Broke a 3-week-long RPG fast with The Facility last night. Felt good to touch dice again!
The Facility is a zine-sized game by Galen Pejeau built on Breathless, a game framework I’ve been digging into since starting through a solo game called Substratum Protocol. It’s a very basic push-your-luck kind of game, where each time you roll a die it gets stepped down the next time you use it. You have 6 stats/skills, and a d10, d8, d6 and 3x d4s divvied up among them. You can take a little break, which gives the GM a goodie, and reset all your dice to full. Straightforward, cute, gets the job done. It also does a nice job of nudging players toward brainstorming approaches other than spamming their best thing, since their best thing quickly gets depleted.
The premise of The Facility is straight out of Portal: you’re amnesiac test subjects in a ruined science facility trying to find your way out. Each character has a Device, a combo of a case (range), cell (die size) and core (effect). You want the effect, you need to roll your Device. The Devices are really where the fun and creative stuff shows up: there are 70 cores in the book (you roll d66 to randomize, and then there are 1-10 and 67-70 the GM can pick from sometimes as well) and you need to come up with clever ways to use really weird shit. In our game, the starting Devices … let’s see… one shot foam, another shot a perfectly frictionless lubricant, and I don’t remember the third. In the course of the game they got a shrink/grow ray, a gun that shot a controllable magnetized surface, another that shot a void of perfect vacuum. It’s all stuff like that.
This sort of game does not play to my personal strengths! Like, it’s very OSR-y in terms of dropping contextless folks into bizarre contextless situations and challenging them to get out. I mean, that’s the whole game. Every spread in the book is a “zone,” with a list of possible hazards, encounters and so on. It shares the trick from Labyrinth in that you advance through the book semi-randomly trying to get to the escape zone. You have a set of Nemesis robots, each one bigger/badder than the last, the GM can deploy to goose the players along. You’ve got these weird Devices. Each Zone is utterly disconnected from the other other than the reappearance of Nemeses. Pretty fun as a one shot! Cannot imagine playing weeks on end. I could see slowing the tempo down a bit into, say, a 2-shot, to let the characters breathe a bit.
The game has one nifty bit of semi-characterization in that characters can experience a Memory and roll a d12 with it, rather than relying on and stepping down skills. The Memory can be literally anything as long as it applies to the current situation. One test subject had recurring memories that pointed at, perhaps, a life as a jungle rebel. Another had memories of having survived The Facility before! I didn’t feel like they came up quite often enough to really build up a substrate, because the players were being very very careful with their Take a Breath breaks to reset the dice. You can only have a Memory once per Take a Breath.
One cute trick I came up with to push the anonymous amnesiac angle was that, once players chose their characters’ pronouns, I had the player to the left of them physically describe them. Like, you don’t even know what you look like! There are no mirrors. And all you get is a a serial number. Kind of fun to sit there in anticipation, waiting to see what someone else sees when they look at you.
So: lots of luck-pushing, a fun couple places to weigh and balance reward cycles, lots of very strange locales, and murderous robots. The Facility reminded me a bit of a cross between Deathmatch Island and Trophy, in terms of tempo and system weight. A fun night for $7!
Very interesting concept, I like being described by another, that’s completely cool.