1. “Experienced your baseline sads” is fantastic. I feel like someone should call a game that. Sounds like something Brand Robins might write.

2. When I played, the main character/supporting character divide felt a little artificial. You don’t get very many scenes of your own, so it can help you focus on making sure you present your main with enough depth that their ultimate decision is an important one, but I fully recommend diving in with both feet in playing all your characters. My friend Delbert Saunders had a main (the lady of the castle), but everyone else wanted scenes with his secondary (the little girl), so the fate of that character ended up being much more interesting than his main, who we only saw in her own scenes.

3. Related to that, there’s no formal structure in place for replacing a secondary character if they die. We just did it. My secondary died in Act II, so I just grabbed one of the unplayed characters and adopted her. (This allowed me to swear and scream at a total stranger, which is a really important part of a good convention experience, I think.)

4. The capacity of the narrator to cut a scene and leave things dangling or only partly resolved is powerful in a lot of ways. Often we would let a scene build to its maximum tension, and then cut away, leaving everyone angst-ridden and uncomfortable. This is a technique that I think some people will find very natural, and others less so. It only led to confusion once, when I (as Pierre-Roger) handed a dagger to a small boy (played by Kimberley Lam) and said “cut” and several people at the table seemed to think that I was cutting someone with the dagger.

5. Scene cards are great for kicking off a scene. They are largely sensory: it wasn’t uncommon for all three of our cards to be smells. Using them for their secondary purpose (taking over narrative control) was a strange mechanic, and felt a little… unfair? I don’t know. Anyway, I think it only happened once in the entire game I played in.

6. Story cards are really fun. Two of our early story cards (a captured enemy knight… Robard something? and the Holy Grail) ended up defining a lot of what happened in our story as we progressed. The prisoner ended up becoming a regular-enough fixture in scenes that I guess he was an honourary secondary character. He was even present at the epilogue, to hear Pierre-Roger’s last words.

7. Resolution mechanics in a traditional sense aren’t really necessary at all. Because all of these characters know each other and nobody can leave, most of the scenes are just talking and trying to get some kind of emotional reward. Because their physical capabilities are all pretty distinct, chances are that any violence or other physical conflict between them will have an obvious outcome, so the scene framer just has to decide whether to go the obvious route or not, and if not, why not.

Ultimately, as long as people take that maxim of “make the choice as painful and difficult as possible” to heart all the way through, frame and cut effectively, and do their best to care about these people and inhabit their heads, I would expect good results.