Ethnography results, Week 5

This week, I visited Coleman's tabletop session once again, and watched them play a game called 7th Sea. 7th Sea (yes, the "7th" shortening is the official title), is a Swashbuckling and Fantasy tabletop game where heroic deeds and over the top actions are the normal. Our heroes were a band of 6 adventurers, washing up on the shore of unfriendly territory, attempting to meet up with a contact, played out by a newcomer.

Once again, this session started 25 minutes after it was scheduled. Unlike Hackmaster or Dungeons and Dragons, 7th Sea was not played with a board, and the overall tone was much more laid back. The players seemed to have a hard time getting in a serious mood when important events were happening, unlike the earlier games. One reason for this might have been the fact that some of the players were split up for a good portion of the early game, making the lulls in the action much more noticeable.

There were two stand out characters in the game, one who was nearly unstoppable in battle, and one who was so charismatic that he could talk the natives into just about anything... even though he had to go through two translators to do it. Which brings me to the new aspect of this game: languages. There were about six languages in the game, and the different player characters did not know a universal language. Every character was bilingual, but only three of the seven players had a single language in common. Because of this, if the group wanted to talk, they almost always had to go through a translator. This wasn't strictly enforced in the game play however, and it was understood that if someone said something, that as long as a translator was present, what was said out loud was passed onto everyone... even if it took a two or three person translator chain to do it. The players eventually came up with a series of hand gestures to show which language they were using.

The session went well, and I got to observe some interesting interaction between the players. After about an hour and a half, halfway through their first encounter, the game got called short due to the DM being urgently called away. This was mostly a moot point however, since one of the characters was a few turns away from successfully summoning a hurricane to deal with a few harmless street thugs.