My first Wraith session
The hurdle: Dealing with intra-party conflict
Yesterday was the first session of my new Wraith: The Oblivion game. I haven’t Storytold as many campaigns as Aron, so I’m not ashamed to admit that I filled up a big mug with coffee and just a little bit of alcohol.
I’m one of those people who throw up when they get nervous enough, and before the first session of the last RPG campaign I ran, I chucked three times. And then twice afterward. It’s now been a day since I ran the session, and I’m pleased to announce that I have puked exactly zero times!
But while that’s an excellent personal milestone, it’s not actually a measure of how the game session went. So… how did it go? Pretty well, I think. I reviewed my notes a lot the night before, but still ended up reading some sections of description directly from them. But I think that I managed it without sounding too wooden, so no big deal there. I set the scene and brought all five of my player characters to an old warehouse, then killed them with fire, bullets and car crashes.
Then they woke up as their Reaper — the wraith who cuts one of the newly-dead out of their Caul — freed them and told them they had to leave. There was some milling around, a few questions, and then I ran into my first hurdle.
There was a Maelstrom — a nasty, supernatural thunderstorm — brewing and I needed the player characters to pile into a Relic car, then drive away. With the Reaper, there were six people. The car only seated five, and there was an immediate argument over who was going to end up in the trunk.
One of the PCs resorted to pulling a gun, while another was trying to stop him. Luckily, machines in the Shadowlands don’t work without an infusion of Pathos, so I didn’t have to worry about the instigator shooting another player character in the face. The one who started the whole fight was the owner of the car, and it was perfectly in character for him to bristle, but I was pretty panicked. There was a crisis ahead to race through the Maelstrom, and I had set a ticking clock as the storm brewed overhead… But my PC party was debating seating assignments!
Alright, now what?
First, I had the NPC Reaper remind them that they didn’t have time for this. I made sure that the arguing players all heard me, and let them know that the Maelstrom would do more damage to them than they could do to each other.
Second… Well, then I just waited. I decided to trust my players. Two of them are new — Amber and Jack — but the other three were the veterans of many, many RPG campaigns. And it was those three who were fighting. They had been at this long enough that I hoped they would sort it out on their own.
And you know what, they did. The car’s owner jumped on top and said he would just ride on the roof. Okay, that’s a bit weird… But hey, it stopped the fighting! I gave him some rolls to hold on and a little extra damage to soak as the Maelstrom began to pour angstblack and broken glass down on them. And then the Reaper had to jump out of the car to deal with a pack of Shades chasing them through the Maelstrom. So he got his car back anyway, and drove it through the rest of the crisis.
Really, it would have been easier for someone to just get in the trunk… And I considered pointing that out, or just having the Reaper force the issue. There are wraith powers that would have let me command the player characters to obey. And if push came to shove, if there didn’t seem to be any other way to move my story along, I would have used them.
But I didn’t. The PCs started the fight, and if an NPC jumps into the middle of it to break it up, that tends not to go very well. I end up feeling like a cop, and my players aren’t very happy. As the Storyteller, I hold all of the power. All of the NPCs — like that Reaper — and all of the monsters belong to me, and I even control the Maelstrom. I could literally have rained hell on the PCs to force the party to do what I want. And if I wield that power to put a stop to a role-playing scene that they began, it stifles their creativity.
The other PCs were trying to put a stop to the fight, but that’s different. They are players and all of their characters are more or less at the same power level. They’re peers and interacting with one another is what they came to do. And you know what, when I gave them some space, they settled the argument themselves.
Unless you absolutely have to, let player characters settle their own debates.
After that, I got everyone moving the same direction. I sent them driving through the Maelstrom, then shattered the windshield until the driver couldn’t see through the storm. They took shelter in a Haunt with a bunch of other wraiths who promptly took them prisoner and are threatening to have their Corpora smelted down. After all, there’s not much of substance in the Shadowlands except wraiths… So a lot of the stuff there is made of wraiths. Which one of the players promptly named Soylent Steel.
The PCs still don’t know each other well and argued a bit, but they’re beginning to band together against a common enemy — getting smelted down into some Legionnaire’s new armor — and that’s good enough. It’s a start, and next week, I’ll pick up from there and see how well the player party bonds.
