I have been busy as heck lately, and playing a lot of games.
Work sent me out to GenCon, were I ran demos of Shadows of Brimstone, Forbidden Fortress, Last Night On Earth, Fortune & Glory, and A Touch Of Evil. It was super fun and I love sharing and teaching many of my favorite games to total strangers... but it was also very exhausting because GenCon is a huge show with a million faces and a hundred thousand games.
In my off hours at the con, I played a couple of new games I hadn't tried before.
Incan Gold is a fun press-your-luck game that I reliably came in... well, certainly not winning, but not in last place, either, so I feel like I did okay for a newbie. The best part was that I got to play the game with my old friend Brendan Riley, who lives far away and I hadn't seen in several years, and my buddy Bill French. I never would have expected them to meet, given that they live in different states, but GenCon is a place of miracles.
Brendan's company Rattlebox Games is playtesting a game called Udder Chaos, the only competitive cow-milking game I've ever seen. It's fast and goofy and full of rhymes. It was light-hearted fun, and you'd be helping support a old friend of mine, so check it out if you get a chance.
One night at GenCon I played a party game called Buy The Rights, in which you get a random hand of high concepts and genres and have to make your best pitch about why producers should invest money with you. I hammed it up, basically role-playing as a different screenwriter or producer in each round, and it turns out that nonsense is a very successful strategy in this game.
The other fun new experience of this GenCon for me was Hellapagos, a party game that starts out fully cooperative and then suddenly very quickly descends into murder and sometimes cannibalism. It was a social game that really felt like the first season of Lost. Everyone was working together to build a raft and catch fish, except for a couple slackers who just raided the wreckage for personal treasures. Much fun was had by all, including those who died when suddenly everyone started scrambling for the limited space on the raft. I, as one of those horrible slackers who spent a lot of turns searching the wreck, found a decent supply of bullets, which I traded 1 at a time to the only person who had found a gun, in exchange for her using them on people other than myself. In the end, 3 of the 8 players, including myself, made it back to civilization to tell the story of how we were the sole survivors of the wreck. Just don't ask about the barbecue.
Shortly after getting back from GenCon, I packed my suitcase a second time and headed to my favorite little (~1,000 attendees) local gaming convention, Dragonflight. I had originally planned to just go for fun, but at the last minute agreed to volunteer to run the Story Games Lounge when the usual volunteer dropped out. As it turns out, volunteering to run the Story Games room is itself a lot of fun.
First day of Dragonflight Game Convention:
GM'd an awesome double-length Psi*Run for 7 players.
Explored an alien planet in The Quiet Year
Lost a game of Snake Oil to the dreaded Fraud card
Played "2 Rooms and a Boom" till my brains hurt. It's a great social-deduction game, kind of like "Are You A Werewolf?" except everyone gets to play the entire game and know one has to die until the last couple seconds.
Won a game of Jetpack Unicorn. Honestly, I'm not crazy about this game. I think Superfight does the same thing, but better.
Played some more 2 Rooms and a Boom. (Across 6 games I've now been on both teams a couple times, been the bomber and been an Ambassador.)
On Day 2 of Dragonflight:
GM'd Og the caveman RPG for 5 players. No use big words play Og. The cavemen met The Doctor, and caused a regeneration.
GM'd another successful Psi*Run, for 4 new players. Hallucinatory madness derailed everything in a delightful way.
Hosted a giant marathon Microscope timeline for 6 players. It was epic! One of the best-developed, most fleshed-out microscope games I've ever seen. These new players really picked it up quickly and dove deep into the game.
That night, I got the band back together! Playing in Laura Mortensen's annual midnight Urchin game, as my recurring character, Rory Wanker of the formerly famous Rory Wanker and the Bloody Stickers. We're making a comeback, if only in my mind.
Other games played in the Story Game Lounge included more Quiet Year, some Zombie Cinema, and a few escapades of esteemed Baron Munchausen.
Day 3 of Dragonflight:
Played in a delightful Lego and d20s game run by Tim Beach. Two of the 5 players were kids, and they kept the game light-hearted and unpredictable. Tim did an amazing job of making the game work on the kids level and not lose the adults to boredom. Nearly all of my GMing experience in the last 20 years is with adults, but I can only imagine GMing for kids takes extra creativity, patience, and panache. Well done, sir.
Later that night:
I went to a birthday party at Zulu's game cafe. While there, we played a game of Dark Gothic. We all lost when the Shadows filled up in a sudden hurry. Quite the shame, as I was super close to winning, and probably could have done so in one to two more turns.
The next weekend:
Battlestar Galactica board game with old friends I hadn't seen in forever: Andy Collins, Gwen Kestrel, and Greg Collins (and their friend Ben). I was a frakking toaster the whole time, and I successfully destroyed the pathetic human fleet by breaking their morale. It was a solid game, and the humans came very close to winning. Possibly the closest game I've ever played of BSG.
After that, we played Between Two Cities, which is a very clever cooperative drafting and tile-placement game where you're building a city together with the player on your right and simultaneously building another city together with the player on your left. I didn't do so good at this, coming in 4th out of 5th place. I love the entire-cooperative nature of the mechanics, and how that's counter-weighted by the scoring. It's a game that exists in a very unique head space. I want the players adjacent to me to do well, and any other players to do poorly, but I don't really have a way cause that second part. There's probably some deeper strategy I'm not seeing yet, but I can at least admire the novelty of this truly unique game.
We followed that up with Royal Turf. It's a Knizia game about horse racing and betting on horse racing. In the abstract the topic doesn't sound interesting to me at all, like if you said "want to play a game about racetrack betting?" I'd reply with "not unless it's Royal Turf". Every time I play it I feel like a) I'm really not very good at it, and b) the game is surprisingly fun and enjoyable despite all that.
Then the wonderful Bobbie Hyde showed up to pick me up and we talked her into playing a round of Decrypto. It's a team code-guessing game, and we both really enjoyed it. If I didn't already own Codenames Duet, I would immediately rush out and by Decrypto. I feel Decrypto is a much better game than normal Codenames, but that makes it about equal with Codenames Duet (which is closer to codenames, but also generally a vastly improved version of Codenames itself).
So, it's been a summer cavalcade of new games and old friends. Pretty damn cool way to spend the days. And it ain't over yet. This weekend is PAX West! I will once again be running demos of Flying Frog adventure games. Sleep is for the weak.
