TROOPS: Cloud City

Last night I ran a one-shot based on the cool old Star Wars fan-film TROOPS. This was the second time I'd run such a game, but the last time was way back in February of 2009.  For last night's reprisal, I moved the game from Tatooine to Bespin. Filmed live on the platforms of Cloud City.

Here's a link to my post about the old game.  For those unfamiliar with the general TROOPS concept, here's a link to the very entertaining video that inspired this madness.

We used the classic d6 system, with the PCs assembled quick and easy via the game's template system. The PCs were mostly Stormtroopers, plus one contract Bounty Hunter (an Ewok of all things) and a probe droid operating as embedded journalist / camera crew. Surprisingly likeable PC Stormtroopers, as in the video, with completely dysfunctional shady NPCs. "All NPCs are Guilty - Otherwise they wouldn't be NPCs." A few of the PCs were reprised from the other scenario two years ago, but any who got promoted had since been busted back down to no more than junior officer status so it would still feel like TROOPS.

This time I ran them through the background events of the last third of Empire Strikes Back, explaining why the 'Falcon's hyperdrive is deactivated, how C-3PO got shot, and what kind of trouble you can get into when someone's severed hand lands on your back porch.

At the start of every scene, I handed a random PC a short written script. This was their narrative monologue to the camera, used to set up and lead in to the next scene, and establish background details. For example, to start the session, I had someone read:

We’ve just been recently stationed out here on Cloud City in the Bespin system. I know, you’ve probably never heard of it, neither had I. It’s one of those fly-by-night corporate towns, mining Tibana gas out of the sky. Not sure you can even call that mining, it’s more like sucking. Can I say that on TV?

The local governor is kinda shady, 'cause the place is almost small enough to not be noticed. He’s not even enrolled in the Mining Guilds, and he owes a lot of back taxes and gambling debts. Anyhow, the citizenry aren’t too pleased with the way he’s running things, and there’s been some disturbances as a result.

That’s why we’ve been called in, to bolster the local police force.

Sometimes that ruffles a few feathers with the local big whigs, of course, but in the end everyone agrees quality of life improves once the Empire gets involved, and that’s what really matters. 

"Cloud City, Bespin, 7:00 am local-time" scrolled across the screen. Then the camerabot turned to another one of the TROOPS, who said (read from the telepromter, no doubt) this:

We’re responding to a call from the local Port Authority, seems they need a bit of help here.

There’s a ship that came in for repairs, had a malfunctioning hyperdrive or something, Put it in to dry dock at the local shop, and there’s some sort of animal problem. I’m guessing the owner left his pet on board, and forgot to tell the mechanics.

Normally, this sort of thing would be handled by Animal Control, not by the Emperor’s Finest, but apparently these here Gas Giant planets don’t have much in the way of wild life, so this town doesn’t actually have an Animal Control Guildhouse.

Looks like that fellow over there works here, we’ll start by asking him if he knows what kind of animal we’re looking for.

So the PCs enter the shipyard, where a pissed-off mechanic is bandaging his hand. He explains the owner of the ship has a real menagerie on board, some big fuzzy thing, a bunch of droids, and whatever it was that bit him. For a couple minutes I managed to imply it was Chewbacca that bit him, which was a total miscommunication red-herring. The players were wondering what the guy did that would provoke Chewie to attack, but had to proceed as the arrogant Imperial pigs they were.

The Imperials head over to the ship to check it out. One officer leans into the open hyperdrive port and bangs on it to scare out whatever the animal is, and ends up with a Mynock wrapped around his helmet.  There's a couple more in the engine block, and they start flying around.

It wasn't much a challenge for armed and armored troopers, but I broke out the Star Wars miniatures anyway and dipped our toes in a combat system none of us had used in a long time.. The first two Mynocks went down in the very first round, but the third one was surprisingly resilient. No one could get a decent damage roll on it, and a missed shot with a "1" on the wild-die left the NPC lying dead on the floor.

After the Mynocks were dealt with, the PCs put a "boot" on the Falcon's hyperdrive, broke one of it's tail-lights to justify a few extra tickets, and searched the holds. They confiscated the boxes full of money that Han was going to use to pay off Jabba. Aside from a little trouble with that little zappy ball that Luke used to practice his sabre work in the first film, the scene wrapped up without incident, and without the PCs ever meeting the main characters from the movies.

Next scene. One of the PCs reads:

This part of town has a bit of a reputation as a “red diode district”, if you know what I mean. That is to say, prostitution, mostly droid-related.

We’re just gonna do a little sweep through the neighborhood, mostly chase off the hookers and johns. Let them know the Empire is here now, and that sort of thing won’t be tolerated anymore.  They shouldn’t be out on the streets lookin’ for droid love, that’s what the Twi’Lek Dancing Girls Guild is for.

Of course, if any of the pimps, hos, or sexbots get uppity with us, we are authorized to use whatever force we deem necessary. That’ll send a message, loud and clear. To protect the decency and social welfare of the city, of course.

This lead to a small scene with an "obvious prostitute", I said as I placed a minature R4 astromech unit on the tabletop. When they eventually blasted the sexbot, it responded in the typical R2D2 method, rolling back, head spinning, and dozens of tools and attachments popping out of all the hidden compartments. So now the corridor is littered with vibrators. They question the other nearby bot,  PI-MP, who claims to know nothing about "that slutty little bitchbot".

"You want me to backhand her for you officer? I'm fluent in over 6 million forms of bitchslapping."

Surprisingly, PI-MP doesn't get blasted. He managed to convince them that he was innocent. Some random protocol droid came walking in at that moment, and PI-MP pointed at him. "Look, that's gotta be the pimp you're looking for officers. Look how much bling-bling he's made out of." So they let PI-MP go, and blasted poor C-3PO who just happened to wander in at the wrong time.

Meanwhile, the dirty little Ewok bounty hunter wasn't at all interested in cleaning up the prostitution of Cloud City. Since we were in a bad part of town, he went looking for other entertainment. Before long, he was involved in some illicit gambling with a bunch of Ugnaughts and Jawas, playing some high-stakes game called "Utini!" As their game wrapped up, his fellow little people said they were off to some big protest that was going on.

Which lead right into this scene:

There’s a lot of labor disputes going on lately. Not being affiliated with the Miner’s Guild, the local government is ill-equipped  to deal with it.

An informant told us that there was going to be some sort of protest going on, an attempt by the workers from “Deck Twelve an’ a Half” to unionize or something.

On the one hand you want everybody to be able to speak their mind and improve their lot in life, but at the same time... well, we all know that protests are often just the first step towards Rebellion and lawlessness. We’re gonna see if we can’t get them to disperse, kinda nip that in the bud before it gets too troublesome.

Ah, jeesh, look at all those little guys. They’re kinda cute. Hope we don’t have to disintegrate them. Set for stun.

I got out an actual map for this one, and set up a big cluster of ugnaughts, ewoks, jawas, and various short droids in a picket line. They were complaining about the working conditions on deck 12 & 1/2. Poor lighting, no safety railings, and the terribly low cielings. "First off, who are they trying to kid here? We all know deck '12 & 1/2' is really unlucky number 13. Secondly, why the low ceilings? Are they trying to say we're short? Just because we're not 2-meter tall freaks doesn't mean that some of us don't get claustrophobic! And what did Baron Calrissian do to 'improve' our lot in life? Longer coffee breaks and freakin' door to the brain of Moff Malkovich. I don't think even Moff Malkovich wants to see what happens inside Moff Malkovich's brain. I sure don't!"

Lucasfilm purists might complain about my bizarre choice to work in numerous references in this scene to Being John Malkovich. I know, it was silly, and doesn't quite fit in the Star Wars universe - not even the Expanded Universe. Just like the cameo by Tom Servo in the background in the TROOPS film, so I feel justified. And lets be honest, it's not like you would have been any happier if my references were to Willow or Howard the Duck, so cut me some slack.

The PC Imperial Officer starts making rolls of his command skill, threatening to blow up the protesters if they don't disperse. This gets rid of most of the crowd, except one little power droid who stands his ground shouting "Gonk no, we won't Go(nk)!" Time for some good old fashioned police brutality. The PC AT-ST Pilot chose to have her walker kick the Gonk Droid off the platform. She failed, with a dismal low roll and a spectacular "1" on the wild die.

So now the AT-ST scout walker is lying face-down on the terrain (a parked Imperial Shuttle on the platform, as a matter of fact) and the badly damaged Gonk droid is ominously whistling as if it's going to blow.

