Fluid the Third

The beginning of last night's Firefly session was everything I want Fluid to be. I'd brought some ideas of my own in case nobody else did, and as it turns out I used almost none of my prepared ideas.

The original idea had been that this session was going to be about the PCs disrupting a poker game being run by a powerful crime syndicate to repay a favor the PCs owed to another powerful crime syndicate. The players decided that the best way to disrupt the game was from the inside, and spent most of this session kidnapping an arms dealer who'd worked both sides during the Unification War, with the idea that one of the characters would take his place in the poker game. They created and named this key NPC themselves; I just played him. Most (if not all) of the group contributed elements to the situation, which ultimately involved literally catching the arms dealer with his pants down at a local brothel. They succeeded, but not without complications, several of them self-inflicted to add interest to the story, which was exactly what I was trying to accomplish!

On the downside, the session then bogged down into planning the actual infiltration, which everybody agreed was Not Fun. Mike H. made a suggestion that tapped into some ideas I'd read about roleplaying "caper films" on rpg.net, which is that you never actually do the planning, but play out the situation starting with the beginning of a plan (the characters board the ship to infiltrate the poker game) and spontaneously add elements that are retroactively determined to have been part of the planning all along, even though the planning never actually appeared "on screen". But of course, no plan survives contact with the enemy, and there will be complications. This is exactly the sort of thing that Fluid is intended to make possible, and I'm excited about trying it in the next session.

Mike H. also brought up another important idea, which is that it might be necessary to determine the scale of a scene before actually starting to play it out. My original idea had been that the players would effectively determine the scale of a scene by adding detail during parts of greater interest to them, and glossing over the less interesting parts. In practice, however, we tended to find ourselves at a fairly fine level of detail because that's the way roleplaying is usually done, even though the players themselves would've preferred a more "big picture" approach to the particular scene in which this issue emerged. I'd prefer to keep things more fluid if we can, but when all of the players agree that they would've preferred a result different than the one we had, then it's time to consider a different approach.

I'm very encouraged by the way the system worked, for the most part, because it encouraged exactly the behavior I wanted from the players, which tends to result in a story with maximum buy-in on their part. There are bugs to work out yet, but it feels like the right track.