Showing posts with label BSG. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BSG. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 28, 2019
Monday, May 16, 2011
Driving Your Players Crazy
Lately, I've been having a lot of experience with PCs going bonkers. There's a couple different ways to handle it, depending on what your goals are.
In 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars, I just drove the whole group crazy. Hallucinations, multiple realities, glaring inconsistencies, characters and situations that obviously couldn't exist, etc. It was almost all improvised, and I made no efforts to correct "mistakes" or obvious contradictions. Each week I just dove down whichever rabbit hole struck my fancy. This works really well when you're okay with the game not being taken 100% seriously, and when you're not really focused on long-term viability of the campaign. Honestly, I never expected that campaign to run as long as it did.
My Gumshoe Continuum campaign, on the other hand, is one I take very seriously, and hope to be running for a couple more years at least. We're about a year and a half into the campaign at this point, and just last Wednesday, I finally revealed that one of the PCs was crazy. He'd technically been nuts for about six months, but we played it real subtle. There was a scene where he nearly got Fragged Out (think of Back to the Future when Marty's hand starts to fade away: Frag's kinda like that, but it'll drive you crazy, too) , took a lot of mental Stability damage and snapped. So, the other players and I (as GM) decided on his specific brand of insanity, and warped the campaign around it. (That is, after all, the way the Gumshoe insanity rules work.) There was a minor NPC, who (coincidentally) had only ever interacted with his PC. So we decided she didn't exist.
Her name was Beverly, and she would eventually be nicknamed Beverly the Wallflower. When she was first introduced, I had every intention of her being a real character. The PC, whose name is Declan McGee, met her at a speakeasy in 1928 New York. She was just a bit of local color, introduced to establish a scene and was but one of like 50 details added just to make 1928 feel really different than modern day. 1928 was the PCs first major trip back in time more than a decade, and so I put some effort into making it interesting and "real". I had Declan run across Beverly the Wallflower a couple times, and was considering introducing a subplot where she starts stalking him, but hadn't really put much work into it yet. Like I said, none of the other PCs had met her yet (though one had most likely seen her across a crowded room).
Shortly thereafter, Declan failed the big Stability test after being Fragged (zapped by paradox), and the rest of the group got to conspire behind his back about what manner of madness had afflicted him. My wife suggested the awesome notion that perhaps her character hadn't actually seen Beverly across the crowded room, because maybe Beverly didn't exist. It was brilliant, and especially devious because it's not something anyone would see coming. If I introduce a character in September and in December your PC fails a stability test, you don't expect the consequence to be that the scene back in September didn't happen. But indeed, that's what we ret-conned behind the delusional character's players back. Effectively, we decided that he'd dreamed up an imaginary friend. He met his imaginary friend this one night in 1928 at a bar where he was feeling a little left out. From there it followed that every time the PC felt left out, lonely, or imperiled, Beverly would show up out of no where to make him feel safe and loved, even if he wasn't.
What can I say? I'm a bit of bastard (and while I'm at it, I'll add that the Gumshoe insanity rules rock). After a few sessions, good ol' Declan McGee was alone for a bit chasing a personal project while far away from 1920's NYC, and Beverly showed up to keep him company. Of course this was a shock to him, as nothing in those first few scenes with her indicated she was a Spanner (time-traveler). So he of course asked about this, and so she (or rather, his subconscious, played by me) filled in details of how they were being kept apart by her direct superior, Alexander Graham Bell. Yes, that Alexander Graham Bell.
Why was Bell keeping Beverly away from Declan? There's a minor rule amongst the Continuum that Spanners are not supposed to procreate with one another. Imagine a small child with the power to invert causality, or worse yet a baby that can teleport out of the womb. Scary stuff, so the rule is fairly reasonable. Beverly explained to Declan that Mr. Bell, her mentor, was concerned at her obvious affection for Declan, and feared she lacked the willpower to keep things platonic. This is why should could only visit Declan rarely, and on the sly.
To his credit, my player chased after this plotline with gusto. He started up a relationship with Beverly, and would tastefully ask to skip ahead to the next morning whenever they were alone together. Which is something I'm very thankful about, because it means we aren't left wondering what was really going on in any compromising scenes. They snuck around outside of the watchful eyes of The Continuum, made secret dates, and complained about how A.G. Bell was forcing them to be all cloak & dagger.
As GM, I just kept upping the dramatic ante. Beverly eventually showed up (all in Declan's mind) as an Exalted (one of the top ranks of the Continuum) based out of Atlantis (a big floating prehistoric battle platform to protect mankind from the time-traveling bad guys). Or so she said. There were a couple bits that didn't quite add up, and so Declan decided to get Further Information. I believe the player wanted to make sure that his sweetie wasn't a Narcissist (essentially a temporal terrorist), but the in-character motivation was basically to confront A.G. Bell and get everything out in the open. You know, pursuit of maximum drama. :) So he tracks the inventor of the telephone down, and starts interrogating him about Beverly.
"Who?!" Alexander Graham Bell asks. "Young man, I'm afraid I have no clue of whom you speak."
So Declan goes off on him. Lots of in-character yelling, and then a couple sessions dedicated to proving that A.G. Bell was lying to him. As that seemed to fail, he asked some NPCs for help spying on Beverly to make sure she wasn't up to no good. As you can imagine, hiring private eyes to investigate someone who doesn't even exist eventually lead to help of another sort. Some Psyches (time-travelling psychiatrists) caught up with Declan and took him somewhere remote to get some much-needed rest and counseling.
One of the awesome things about a time-travel RPG is that you can advance the plotline or timeline for one PC without it affecting the others. If you were playing some other RPG and one character went nuts, you'd either have to retire the character, or come up with some miracle cure. Instead, Declan spent 3 years in therapy in a Boxed (really really really remote, both temporally and physically) facility, conquering his own inner demons. We talk a bit about therapy, introduce a few NPCs he meets at the asylum, and then, 3 years older and wiser, he spans right back down to just a couple seconds after he left the party. That's a useful tool / implication of time-travel that has never before proven as immensely useful as it did last session. What could have been a campaign-wrecker instead became a puzzle with a quick and painless solution.
