Scum Day!
Last night was our triumphant return to Scum and Villainy. It’s been hard to get back to back weeks of play with the school year starting. Which is weird because I thought it was stupid summer vacations that broke up our rhythm. Dunno. Kids are the worst. Really just families in general.
This was our fifth or sixth session, I can’t remember, and the first one where they had clear marching orders from clear bosses: last session, they ended up destroying their Stardancer and had to ask for a solid from one of the character’s affiliated factions. So, new boss same as the old boss, except they haven’t formally stolen this ship yet.
There are now really clear lines connecting the crew to factions now, which I felt like was hazy for the first several sessions. Janus Syndicate is now actively hunting them for stealing and then destroying their ship; the Nightspeakers have revealed themselves to be the true force behind “The Dark” faction that we’d made up. It’s turned out to be really easy to slot a canonical faction into position since the rest of the S&V campaign materials already support them. Neither the Concordiat Knights nor Vigilance made an appearance but everyone’s acutely aware of them. Same with the Ghosts. So basically we’ve got a constellation of five-or-so Tier 2 factions and they’re now formally a Tier 1 crew, so that feels about right. Anything bigger and they’re just not a big enough deal for the other factions to care about.
If I had a gripe at this point, it’s the big undefined space around the characters’ drives/beliefs/heritage/background, and in a very similar way the crew’s goals/drives/inner conflict/essential nature. I’m absolutely sure these were deliberate choices on the part of the design team. I don’t love those choices! And that’s okay. But every session, we tally up our XPs and that question comes up, and nobody really knows how to answer it. Only one character, the Mystic, has nailed down a drive/belief/heritage core: he really wants to become a Nightspeaker Adept. But! The reason he could hook into that is that it’s a mechanically supported thing to chase. If he takes 3 “Veteran” advances on his playbook, the special ability he chooses can be from the Nightspeaker faction. That’s cool and special and it gives the player something to strive for. Neither the Muscle nor the Scoundrel have come upon a similar goal, and I don’t know that they will. The Muscle is just kind of coming into his own violent nature (he has been a reluctant tough guy until this session, where he finally decided that overkill might be enough kill), and the Scoundrel has consistently been a self-serving addict scumbag, but we can’t quite disambiguate that characterization from the third XP question, “you struggled with issues from your vice or traumas during the session.”
Some of that gap, too, is the gig emphasis of the game. Every session they’ve got one or more Jobs, and they do those jobs, and their investment is largely in getting through a job without fucking dying. (I’m running a pretty gritty game.) But they haven’t really thought beyond the next paycheck at all.
So, like, yeah. It’s a void that needs filled but I’m not sure it’s especially fruitful. It is when there are tools to help the players decide what to chase, but it’s just kind of a point of frustration when there aren’t. We’re still talking through, every session, what to do about that.
On the crew characterization front, I think they’ve settled on “constantly bickering” as their “essential nature.” When they got their new ship from the Nightspeakers, Enigma, they changed their reputation from “professional” to “daring.” That was a fun change, and it’s more fun for them to chase.
Other than the factions coming into focus, the other really satisfying part about running S&V is that I feel like I’ve really nailed down the whole action roll transaction: consequences are getting easy to call out, describing greater and lesser outcomes is getting easier as well (or just not really having anything, but saying so out loud so they don’t spend time and energy deciding whether to shift position or push for effect). Stras I think has sold me on the utility and overall goodness of the Blades way! And I think the players appreciate having some choices to make each time they roll.
We’re still discovering weird little wrinkles in the rules! Did you know you can push to increase effect? I didn’t, not until we stumbled across it in the rulebook. That rule doesn’t appear anywhere on the rules reference sheets. Also, maybe, you can push to ignore an injury effect…but I’m not actually sure. That’s an implication from the Muscle playbook’s “flesh wound” move, which says it only costs 1 stress to ignore wound penalties instead of 2. For the life of me I cannot find a rule about pushing to ignore wounds anywhere, like, at all. There’s kind of an oblique reference in “Stress & Trauma” in the rulebook but all it says is “take action when you’re incapacitated.” Is incapacitation any level of harm? Or just the top-tier “need help” level? Dunno. I mean the probable answer is that “ignore wound penalties” is synonymous with “incapacitated.” Seems like a small thing that slipped past editing, is all.
