So I’ve played this game a couple of times (or four, or seven) and I’ve got some thoughts about it, as its one of the places where a couple of my different worlds (Danish Scenarios, Indie games, historical games, drama larp) overlap, and as a result I’ve played it with different folks and seen some different elements come out of play.
 
There’s a few things in this thread that really stood out for me, in terms of how play cultures and expectations shape and inform what we do. And, as part of that, how much of what we do are things that are informed as much or more by previous play as by the rules, mechanics, and procedures we so often attribute play generation to.
 
First up: the “do you know or do you play to find out” issue – as seen with Christian Griffen and the baby. There’s a critical conjunction of play culture, skill, and expectation that goes into answering that question. Folks used to directed play will often say, as Christian did (a man who knows how to make a plot come together in a game) that you make a decision early and then play it hard. Whereas other folks will say the opposite, that being keyed to the moment and the developing intricacies of character interaction will reveal the answer to you. And here’s the thing, I’ve seen both work, and I’ve seen both fail. (Soft fails, the kind of thing where you still have a good game, but are like “yea, that was good but I wish I’d decided who the dad was and run with it hard.”)
 
Part of this, I think, has to do with how different players, and the gestalt of a play group, deal with pattern and pattern disruption. If you need pattern to play to, or if you’re used to pattern emerging out of play, will change how you approach your inputs and how you feel about them. And this game can, honestly, support either, but gives strong support to neither. It does, however, have a propensity to pattern disrupt in fruitful ways.
 
One of those ways is the “play to find out, always be looking for scenes that could challenge your character’s direction towards recanting or burning.” When you do this honestly it disrupts simple patterns of “my dude is a martyr” and makes you confront humanity in interesting ways. For example, I’ve often played the older male perfect as an evil man. Just a fucking piece of human trash, who is hiding behind the faith. But the worst version of him I ever played, who I totally thought would bolt and run, stayed and burned. Even quoted Paul (“I have finished my course, I have fought the good fight, I have kept the faith”) as he went. And he went because who says martyrs are good or right? Sometimes they’re just fanatical and trapped. He was trapped by his own expectations of himself as a man, and burned for ego, not faith. And at the beginning of the game I would not have seen that coming.
 
Part of the pattern disruption is also about the scene framing and being able to take it over. That lets you disrupt other people’s patterns, and (most of the time that I’ve seen) does so in a way that does so in a fruitful way that leads to new patterns emerging, rather than simple disruption for its own sake. For example, I played a game with James Stuart where he interrupted one of my scenes. I was Garnier and was on my way to climb into the Princess’s window at night and make with the wooing. James (playing the princess but not in the scene) interrupted to have some of my mercenary friends reveal that they had found a way into the treasure vault. They had a simple plan, we’d steal lots of money and Garnier, who had already been established as able to get out of the fortress and into the woods to hunt almost at will, would lead them out and we’d all run off rich. Garnier helped them steal the money, then stayed in the castle to fight. This totally changed the whole character. He was still an asshole and a rogue, but he was an asshole and a rogue who loved this place and these people. (And no, he didn’t burn. Because burning is stupid, eating rabbits is better.)
 
At Sandcon when I played with Mo Jave and Rachel E.S. Walton I used all of my cards to interrupt, almost always to end scenes before the participants were quite ready for them to end. It was a bit aggressive, but I tried to do it mindfully and with a point: in these types of situations we don’t always get to say everything we want to say, and the things unsaid often stay with us like ghosts. So over and over, just as there was a pause, and you could see how something more might just come if we gave it a moment, I’d have something set on fire, an attack, an alarm, a dad walking into the room – and things left unsaid. I would have done it more often, but the limitation of the number of cards you gets limits the number of times you can do it. Which is pattern forming itself, I guess. (Though notably, I’ve also played games where no one used a card that way at all.)

Notably, in all of these games I, myself, played a little bit differently. I worked to try to get a feel for the group, and where this game was going. In the Sandcon game we were all tired, so I ended up doing lots of scene framing — maybe too much? — just to try and help move things. In other games I’ve done almost no framing. I often would just start by saying something like “I want a scene where we see Raymond being an asshole, anyone want to be abused?” and then let the others fill it in for me.

All of which is to say, it’s a game that works by taking the urge to tell stories and portray people, and then supports it with prompts, seed material, and a regular structure and forces it to react and change by disrupting patterns, encouraging exploration, and giving people shifting authority that makes us adapt and react to what we’re saying together.