Now, it occurs to me there's a lot more I could have done to keep the truth from him. As I understand about schizophrenic delusions, most people inflicted with them go a long ways towards rationalizing and justifying their visions. Anyone who tries to tell them they're crazy stands a good chance of being labeled "part of the conspiracy". But ultimately, that would make this entire campaign a game about how this one PC went nuts. I just recently did a game (3:16) about people going nuts. I didn't want to tank or warp this campaign entirely around it, unless it was really an exciting concept to the players.
So, rather than come up with more convoluted defenses for Beverly (as if "I've been spending time in Atlantis because Alexander Graham Bell doesn't trust me around you" isn't convoluted and ridiculous enough), I decided to just throw things in the player's court. If he wanted the quick 10-minute solution, which he did, it would just cost a couple years of his character's life. If he'd instead told me "No, I want to be like Baltar", then I would have continued to play his imaginary friend on-and-off, but kept it secondary to the plot, just a minor character quirk. In the real world, when you can't tell reality from imagination, it's all but "game over", but this being an actual game, I need to make sure it only enhances the fiction. This may be Gumshoe, but it ain't Trail of Cthulhu, and I feel no need to ride the road to madness and despair in a streetcar named tragedy... at least not if it's not what the whole playgroup thinks would be the most fun. When the insanity is over, the game must go on.
In 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars, I just drove the whole group crazy. Hallucinations, multiple realities, glaring inconsistencies, characters and situations that obviously couldn't exist, etc. It was almost all improvised, and I made no efforts to correct "mistakes" or obvious contradictions. Each week I just dove down whichever rabbit hole struck my fancy. This works really well when you're okay with the game not being taken 100% seriously, and when you're not really focused on long-term viability of the campaign. Honestly, I never expected that campaign to run as long as it did.
My Gumshoe Continuum campaign, on the other hand, is one I take very seriously, and hope to be running for a couple more years at least. We're about a year and a half into the campaign at this point, and just last Wednesday, I finally revealed that one of the PCs was crazy. He'd technically been nuts for about six months, but we played it real subtle. There was a scene where he nearly got Fragged Out (think of Back to the Future when Marty's hand starts to fade away: Frag's kinda like that, but it'll drive you crazy, too) , took a lot of mental Stability damage and snapped. So, the other players and I (as GM) decided on his specific brand of insanity, and warped the campaign around it. (That is, after all, the way the Gumshoe insanity rules work.) There was a minor NPC, who (coincidentally) had only ever interacted with his PC. So we decided she didn't exist.
Her name was Beverly, and she would eventually be nicknamed Beverly the Wallflower. When she was first introduced, I had every intention of her being a real character. The PC, whose name is Declan McGee, met her at a speakeasy in 1928 New York. She was just a bit of local color, introduced to establish a scene and was but one of like 50 details added just to make 1928 feel really different than modern day. 1928 was the PCs first major trip back in time more than a decade, and so I put some effort into making it interesting and "real". I had Declan run across Beverly the Wallflower a couple times, and was considering introducing a subplot where she starts stalking him, but hadn't really put much work into it yet. Like I said, none of the other PCs had met her yet (though one had most likely seen her across a crowded room).
Shortly thereafter, Declan failed the big Stability test after being Fragged (zapped by paradox), and the rest of the group got to conspire behind his back about what manner of madness had afflicted him. My wife suggested the awesome notion that perhaps her character hadn't actually seen Beverly across the crowded room, because maybe Beverly didn't exist. It was brilliant, and especially devious because it's not something anyone would see coming. If I introduce a character in September and in December your PC fails a stability test, you don't expect the consequence to be that the scene back in September didn't happen. But indeed, that's what we ret-conned behind the delusional character's players back. Effectively, we decided that he'd dreamed up an imaginary friend. He met his imaginary friend this one night in 1928 at a bar where he was feeling a little left out. From there it followed that every time the PC felt left out, lonely, or imperiled, Beverly would show up out of no where to make him feel safe and loved, even if he wasn't.
What can I say? I'm a bit of bastard (and while I'm at it, I'll add that the Gumshoe insanity rules rock). After a few sessions, good ol' Declan McGee was alone for a bit chasing a personal project while far away from 1920's NYC, and Beverly showed up to keep him company. Of course this was a shock to him, as nothing in those first few scenes with her indicated she was a Spanner (time-traveler). So he of course asked about this, and so she (or rather, his subconscious, played by me) filled in details of how they were being kept apart by her direct superior, Alexander Graham Bell. Yes, that Alexander Graham Bell.
Why was Bell keeping Beverly away from Declan? There's a minor rule amongst the Continuum that Spanners are not supposed to procreate with one another. Imagine a small child with the power to invert causality, or worse yet a baby that can teleport out of the womb. Scary stuff, so the rule is fairly reasonable. Beverly explained to Declan that Mr. Bell, her mentor, was concerned at her obvious affection for Declan, and feared she lacked the willpower to keep things platonic. This is why should could only visit Declan rarely, and on the sly.
To his credit, my player chased after this plotline with gusto. He started up a relationship with Beverly, and would tastefully ask to skip ahead to the next morning whenever they were alone together. Which is something I'm very thankful about, because it means we aren't left wondering what was really going on in any compromising scenes. They snuck around outside of the watchful eyes of The Continuum, made secret dates, and complained about how A.G. Bell was forcing them to be all cloak & dagger.
As GM, I just kept upping the dramatic ante. Beverly eventually showed up (all in Declan's mind) as an Exalted (one of the top ranks of the Continuum) based out of Atlantis (a big floating prehistoric battle platform to protect mankind from the time-traveling bad guys). Or so she said. There were a couple bits that didn't quite add up, and so Declan decided to get Further Information. I believe the player wanted to make sure that his sweetie wasn't a Narcissist (essentially a temporal terrorist), but the in-character motivation was basically to confront A.G. Bell and get everything out in the open. You know, pursuit of maximum drama. :) So he tracks the inventor of the telephone down, and starts interrogating him about Beverly.
"Who?!" Alexander Graham Bell asks. "Young man, I'm afraid I have no clue of whom you speak."
So Declan goes off on him. Lots of in-character yelling, and then a couple sessions dedicated to proving that A.G. Bell was lying to him. As that seemed to fail, he asked some NPCs for help spying on Beverly to make sure she wasn't up to no good. As you can imagine, hiring private eyes to investigate someone who doesn't even exist eventually lead to help of another sort. Some Psyches (time-travelling psychiatrists) caught up with Declan and took him somewhere remote to get some much-needed rest and counseling.
