Very curious about what you said here, are you able to elaborate at all?
"We were able to start Belonging-outside-Belonging lucid-dreaming after the second round, which was also really cool to experience."
thanks for sharing!
"Belonging-outside-Belonging lucid-dreaming" is me rephrasing/repurposing/bastardizing a line from Riley Rethal's excellent Galactic 2e. In her words:
"as you're brainstorming ideas and discussing the shape of your story, you're entering a mode of play called idle dreaming. this mode is all about curiosity: asking questions, following tangents, brainstorming together. talk about the setting you're building and the things that you find interesting, confusing, or important."
At the start of Orbital, when answering the setting questions and fleshing out the Aspects, we engaged in exactlywhat Riley Rethal describes.
However, during play after the second round, we were all collaboratively storytelling in what felt like a mix between "idle dreaming" as described above and long-form (U.S. American) improv, where we were implicitly passing focus and taking turns to define scenes and pick who would be in each scene. We trusted each other and the story we were building together - building the setting together built groupthink to the point that players were playing up/off motifs that other players were setting up and building themes in the narrative. It really did feel like good long-form improv crossed with being in a TV writer's room, since we were describing film camera shot compositions during our scenes and building the visual aspect and bringing up running color motifs and so on. That's why I described it a bit differently as "lucid" dreaming, because we basically didn't use the rules at all at that point. We were just naturally passing focus without turn order and asking questions like "I have a really good scene idea, do you trust me?" or "I think X should go next, I want to see how their character reacts to what just happened."
Appreciate the interest, hope this helps!