Learning Curve

As of last night, I'm two sessions into a Nobilis campaign. There's a pretty steep learning curve involved, I've found.

It's very different from traditional RPGs simply by virtue of how powerful the PCs are; they have vast, cosmic, god-like abilities that make things like a straightforward mystery almost (but not entirely) pointless. If a player wants his character to do something, then chances are he'll do it, and probably in a much shorter time than anyone expected. But on the other hand, I can't go the lazy Burning Wheel route of leaving things in the hands of players to figure out what happens next, because the storybuilding power is left in the hands of the HG like in most traditional games. Thus, the challenges involved are fairly unique to me.

For example, I went into the game with a list of events. These were mostly unconnected, random "stuff that could happen" based on the bits and pieces of the setting that I've thrown together so far. Weird stuff is supposed to happen to anchors, so I had the Anchored-son of the Power of the Lost (a real estate mogul) sink a lot of his assets into a golf course that happened to have been built on ye ole Indian burial ground, and something happened recently to anger the spirits that rested there. Fairly cliche, I know, but it was just one thing in my list.

In a standard game like DnD, this sort of thing could take up an entire session or more, depending on how it's played out. In Nobilis, resolving the issue took maybe twenty minutes of solid play spread out among various scenes, because as soon as the idea occurred to them that the Power of Music could simply sing a dirge to the spirits that would put them back to rest, that was it. They never learned the source of the troubles (though they could have with very little effort), and I suspect they didn't really care. They just wanted the problem to go away, so away it went.

At first, I was a touch disappointed at how simply the problem was resolved, but then it occurred to me that this is one of the strengths of Nobilis. Because of the power levels involved, players can do away with or resolve those plot elements that don't interest them fairly quickly, allowing them to focus primarily on those elements that they DO find fun. Feature, not bug.

There's another advantage of the power scales involved in Nobilis, one which I was aware of going into it. When I run DnD games, if I think up some plot obstacle or what-have-you, I always think up at least one means of overcoming it. During play, of course, I'm open to alternative means that players might think up, but I make sure to come up with a default solution just to ensure I haven't inadvertantly created an insoluble problem.

I never have to do that with Nobilis, because no matter the obstacle, the PCs are able to overcome it. It's just the nature of the game and the characters therein.

(Burning Wheel is similar, but for very different reasons; it's just got all kinds of GM-time-saving features built into it, whereas Nobilis definitely doesn't.)