One of the awesome things about a time-travel RPG is that you can advance the plotline or timeline for one PC without it affecting the others. If you were playing some other RPG and one character went nuts, you'd either have to retire the character, or come up with some miracle cure. Instead, Declan spent 3 years in therapy in a Boxed (really really really remote, both temporally and physically) facility, conquering his own inner demons. We talk a bit about therapy, introduce a few NPCs he meets at the asylum, and then, 3 years older and wiser, he spans right back down to just a couple seconds after he left the party. That's a useful tool / implication of time-travel that has never before proven as immensely useful as it did last session. What could have been a campaign-wrecker instead became a puzzle with a quick and painless solution.
Now, it occurs to me there's a lot more I could have done to keep the truth from him. As I understand about schizophrenic delusions, most people inflicted with them go a long ways towards rationalizing and justifying their visions. Anyone who tries to tell them they're crazy stands a good chance of being labeled "part of the conspiracy". But ultimately, that would make this entire campaign a game about how this one PC went nuts. I just recently did a game (3:16) about people going nuts. I didn't want to tank or warp this campaign entirely around it, unless it was really an exciting concept to the players.
So, rather than come up with more convoluted defenses for Beverly (as if "I've been spending time in Atlantis because Alexander Graham Bell doesn't trust me around you" isn't convoluted and ridiculous enough), I decided to just throw things in the player's court. If he wanted the quick 10-minute solution, which he did, it would just cost a couple years of his character's life. If he'd instead told me "No, I want to be like Baltar", then I would have continued to play his imaginary friend on-and-off, but kept it secondary to the plot, just a minor character quirk. In the real world, when you can't tell reality from imagination, it's all but "game over", but this being an actual game, I need to make sure it only enhances the fiction. This may be Gumshoe, but it ain't Trail of Cthulhu, and I feel no need to ride the road to madness and despair in a streetcar named tragedy... at least not if it's not what the whole playgroup thinks would be the most fun. When the insanity is over, the game must go on.
Meanwhile, one of my other PCs is busy having The Last Supper with Christopher Marlowe and Derren Brown, but that's a tale for a whole other blog post some other time...
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Space Alert
As usual, I made this post way longer than it needed to be, so here's a to-the-point summary:
My wife and I are semi-quarantined, so we spent the weekend (and last night) playing the new boardgame that I bought just an hour before the doctor said "It might be swine flu, so stay home, sleep as much as possible, and call me if your symptoms worsen".
That new boardgame is Space Alert, and man does it kick interstellar butt!
Space Alert is a cooperative game, where you are the under-trained crew of a "Sitting Duck"-class spaceship. You are exploring a new sector of the galaxy. You'll be attacked by enemy spacecraft and giant space amoeba, discover you're on a collision course with a comet, fight off boarding parties, contract exotic infections, try to manage your power core to keep fuel running to the shields and weapons, etc. It's good zany sci-fi fun.
And it's hectic and tense. The game comes with two CDs of 7 to 10 minute soundtracks. These soundtracks have the ships computer narrating events that happen in real time. You play cards, programming your actions like in Roborally, but instead of being in turns it's as you see fit in response to the events of the soundtrack. When the soundtrack is done, there's a 5-10 minute process of resolving the cards you'd played.
Like Roborally, if you played the wrong card, or a card in the wrong order, it messes up your later actions. That creates all sorts of craziness, where the whole crews plan hinges on the one character that goofed up. Picture the most dire Star Trek scenario, surrounded by an enemy fleet and barely enough power for shields and phasers if Scotty's working his miracles. Now make Scotty drunk and incompetent - that's Space Alert when you played the wrong card.
I've always loved Roborally, but I like Space Alert better. Roborally had problems with the "runaway leader" syndrome, where one player would get way ahead of everyone else. Clever track layouts could mitigate that, but not completely rule it out. If you made your track too hard, one person could be the clear leader for 30 to 45 long anti-climactic minutes. In Space Alert, the game is over in 15 to 20 minutes, the first 10 of which seem to pass in the blink of an eye. And you're so excited at the end of it, that you want to play again. Roborally is hard to teach to new players, as well, because it's a little overwhelming and they're guaranteed to lose the first two or three games. With Space Alert, you're working together, so the experienced players are motivated to coach the newbies, and can pick up the slack if someone's confused or making mistakes.
Speaking of "easier to teach new players", I feel Space Alert also compares very favorably to the Battlestar Galactica boardgame. It's got just as much going on (It feels like more is happening in Space Alert, but that may be an illusion because of the time pressure), but each individual component is a less complicated. You feel like your choices and actions have more impact, and there's less randomness. Space Alert is like the most tense critical moments of BSG, wrapped up into 15 lightning-fast minutes. It lacks BSGs long pregnant hours of sizing up the other players, trying to decide which challenge is worth spending which resource on, and regretting every action. So, if you were buying BSG because you wanted a game about space ships, Space Alert is probably the better choice. If you were buying BSG for the specific Galactica branding/flavor/characters, however, then stick with BSG. If you wanted a long, slow, cerebral puzzle, BSG is your ship. (If you were buying BSG because of the "Who's the Traitor?" element, I'd say get Shadows Over Camelot instead, as it's got that same feel with a lot less arbitrarily fiddly mechanics than BSG.) If you want decisive action and an adrenalin rush, Space Alert is definitely the better game.
And speaking of other cooperative and team games, Space Alert has replaced Pandemic as my favorite (which replaced Shadows Over Camelot, which replaced Lord Of The Rings). In that chain of replacements, there's a noticable theme. Space Alert is shorter than Pandemic which is shorter than Shadows which is shorter than LOTR. So, again, it never gets long or anticlimactic, and you can squeeze in an extra play or two into the evening. As far as complexity, though, Space Alert occupies a place somewhere between Shadows and Lord of the Rings, being much more complicated than Pandemic. If there wasn't the real-time element, you might overthink all the fun out of Space Alert, as every scenario is mathematically solvable - but you just don't have the time to do so, and it maintains its fun as a result.
As my last game comparison, it reminds me of one of my favorite computer games - Weird Worlds: Return To Infinite Space. It has that same goofy feel, and same quality of lasting just 20 minutes to a play. If you liked WW:RTIS, I think you'll get a kick out of Space Alert. Play WW:RTIS when you're alone, and Space Alert with a group.
