So I hope to do what I usually do when confronted with something I find curious or troubling–write about it and see what other people think!

I haven’t read the full backlog yet, but I’ll tell you my own process here: I immediately googled and checked out your (new) presence at story-games, and did think at first “who the hell is this guy coming out of Portland?” But I was quickly won over by the explanations of the mechanics, and especially the player-character-sheet-as-board thing. Also the way you nonchalantly stomped on the classic “My character! MINE!” canard of most of RPG history to date.

Those aren’t new developments; they’re well-attested in several games. Polaris and In a Wicked Age come to mind; the latter even has a resemblance to your own character sheet, though simpler.

I think you’ll find the “indie games community” as represented on sites like that is very welcoming, and no stranger to parallel inventiveness. I can also recommend my friend Brad’s blog at http://www.vsca.ca/halfjack/–he did a very nice job marketing Diaspora on several different boards without ruffling feathers and to much benefit. It wasn’t a Kickstarter project but it has a very similar history of “designing in public.”

I’m a backer and look forward to my spinner boxed set! This game hits right at a lot of my priorities and I wish you the best of luck because of that, and also ’cause you seem like a totally cool guy.

I find this all the time as I work in interactive and graphic design. The best web-sites, interfaces, etc. I have created didn’t start in Photoshop or HTML (or with the latest jQuery/flash/place the hot program here), they started on a sketch pad or on my white board. I was able to prototype and iterate quickly while removing all of the time overhead spent on getting the right gradient for the navigation. I then avoided painting myself into a corner, or focusing on the wrong thing. I created a solid base, then moved on to making those ideas work digitally.

And finally this post reminded me of this story:

http://www.citypages.com/2011-01-19/news/oregon-trail-how-three-minnesotans-forged-its-path/

The first few paragraphs illustrate the point made in this post very well. The Oregon Trail, probably one of the seminal video games of my generation started out as a board game.

Firstly, it’s intended to be used as your Skein wants to use it. If you need rigid rules around the sharing of performances, it’s perfectly acceptable to make that part of your Skein’s social contract and Bhaloidam will still support your storyworlds.

Secondly, If your social anxiety is something you want to work on, Bhaloidam is specifically designed to provide a safe, supportive, platform for doing so. Of course, you’ll need to find people who respect your boundaries and are willing to let you play at your own pace.

And if you don’t want to work on your social anxiety, and can’t bring yourself to contemplate learning to trust the people you’re gaming with, then I’m not sure any tabletop storytelling game would provide a safe storytelling environment for you.

So what you’re saying is, it’s impossible for someone with social anxiety to play this game as it’s meant to be played?

And not only is the mechanic self-correcting, but it encourages self-correction at the social level as well. A more hands-on Weaver might intervene with gentle questioning, “Do you feel that description is in keeping with the amount of Effect you have to spend?”

The Skein could agree to reward Renown modifiers (these increase the capacity of Influences) to compelling performances and reward only more appropriately scaled actions.

Even without intervention, a Spinner who finds the “reality” of the exchange not matching her Performance will, ideally, scale her future performances as she see the more experienced Spinners having a more fulfilling experience.

And there’s no reason the Skein couldn’t justify temporary swells in power, either! Adding a device to the story that has great effect (x6 your exerted will in Effect) could also have great drawbacks (the Will you exerted is Spilt, not spent, and therefore is more difficult to regain).

And, as you say,the social contract can also be adjusted to simply allow for more impactfully grandiose performances!

Correct me if I’m wrong in the rest of this:

A practiced Spinner will make their performance line up with the mechanical results of the die roll. A less practiced Spinner will probably miss some of their mechanical cues and create a more-or-less incongruous performance. This doesn’t seem to be a problem though, because the state of the markers on the LifeWheels and Opportunity tracker remain unaffected by performances that produce incongruous fiction. The next performance will still be cuing off the mechanical markers, so they have a self-correcting influence on our interpretations and hence our performances.

That’s really interesting! So even if a performance is egregiously off, the incongruity won’t last. Even if the performance indicates a profound shift in the power balance between characters, if the tokens on the LifeWheels don’t indicate such a shift, the other characters will be able to leverage quite a bit of narrative power still.

For example, say the Young Wizard fires off a spell intending to put an entire city into a magical slumber, but the Will exerted and dice result don’t support such a monumental effect. Her Spinner performs as if the spell was completely successful, narrating the populace falling asleep.

However! The Spinner of the Young Wizard hasn’t managed to mechanically wrest that much narrative control (pardon the combative language), as indicated by the state of the markers, and the next Spinner to perform has the mechanical support to do something more-or-less uninhibited by the (in-fiction) slumber enchantment – in fact, they have as much mechanical support left to do what they desire as if the performance were more in line with the mechanics. So along comes the next Spinner, who – in-fiction enchantment notwithstanding – has the Will tokens and a good enough roll on the dice to narrate how the depth of a their character’s love and concern for his ensorcelled daughter breaks the enchantment, allowing them to flee the city together.

If I’m understanding the answer right, then, the mechanics serve as an anchor, or a narrative centre of gravity, that gives Spinners permission to give performances how they will, but also gives every Spinner permission to balance under- and over-powered performances by creating performances that draw the fiction gently closer to congruence with the current state of the mechanical markers.

And best of all, what fiction counts as (in)congruous with the mechanical markers is entirely a matter of more-or-less intuitive group interpretation and consensus!

Sorry it took so long I really hope this comes through!

The Lifewheel includes an Opportunity Track (I just renamed it–it was once called the Timing Track.) that is used to determine who can perform an action when. If multiple Spinners are ready to perform simultaneously, there are any number of options to resolving the situation. The most compelling of which is Sharing the Scene and the most mechanical of which is letting the person with the highest capacity Influence go first. I encourage Skeins to follow the needs of the scene.

Being in a Skein requires building trust. If you have a Skein that is constantly vying for control and undermining each other (I mean as Spinners, not as characters.) –find a new Skein.

We’ve launched a Kickstarter project for Bhaloidam, so if you have found this post to be of value please consider helping us out.

Thank you very much for this post.

I’m not even sure the font displays properly in Chrome, it looks really funky here, like something was scaled down in Flash with the Quality mode disabled… it looks like it’s dropping pixels.