So yeah, game is still cool, it’s building momentum, and I’m looking forward to seeing it through to the end.
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I’ve looked at those drives/beliefs/nature xp triggers as the freebies, essentially. Did you show up and avoid actively sandbagging the game? Here’s an XP. For when a character actually does nail down their goal and strive towards it, I like to give out that coveted 2nd XP per trigger.
Ha, it’s like our one not-freebie in this game. Making them work for it.
Would duct-taping on a fate aspect or some variant of Burning BITS help codify it for the characters who don’t have concrete ideas?
I think of the Drives/Beliefs/Heritage question as a way for players to point out something fun about their character to the rest of the table, particularly for quiet, shy or mechanically focused players. Since the players say if they earned the xp, it gives them a chance to recapitulate and reflect on the session, calling out good things and things they want to see again from themselves and each other. They might say “Hey, remember that cool flip? I did that because I grew up in the circus.” or “Remember when I totally knew all about Rendian Space Madness? I wanted to mention that I liked that and it was cool because I want to investigate space madness.” I’ve also see it work in the reverse sense, too, where some players wanted another to take experience for something, but that player didn’t want their character to be defined by that action mechanically.
Oh god, families. One of my usual crowd, who also happens to be the host of most of our game sessions, is a step-parent of two kids, one of whom is now going to living with bio-dad during the school week and with my friend only on weekends. So he’s had to drop out of our Friday game, sending… basically all games into a spiral.
One cannot worry about self-actualization when one is worried about survival. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Space Jobs.
Joe Beason that’s for real.
John Dornberger you know, that’s a good point about the players deciding on their own xp. They sort of already do it. I don’t really have any say, mostly I just remind them that they’re due an XP when they’ve forgotten. But they’re hard on themselves, I think.
I’ll consider reframing the heritage/background thing. Might be as little as good roleplaying that isn’t vice/trauma.
Adam Schwaninger we talked about a more formalized Belief to thing. But it’s such a pain to workshop them in Wheel, where they’re more mechanically supported!
When you have a Lv 3 wound you are incapacitated. You cant move anywhere without someone’s help and you can’t take any actions UNLESS you push yourself to do so. I believe the Muscle special ability is talking about this and saying you can act with a level 3 wound for only 1 stress instead of the usual 2.
Aaron Berger so you think the Muscle special is only referring to the level 3 effect? Probably. That’s a clean read
I always squirm while sitting though the end of session experience questions. This is mostly because it’s an unfamiliar situation for me. The questions are so player facing oriented, that I don’t get the usual cognitive feedback of other reward cycles. The questions are there to help the Player Character’s refine their own play, and not to help the GM formulate sessions.
I was quick to hack in explicit Beliefs and Drives, because I like taking those statements as telegraphed player interest and forming sessions around those ideas. But then I was also quick to realize how disruptive focusing on player level goals can be for the crew based job to job sandbox. Its was with that realization that I started viewing characters as tragic figures and the crew as the real engine of dramatic change. Being explicit about the crew’s goals can be helpful for a GM. Even better, the workshopping of such goals can occur in game in character and lead to some satisfying play.
I still miss prepping session around Xp triggers though. The closest I got to a fix was an add on xp trigger I called “Professional Pride”. These would be always/never statements about how each scoundrel prefers to conduct their business, and if the PC takes on trouble to maintain their pride they get xp at the end of the session. Some examples would be the master of disguise who never drops character while on the job, or the acrobatic prowler who always avoids confrontation. I find this kind of xp trigger useful to play up the player’s idea of their character and helps the GM prep interesting challenges.