The one worry I had about Space Alert prior to buying it was the soundtracks. I feared that they might limit the replayability of the game, because I thought they were entire scenarios unto themselves, and that you'd only want to play each one a finite number of times. Instead, the soundtracks don't tell you what's attacking, just what category of threat it is, when it shows up on sensors, and what trajectory it's approaching on. Something like "Alert! Time is T+3. Serious Threat detected in Red Sector." Then you flip over the top card of the Serious Threat deck, and discover it's an enemy stealth fighter, which you can't get a weapons lock on until it reaches the midpoint of it's approach vector. Or it's a giant "Space Octopus", that has to be destroyed from far away or else it will become enraged and rip your ship apart. Or it's a malfunctioning warhead in your missile bay, which has to be jettisoned before it explodes. As you can imagine, those three problems take very different solutions. Thus far we've mostly played soundtracks on the first disk, which typically give you about three such threats to deal with. Judging from our one play on the advanced disk, it gets much more frantic. In this one weekend of being ill, we've more than gotten our $60 value out of Space Alert, and we still haven't played three quarters of the soundtracks or seen half the cards.
One warning, however. My copy came with two production errors.
Space Alert is a fast-paced cooperative boardgame with a sci-fi theme. A single game of it is about 20 minutes, so you can cram in several plays in a night. It has some similarities to roborally, but the short length and real-time pressure means it is more tense and frantic. The short and exciting nature of it has promoted this to the slot of being my favorite cooperative game.And now for the long winded raving:
My wife and I are semi-quarantined, so we spent the weekend (and last night) playing the new boardgame that I bought just an hour before the doctor said "It might be swine flu, so stay home, sleep as much as possible, and call me if your symptoms worsen".
That new boardgame is Space Alert, and man does it kick interstellar butt!
Space Alert is a cooperative game, where you are the under-trained crew of a "Sitting Duck"-class spaceship. You are exploring a new sector of the galaxy. You'll be attacked by enemy spacecraft and giant space amoeba, discover you're on a collision course with a comet, fight off boarding parties, contract exotic infections, try to manage your power core to keep fuel running to the shields and weapons, etc. It's good zany sci-fi fun.
And it's hectic and tense. The game comes with two CDs of 7 to 10 minute soundtracks. These soundtracks have the ships computer narrating events that happen in real time. You play cards, programming your actions like in Roborally, but instead of being in turns it's as you see fit in response to the events of the soundtrack. When the soundtrack is done, there's a 5-10 minute process of resolving the cards you'd played.
Like Roborally, if you played the wrong card, or a card in the wrong order, it messes up your later actions. That creates all sorts of craziness, where the whole crews plan hinges on the one character that goofed up. Picture the most dire Star Trek scenario, surrounded by an enemy fleet and barely enough power for shields and phasers if Scotty's working his miracles. Now make Scotty drunk and incompetent - that's Space Alert when you played the wrong card.
I've always loved Roborally, but I like Space Alert better. Roborally had problems with the "runaway leader" syndrome, where one player would get way ahead of everyone else. Clever track layouts could mitigate that, but not completely rule it out. If you made your track too hard, one person could be the clear leader for 30 to 45 long anti-climactic minutes. In Space Alert, the game is over in 15 to 20 minutes, the first 10 of which seem to pass in the blink of an eye. And you're so excited at the end of it, that you want to play again. Roborally is hard to teach to new players, as well, because it's a little overwhelming and they're guaranteed to lose the first two or three games. With Space Alert, you're working together, so the experienced players are motivated to coach the newbies, and can pick up the slack if someone's confused or making mistakes.
Speaking of "easier to teach new players", I feel Space Alert also compares very favorably to the Battlestar Galactica boardgame. It's got just as much going on (It feels like more is happening in Space Alert, but that may be an illusion because of the time pressure), but each individual component is a less complicated. You feel like your choices and actions have more impact, and there's less randomness. Space Alert is like the most tense critical moments of BSG, wrapped up into 15 lightning-fast minutes. It lacks BSGs long pregnant hours of sizing up the other players, trying to decide which challenge is worth spending which resource on, and regretting every action. So, if you were buying BSG because you wanted a game about space ships, Space Alert is probably the better choice. If you were buying BSG for the specific Galactica branding/flavor/characters, however, then stick with BSG. If you wanted a long, slow, cerebral puzzle, BSG is your ship. (If you were buying BSG because of the "Who's the Traitor?" element, I'd say get Shadows Over Camelot instead, as it's got that same feel with a lot less arbitrarily fiddly mechanics than BSG.) If you want decisive action and an adrenalin rush, Space Alert is definitely the better game.
And speaking of other cooperative and team games, Space Alert has replaced Pandemic as my favorite (which replaced Shadows Over Camelot, which replaced Lord Of The Rings). In that chain of replacements, there's a noticable theme. Space Alert is shorter than Pandemic which is shorter than Shadows which is shorter than LOTR. So, again, it never gets long or anticlimactic, and you can squeeze in an extra play or two into the evening. As far as complexity, though, Space Alert occupies a place somewhere between Shadows and Lord of the Rings, being much more complicated than Pandemic. If there wasn't the real-time element, you might overthink all the fun out of Space Alert, as every scenario is mathematically solvable - but you just don't have the time to do so, and it maintains its fun as a result.
As my last game comparison, it reminds me of one of my favorite computer games - Weird Worlds: Return To Infinite Space. It has that same goofy feel, and same quality of lasting just 20 minutes to a play. If you liked WW:RTIS, I think you'll get a kick out of Space Alert. Play WW:RTIS when you're alone, and Space Alert with a group.
The one worry I had about Space Alert prior to buying it was the soundtracks. I feared that they might limit the replayability of the game, because I thought they were entire scenarios unto themselves, and that you'd only want to play each one a finite number of times. Instead, the soundtracks don't tell you what's attacking, just what category of threat it is, when it shows up on sensors, and what trajectory it's approaching on. Something like "Alert! Time is T+3. Serious Threat detected in Red Sector." Then you flip over the top card of the Serious Threat deck, and discover it's an enemy stealth fighter, which you can't get a weapons lock on until it reaches the midpoint of it's approach vector. Or it's a giant "Space Octopus", that has to be destroyed from far away or else it will become enraged and rip your ship apart. Or it's a malfunctioning warhead in your missile bay, which has to be jettisoned before it explodes. As you can imagine, those three problems take very different solutions. Thus far we've mostly played soundtracks on the first disk, which typically give you about three such threats to deal with. Judging from our one play on the advanced disk, it gets much more frantic. In this one weekend of being ill, we've more than gotten our $60 value out of Space Alert, and we still haven't played three quarters of the soundtracks or seen half the cards.