It ain't easy justifying this much SteamPork.

That's not nearly dire enough, so I chose that moment to have some of the other protesters return. Including several ugnaughts in a mecha war machine. I put my "Uggernaught" miniature on the table. I've been itching to use this mini in a scenario ever since I opened it in a booster of Star Wars minis a couple years back. Look at that thing, ain't it just ridiculously cool? Usually hard to justify, but this was no doubt the perfect game for it.

So now the PCs are pinned between the fire of a crazy ugnaught death machine, and the whistling overload of a malfunctioning power droid. Now that's drama!  :)

While most of the squad was pinned down, one of the Troopers did manage to use the cover of the buildings on the map to advance without incident and take out the rebel ugnaughts by means of a well-placed grenade. The whistling Gonk droid on the other hand was beyond their ability to multi-task, so most of the PCs took wounds from shrapnel damage that penalized their rolls the rest of the night.

The PC Imperial Officer went to fetch a change of uniforms, and came back with a new mission (and thus another of my short scripted monologues).

We’re responding to a possible domestic dispute. Neighbors called, said there’s a lot of yelling and the sounds of dishes shattering coming from one of the homes here.

I don’t expect too much trouble, though, as you can tell we’re in a nice part of the city. They’ve got a beautiful view of the bottomless shaft, there. That’s a doozy.

 If need be, we can take one or both of them down to the Detention Center till they sober up or calm down.

Dispatch says its the address is the home of one of the local city administrators, so chances are they’ll quickly calm down just to keep up appearances. These local government types are kinda slippery like that.

As it turned out, the home was that of Mr. and Mrs. Lobot. For those of you who don't recognize the name, Lobot was Lando's right-hand man on Cloud City. The bald guy with the computer sticking out of his head who follows Calrissian around, wordlessly directing lesser minions. He holds a position of importance, but he's very formal and not a particularly warm or communicative individual. So, it's no surprise that his marriage is a bit strained. Probably works late nights and weird back-room business deals with his shady boss in gambling dens and strip clubs. Who's to blame Mrs Lobot if she suspects her husband is secretly some sort of mob boss?

Lots of hysterics follow. The place has been trashed. She's in tears, crying and screaming, and he's standing there stoicly telling the troopers that everything is under control. Amidst all her sobbing, they eventually figure out she keeps repeating "it's on the balcony!" There the PCs find a severed hand. Mr Lobot swears he had nothing to do with it, that it must have fallen from somewhere further up the bottomless shaft. Mrs Lobot, however, is certain it's some sort of creepy mob signal, like waking up with the head of a Bantha in your bed.

While they're all out on the balcony trying to sort things out, the rest of a body falls past them. They look upward, and see this narrow promontory extending out to the middle of the chasm. There's someone else up on the damn thing, too, some black-clad Emo kid. Cut to narration:

We’re heading up a few levels, there’s a crisis situation, looks like a Jumper. It’ll be our job to talk him down.

We don’t get these suicide calls too often since most citizens of the Empire are so darned happy. You sure do see it more often out here on the Rim, though.

I remember a couple of planets back, there were these Jumpers just hanging from the ceiling! Hanging there. Wouldn’t come down. Stayed up there so long, they caught their death of cold.

Man, that place sure was chilly. C - O - L - D! You can ask my wife. On a frosty night,
laying in bed, I still say to her “Well at least I’m not back on Hoth!” I’ll remember that place for the rest of my life.

Hey, if you forgave a Being John Malkovich reference, I figure you won't mind me stealing a Bastogne line from Band of Brothers.

In the movie, after Luke throws himself off the ledge, Vader just heads back to his Star Destroyer like its no big deal. That of course is not what the PCs find when they get up there, though. No, I have a "fine tradition" in my TROOPS games that every session must end with a Drunken Darth. So Vader's out on the far end of this narrow ledge over a huge pit, all sad and depressed because his son just jumped. The Ewok bounty hunter walks out there to talk him back in. They end up sharing a few drinks - all those buttons and switches on Vader's chest plate are controls to his built-in minibar.

"I'm not a bad father, am I? I know I wasn't ever really there for him, but lots of people have workaholic absentee dads, right? That's no reason to shout 'you're not my father' and jump off a cliff, is it? I mean, it's not like he didn't know I exist, I left him with family after all. That's better than I had. You know what my mom told me? She said my daddy was a magic space virus!! You know what that does to a kid? Teaches him his mommies a damn liar, that's what it does! So at least I didn't lie to him like that..."

The Ewok tries talking him back in off the ledge, but without a lot of luck. In retrospect, I should have called for some sort of social roll to give him a shot at success, but it was a surprisingly complex scene and I was pretty deep in character, so I dropped the ball there. Not that I wasn't pleased with how it all turned out.

He's out there, waxing suicidally, and would rather down a six pack and a few bowls right here at the cliffs of doom than go back to work or blow off steam at some nightclub.

Someone suggests that the one female Stormtrooper in the squad try to coax him back to safety. She's rather reluctant, because the other time we played this, he made her be his date to his High School Reunion... and let's face it, Darth Vader is kind of a dick. Speaking of which, it's not long before she's ordered out on the ledge, pole-dancing on that vertical pipe or antennae or whatever the point of those weird bits on the bridge to nowhere are. This took a fairly difficult climbing & jumping roll, especially in the armor, but as it turns out she was up to the task.

As Vader is talking about what a great kid he had before he threw himself off the ledge, the PC Imperial Officer steps forward with their evidence baggie from the previous scene. "This son of yours, was this his by any chance?" he asks, handing Vader the severed hand.

I tell everyone that this is too much for Vader, and he feints. Everyone should roll initiative. I'll roll 3d6 for when Vader falls, only people who roll higher than him can act before he falls off the ledge. The first PC to act is also the only one who's too far away to do anything more than shout. The next two PCs try Brawling rolls to grab Vader, but fail and have to make a Dex check to keep from falling with him. The Ewok bounty hunter attaches a grappling hook to Vader, but there's some doubts as to how well a lone Ewok can belay the descent of a rather tall human in battle armor carrying a well-stocked wet bar. Yet another PC rushes out on to narrow promontory to try and grab him, and they also fail, this time with a "1" on the wild die.

Time for some final narration, this time improvised, by the GM:

There's a scraping metallic sound, and the camerabot pivots to see several bolts of the superstructure pop as the narrow platform buckles under the weight. With a sudden lurch, the entire promontory breaks loose and tumbles far down out of sight, taking Vader and the whole squad with it.
"TROOPS was filmed live in Cloud City." The theme music plays as the credits roll. "Bad Droids, Bad Droids, whatchyagonna do?"...

So I guess technically that's a TPK, but I've never seen a group quite that unanimously happy with a Total Party Kill before. TPKs don't usually get applause and laughter.

Recent Gaming Shenanigans

I haven't gotten around to much blogging lately, so here's a quick run-down of recent games I've played or GM'd. Probably any of these could have been an entire blog post unto themselves, and a few might still be if I find the time and energy.

• I played Lacuna at the Emerald City Game Fest. This nearly became part of my "A good GM can save a bad system" post, but after a couple weeks of keeping it warm on the back burner of my mind, I've decided I don't like the taste of it after all. It's certainly unique, and an admirable experiment, but not one I plan to subject myself to again any time soon. Reviews I've read since suggest that PCs can perform all sorts of crazy stunts, but our game was rather more restrained than that. Ours played more like a mystery or detective story in which all the PCs had amnesia and expectations of cause and effect were upended. I had too many questions about the setting, and the GM (not just the NPCs) had too few answers; I found it frustrating. I guess I was hoping for Inception meets The Prisoner, and would have been totally okay with The Matrix meets Blue Velvet, but what I got was more like Memento meets Eraserhead. Interesting to watch, but damn hard to game in.
• The day after that, our Truth & Justice campaign wrapped up. I was likewise never quite rocked by that campaign. I really wanted to be challenged more. The plot was a little slow, the villains not as colorful as they could have been, and just not enough tension or drama to really engage me. I would have preferred to have the baddies be a bit more "in your face". The players (myself included) share some of the burden as well, as we never really worked together well and didn't chase plot threads perhaps as well as we could have. I guess I wanted less dysfunction, and more action. The game thankfully didn't meltdown or implode, but it also never seemed to get beyond a simmer.
• My Continuum campaign has had a few out-of-character hurdles. Individual sessions have been really good, but since it's a game where Information Is All, I can't really blog about any plotline (like the basilisk deaths near the 1527 Paracelsus symposiums, or the part where Derren Brown was posing as Christopher Marlowe) that's still in process. And they've been in-process for a long time, as we've only been getting half as many sessions as expected. Normally, I GM twice a week for two different playgroups in the same timeline/universe. The Wednesday night group had to take a month off from play because of one player doing a lot of summer travelling. Just before the Wednesday group returned to the game, the Tuesday group also had to take a month off because a huge work deadline hitting a player. So I had a couple weeks without GMing my Time-Travel game, preceded and followed by less GMing than normal.