Aaron Berger yes! You’ve totally nailed a thing I’ve been dealing with every session. Character-driven sandbox play is a beautiful unicorn but damn is it hard, as a practical matter, to keep it going. Can’t really prep in either style but you have to keep both in mind at all times. Augh.
I think they actually have been workshopping their goals and character stuff through play, and it’s emerging organically albeit slowly. And it’s not mechanically or procedurally explicit, right? There’s no way to fall back (maybe defensively?), and say “hey player, you said these were your flags and you said this was your crew’s flag, and that’s what I’m working toward.” Saying their goals and drives out loud kinda sorta bridges that gap, but it feels different than writing it out or doing it prescriptively. Are they still flags if they’re ex post facto?
It’s a totally different interplay and it kind of requires psychic powers. Which is most trad play in a nutshell.
Paul Beakley I don’t think trad play is the inspiration, but rather the game has a radical design philosophy of a flat hierarchy. This philosophy effects the player side as well. I see it come up with resistance rolls, where players are so use to accepting consequences that they forget to assert themselves and try to resist things. You can see it in the action rolls where the PC picks which action they’d like to use, while the GM chooses position and effect. The game is constantly creating opportunities for all players to check in with each other to see if things are going well. I’ve heard John Harper describe it as, “The players’ are responsible for their own fun.”
This design philosophy is also reflected in the reward cycle. I think the absence of explicit statements is very intentional. The game does not want GM to decide what is and is not worth xp. The XP questions are not there to dictate proper play. They are there to encourage discussion after session and to be a tool for the players to reflect on their own play. Incongruities may occur in play, but the rules take every opportunity to encourage checking in rather than enforcement.
All that being said, I definitely find it hard to let go of the steering wheel. Designing scenarios to challenge specific Flags has become one of my favorite mind puzzles, and I have difficulty prepping sessions without it. Luckily, I don’t think a single FidD game has come forward that doesn’t have a rich evocative setting. Making sure the GM has plenty of inspiring material to pull upon.
I meant to do this before 12/31 but, well. Y’all have read plenty about my malware woes. It’s under control for now, but I’m looking at maybe, possibly reinstalling at wordpress.com and letting them deal with the server headaches.
Here’s what I played and my year-later takeaway, nice and short for potty reading:
Epyllion
Played, didn’t run. I really enjoyed it! But a couple things still jump out at me a year later:
As lovely as the friendship crystal mechanic works (short version: you give away your supply of tokens to other PCs when they act on the flags you’ve put on them during character creation, then either count them up when helping or spend them on the “moon magic” move), I still remember it being especially punishing for groups that aren’t great at paying attention to each other. Basically, you end up spending a lot of energy playing toward other folks’ flags but if they’re not paying attention, it’s easy to feel resentful about spending that energy. Given how my year played out, I very much think this is a phenomenon of my home group. I hope to address this more specifically in 2019.
I have no idea how the long game plays out. I chased advancement really hard and got to the next age. It’s fine. I did notice that advancement choices are pretty narrow. I feel like everyone’s playbook will end up looking like everyone else’s playbook across play groups and experiences.
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No Thank You, Evil!
I played a good amount of this with my daughter early in the year but we haven’t played in months, now. Honestly, I’m kind of itchy to get her to try something with a little more mechanical complexity. That’s totally on me and if I’m being honest with myself, it’s probably not what she would enjoy. But I think about running NTYE and it bores me. The narrow, short formula absolutely works! But it’s a narrow, short formula for play.
Probably the next thing we’ll do with it is move her to the highest character sheet level. She graduated from triangle to square in January, and that might have been the last time we played.