One warning, however. My copy came with two production errors.
- A misprinted card, which they detected at the factory, and tucked a corrected card (and an explanatory note) into the box. Kudos to Rio Grande for catching and solving that problem.
- The other error was the swapping of labels on the two CDs. This they didn't catch. The Tutorial disc was labeled Mission, and vice-versa. So we played our very first game with the hardest difficulty soundtrack, which referenced all kinds of events that weren't covered in the introductory rules. Man, was that ever confusing. Your very first game should be one of the 7 minute tracks. If it runs 10 minutes or mentions an "Unconfirmed Report" or "Internal Threat", you're on the wrong disk.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Another Hypothetical RPG - an alternative BSG RPG
Battlestar Galactica - yeah, I know there's already a BSG RPG. I'd never play it. I'll start with a few points as to why I'm not interested in just playing it as-is:
I'd go with a really rules-light system for the actual characters. Probably FATE, as it's solid, simple, flexible, not too cinematic, and provides some character background. PCs would have skills, but not lots of feats. I'd put the majority of the focus on the ships, instead.
I'd have each player design a ship - and I'd focus my game-design energies on making a system for that rewards the players for making a fleet that's diverse. Their PC would be the captain of the ship they designed. Rather than having one big Battlestar to focus everything on, the needs of the fleet would be split between various vessels.
When the Captain of the only Agriculture vessel in the fleet decides to play political hardball, I want him to have some clout. When he tells the Military Carrier that he wants their engineers to install some point-defense on his vessel or else he'll cut production to emergency ration level, I want it to be a workable threat. I also want the players to be able to prioritize which ships get protection and babying based on what they bring to the fleet based on an appraisal of how important that vessel is to the fleet, and the mechanics need to make that possible.
Of course, when a fight breaks out, who wants to play the Agriculture ship, even if it has some jury-rigged flak guns? To solve that dillema, each player would have option of having two PCs. One is a captain of a civilian vessel, the second is one of the hot-shot fighter pilots. The captain characters would take part in the political struggle and resource management, and the fighter pilots would face the threats head-on. During full scale fleet battles and "33"-inspired ambushes, each player would control both their fighter and their civie ship, and the game would need a good tactical 3-D space combat system to make that work... Problem is, I have yet to play an RPG that does so, so I'm uncertain where to start.
I think I might crack open my old Full Thrust miniatures game books. Something similar, with individual ships-systems recorded and tracked, and using relative vector movement, would probably be the way to go. Fighters would have to be souped up a bit to feel like BSG, but Full Thrust is at least a good inspiration. You'd add systems like "Cargo Hold", "Tillium Processor", "Improvised Housing", "Hydroponics Bay" and the like so that the ships could hold a purpose in the fleet. You don't want a system where a critical hit makes the whole ship explode, nor a system with abstract hit points and a boolean unimpaired/destroyed status for the whole vessel. Instead, you want a brutal system where ships get battered and impaired, systems go offline one by one, and you have to nurse it back into shape after the battle.
That's where I'd start, anyway.
- It's based on the current show. I enjoy watching the current show, but as an RPG setting it sure has flaws. It's muddled, and I really can't tell what will prove to be prophetic destiny arranged by godlike beings and what will just be Baltar's paranoid schizophrenic ravings. I'm not entirely convinced the writers will be able to make the cosmology make sense in the end, and I'd hate to find that out for certain in mid-campaign.
- Worse, there's giant logic holes in the show that wouldn't survive contact with your typical playgroup. To keep the PCs from having a cylon detector by episode two, you'd have to deny them access to any science or engineering characters, and also disallow cameras and the seduction of their fellow pilots. The Galactica has a never-ending supplies of missiles for the vipers - so PCs would jury-rig missile launchers onto the hull of the President's ship by the end of session one. It goes on and on.
- I've read that the two types of Viper (Mk II and MVII) have the same stats in this system. There's 40 years of tech development seperating them. I know the show doesn't dwell on it real long or hard either, but they ought to have some variation in stats. Abstract elegance is good, but for a setting the features space-dogfights so prominantly, you need more granularity.
- On the other hand, the rule book lists several different pistols that only vary in cost, not effectiveness. Why differentiate between costs of identical handguns? The show never names gun types, never dwells on them beyond "he's armed", and only mentions money when plot points are being discussed over a game of Pyramid.
- Politics is a huge part of the story, and resource depletion is a recurring plot line. You could handle the resources with a light and abstract touch by having an NPC admiral give the PCs missions every session - "The Admiral says Fuel supplies are low and we need to raid that Cylon tillium station". Sadly, that runs into the same "powerless PCs" problem you get when you have a NPC Prince in a Vampire LARP - it would strip the Politics out of the setting, and/or make the PCs feel like bit players. Alternately, you could have a very gritty system that tracks resources so players can make the hard decisions - but every review I've read of the game suggests that it's crunch-lite, without any rules for how to find a world with food, how much fuel it takes to jump the fleet, etc.
- Most generic systems lack the ability to make 3-D space combat meaningful or exciting. I haven't heard any praise of how this one is different.
I'd go with a really rules-light system for the actual characters. Probably FATE, as it's solid, simple, flexible, not too cinematic, and provides some character background. PCs would have skills, but not lots of feats. I'd put the majority of the focus on the ships, instead.
I'd have each player design a ship - and I'd focus my game-design energies on making a system for that rewards the players for making a fleet that's diverse. Their PC would be the captain of the ship they designed. Rather than having one big Battlestar to focus everything on, the needs of the fleet would be split between various vessels.
When the Captain of the only Agriculture vessel in the fleet decides to play political hardball, I want him to have some clout. When he tells the Military Carrier that he wants their engineers to install some point-defense on his vessel or else he'll cut production to emergency ration level, I want it to be a workable threat. I also want the players to be able to prioritize which ships get protection and babying based on what they bring to the fleet based on an appraisal of how important that vessel is to the fleet, and the mechanics need to make that possible.