Knowing in advance about the month-long gaps in my Continuum group's schedules, I planned to GM as often as possible for our Thursday night one-shot group. However, between my wife getting a promotion that totally rearranged our home schedule, a friend at that game coming down with chicken pox, and me getting sucked into a video game, then mired in a short patch of writers block... well, the month shot by with me just GMing once. That puts me in withdrawal. It gets ugly. My wife came home from work one day, and found me passed out in the bathroom with 3d6 sticking out of my brachial artery.

• The one time I did get to GM on the one-shot night was Og, which I totally only ran because I couldn't quite get the pregens finished for the Cyberpunk scenario I was planning on running. Og is a very goofy caveman game. I've run it a couple times before, more than a year ago, and worked in some Land-of-the-Lost references and time-travel nonsense which seemed to go over well. This time, though, I think I bit off more than I could chew. The PCs scattered every chance they got, and I was left with too much plot for their limited caveman vocabularies. I started grasping at straws, and pulled out of my belly  The Great Gazoo, an intervention team from the Planet of the Apes, [a Slip-and-Slide, the Beach Boy's Pet Sounds] and about half a Roman Legion. I felt like it was a huge cluster-failure, but most of the players seemed to laugh their way through it.

This past week, however, the gaming has swung back around and apparently I've been on fire (or just really obnoxious).

• Thursday night we played Lady Blackbird. Honestly, I lack confidence in Lady Blackbird's mechanics, and I think a bit more definition to the setting (and magic) would be a huge benefit. Leaving so much up to the players is dangerous, especially when I've been role-playing deprived for a week or two. I played Snargle, the shapeshifting goblin pilot, and I hammed it up to no end. There was way too much discussion of goblin-porno and the proper inflating of boobloons.  I'm quite certain it was nothing like what the designer of the game intended, and it may very well have undermined what the others at the table wanted too, but at least it entertained the bystanders at the game store.
• Then the night after that, dinner with friends lead to an impromptu game of Microscope. Our setting was an alternate earth with urban fantasy elements, where famous fictional literary figures became real. Dracula, Lilith, and Dr. Jeckyl all made appearances. There was this scene where I played Dr. Jeckyl (which I pronounced Gee-kell with a thick scottish accent so I could sneak past the initial round of character declaration without most people realizing who I was really playing till the scene got going) and turned into Mr. Hyde and crawled around under the table in some very inappropriate LARP-ish antics with my secretary. What happens under the table, stays under the table.

I am definitely looking forward to getting my regular fix of plot, puzzle and drama sometime soon, in hopes that it will pull me out of this over-the-top perverted character-actor spiral.

A good GM can save a bad system.

A good GM can save a bad system. I played several new (for me) RPGS this weekend at the Emerald City Game Fest, and I had a ton of fun. In spite of the mechanics. These games had ridiculous off-kilter mechanics, but the GMs kept the games rolling and provided more than enough color to overcome the flaws in the systems.

The first game was octaNe. The scenario was a riff on Big Trouble In Little China, and I gather that's not the usual setting for the game, but it was a lot of fun. Towards the end, the silliness meter cranked up higher than it goes in Big Trouble In Little China (and that's saying something, isn't it?). Ranma and Sailor Moon both showed up in the final scene, a couple PCs got replaced by their evil twins, things just got... odd.

All of which certainly justifies using some light-weight system (instead of, say, Feng Shui, or d20). Yet, I can't say I cared for octaNe. The mechanics were very unbalanced. The pregen I was playing had a Daring rating of 2, and (since the other pregens didn't) that meant I almost always acted first, almost always succeeded at every task, and ended every conflict with more plot points than I started with.

I can't imagine building any sort of dramatic tension in this system, given that on any die roll the PCs have at least a 71% chance of winning... the whole conflict. Because I was going first every round, I was constantly having to reign myself in, force myself to leave something for the other PCs to fight (or do). It was not easy.

I feel particularly bad for one of the players in our group whose best stat was Magic. Magic goes last each round, _and_ you have to pay plot points to activate it. In theory this is somehow compensated for by being broadly applicable and open-ended, but given the level of narrative freedom that any of the other stats already has, I can't imagine how that could possibly compensate for such drawbacks.

To add insult to injury, his second best stat was Charm... which sits in the middle of the initiative order. Ever try to make a social roll in the middle of the round, _after_ you comrades have already killed half the enemies? Oh, sure, on a success the rules let you narrate a sudden peaceful resolution, but it will rarely pass the disbelief test. "After you ambush and behead most of them, I convince the survivors that there are non-violent solutions to our disagreement." Sure.

Painfully bad system. I think the exact same scenario would have been far, far better with Wu Shu, Risus, PDQ, 3:16, F#, or any of a dozen other "fast and fun" systems. I can't think of any reason why I would want to use octaNe's system. Admittedly, I've never read the rulebook, so maybe there's something I'm missing here... but I doubt it.

Honestly, I'd rather just have everyone roll a single die at the start of a conflict and highest roll narrates how the entire conflict wraps up. It'd honestly be better balanced. As it was, I'd always go first, and nearly always had the freedom to end the entire encounter on that one roll, so spreading that around to the other PCs would have had to be an improvement. I have never, ever in my decades of gaming experience, had to fight so hard to keep myself from abusing a system. The flaws in octaNe are so obvious and horrid, it's amazing it ever made it into print (and even more amazing that there are supplements and expansions out there).

And yet we had fun. The GM did a few really interesting things outside of combat that really saved the game from its own conflict resolution system. His previous plays of the system had indicated that there'd be a plethora of plot points sitting unused, so he came up with a way to make them meaningful. He got these really fancy chinese envelopes and stuffed them with "fortunes". Clues, plot hints, solutions to puzzles, revelations of background info, and some real game-changers like "your character is actually a ghost". So, between scenes, we cashed in excess points for clues, and they really helped coax us along several possible plotlines. He also prepped color photos of all the locations alluded to in the clues (and many of the villains), so there was plenty of instant flavor and atmosphere, and a sense that we were "on the right path" even though it was free-form. Without these clever structural cues being available, I imagine our narrative freedom would have imploded the plot before the end of the second conflict scene. Well done, Mr. GM! I may just have to steal your red envelopes for my own future campaigns.

Remember Tomorrow

A couple sessions back, my weekly one-shot group gave a test run to Remember Tomorrow. It's a rules-light set of cyberpunk mechanics, with little to no setting and roundtable narration principles. The "hippy game" equivalent for Cyberpunk 2020 fans, Remember Tomorrow has a little bit in common with Universalis in that GMing duties are distributed across the table and you may end up playing several characters over the course of the night.

Remember Tomorrow was written by Gregor Hutton, who also wrote 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars, and it really shows. That's not really meant as the "diss" it may have sounded like, given how often I've vented about 3:16. While I eventually grew frustrated with 3:16, along the way it provided our group of about 6 people with entertainment for about 17 sessions. So I certainly got my money's worth, and then some. (Over 350 manhours of entertainment from a $10 PDF. That's a heck of a bargain!)

Remember Tomorrow (hereafter called RT) has many of the same strengths that 3:16 does - it's easy to learn and remember, distributes narrative power across the table, reduces the GMing prep burden to nil. In fact, you could argue that those strengths are actually amplified in RT. It's better at what 3:16 did well than 3:16 itself was. In our first session of RT, we told a wild, unpredictable story, and only once had to look anything up in a rulebook. Bravo!

However, RT has many of 3:16s flaws as well - limited differentiation between characters, mechanics that are so grainy you can't apply any modifiers, the occasional pacing and structural issues caused by unrestricted narrative rights, rules that encourage Player-Vs-Player conflict but don't really reward it enough to make anyone comfortable getting aggressive - and these flaws too are amplified beyond their presence in 3:16. RT is definitely drawn from the same well as 3:16, but then adapted to a less-structured genre. It's everything you loved or hated about 3:16, dialed up to 11.