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Burning Wheel
2018 has obviously been a long fucking year because I completely forgot we played Burning Wheel! I played, didn’t run. It was nice. I’m also clearly not the target demographic for this game any more. It’s just such a heavy load, both on the GM side and the player side. Lots to manage. We didn’t do a great job of really workshopping Beliefs, and our campaign reached a point where we’d just kind of…done what we came to do. Was that my short attention span? Maybe!
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Bluebeard’s Bride
Played this at NewMexicon 2018 and it blew my mind. It’s super weird, very arty-farty, not at all a conventional RPG in terms of agency and bildungsroman and long meaningful campaign play. It’s a one-shot featuring a series of horrific vignettes, everyone plays an aspect of a single character and takes turns in the driver’s seat, and it’s so squicky and weird that it’s just impossible (or perhaps just in poor taste) to try and describe actual play. Very high on my list of best games of the year.
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Sagas of the Icelanders
Another NewMexicon 2018 game. I ran this, because I always run it. SotI is on my very short list of games I’m so good at, I can make the game do anything I want. It is a lovely experience every time.
This particular game was a “spotlight GM” event that I ran. I remember it being funnier and more Fiasco-y than it usually is. Worked great and I’m adding that mode to my quiver for future runs.
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Masks
My first run at Masks and it was super fun. My buddy Kit ran it at New Mexicon, and he is to Masks what I am to Sagas. The game does some really interesting stuff about supers relationships and completely dispenses with Champions style physics modeling. It’s terrific, loved it, want to run it here in 2019.
I had another opportunity to play Masks later in the year, at Rincon 2018 with Jason Corley running it. I played a more conventional character and it was a more conventional experience, which is great because you don’t have to push the envelope every time.
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Golden Sky Stories
Actually a fantasy adventure hack called Fantasy Friends. GSS is cute but not my jam: it’s heartwarming and affirming, you basically bid points to get things done and then do heartwarming and affirming things to get those points back. I mean it’s nice! And Nick Hopkins did a really good job running it. I was just ehh on the whole model of play afterward.
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Coriolis
Coriolis was my only real heartbreak of 2018. I adore, absolutely love Mutant: Year Zero from Fria Ligan, and Coriolis is built on the same engine. The game is packed with interesting history and social context, the setting is super interesting, characters look neat. I mean just on reading the text, I was all in. But the game has a huge glaring problem at the center of it: a GM-facing economy called Darkness Points.
What I discovered was that I grind against the DP economy in every imaginable way. First off, there’s a huge list of bad shit the GM is “allowed” (?) to launch at the players by spending DP. I read that to strongly imply, or mandate really, that nothing on that list is in my toolbox without spending those points. Then what really killed me was that I can effectively earn and keep unlimited DPs, and the players can’t do shit about it. Even playing hard toward the intent of the system, this is I think intentional! So there’s no meaningful decision making, no tension, nothing. It’s a list of things I feel like I can’t do but actually can do because I’m spending an effectively unlimited number of points.
I will say, though, that Coriolis has an extremely nifty spaceship combat system. Each player takes on a specific on-board role and everyone’s contribution matters. It’s great.
Otherwise, the game left me restless and irritated. What a shame, because it’s so very beautiful. And it appears I only ran three sessions of it? Ye gawds.
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The Veil
I tried to run The Veil but it catastrophically failed for us within an hour of the first session. When I had read the rules, the playbooks stood out as weird and very specific and I thought “oh wow, everyone is so strange!” And they are. But once you figure out where each playbook comes from, escaping the tropes and references becomes nearly impossible.
For us, I think, we worked hard at not doing that. But the moves, oh the moves. Designer Fraser Simons made a fairly lengthy argument explaining his approach, which was to build the moves in a very broad way. I like the idea in principle, but lordy in practice we just couldn’t get a handle on how anything was supposed to work or how any given move’s outcome was supposed to look in the fiction. The whole thing felt very abstract and it wore everyone out in about an hour.