Of course, when a fight breaks out, who wants to play the Agriculture ship, even if it has some jury-rigged flak guns? To solve that dillema, each player would have option of having two PCs. One is a captain of a civilian vessel, the second is one of the hot-shot fighter pilots. The captain characters would take part in the political struggle and resource management, and the fighter pilots would face the threats head-on. During full scale fleet battles and "33"-inspired ambushes, each player would control both their fighter and their civie ship, and the game would need a good tactical 3-D space combat system to make that work... Problem is, I have yet to play an RPG that does so, so I'm uncertain where to start.
I think I might crack open my old Full Thrust miniatures game books. Something similar, with individual ships-systems recorded and tracked, and using relative vector movement, would probably be the way to go. Fighters would have to be souped up a bit to feel like BSG, but Full Thrust is at least a good inspiration. You'd add systems like "Cargo Hold", "Tillium Processor", "Improvised Housing", "Hydroponics Bay" and the like so that the ships could hold a purpose in the fleet. You don't want a system where a critical hit makes the whole ship explode, nor a system with abstract hit points and a boolean unimpaired/destroyed status for the whole vessel. Instead, you want a brutal system where ships get battered and impaired, systems go offline one by one, and you have to nurse it back into shape after the battle.
That's where I'd start, anyway.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Battlestar Complexica
This past weekend, between games of Dominion and Pandemic, we played the Battlestar Galactica boardgame from Fantasy Flight. I'm still trying to figure out if I truly liked it or not. It was a lot of fun, but it was also needlessly complicated.
The game plays a little bit like Shadows Over Camelot, in that it's mostly cooperative, but has traitors (in this case, they're Cylons).
Yet, they don't feel alike. In a typical game of Shadows, you're keeping an eye out for the traitor, but mostly everyone's trying to solve the challenge of the game. There's one Traitor card amidst all the Loyalty cards, so in a 5-player game of Shadows, it's not unheard of for no one to be a traitor. Happens fairly often, actually.
In Battlestar Galactica, the math is a little different. In a 5 player game, you use a loyalty deck of 11 cards, 2 of which say "Cylon". At the half way point, you add a "Cylon Sympathizer" card to the deck, and deal out the remaining cards - everyone gets a second card, and if it's a Cylon card it overrides your previous human card. So, a 5-player game could actually have more Cylons than Humans after the half-way point, and it's actually impossible to go the entire game without a "Traitor". That certainly captures the feel of the show, but I haven't played enough to figure out how well it works mechanically. There's a traitor for certain, so you should be even less tolerant of shady behavior and poor decisions. However, I could also see it be a lot less tense, since there's no false hope that we might be traitorless this time.
As I said, the loyalty system certainly scores well in the "recreating the feel of the show" category. So does the space combat system. Galactica gets ambushed, spools up her jump drives, waits till the last civilian ship jumps (or is destroyed), manages viper squadrons, etc. That part of the game is incredible. I wish the whole experience were as good.
Where it fails for me is the cards. There's tons of cards in this game, which should be a plus. Most are based on events from the first season of the TV show, and have photos and quotes that reinforce the flavor of what's happening. Problem is, you never read them. The rules require reading the quotes out-loud, and certainly the game will be more fun if you're in-character, but it's hard to see it as anything but a diversion. The problem is, the cards are too complex. They're bordering on overwhelming, and the flavor text is only distracting.
I'll describe a typical Crisis card. At the top of the card is the name of the event, below that is a picture, below that is a quote. On the left hand side of the picture is a number - this tells you the target number of the skill challenge. Below the number are 2 to 5 colored blocks, corresponding to various decks of resource cards. Below the quote is a section that tells us the results of passing the skill challenge, and of failing the skill challenge. Below that is an icon indicating which Cylon ships act, and what they do. To the right of that is an icon telling you whether or not the jump drive spools up this turn.
Let's deal with just the skill challenges for a moment. In order to pass the skill challenge, the group needs to play resources of the right colors and combined number value. Every player has access to different resource decks (and thus different colors), so sometimes you just won't be able to help the group complete a challenge. The cards vary in power from 1 to 5, as well, so knowing that 4 cards have been played face-down on the challenge so far means you're at a total of anywhere from 4 to 20, which isn't much to go on when the skill challenge has a target number of 13.
However, cards of the wrong color count negative, and, you'll recall, there's at least one cylon hidden amongst the crew. So, really, 4 cards having been played means a total of anywhere from -20 to +20. It all depends on who the Cylon is, how many there are, how subtle they're being, and who's got what color of cards. And then two random cards from a destiny deck get added as well, bouncing the number by another +10 to -10. In other words, you really don't have a fuzzy clue whether or not you'll accomplish any given skill challenge.
I haven't yet mentioned the resource cards don't just have a color/suit and a value, they also have a special power. So, when deciding what to contribute to a skill challenge, you have to weigh it's value in the challenge against it's potential value as an action on your turn. Guess wrong and you'll squander a resource that will prove vital later.
A lot of times, the Skill Challenges will have decisions that can be made by one particular player. Sometimes it's the President, sometimes it's the Admiral, sometimes it's the active player. Often, these decisions let you skip the skill challenge entirely, and sometimes they let you pick between two different outcomes if you succeed.
Like I said, it's a little overwhelming. Trying to judge the severity of a given Crisis card is really tough. You have to factor in all those details of the Skill Challenge, it's consequences and the potential gains to Cylon traitors who chose to sabotage. It doesn't stop there, as the commands at the bottom of the card concerning Cylon attack fleets and the Galactica's jump drive can make an otherwise non-critical card absolutely devastating at the wrong moment.
Everyone plays a character. All the characters have special powers. One of them is "once per turn, look at the top card of the Crisis deck and either put it back or put it on the bottom of the deck." There's so much data for them to consider, it easily doubles the length of their turn, and they'll probably miss some important factor that makes the card more or less dire than it appears. I don't ever want to have that power! It'd be terminal information paralysis, I suspect.
This complexity permeates the game. Even the loyalty cards are over-complicated. Each different "traitor" card includes a different power you get to use if and when you're revealed - but if you stop to read yours, everyone will know you're a Cylon. Knowing what your power can do, however, would let you know when the right time to make your move is.