The lack of setting can be a source of confusion, such as when two different people disagree about what it means to be a "rogue AI", and how they can interact with the world. The lack of solid GMing advice or definitive guidelines, the competitive elements, and the scene-by-scene narration rights rotation can combine to make for a very uneven pacing and sometimes a lack of fairness. The conflicts caused by setting vagueness are not insurmountable, especially if you're just using it for a one-shot or short-run mini-campaign. Just the same, they render it probably a better game for use with friends you have an established rapport with, than for dumping on a group of strangers at a convention.

We encountered these lack-of-guidance stumbling blocks in our group when one person kept starting all his scenes with one of the other PCs (the rogue AI mentioned above) yet again trapped inside another unfamiliar super-computer. Eventually, those sorts of issues would sort themselves out, but it was definitely frustrating in the short term. We approached the game from a point of view of generic cyberpunk future, and so some of us narrated things as gritty and dark, while others went for sufficiently advanced tech and a more lighthearted cinematic approach. In hindsight, I think the game would play much better if the group agreed up front to use a setting they are all familiar with, such as CP2020, Max Headroom, a specific series of novels, or The Matrix. That way everyone's on the same page about what you're after thematically, and you have a reference point for what the tech in the setting can do. The other half of it, learning how to play fair in a game with no GM, is just a trial-and-error issue. (And though it bugged me to see the same "trap" again and again, what else can you do to challenge a rogue AI?)

A few other minor issues were caused by the non-traditional structure. Most notably, there was a particular type of scene that was conspicuously absent from RT. When one PC wants to talk to another PC, that's generally trivially easy to arrange in any RPG. Unless it's the middle of a fight scene, or one PC has been taken captive, the players have it entirely in their power to start up a conversational scene between their characters, often even in campaigns where GMs keep a tight reign on the narration rights around you. In RT, surprisingly, this paradigm is inverted. Though the rules really don't draw attention to it, it is in fact nigh impossible for two PCs to even communicate, let alone work together in RT. I can easily start a scene where one PC attacks another, or where a Faction attacks a PC, or where a Faction contacts a PC and strikes a deal with them, but I am implicitly forbidden to stage a scene where my PC contacts another PC and tries to help or team up with them. There are color narration scenes, but as written those must begin with the intention of turning into conflict, and only become peaceful scenes by means of a happy accident when no one escalates. Which means that only those players most inclined to abuse rules-systems or metagame are even capable of teaming up. Of course, if the other player misunderstands you attempt to subvert the system, you could easily end up in a combat between your PCs, which makes people not want to risk trying to interact with the others.

As a result, one of the players at our group compared the game to multiple solitaire, and that wasn't an entirely unfair comparison. Indeed, the momentum always lies with the Factions within the game, not the PCs, which is a bit awkward. PCs feel less like protagonists and heroes, and more like the poor dumb schlob that everything happens to. Even when the PCs win the die rolls, they still have a somewhat passive role in the game, since their scene goals are usually something along the lines of "don't get shot". Worse yet, the structure feels terribly counter-intuitive, as though you aren't actually playing the character you're holding, instead you're just waiting for the next threat to rear its head. The rules as written render the PCs incapable of actually pursuing anything, and they instead just have to roll with the punches. That seems like a house-rule might be in order:

A Very Simple House Rule:  This rule adds an additional scene type: Dialog Scenes. You may choose your PC and any other PCs or Factions, played by the appropriate other players. You play this scene out as a conversation and light interactions. Unlike normal Deal or Face-Off scenes, Dialog scenes give no mechanical rewards or penalties, and involve no die rolls. They exist solely to facilitate the interactions between PCs, to allow for a bit of flavorful characterization, to illustrate (but not advance upon) your goals, or to function as a "pass" if you're stuck for a better idea when it's your turn to frame the scene. Color | No Conflict scenes may still be initiated in the normal way, by having a Face-Off scene peter out. Face-Off scenes that result in no conflict still get their usual rewards, as the risk of conflict was present.

That simple house rule (and a clearer discussion up front about the setting) would solve most of my objections to the game, and allow it to run a lot more smoothly and intuitively.  It would then function as the quick-to-pick-up, easily improvised alternative to CP2020 or Shadowrun, a role at which it would excel. If I wanted to run CP2020 next week, I'd have a lot of reading and planning to do between now and then, but if I wanted to run RT in the next 5 minutes I'd have a one page summary to read and the other 3 minutes of my prep would be breaking open a pack of blank index cards. In this hectic world where we don't always have as much time for gaming as we'd like, light-weight games like RT are a real boon.

Bad Habits in the Vineyard

Last night I ran Dogs In The Vineyard for the weekly one-shot group. Actually, this was part two of what looks to be a three-shot. I'm finding I really like the system, but it has some awkwardness. There's specifically three bad habits I'd like to "break" my players (and myself) of, if I were to run something longer than a single scenario.

1. Bad Habit #1: Spending too long agonizing over how to total up your See.
   I'm guilty of this one as well, and I figure if I'm going to be hypocritical, I might as well put it up front and label it as such. I had one See in particular that I really just should have Gave on, because I was taking too long to calculate all my strategic options.
   I think this one would sort itself out over time. As you become more familiar with the system, the decisions will become more intuitive.
   Seriously, if you're agonizing over whether to take the blow on four dice, or take it on five dice but leave a higher die for your Raise, you've already failed to assess the situation properly. Unless the stakes are "do I die?" (or maybe if the conflict hasn't escalated beyond talking) you should really be Giving in once it tips past the third die on your See.
   
   
2. Bad Habit #2: Trying to use all your available stats and items in every conflict. 
   For example, one player wanted to call on his d6 in "Exorcist" during a conflict with just a shady character trying to talk them out of poking around in his silver mine. I told him he could roll it, but only if he publicly declared that the man was clearly possessed. 
   There's a strong impetus to call on everything to get the extra dice every conflict, but it's often not appropriate to do so. I imagine that over a long campaign, always calling on everything would make conflicts repetitive.
   It also makes conflicts much longer, where Giving more often would speed things up. The problem is that no one wants to Give because it means you sit around with nothing to do while the conflict rages on. Given the choice between sitting around idle, or grasping and stretching to invoke the trait that will score you another die, people will almost always make the "non-boring" choice even if it drags out the fight. After the fact you might realize that you were sacrificing the group's enjoyment for the sake of your own, but in the heat of the moment such clarity is unlikely.
   
   
3. Bad Habit #3: Picking the same fallout again and again.
   The game tries to counter this by letting anyone veto a proposed fall-out effect, but the issue I keep seeing isn't about people choosing something narratively lame.
   The problem is mechanical, not conceptual. Most bad things that could happen to you could be represented in several different ways (adding d4, downgrading to d4, subtracting other dice, reducing a stat, losing an item, etc), but one of those options is clearly better than the others.
   The rule system's insistence that +d4 is actually a bad thing is a little odd. I've seen how it can be bad, because a big pile of dice fools you into getting cocky and taking the blow when you shouldn't. But from the point-of-view of a player who's new to the game, adding a die looks like it's always a good thing. Perception becomes reality.  Mathematically, it's certainly better to add +1d4 to your sheet than to downgrade an existing 2d8 down to 2d4 or 1d8. The fallout system treats them like they're identical, but clearly they aren't. Plus 1d4 is just better than  minus 1d8, anyone can see that. Even losing just a d6 is arguably more than twice as bad as gaining a d4.
   Let's face it, you'd rather add "Blind as a Bat" at d4 than downgrade "I'm a handy with a rifle" from d6 to d4. Ironically, being blind would make you a better shot. The system is a little weird.

None of these three problems with the system (or players) are insurmountable.  Bad habit #1 will work itself out naturally over time, and #2 will be easy to solve over the same stretch of time with just a tiny bit of intentional effort.  I could see myself running this game system as a campaign, and it'd be a lot of fun.

Issue #3 is the only one that presents a real long-term problem, worthy of a house-rule.

UPDATE: My first proposed house-rules to "fix" issue #3 were far too draconian, and as was pointed out in the comments to this post, would result in a spiral of death over the course of a few sessions as PCs were forced to burn through their good traits. A better rule would b: The first time in any session that you get a fall-out total of 12+, you're required to pick something other than +d4 for at least one of the two long-term effects. 