But! But but but: I think The Veil may be best in class for how you create your cyberpunk setting. Each playbook has a very specific set of questions and inputs, so that any given playbook mix produces a wildly different and unique setting. We really liked this. The Veil produced a setting I’d be very happy to play in! Just with a different game.
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Scum & Villainy
My surprise hit of the year was Scum & Villainy, a sci-fi take on Blades in the Dark. I’d had the pleasure of playing once before at a private con earlier in the year, but I was so exhausted that the playbook felt like an incomprehensible wall of jet fighter controls.
I gotta say, now that I fully grasp how the GM-player transaction works in Bitd/S&V, it might be my favorite. Even more favorite than Burning Wheel! I really like how the negotiation bounces back and forth: how well positioned are you? How difficult is the thing? How hard do you want to try? Are you willing to take an additional consequence? Love it to pieces.
Our run at Scum petered out because everyone advanced to a point where there was really no more mechanical tension to the game. This is something I was worried about in Blades as well: the Resistance mechanism (short version: if you suffer consequences you don’t like, you can resist them at a cost to your stress) is such that eventually you can just do anything and everything and practically never suffer for it. I don’t love the realization that so much of the play juice was coming from the mechanisms, but in S&V it did for us.
It did get me thinking about versions of Blades where maybe you don’t get better, but the scope of your action just gets broader. Dunno. It was a good experience, very fun, just ran its course.
Oh and I ran it at RinCon 2018 and completely forgot! Pitched it, explained it, ran it, easy as pie. S&V is definitely on my short list of pickup one-shot games I’m happy to run without any prep.
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The King is Dead
This is Vincent Baker’s diceless, GMless game of fantasy intrigue built on the PbtA framework. I absolutely love this! And it may be my favorite of his games, even more than Apocalypse World itself.
The core of the game is that everyone gets a copy of the same rules book. You sketch out sexy young princes and princesses in a Game of Thrones-ish setting. And then you start picking little mini-games to play out scenes. You start with a game called “muster and intrigue,” which adds a little fictional context to the setting and gives you a card. The ostensible object of the game is to win the crown by any means necessary. You do that by building a good hand of cards, with more and better face cards worth more than numbered cards.
I’ve played this game twice now. The first time, we just rolled with the minigames and didn’t worry much about the underlying card game. It was really fun that way! But the second time, when I ran it again at Rincon in Tucson, I really charged hard at the card game. It was even more fun that way, because it forced me to play really strategically and think bigger-picture. My game basically shifted from playing Arya to playing Cersei.
Highest recommendation.
Ref: https://indiegamereadingclub.com/indie-game-reading-club/the-king-is-dead/
Palimpsest
Okay, I pretty much never brag on myself but I’m going to now: I am super proud of my Game Chef submission this year, a little time travel game called Palimpsest. The premise is that three different time travelers converge on a small but vital moment in history, and try to make events conform to their wishes before uncertainty collapses and that moment is forever set.
I’ve run it twice, it was fun twice. It could stand a bit of polish and definitely some art direction, but this was the first time I’ve ever submitted a Game Chef and thought to myself “oh heck yeah, this fucker has legs.” I’m gonna publish it in some form down the road. But for now, here it is:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QdRrUkaaxZvUO1ENt2D6OpjoBv1SEhVuG2Q5wcdeono/edit?usp=sharing
Legacy
Oh boy. The last game I ran this year.
It did not end well.
It started with such promise: a game about generations passing through time. A game about building up communities, rather than scrabbling for short-term wins.
It ended for a lot of reasons. Some had to do with the game itself: Mechanically, Legacy was overwhelming to everyone. There are move sets for your character and your family and the common moves and the story moves and and and. There are multiple economies. There is room for really unpleasant coercion via the game’s debts system. But beyond that, Legacy demanded everyone walk away from deeply ingrained habits of character monogamy, agency, and campaign continuity.
It was just too hard. It ended on a really sour note and we haven’t run a game since. That was early December, I think? It’s been a month.
It did, however, give me a lot to talk about.
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