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Message: <blockquote data-quote="lin_fusan" data-source="post: 5141965" data-attributes="member: 37085">Oh! Thanks for the reply, Novem5er. This thread got so buried I hadn't realized you had answered my question.The second session went incredibly well by comparison to my first (not having a headache helped). I was able to smoothly (relatively) transition from GM Turn to Player's Turn, show the three levels of tests (simple, versus, and conflict), and get the players to understand the importance of the negative aspects of their Traits as well as their positive aspects. The mission was to discover what had happened to a couple of moss harvesters (a husband and wife). I had left the first session on the players finding their bodies instead of a proper end of a Player's Turn, but decided it would be a good hook to start off on. Once they realized it was a ferret that had attacked the harvesters, the patrol quickly decided to forge westward toward Darkheather and pretty much failed every Scout and Pathfinder test before them. By the time they found the ferret's tracks, they had been sidetracked by a drowning mouse, almost drowned themselves saving him, and were Hungry and Tired. I launched into a Chase conflict to introduce the concept to them, and due to an unlucky pick (a Feint versus an Attack), the ferret got away. On the Player's Turn, they attempted to get back to Elmoss, recuperate, and due to more failures and sidetracks, decided to head to Lockhaven immediately to report to Gwendolyn about the ferret spy. This Pathfinder check was perhaps the only one they succeeded on!There was a lot of discussion afterward about the game, the structure, and the mechanics. There was a lot of frustration that the group wasn't "effective", but I tried to impress upon them that the game doesn't punish "failure". (That and the fact that they were all rolling their best skills; one mouse's Pathfinder was 6, and the other mouse's Scout was also 6.)One player had wondered why he was forced to choose a "worthless" skill like Harvester. I asked him why he didn't decide to use his checks on the Player's Turn to do some Harvesting, he replied that he didn't have enough; he was spending them to recover from conditions. I pointed out the several times where he could have taken a hit from his trait to earn a check, to which he again iterated why he would want to fail on a test. I again mentioned that this game doesn't so much punish failure as provide opportunities to tell more story and perhaps succeed. I'm not sure if that player was convinced about the "effectiveness" of his character. However, the other players suddenly realized that the Player's Turn provided them the opportunity to turn the narrative to their direction. One player decided that she could use her "useless" Apiarist skill to establish a hive in her hometown of Sprucetuck on the Player's Turn!We'll see if my group will remain interested enough to keep playing. It's interesting that this game provides an amazing amount of player control over the story (maybe not as much as Dogs in the Vineyard), yet the discussion was stuck on the idea that a character couldn't be effective unless he/she had a stat/skill maxed out.</blockquote>

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