Scumday Wednesday
So our campaign is back up and running. And very nearly came to an end!
It was kind of a perfect session in some important ways. Like, the crew finally came to a head on the “what do we do with the Aleph Key?” question. Despite getting a super freaky psychic warning off their Entanglements roll last session (three 6es in a row got them to the top-tier table), they ignored the nightmarish visions and decided to see if they could open the ancient Ur vault it was supposed to go to.
They did everything right and yet they did everything so very wrong as well. Their Engagement roll set them up in a risky situation right out of the gate: an ancient Ur defense awakened by their sensor sweeps of the small moon. But they wanted ticks on their clock so the pilot pushed their risky to desperate to go for a better outcome. The die pool wasn’t huge, like 4 or 5 dice, but it came up with what I believe was our first-ever straight up failure: nothing better than a 3. The odds are really low for that sort of thing but it was gonna happen someday.
So the Ur defense opened a jumpgate at their ship’s midpoint and cut it in half.
I really wasn’t ready for such a dramatic turn of events but you have to follow the fiction, you know? There was some outstanding competence porn as they gently nudged the wreckage toward the moon’s surface to touch down, followed by dueling clocks to reach the Ur vault (6 slices) versus out of oxygen (4 slices, one for each character). The mad dash to the vault also came up a desperate failure. So I decided, rather than straight killing them, I’d simply remove the reach the Ur vault clock: that opportunity was gone. They were lost.
The session ended with the Mystic putting the whammy on his own crew and finally directly summoning help from his faction, a group we made up called The Dark. I kind of wish I’d understood the setting better because I would have preferred to have folded his faction into an existing group, like the Nightspeakers (thematically similar). I may yet just change the Nightspeakers into The Dark, still deciding. Anyway, the Mystic had wanted to get the Aleph Key to his group since session one, and things finally fell together to make that happen.
So they’re starting with a fresh copy of the Stardancer and a whole big set of “you owe us for your lives” obligations to a group they’re feeling pretty iffy about. It’s great! But it was a huge, huge turn.
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I got a real Mass Effect 2 vibe from that. You should be dead, but you’re not and you owe this shadowy group now. Given ME2’s probably objectively the best of that series, that’s a good thing!
Sounds like a great session!
If you feel like writing more about Racing Clocks – how you’ve used them, lessons learned, I’d like to hear about that. I’m making a list of lessons learned from the last Blades campaign I ran & one of the bullet points is on Racing Clocks. I want to try them again & more often. In particular, I’m curious about 1 versus 3 individual clocks in pure procedural terms.
I re-bought Mass Effect 2 & started playing through it again, have been idly browsing through the fan-made Mass Effect d6 RPG & plan to play a character who is, aesthetically at least, a Quarian for the S&V game I’m playing in next week. Harry Lee Alexander Cooley Brendan Adkins
“So the Ur defense opened a jumpgate at their ship’s midpoint and cut it in half.”
Amazing. Reminds me of some of the best battles of Freespace 2, where jumpgate placement was often used offensively.
Matthew Gagan so it started as a single “you’re out” clock, and it was deliberately shorter than the “you made it!” clock. Then somebody led a group Scramble action, and I wanted to offer each of them the obvious Devil’s Bargain: a tick on the O2 clock for a die. Well, ticking the whole clock seemed suicidal so I decided to just write each character’s initial in the spot as the accepted or rejected the Bargain.
Oh they failed that roll a well. Seven total dice, nothing higher than 3. That’s when I threw away the “you got there!” clock.
Yeah it was really good. The whole thing has a really different vibe now, which I think it needed. They were smugglers but now they’re… something else.
BitD didn’t click with me when I ran it earlier this year, but I need to give Scum a shot sometime. This is helping me sell on it, although some of the bits I dislike are still there.
Thanks.
I’m not enough of a math head to do it, but I’d love to see someone break down some various racing clock math so when I’m setting up a race in Forged in the Dark games I have a rough idea of success odds for the contest. It would be broken out in X segments versus X segments, number of dice rolled as a baseline and would assume no Devils’ Bargains, Pushing or Assists. Then I’d know as GM, “This is a 50/50 or 66/33 proposition but the PCs can “Stress, Consequences & Resist (also Stress)” their way towards better odds if they want to.
One thing I fell into towards the end of my most recent Blades run was a meta rule that for Clocks where time was a factor (Mission Clocks, Racing Clocks & some but not all Danger Clocks) the time factor would always be one tick per Consequence so that element was predictable and measured. So, for example, a 4/5 result on a Risky Action Roll under the time gun would always be one tick on the Mission Clock timer, and an additional minor complication or lesser harm, etc. An 1-5 on a single Action Roll would never result in two or more ticks for the time pressure no matter how desperate the circumstance; one tick plus some additional trouble.
I’m still making my way through S&V, Gregor Vuga but it seems like all of the bits you disliked would still be there unless the setting was your issue? Or no?
Yeah, I use the same guideline for any kind of “damage”: 1/2/3 ticks on clocks, level 01/2/3 harm, 1/2/3 levels of ship harm, etc.
Not always though: when I announced the “the Ur ruins seem to have begun opening, whoa, it looks like a jump gate is opening right in front of you!” bit, that was me telegraphing “get out or your ship will fucking die” rather than “you might take 3 hits because it’s desperate.” That’s where I don’t like feeling so very constrained by that guideline.
I’ve never even thought about the possible math ramifications of running asymmetrical racing clocks. But it felt good and scary! I’m now regretting not putting all the “you’re out of 02!” ticks against the same clock, get them sorta competing for the same resource.
Yeah, it was a guideline for me & I saw cases where following it strictly wouldn’t be the best answer to honor the fiction.
Definitely some confidence issues for me there which I think some math/charts might help me with?
I was able to build up some confidence with this aspect in Danger Patrol after running a lot of games. I’ve run even more games of Blades now but still learning & fussing with this bit.
We manage to have fun regardless. 🙂
Matthew Gagan Yeah, I guess the main mechanical bits are all still there. Although switching from a lair to a spaceship and from Duskvol to the vastness of space might somehow make that work better for us, I dunno. I also picked up a few house rules along the way which might make the second time around flow better.
Gregor Vuga yeah, S&V feels different than BitD in some important ways. The big one is that it’s not nearly so claustrophobic. It also feels less face-stabby, in that the Scum factions are all kind of doing their own thing on their own clocks. It’s much more of a sandbox than Blades, where at least in our game you had to defend your tiny bit of turf right out of the gate.
The heat/wanted system in Scum, I think, is good for letting the crew buzz around with impunity. At least in our game, there always seems to be enough time or money during downtime to “lay low” and back down their wanted level. There’s generally quite a lot of heat everywhere but Wanted is quite easy to get rid of.
Thanks for posting this, Paul. I’m running a one-shot of the game a week from Saturday. This gives me a few ideas.
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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