it would be okay if some die rolls said “you must stay in the same place” or “you must move” but these should be the minority).  Also, perhaps characters should start out in the same location, and move together, at least until the accuser or companion come into play?

Please don’t take the above the wrong way.  Despite my comments I would actually be interested to try “Bacchanal” again now I have a better handle on how it works (even if with only the minimal mandatory tweaks to prevent the bang-you’re-out scenario that whomped you, Nasia and me).  When I lived in the UK I used to playtest board games for a prolific German designer, so believe me I have played my fair share of ugly ducklings: if I bailed on a game just because it was broken the first time I tried it out, I’d have missed out on some very cool games indeed.  “Bacchanal” has the kernel of something cool even though it needs a lot of bashing into shape; and although what I got from those two hours was some ideas about game design rather than an intense emotional experience, that’s still good value in my book.   The game may not have worked for me on the roleplaying level, but since it has me still feverishly thinking things over several hours later, I hope you’ll count that a success of sorts!

--- --- ---

To which I then linked to a thread I'd found about Bacchanal, in which Paul Czege said:
 

It becomes immediately apparent in play that Bacchanal is an endeavor of audience management.

It's Fortune-at-the-Beginning: you roll, everyone sees the result, probably some suggestions are offered, but the buck stops with you, and you narrate.

And Bacchanal flips roleplaying's traditional sex/violence ratio, putting you into dramatically less familiar narrative circumstances. As roleplayers, we have a pretty well developed understanding of how to orchestrate the drama of violence, but we don't hardly know a damn thing about the drama of sex. So, in part, the game is compelling because it offers the player a chance to learn something worth learning: audience management using less familiar subject matter.

But the game is also thrilling. (There's a correlation between self-revelation and audience interest, because someone showing us their soul commands our attention.) Have you read any of Robert Browning's poetry? The poems of his first volume were very revealing of his most private emotions. And when they were rather savaged by the critics, he took it very hard. So in his later poems he developed a style that protected his emotions; he wrote them from the perspective of invented characters. And they're awesome. They suggest the author, they expose him, but indirectly. Browning's poetry went from utter vulnerability to more powerful veiled vulnerability. Bacchanal, I think, takes the roleplayer into that space from the opposite direction, from entirely opaque to veiled vulnerability.

The overwhelming feel of play, for me, was not unlike a somewhat risky game of Truth-or-Dare (fun in a true and voyeuristic way) fused with the satisfaction of meaningful creative activity.

--- --- ---

To which Ivan then replied:

That's interesting, and would definitely have helped. And it sounds like some of my comments would take the game towards something other than what Paul wants it to be. Nevertheless, even on his terms, I think "Bacchanal" currently fails.

For example, he talks about learning how to narrate sex instead of violence (paraphrasing here). That's a noble goal, but "Bacchanal" doesn't really help. Most of the guidance it gives seems to be "tell something more/less decadent than the last thing" (or tied up with the accuser or companion subplots, about which my comments stand).

This doesn't really help players create narrative interest, tension or revelation: it provides only the staccato framework of pornography, the disconnected recounting of thrills sought and taboos broken. His reference to "truth or dare" is telling: as a drinking game for people to tell each other about their own taboos and fantasies at a safe remove, "Bacchanal" might work, but that's neither role-playing nor story gaming: it is indeed "truth or dare," minus the dare.

(Also, if this is what he wants, the accuser and companion elements become even more mystifying: do they serve *any* purpose other than to tell you when to stop playing?)

Contrast this with Stephanie's "Sitting Shiva." That had a similar concept of creating self-revelatory narratives around themes other than ye olde RPG violence (death and remembrance, of course, rather than sex). But "Sitting Shiva" was much more effective in unfolding and structuring a narrative arc, through the gradual introduction of elements which built on what went before and through the guiding presence of the dead and of the host (and, albeit to a much lesser extent, through the provision of archetypes to suggest attitudes and actions).

"Bacchanal" would benefit hugely from that additional level of structure and guidance. In fact, thinking about it, Stephanie's structure of people sitting together relating stories would fit nicely with Paul's declared goals for "Bacchanal," much better than the chaotic bacchic dance of locations of the current design. It would also better handle different levels of engagement: personally I am not willing to discuss my sexual taboos and fantasies with a random bunch of con-goers, even at one remove, an attitude which "Sitting Shiva" handles neatly by
allowing players to adopt an "audience" stance whereas "Bacchanal" insists that everyone take their turn to stand naked under the lights.

And, dash it all, it would allow and even encourage *INTERACTION* rather than relegating each player to a passive role or to out-of-character brainstorming for 80% of the time.

Also, he talks about "audience management" but I find this hard to reconcile with the round robin structure. He talks about the poetry of Browning but I don't recall that in between each stanza of a Browning poem there were interspersed stanzas of four completely separate poems by Keats, Burns, Dickinson and Larkin. A better structure might be something like "Baron Munchausen," where the player tells a complete story rather than having it artificially broken up, but other players have an active in-character role in the story-telling (as in "Baron Munchausen"'s challenge mechanism), so that they are not merely passive observers as they are in "Bacchanal" and can therefore sustain their interest in longer narratives. (Hmm, and thinking about it, "Baron Munchausen" also refracts the stories through a dinner party setting. I'm beginning to notice a theme here...)

But as you'll have realised by now, my issues with round-robin games could fill a much longer email than this one... *grin*

Anyway, looking forward to seeing your writeup, and I hope the other players will comment as well -- I get the feeling that we all took away
interestingly different impressions of the game.

• I want to run a 3 to 7 episode game of Mouse Guard - which my Tuesday night group is already doing. [ DONE! ]

• After that, it looks like we're going to play Season 2 of our Primetime Adventures: 'The Other Side' game. This would make it the longest running game we've ever done, and the first time we've revisited one of the stories we've told. [ DONE! ]

• I'm going to run Bacchanal this year - a one-off game of wine and decadance in ancient Rome. [ DONE! ]

• In terms of publishing, I want to finish putting together the Bad Family ashcan so other people can read and play it. Then I want to choose a 3-page game to publish - at this stage it's looking like either the Zombie Plan or my untitled LARP game.