The game didn't need to be that complex. It could have been just as flavorful and more enjoyable without so much data being shoved down the player's throats. If so, it would have been a better gateway game for converting BSG fans into gamers. It also would have played much faster, and been a lot easier to master. The learning curve is so steep. If we didn't have so much data to parse, we'd be more impressed by the quotes and eye-candy - so it'd actually be more flavorful. It just feels like it had so much more potential - if only the skill challenges and crisis cards (and everything else) were just a little less byzantine and subjective, you might feel like you had a hope of actually making a better than average play once in a while. Honestly, the characters in the rather bleak show have more hope of making a difference than players of the game do.
Yet it still manages to be fun. (It would have been more fun if it weren't so darned complicated and fiddly, but I think I've already made that point.) I'd gladly play a second game of it, I'm just not sure I'd buy it. Luckily, a friend owns it, so I'll likely get another play or two without having to fork up cash myself.
The game plays a little bit like Shadows Over Camelot, in that it's mostly cooperative, but has traitors (in this case, they're Cylons).
Yet, they don't feel alike. In a typical game of Shadows, you're keeping an eye out for the traitor, but mostly everyone's trying to solve the challenge of the game. There's one Traitor card amidst all the Loyalty cards, so in a 5-player game of Shadows, it's not unheard of for no one to be a traitor. Happens fairly often, actually.
In Battlestar Galactica, the math is a little different. In a 5 player game, you use a loyalty deck of 11 cards, 2 of which say "Cylon". At the half way point, you add a "Cylon Sympathizer" card to the deck, and deal out the remaining cards - everyone gets a second card, and if it's a Cylon card it overrides your previous human card. So, a 5-player game could actually have more Cylons than Humans after the half-way point, and it's actually impossible to go the entire game without a "Traitor". That certainly captures the feel of the show, but I haven't played enough to figure out how well it works mechanically. There's a traitor for certain, so you should be even less tolerant of shady behavior and poor decisions. However, I could also see it be a lot less tense, since there's no false hope that we might be traitorless this time.
As I said, the loyalty system certainly scores well in the "recreating the feel of the show" category. So does the space combat system. Galactica gets ambushed, spools up her jump drives, waits till the last civilian ship jumps (or is destroyed), manages viper squadrons, etc. That part of the game is incredible. I wish the whole experience were as good.
Where it fails for me is the cards. There's tons of cards in this game, which should be a plus. Most are based on events from the first season of the TV show, and have photos and quotes that reinforce the flavor of what's happening. Problem is, you never read them. The rules require reading the quotes out-loud, and certainly the game will be more fun if you're in-character, but it's hard to see it as anything but a diversion. The problem is, the cards are too complex. They're bordering on overwhelming, and the flavor text is only distracting.
I'll describe a typical Crisis card. At the top of the card is the name of the event, below that is a picture, below that is a quote. On the left hand side of the picture is a number - this tells you the target number of the skill challenge. Below the number are 2 to 5 colored blocks, corresponding to various decks of resource cards. Below the quote is a section that tells us the results of passing the skill challenge, and of failing the skill challenge. Below that is an icon indicating which Cylon ships act, and what they do. To the right of that is an icon telling you whether or not the jump drive spools up this turn.
Let's deal with just the skill challenges for a moment. In order to pass the skill challenge, the group needs to play resources of the right colors and combined number value. Every player has access to different resource decks (and thus different colors), so sometimes you just won't be able to help the group complete a challenge. The cards vary in power from 1 to 5, as well, so knowing that 4 cards have been played face-down on the challenge so far means you're at a total of anywhere from 4 to 20, which isn't much to go on when the skill challenge has a target number of 13.
However, cards of the wrong color count negative, and, you'll recall, there's at least one cylon hidden amongst the crew. So, really, 4 cards having been played means a total of anywhere from -20 to +20. It all depends on who the Cylon is, how many there are, how subtle they're being, and who's got what color of cards. And then two random cards from a destiny deck get added as well, bouncing the number by another +10 to -10. In other words, you really don't have a fuzzy clue whether or not you'll accomplish any given skill challenge.
I haven't yet mentioned the resource cards don't just have a color/suit and a value, they also have a special power. So, when deciding what to contribute to a skill challenge, you have to weigh it's value in the challenge against it's potential value as an action on your turn. Guess wrong and you'll squander a resource that will prove vital later.
A lot of times, the Skill Challenges will have decisions that can be made by one particular player. Sometimes it's the President, sometimes it's the Admiral, sometimes it's the active player. Often, these decisions let you skip the skill challenge entirely, and sometimes they let you pick between two different outcomes if you succeed.
Like I said, it's a little overwhelming. Trying to judge the severity of a given Crisis card is really tough. You have to factor in all those details of the Skill Challenge, it's consequences and the potential gains to Cylon traitors who chose to sabotage. It doesn't stop there, as the commands at the bottom of the card concerning Cylon attack fleets and the Galactica's jump drive can make an otherwise non-critical card absolutely devastating at the wrong moment.
Everyone plays a character. All the characters have special powers. One of them is "once per turn, look at the top card of the Crisis deck and either put it back or put it on the bottom of the deck." There's so much data for them to consider, it easily doubles the length of their turn, and they'll probably miss some important factor that makes the card more or less dire than it appears. I don't ever want to have that power! It'd be terminal information paralysis, I suspect.
This complexity permeates the game. Even the loyalty cards are over-complicated. Each different "traitor" card includes a different power you get to use if and when you're revealed - but if you stop to read yours, everyone will know you're a Cylon. Knowing what your power can do, however, would let you know when the right time to make your move is.
The game didn't need to be that complex. It could have been just as flavorful and more enjoyable without so much data being shoved down the player's throats. If so, it would have been a better gateway game for converting BSG fans into gamers. It also would have played much faster, and been a lot easier to master. The learning curve is so steep. If we didn't have so much data to parse, we'd be more impressed by the quotes and eye-candy - so it'd actually be more flavorful. It just feels like it had so much more potential - if only the skill challenges and crisis cards (and everything else) were just a little less byzantine and subjective, you might feel like you had a hope of actually making a better than average play once in a while. Honestly, the characters in the rather bleak show have more hope of making a difference than players of the game do.
Yet it still manages to be fun. (It would have been more fun if it weren't so darned complicated and fiddly, but I think I've already made that point.) I'd gladly play a second game of it, I'm just not sure I'd buy it. Luckily, a friend owns it, so I'll likely get another play or two without having to fork up cash myself.
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