Invoking this just once per session per player will prevent abuse, mandate some variation in results, and most likely not result in an undesirable death-spiral. Plus, by linking it to taking Injury, you further motivate players to sometimes Give in challenges instead of taking the blow.

Such a rule may also help address another problem I've noticed with system, namely that since Body is used for the "Do I die?" roll, it's more important than the other three stats. With this house-rule in place, having a really high Body score doesn't take all the danger out of being injured.

Dirty Rotten Heroes

Last night was the third session of a four-part super hero mini-campaign of Truth & Justice. The villains are particularly despicable, having at this point killed over 2,000 people in their campaign of terror (and they'd tried to kill a stadium full of 50,000 as well).

The villains thus far have all been Invulnerable, Immortal, Intangible or just plain Untouchable. In the first 5 or 6 fights (the first 2.5 sessions), despite usually outnumbering them one villain versus 3 or more heroes in any given fight, we were unable to get any decisive victories. The bad guys always out-classing us, and always escaping.  Since any one of them can fight any three of us to a standstill (and, all assembled, there's about as many of them as there are of us), we've been getting kind of desperate.

Last session, there was a point where a group of four of us "heroes" managed to knock one of the villains unconscious. It was our first success. This particular villain was a thug - a super-powered thug, sure, but still nothing more than a hired gun, and unlikely to know anything useful. Plus, he had a lot of blood on his hands (literally and metaphorically).

So we chopped the unconscious villain into little pieces with an axe, on a public street. I kid you not.

Truly a bright and shining moment in super-hero stardom.

The Meat Shield (Truth & Justice PC)

Played a little Truth & Justice last week. It's a reasonably rules-light superheroes RPG.

I tend to over-think my characters too much, and take way to long making a PC. So, with my back up against the wall at the game, I slapped together a thin parody of a character, which I named The Meat Shield. Despite being so shallow, the character was kind of fun to play.

The Meat Shield

• Hot dog vendor by day, heroic sidekick by night.
• His superhero suit is printed with the cuts of meat he could be chopped into.
• He has some minor thematic equipment, such as a Knockwurstchuku and a hot-dog shaped cell phone, but nothing that actually provides a bonus (well, except the hot dog cart itself, which is mundane but amusing).
• I intended him to just be a lackey, but discovered in the process of playing him that there's some pretty enjoyable grandstanding to be done when your character resides at the intersection of invulnerable and ridiculous.
• Officially I'm the sidekick of the great Beef Wellington, a hero of immense girth reknown, who is, sadly, out of commission with some sort of food poisoning.
• The police got annoyed with me in one scene, and put a "boot" on my hot dog cart. It's hard to be a superhero when your bicycle is being impounded.

Powers:
Invulnerability +2
Regeneration +4

Qualities:
Body Guard +4
Karate +2
Unobtrusive +2
Bicycle-driven hot dog cart +2

Weakness:
Can't disobey anything a Superhero tells him to do (-2)

Last Night's Fiasco

Last night I played in a one-shot of "Fiasco". It's a rules-light GM-less RPG that seeks to capture the feel of a Coen brothers movie. In our case, we were a touring rock band that was on the verge of breaking up. Our scenario ended in tragedy, followed by a killer solo album.

If you've never heard of Fiasco, there's plenty of reviews out there that will tell you the basics. I suggest taking a look at:
http://artbroken.livejournal.com/1095154.html
http://critical-hits.com/2010/06/25/review-fiasco/

Rather than cover all that ground, I'm just going to mention a couple things I particularly liked, and a few I didn't.


What I loved about the system:

• The charts and mechanism for creating character relationships were awesome. There was a random element, but the players had a collaborative decision-making process to go through in choosing which (rolled) numbers to use on which charts, and interpreting those chart results. It was great source of inspiration, and made sure everyone had a voice in how things started. I will absolutely steal this idea for future one-shots I run that may or may not use any other mechanics from Fiasco.
  
• The "Tilt" mid-game. It uses a similar mechanism to the character-creation system to show us the end goal/condition half-way through the session. This was pretty genius, and helped us provide structure at the point where the game was just about to explode out of control.
• The "Aftermath". Not quite as cool as the character creation and tilt, but still pretty neat. Each PC got a montage of images showing the impact of the events detailed in their future life.

What I wasn't crazy about:

• The unstructured GM-less mechanics of the scenes themselves. The set-up, tilt, and conclusion mechanisms were all pretty awesome, but I wasn't completely enamored with what went between them.
  It felt a little too "Gong Show" or "Voted off the Island" for me. The other players voted on whether the scene was beneficial or damaging to your character, which in and of itself was just an okay mechanic. Problem was there wasn't a clearly-defined end point for a scene, so you didn't know when to start kibbutzing about the voting part. If someone jumped the gun, it would disrupt the scene / spoil the moment.
  I could easily imagine situations where it would lead to out-of-character social tension as well, like Player A constantly cut Player B's scenes short, always gave Player B a damaging vote, or metagamed the voting procedure to make sure the Aftermath for Player B was dismal. With some groups I've gamed with in the past, that would have been a recipe for disaster.
  
• Giving away your results dice in the first Act. My dislike for this may have had to do with the impromptu nature of our session (we'd all showed up for a different game, but there'd been too many players, so some of us broke off into a second table, and decided to play Fiasco instead). Since we weren't prepared for it, the description of how things worked was a little weird, and I couldn't quite internalize what the giving away of the results die represented... if indeed it represented anything. It may have been purely mechanical. The second Act, where you keep the results die for yourself, made more sense to me. The first act felt more like a board game too me, where the mechanics trump the story, and the second felt more like an RPG where the mechanics support and enable the story. I can't say for certain how much of that had to do with this one little rule change between the two acts, and how much had to do with simply progressing through the games learning curve (which is very light, but not transparent).
• It was over too soon. I expect a 5 or 6 player game is probably about the right length, but the 2-act structure seems to make a 3 or 4 player game just whip right by. It was over before we knew it. I'd like to add a third Act for smaller groups, but I imagine some changes would have to be made to the Tilt and Aftermath to make that work.
  

I had a lot to say about the two things I didn't like, but I would be very interested in playing this again sometime. I suspect it's a game that benefits greatly from playing it repeatedly and getting a handle on the nuances of both the mechanics and the narrative structure.

Final note: I'm not 100% certain that it needs to be GM-less, and I think it might actually work better if there was a single authority giving it structure during the bits that aren't chart based. You could then just essentially use the Tilt and Aftermath as an improv tool for the GM.

Beam Me Up Before You Go-Go

Last night I ran "Wham Trek" at my weekly one-shot group. The mechanics were an extremely light trimmed-down version of Warhammer FRP 3rd. After a brief explanation of the rules, and a tiny bit of clarification that this had nothing to do with George Michael, we were ready to go.

For those still scratching their heads, Wham Trek was an RPG scenario blending of a couple of crazy old boardgames designed by the great Tom Wham, with just a hint of Star Trek parody. The PCs were the crew of the Znutar, and they were responding to a distress call from the backwaters world known as "Snitopia". It would appear there was an unexplained geological upheaval on Snitopia, and an entire mountain range was jumping up and down on the peaceful snits.

For those still scratching their heads, George Michael was half of the 80's UK pop duo "WHAM!"

For reasons I can't really explain, this was a game I'd wanted to run for a long time. I'd been unable (until just recently) to figure out mechanics that would work for it. In theory, it needed to be goofy and light, but able to support random interactions of bizarre weapons and alien biochemistry. I used the board from Awful Green Things as the map of the PCs spaceship. That map shows (amongst other things) where 12 different weapon types can be found on the ship, so I assumed I needed a system that would make these 12 weapons functionally different. I felt that Fudge or Risus or the like wouldn't do that - but in retrospect I probably could have saved myself a lot of trouble.

As it turns out, I forgot to make the PCs specify what weapons and equipment they took down to the surface until they were in the middle of a fight and had already sounded the retreat. As a result, my big list of weapons didn't really matter. I also managed to forget to print one very important sheet of paper - the page with all my NPC stats. Several days had passed since I'd statted out those NPCs, and the morning of the game I'd had a very distracting emergency trip to the vet for one of my cats, so I really had no fuzzy clue what the stats were. Which meant more improvisation, as it turns out was alright.

