On The Road

We had a short session of Vertigo the other night. I wasn't actually prepared for company that night, so we had to scramble a bit for food, which cut into our gaming time a bit, but we managed a couple hours.

It's interesting to note that, in two sessions of playing/playtesting, we have conducted and concluded two meetings with high-ups of the setting and gone on two...check that, three car rides. We also found ourselves twice in situations that could have easily erupted into combat, but we managed to schmooze our way through one and pay our way out of the other, so we still haven't run that particular gauntlet yet.

Travel is an often-overlooked (nearly always-overlooked, in games I have played and GMd) facet of the traveling group of heroes. In traditional stories about such groups, travel is not simply about getting from Point A to Point B, it's about how the characters interact during such travel. This is the heart of stories including literary classics like Canterbury Tales, The Divine Comedy, and Huckleberry Finn, movies like Stand By Me*, Dead Man (which is on Netflix Streaming), even the original Star Wars, and TV shows that include much travel, from Star Trek to Supernatural to almost every ensemble cast anime ever made. Travel time is when we really get to know the characters as people (using the term loosely in many cases). Travel is used to give us time to care about them.

Which brings us back to our two car rides so far. Now, I'm a fan of duking it out in a game as much as anybody, but a recent trend in tabletop mainstream has been focus on combat to exclusion of virtually everything else, and travel has never been handled well by the systems I have played with. In Vertigo, however, our little group of three--the hot-headed human anarchist, the mellow alien negotiator and me, the information-broker robot--has already had ample opportunity to develop and scheme in-character, courtesy of our employer's chauffered car. We're tiny cogs in an unimaginably complex political and economic machine, and we find ourselves trying to find our place in it...and maybe, one day, carve out a bigger piece of the machinery for ourselves. And we've been able to talk about it at length because of travel time.

My suspicion is that the atmosphere of being in a limousine fosters this sort of collaboration between our characters as well as us players (yes, the grammar is correct), maybe because we aren't having to imagine paying too close attention to what's outside the armorglass windows unless something unusual happens, but we also feel like we are objectively progressing to a next step, even if the driver is wandering us aimlessly through Amsterdam (at our behest).

It's an unexpected little bit of emergent play that I am going to keep an eye on, look for patterns, because two is a lousy sample set.

That's what I've got tonight. Until next time, true believers.



* With obligatory geek homage to Wil Wheaton