S/Lay w/Me

Hi, this is a video of a recent session of S/Lay w/Me played by me and Sam. It includes a little chat from me beforehand about how we wound up getting this game together, some after-game reflections about what it was like, and plenty of rules talk and figuring-it-out during the game itself.

That last part warrants some attention, as in reviewing the gameโ€™s procedures (and this is especially clear in the revised text Ron posted on Patreonย  โ€” last year, I think?), the parts of the game that involve using the dice and choosing the game outcomes should take place silently โ€” leaving the Goes themselves as the sole verbalized content of the game. This suggests a level of sustained being-in-the-fiction that I havenโ€™t really pursued as a value in my last several years of gaming, but Iโ€™m intrigued by it. We donโ€™t do that here, obviously, but maybe next time.

A few technical notes:

The visual tool weโ€™re using to keep track of game elements on-screen is Google Jamboard, basically just a virtual shared bulletin board that users can populate with sticky notes, text and images. For next time, I added a โ€œGoโ€ token to it that the players can pass back and forth, as advised in the Patreon text.

My intention was to go back and forth between the Jamboard and our cameras, but for some reason OBS wouldnโ€™t recognize my Discord pop-out window as a capture source (frustratingly, I feel like Iโ€™ve solved this problem before, and forgotten the solution). Of the many workarounds that suggested themselves, I settled on just showing the Jamboard full-time during the game. I do add some on-screen comments here and there, so there is a reason to keep your eyes on the screen, or at least keep it in your peripheral vision, if you choose to do so.

Samโ€™s mic sounded fine while we were playing, so if itโ€™s scratchy or cuts out here I think thatโ€™s a recording issue.

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5 responses to “S/Lay w/Me”

  1. Postscript on the subject of reading comprehension

    I'm back to studying the text to prepare for another session soon, and you know what: I didn't really absorb the information that both players can contribute to a Go. As with many other elements of the game, the Patreon revision is helpful in clarifying what's possible, both through the rules text itself and through the example of play at the end.

    (If anyone is on Ron's Patreon and doesn't know/remember what I'm talking about, it's in this post of Mar. 4, 2020: https://www.patreon.com/posts/re-presenting-s-34587124 )

  2. Available but …

    … I never really know what to say about the play-reports for games I've written. It seems appropriate to say something, but without a question or topic for discussion, whatever I write (seems to me) to become an implied critique. Rod or Sam, can you direct my attention to anything particularly?

    • Hey Ron, we just played

      Hey Ron, we just played another game, and some specific topics to discuss did come up. It may be a couple of days but I'll get back to you with a direction to go in. Or if Sam jumps in before then, that's fine too.

  3. I listened to the session over the last couple days. You mentioned and I observed that you both jumped aggressively to conflict and goal-claiming, almost from word one. I haven’t played s/Lay since around 2012 or 2013, but I recognized that impulse (or outcome) from my own sessions with it. Maybe it was something about the intimacy of a 2-player game, a chunk of which has very explicit procedure that leads into the resolution of the session itself, that makes one want to drive toward that procedure and hope it holds some of the pressure? I’m talking about myself, of course, not speculating on your play.

    In any case, I recall from vague snippets of my most enjoyable session (a ceramic-armored warrior woman wanders around a mountain town, inhaling the miasma of unease that surrounds the villagers before trekking up into the mountain to face the lover/monster) that letting things breathe, or rather coalesce–getting some sort of creative rhythm in place with the other person–before driving toward the conflict is a large part of what made that session enjoyable.

    Now I want to play!

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