Dice mechanics were pretty simple, using the dice from Warhammer 3rd as a narrative engine without most of the baggage that game brings with it. I skipped the green and red dice, the fatigue rules, the recharge rates, etc. The "comets" on the yellow dice gave PCs narrative control, the "Chaos Star" on the purple dice meant something really bad happened. In theory I had worked out success, boon and bane results for all the weapons and a few locations internal to the "mountain range" (that is to say, the Bolotomi from the Snit's games) but they really didn't end up mattering as we just improved our way through my missing paperwork. (I wouldn't be surprised if none of the players even knew I was missing most of my GM's notes, since I just kept my error to myself and rolled with it. GMing and grifting have more in common than most of us suspect. If you can fool your players into believing everything is running smoothly, it usually will.)

I replaced the intricate critical hit system from Warhammer with a neat little subsystem stolen from the "New Hope" game I played in last week. Each PC had a handful of consequences - disarmed, wounded, distressed, and captured/killed - they could choose from when a foe got a hit on them. A critical success (lots of hammer or eagle symbols on the dice) let the attacker choose which consequence they suffered, otherwise it was defender's choice. In addition to the common consequences, every PC had one custom consequence unique to that character. The captain could be seduced by aliens, the chief engineer could avoid personal injury by having the engines go offline, the doctor could get cranky and drunk, the communications officer might start speaking in tongues, etc.

It worked well enough for a one-shot, but probably would have been better if I'd had my carefully-balanced NPC stats on hand so I would have felt more confident throwing real challenges at the PCs. As it played out, there were very few injuries and no real PC fatalities. I was probably too easy on them to really capture the proper Tom Wham feel. No one seemed to complain, though.

The best developments of the night started when the Pilot (played by Peter) engaged the warp drive while in the atmosphere of Snitopia, and thus slingshotted around to an hour before the scenario started. You know, the classic Star Trek trick of bumbling into time-travel. This gave them the opportunity to actually cause the problem they'd responded to. When things went poorly and the 1st Officer was lost, they just flew out to where their ship had been half an hour earlier, and kidnapped the younger self of the 1st Officer, thereby disrupting the time line. Transchronal ripples spread throughout the universe as they continued to mess with their previous selves and engage in more time travel. In one time line, they contaminated the Snit gene pool with xenomiscegenation and converted them into a Fremen Fedaykin army that spread across the cosmos destroying everything in the name of the 1st Officer (who, along with the ship's mascot, was revered as a God). Then they undid that timeline and prevented themselves from ever visiting the planet in the first place. Good clean stupid fun.

All in all, we had a blast. I sort of regret the amount of work I went to trying to customize the game system. I made Ook and Leadfoot (the mascot and the robot from Awful Green Things) into followers akin to the "Small But Viscious Dog" in Warhammer, and created small deck of random weapon affects, none of which probably needed the level of detail I'd prepped for them. The game was a big success, but probably would have been just as successful with 1/3 the prep work. Hopefully I'll learn that lesson one of these days.

May the Blackbird be with you

Last night I played in a one-shot called "New Hope" that was sort of set in the Star Wars Universe, and used mechanics somewhat based on the indy RPG "Lady Blackbird".

It was set several years after Return of the Jedi, and the New Republic was every bit as as nasty as the Empire had ever been. Everything you recall from the movies was just Republican propaganda. It was an interesting twist on the Star Wars setting as seen through the perspective of The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again." It was a good game and plenty fun, but could probably have used a stronger opening scene. The GM vaguely explained the situation, but since it's a game where the Players have a lot of narrative power, he left most of the details fuzzy at first. He was trying to leave us free to take things in whatever direction we wanted, but as a result, we had a really slow start. I think if he'd narrated the opening situation more forcefully and given us a memorable villain to really hate, the first hour of the game would have been a lot better.

The rules were really interesting. They were derived from or inspired by Lady Blackbird, which is an indy game I was ignorant of until last night. I downloaded it this morning and took a peek through it, and I can tell that New Hope customized and built on it quite a bit. Overall, I think the changes were good ones. That said, I kind of felt like the GM's backlash dice pools were just a little too small. I think they could stand to range from 5 to 9 instead of 4 to 8. It's hard to say for certain, because we had some really lucky rolls on the players part. I just think the game would have been in it's best possible light, if the PCs had taken 25% more damage across the board and had to start worrying about resources and situations. I was the only one really hurt badly during the game, and that was only because I took some very big risks and painted a target on myself. I was so intrigued by the damage system I intentionally left myself open to suffer more of it.

My favorite part of the rules were definitely the "hit points"-like mechanism, which were customized to each character and really made you agonize over damage. You had three rows of labeled boxes. The first row was more like traditional HP, or like a World of Darkness health boxes, in that they were labeled "Hurt", "Wounded", "Crippled" and "Dead" or something to that effect. Below that was a row that had to do with our social status and the level of pursuit, so they were "Recognized", "Wanted", "Hunted" and "Infamous", I think. Then the fourth row were customized to each PC. My character had a wife and family - their health and safety were 5 of my 6 boxes in the third section. When you take damage, it's usually 1 or two points, and you get to apply them to any empty box that seems appropriate. So in a bar-fight I'd probably take the damage as physical damage in the top row, but I might instead take it in the second row and narrate that I was now a wanted man for having killed the person I was struggling with. If my family was present during a conflict, I might knock boxes off of them and say they were captured or harmed in the battle. One of the other characters was a rich man, and he took damage to his wealth when he got backlash off a roll to bribe someone. Having these custom consequences for each character was pretty cool, and really spiced up the conflicts. I may just have to steal the idea sometime.

Overall, it was good fun, and I'd definitely recommend it if you like the free-form "story game" narrative approach to role-playing. The RPG it was closest too in feel (at least of RPGs I'd played before) was probably Universalis, and I imagine if you like that you'll probably get a kick out of New Hope (or Lady Blackbird). It had more structure than Universalis, but appealed to the same mental space and had a similar spirit.

You can download New Hope for free.

You can also download Lady Blackbird for free.

They said "Dinosaurs", not giant blooming Cockroaches!

At last night's weekly one-shot, my buddy Mark ran this awesome little Risus scenario inspired by a TV show Primeval. I'd never seen the show, but the premise is pretty simple: portals open up to the ancient past, dinosaurs pour out, and the PCs have to wrangle the monsters back in. Kill a dino and you might change history.

He said for player characters, we had basically four options.

1. Badass
2. Scientist
3. Badass Scientist
4. Some combination of 2 or more of the above.

That cracked me up.

My three Cliches (the Risus system's form of attributes) were:

• Croike! I'm like that crocodile hunter guy!
• Parkour traceur
• Chemistry Set

The team was rounded out with an ex-special forces commando, a quick-thinking facewoman, and multilayered inventor type. We built our characters to complement each other, and the group functioned great as a team.

Mark did a wonderful job of handling the game, and it's mechanics. I've found that, despite being a light and simple system, the spiral of death inherent to Risus can really be a problem. Out of probably 8 games I've played of it, this was only one of 3 where the mechanics really shined, instead of hindered. It's a deceptively simple system, that takes a good GM to make it work - and Mark was up to the task, I'm happy to report.

To start the session off, we were called down to the Pike Market in Seattle, responding to an anomaly / gate that something had come through. We all had dinos on the brain, and as the clues amounted to some smaller critter, we assumed little compsognathses or the like.

Turns out they were trilobites, instead. This was a fact we discovered when I was dangling some bait over the hole in floorboards. Instead of a little lizard popping out, long exoskeletal tentacles lashed out and tried to pull me in. "Croiké! They said dinosaurs, not giant bloomin' cockroaches!" It was a great surprise, and really shook up our assumptions. Well done, Mark!

He did a series of short encounters, spread over several in-character days, as various gates opened. When all was said and done, we'd wrestled with trilobites, commandeered a DUKW from a tour group, swam with an apatosaurus, crashed an ATV into a smilodon, and exchanged trophies with primitive hominids. The plotline was simple, and largely an excuse for megafaunal havoc in the modern day, but it was a hoot. Great game, all around.

I missed the Emerald City Game Fest

Emerald City Game Fest is an annual free one-day gaming convention, put on by the same group that hosts the weekly Game Feast I regularly attend. Last year's ECGF was tons of fun. This year's con was last weekend, and I'd been looking forward to it all year.

But on the morning of, our car refused to start. We intended to go catch the second half later, but the car still wouldn't start, and the ECGF was way up in Kenmore... Okay not "way" up, if the car had been running, it would have been less than a half an hour drive. Instead, as it turns out, in order for us to arrive in time for the 2:00 game, we would have had to get on a bus at 12:08. We didn't realize it would take that long, and didn't even go look up the schedule till a few minutes after that.

In general, the bus-service here in Seattle is really good, but in this case, when taking a bus to far northern suburbs, it kinda sucked. I guess I've just been spoiled by my direct and easy route downtown.

Two comments on Wraith: The Oblivion

Last night, my weekly one-shot group played Wraith the Oblivion. Two observations:

• I really like the concept of you playing two characters: your main character, and the shadow-self (like the devil on the shoulder) of another player. It was really flavorful, and it meant every player always had something to do.
• Both the mechanics and the setting were probably more fiddly than is ideal for a one-shot. (Having now played the old Vampire, Werewolf, Changeling and Wraith, I have to say that Vampire is the most accessible and newbie-friendly of the batch.)

Were-Ostrich and Iguana Boy

I played in a hilarious and completely awesome game of InSpectres last night.

InSpectres is a very light RPG where the PCs lie somewhere in the spectrum between Ghostbusters and Ghost Hunters. It's a very simple system, and allows for a lot of narrative power in the players hands, so I really like it.

An aside about silliness:
I've played InSpectres half a dozen times over the past year, and have come to the conclusion that it handles goofy, almost slapstick, adventures better than more serious ones.

Everyone gets very different ideas in their head about what's going on, and given each players narrative power, it's easy to end up with a disjointed and somewhat contradictory story. If you go in with the intention of being goofy, you're not alarmed when someone pulls a completely random bit of nonsense out and makes the plot take a sharp turn. Scooby Doo endings, Big Bads behind seemingly disparate events, Werewolves in Spaceships, by embracing wackiness you're freeing up the plot (and players) to surprise you. You never know when someone's going to say, "Your stake breaks against his chest, but it does tear open his artificial flesh - it turns out the vampire is actually a robot!"

A more serious game of InSpectres is harder to pull off, because it only takes one moment of wild improvisation for another player to completely destroy your suspension of disbelief, and thus "ruin" the session without doing anything "wrong". Better to go in with your eyes wide open to the truly bizarre nature of the game.

Goofiness all around last night. We were playing the creators and staff of a little monster-hunting show on the internet. I was constantly adding in-character statements like "I know were-ostriches sounds pretty strange, but this is from a reliable source. The same source that gave us our lead on that episode in season 1, remember the vampire armadillos? The same guy. That sounded unbelievably bizarre then, but John's still got the scars to prove it was true. Were-ostriches will play out the same." Other folks started getting in on the joke, though I'd been it's main instigator for the first half of the session. By the end of the night, it was established that our show was in it's 4th season of investigating mostly supernatural versions of otherwise mundane animals.

We ran two mini-scenarios during the course of the evening.

• The first had to do with a possible were-ostrich killing the workers at an ostrich farm. Investigation later revealed it was actually ostrich warriors of some rare African mystical tradition.
• The second scenario began with a Fortean rain of cursed coins from 1923, and ended with Iguana-Human hybrids who were being held captive by a witch. I can't really summarize the plot of the second scenario. You had to be there.

I really liked that the game's extremely light rules and quickly-resolving narrative structure allowed us to pack two self-contained scenarios into a four-hour block. If most RPGs sessions are Novella, and long campaigns like a multi-book Novel series, then last night was a short-story anthology. It's was a nice change of pace, very unlike most other gaming experiences.

Another aside, this time about the sudden resolution of plot arcs:
The hardest part of InSpectres is pacing. There's a mechanism that determines how far you are from completing the scenario, and it's really easy to accidentally blunder into what should be whole-hog resolution while you're just trying to narrate your way past what you thought was just a minor hurdle and unrelated to the main plot.

After half a dozen sessions of the game, I don't feel our group has gotten any better at keeping our eye on that and adapting our narration to match. One of these days I should really sit down and do an exhaustive mathematical analysis of the core mechanics, and different scenario length possibilities.

At least I went down while shooting at Space-Hitler

In the previous two sessions, the crew had become the "guests" of the evil space genius who intended to destroy an entire civilization as revenge for them stiffing him on a weapons-design contract.

We'd made a plan to defeat the villain, and at a critical moment I was betrayed. Division within our own ranks resulted in me being subdued by my own crew, who feared their own deaths more than the dishonor of being the lap-dogs of a genocidal maniac.

(Now, admittedly, there's out-of-character pressures involved there. Most players consider self-preservation more important than accomplishing the goals of the mission, in most circumstances. But I'd made a hero, gosh-darn-it, and if I had to choose between my survival and my humanity, it was an easy choice. Plus we'd just watched Valkyrie about a week ago, so I have a relatively fresh model for making hard sacrifices to do what's right.)

It actually turned out pretty amazing in the final session of the three-part storyline.

My Kirk-role was, as I mentioned in my last post, hampered by the humorous hindrances placed upon me by the Worst...Crew...EVER. Despite those many handicaps, I managed to muster some Stauffenberg-esque determination.

I fought to the bitter end, and managed to do massive damage to the super-ship, stranding the evil doctor and the traitorous members of my crew deep in the void of space. I died, having been injected with the evil doctor's syringe full of poison. Laser pistol hot in my hands, my last envenomed breaths being taken as the self-aware and mostly crippled ship choked out life-support on the bridge to make sure I was really out of commission. Did I mention that all of this was happening while the super-ship was wiping out two fleets of warships? I'd timed my actions to coincide with the most critical part of the fight, so that the ship couldn't just space me.

One of the two mostly-innocent player characters managed to escape the vessel, find rescue, and distance herself from the madman. Sadly, the other wasn't able to escape as well, the ship went to hyperspace while she was getting the airlock ready. That character was the only collateral damage I regret. The rest of them, their actions made them villains, and the characters got what they deserved.

Kudos to Erik. After one rough scene at the very start of the session, he managed to maintain order and keep the game fun despite everything that was happening. That couldn't have been easy. Even after the game, everyone was laughing and pal-ing around.

Twice As Powerful With His Crew Stabbing Him In His Shirtless Back

Update: Rereading this, it seems far more bitter than I really intended. I don't have the time to edit it right now, so it'll have to stay, rant and all. So I'll qualify it with "it was actually quite fun, just really frustrating at the same time". Like get-up-and-walk-away-from-the-table-for-a-moment-because-you-need-to-calm-down-and-can't-believe-how-bad-the-other-player-just-screwed-up-your-plans fun. Anyhow...

Several weeks back we arrived a little late for this sci-fi short-shot we were playing in. Four other players had already made their characters when my wife and I got there. No problem, the GM says, character creation is fast, flexible, and a little experimental. So, I ask, "what positions in the crew haven't been taken yet?" They say, "actually, we don't have a Starship Captain yet. Why don't you play the captain?"

We're late, I don't want to hold up the game, and as it happens it was the day I was diagnosed with Achilles Tendinitis, so I name the character "Captain Achilles". Top of the character sheet says "Character Concept", so I write "Captain Kirk with Prosthetic Leg". We'd recently watched some season 1 classic Trek - before he develops the strange pause-laden over-dramatic speach method that marks his characterization in season 2 & 3 and the movies. In short, I'm thinking I'm making a heroic and competent captain - Star Fleet's finest, beloved by his crew, etc, but with an old war wound as a handicap to keep me from dominating the game.

Next step in character creation is handing your character sheet to the left. That person adds an aspect to your sheet. Then they pass it left, and another person gives you your second aspect. I get my sheet back, and my two aspects are "Twice As Powerful With His Shirt Off" and "Compensating For Something". Thanks, guys.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. All I knew was that the setting was ostensibly that of the old Traveller system. Now, I don't know Traveller very well, but it never struck me as slapstick or a parody. What I didn't know, was that in the 20 or 30 minutes we'd missed, they'd decided the crew would be the worst most dysfunctional crew that had ever been press-ganged into service. But they didn't tell me that. Nope, no clue had I till my first attempt to give a real order.

Now, when I'm playing a ranking PC, I don't pull rank often. It's not any fun to be bossed around, so I play it a lot more casual than any military or workplace would ever allow. In recent memory, this has burned me twice. So, it's not till the situation is dire that I start making command decisions, and the Pilot, Engineer, and Ship's Surgeon decide to do their own things instead. Total cluster. "Oh, well," I think, "that's what I get for showing up late. At least it's just a one-shot. I'll just roll with the punches." For the second half of the session, I switched from Captain Kirk to Zap Branigan, 'cause clearly that's the type of captain the rest of the players wanted. Any attempts at using logic, charisma, or discipline were going to be disrupted by the other players. Worst crew ever. We end up crashed, our passengers and crew imperiled, on this desolate ice planet run by a mad scientist. But, we didn't all die, so I considered that close enough to victory for a one-shot.

Imagine my surprise then, when, several weeks later, I come back from vacation to discover that a follow-up session to this game has been put on the schedule. Now I'm stuck reprising my over-compensating, shirtless on Hoth, incompetent captain, doomed to be disrespected by his crew. "Oh, well," I mutter again, and try to put on a good front.

Twenty minutes into this second session, it becomes clear that our NPC "host" is not just a mad scientist, but a genocidal fiend. He was marooned on this planet after being back-stabbed by the Draconian Empire, for whom he'd been a designer of superweapons. In the decades he'd be stranded here, he'd built a new super-weapon, a space ship with artificial intelligence and the power to destroy entire solar systems. He was now planning on obliterating a third of the galaxy to get his vengeance.

So, I talk to my horrible, incompetent crew. I know ordering them to fight won't work. But it is "Space Hitler" we're facing here, so I figured the players would grok that he's the badguy. "We need to figure out how to deal with this villain," I say. "We need to separate him from his ship, and knock him unconscious. Then the pilot and engineer will be able to jerry-rig a distress signal or possibly disable the AI in the ship." We discuss this, we lay out signals (blink three times, as silly as that sounds), we discuss it again and again, disseminating this information to all the PCs. Everyone is on-board.

A few scenes later, we have an opportunity. The mad scientist is in room with us in his base. All the PCs are present. There's two sets of 40-foot hangar doors between us and the evil AI ship. We've all got weapons drawn, because it had turned out one of our passengers had been a Draconian spy. The spy was subdued, and the Mad Scientist stood with his back to me. I blink three times at the Pilot's player, and attack the Mad Scientist. The game has no sneak attack rules, but the GM gives me initiative. I get a good hit, but it's not quite enough to take the Scientist out in one blow. Even though we had weapons at the ready, I started with an unarmed attack, because we wanted to capture the Mad Scientist and keep him as leverage so the supership couldn't just vaporize the planet. The scientist counter-attacks with a laser, but misses because I burn through a bunch of character resources to stay alive.

It gets to the PC Pilot's action. He shoots at me. Yep. My character is his target.

Then it's the Engineer's action, and he starts throwing pies at me. I kid you not.

3 other PCs flee the room. They're not really combat characters, and one had already been wounded by the Draconian spy, so I can't really blame them.

On my actions, while focusing my attacks on the Mad Scientist I shout orders to my crew to help me stop this madman - all the while reminding them that he is planning the genocide of billions. I even chose not to attack in round three so I can make a Leadership roll to force the Pilot to do his duty to not just his Captain but also Humanity. The player of the Pilot character blows through a big stack of Fate chips to resist it.

About 4 rounds into the fight I finally get some help from one of the other PCs, but by then I've burned through all my Fate Chips and taken a lot of damage. Even that PC decides to wrestle me to the ground on round 5 or 6, because she decides that's easier than fighting the villain plus all the other PCs. Total freakin' chaos.

The session ends with me in the brig of the evil super-ship, and everyone else buddy-buddy with Space Hitler. "Oh, well," I think, "at least it's the second-half of a two-parter. I'm out for a couple of scenes, but it'll all be over soon."

This Thursday, we're playing part three.

Toe-Eating Mechano-Crabs

Posting those sketches my players did at the last game reminded me that Devon had requested I put up on the web a photo of the drawing I'd made of the toe-eating mechano-crabs that attacked us in a game she ran a few months ago.

Our weekly one-shot group sure runs some interesting games.

2 out of 3 have climax

Heavy gaming week for me. Wednesday night I ran Trail of Cthulhu. Last night I played in a Savage Freeport game. Sunday I'll be running Deadlands.

Wednesday night's Trail of Cthulhu for my wife was mostly a wrap-up session. Campaign's not over, but that story arc was essentially post-climax. I'd been tempted to just jump ahead to the next story, but there was still some possibility for her to screw it up and let the bad guys off the hook (she didn't), so we kinda had to go through the motions. I kept it short, and freely dispensed with relevant facts in the few minor areas of inquiry she had to track down. Having effectively disarmed the villains, she was able to hand them off to the police without having to expose the authorities to any supernatural elements. Good moves on her part.

Thursday night's game I played in (at the weekly Game Feast) was a one-shot that turned into a two-shot due to getting started a little late. Pirates are fun, as is the notion of the Wizard-Lizard. Not much more to say on it till I see how it wraps up next Thursday.

Sunday's game is hard for me to predict. PC's are either posse-ing up with, ambushing, or getting ambushed by, the Big Bad. Way ahead of schedule, to their credit. But that makes getting the balance very tricky. Make him too weak, and it'll be cheap and anti-climactic... which might burn-out the campaign despite significant plot that will survive his defeat. Make him too buff, on the other hand, and they'll feel railroaded or ineffectual. The ideal scenario is probably PC success, at the cost of 20%-40% PC casualties. The plot would then continue into the city they're approaching, where the dead PCs could be replaced by new characters (provided they don't get "lucky" on Harrowed draws). There's a palpable tension for me as GM, as I can either bungle and implode the game, or make what follows far more interesting.

F#iref#ly

Having had some time to reflect on F#, I think it's the system I'll use should I ever end up running a Firefly campaign (which I've wanted to do for years). F# is very flexible (good for all that multi-genre-ism), handles tech extremely lightly (just like the show does) and it features the right amount of danger to characters that the series has. Yes, F# doesn't do the "characters die like flies" thing that the Serenity movie did, but that's okay - I wouldn't be likely to use Reavers as Orcs, either.

I'm tempted to run F#iref#ly at the Thursday night group sometime, to try it out. I'm also intimidated/scared to do so, because the coffeehouse we play at on Thursdays is the Seattle Browncoats HQ, and I'd feel like some stranger (or the barista) might wander over and correct me if I break cannon.

Aspects for F#FF

Here's the setting tag lines for the F# one-shot I'm running this Thursday at the Emerald City Game Feast:

1. All Fiend Folio, All The Time. Bizarre and Mundane are inverted. If it's stats aren't in the 1st Edition of the weirdest monster book of them all, then it's only a myth. Such things as orcs, humans, and rutabegas are spoken of in hushed reverent tones, or lambasted contemptuously, depending on who's speaking.
2. There are no other Planes, just this bastardized version of the Astral. The PCs hail from a city state on an asteroid floating in the great off-white void.
   
3. Life is hard, harsh and unfair. The ecosystem rests upon the backs of a handful of plants, all of which are carnivorous. Giant "Fortress Farms" keep the food from eating the cities. The priesthood is corrupt and evil (afterall, they worship Lolth, the Elemental Princes of Evil, and the Slaad Gods), and charge a huge margin on create food and water spells. The various races live in the same city, but are not created equal.
   • Corollary to Tag Lines 2 & 3. Many other such rocks and city states float in the void, and when they pass close enough for contact it results in wars, adventures, and cataclysmic cultural shifts.

As is typical for F#, the PCs will each have up to 3 catch phrases and up to 3 backgrounds. I am putting one restriction on them, however: Each player must pick a race from the Fiend Folio. Their character is a member of that race, and they must work it into (or use it as) one of their aspects. So "Drow" would be perfectly acceptable background, but so would "hen-pecked Drow husband/slave" or "I was an ordinary Fire Toad, until the day I was granted intelligence by a perverse whim of Ssendam". Heck, I'd even accept "The first Carbunkle to graduate from Business School" (though first carbunkle to graduate from the Seminary of Lolth might be more in keeping with the setting).

They'll roll and use that aspect per the normal F# rules, but it also grants whatever powers the race has according to the Fiend Folio. In some cases, like Crab Men or Hook Horrors, that's really not anything, but should someone choose to play one of the four Death Slaadi, for example, it'll come with some magic and baggage.

I intend to fill in the details of the City-State and Asteroid the game starts on based on the races the players choose to play. I'll probably let the players decide whether that race is common or rare within the city. If we've got flying PCs, the City will be on the surface. If we're all Sverfneblin and Terithrans, then it'll be a subterranean city with surface given over to farming.