Author Archives: Rick Neal

Leverage: The Crossfire Job

By | | What's he playing?
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With this post, I am officially caught up ((It won’t last. Fair warning.)).

Friday night, I got the gang back together for the second part of my more involved Leverage RPG playtest ((You can see the first part of the playtest here.)). This time, the objective was to run through a job that I created, to see how that works.

To create the job, I used the Situation Generator in the rulebook, which lets you use dice to determine the client, the mark, the problem, and the twist, along with all the various shades of those things. Now, I had been playing with this little toy for some time, rolling up different random situations, and I had come to the conclusion that this was a great thing to add to the game; in five minutes, you can have the skeleton of the job down on paper, and then five more minutes to flesh out the bare minimum of stats you need to play.

I spent more than ten minutes building the job, though. I did up stats for a number of people and places that never made it on to the screen, and I spent a fair bit of time juggling different storylines for the job to see what fit best what I wanted to achieve, and I spent some time brainstorming a couple of things with a friend who was not part of the playtest ((Thanks, Chris!)). If I were a little more familiar with the system, I think that I would have spent less time filling in the details and trusted the game to provide the complications and twists I needed to make the story work.

One danger that cropped up is a holdover from other RPGs, and that’s a reluctance to change a die roll during the situation generation phase. Somehow, it feels like cheating to pick an appropriate item off the list for a given aspect of the game, or even to re-roll. I’m a big fan of random generators – they can really help spark creativity when it’s flagging – but not every random conglomeration of elements is equal. My old-school tendency was to honour the dice; I had decided to roll randomly, so I had to live with the random results, right? When I realized I was doing that, and bending over backwards to work in certain unworkable elements, I gave my head a shake and threw out the problematic bits. Suddenly, the whole job fell into place. Short version: random tables require the exercise of personal judgment, not blind obedience.

With the job in hand, I spent the first little while with the group talking about how their crew usually does things. I asked them where their base was, who usually met with clients, how they found clients, things like that. The questions were only vaguely relevant to the game we were going to play; really, what I wanted to do was to give the players a feel for how their characters fit together and how the crew as a whole fit into the world. It also offered me a little insight into the group dynamic, and gave me some ideas for things to do later on. Once we had a better grip on who the characters were and how they worked, I brought in the client for the briefing.

I had been going back and forth on how much to lay out in the briefing and how much to force the characters to find out through play. This is basically a question of how you want to weight the mystery-to-caper ratio; i.e., how much time do you want the characters working to figure out what’s going on versus pulling crazy cons. In the end, I went with a fairly high mystery component, not because I didn’t want lots of wacky caper goodness, but because I felt that would accomplish a few things:

  • It would allow a bit of a ramp-up to the bigger pieces of the con, as they pull little capers to gather the information they need to make the whole thing work.
  • It would avoid prejudicing them toward a specific course of action, allowing them to choose the approach they liked best with minimal interference from me.
  • It would help flesh out the world, giving me some raw material that I could pull in later as need, generated by the actions of the crew.

With that approach, I gave them the bare bones: a college football star had been arrested and convicted of drug possession with the intent to distribute, and sent to prison for 15 years. His sister had been trying to get him to appeal, but he wouldn’t even see her. From all accounts, her brother had been framed.

First step was to try and get the court files, but the hacker blew her roll, which I decided meant that the files had been removed from the computer and the hard copies sealed by court order. She was able to find that it was the DA’s motion to seal the files, though. And he was up for re-election, on a tough-on-crime, zero-tolerance platform.

So, the mastermind went to steal the paper files, while the grifter went to try and see the brother, and the hitter was following around the sister, because he’d spotted someone else following her during the meeting. Things went pretty smoothly: the grifter got in as a DoC psychologist, the mastermind told the file clerk he was part of an ongoing federal corruption task force, and the hitter identified the people following the sister as detectives in the vice/narcotics division ((He also got to beat a couple of guys up, after the cops spotted him.)).

The crew pulled together a pretty solid picture of what was going on: the DA had a couple of dirty cops on his payroll, and was setting up some high-profile cases during his re-election, framing people like the college football star. The plan came together fairly rapidly after that: get enough evidence to expose the DA and his dirty cops, forcing the cases to be reopened and the charges against the client’s brother dismissed.

To that end, they staged a fake assassination attempt, with the hacker on a rooftop using a Mil Spec Sniper Rifle d8 to take out the cops’ car, allowing the hitter to come to the rescue and take the cops to be debriefed by the federal corruption task force, represented by the grifter and the mastermind. They played hard-ball with the cops, offering them immunity from prosecution in return for information. The info that was offered was the twist in the job: they offered the DA’s real name.

The story that emerged was that the DA was really the brother of the head of a drug cartel, who had created a fake identity to go into law. He made it to DA thanks to the lessons he learned from his family about using corrupt cops, and that’s when his brother tracked him down. Now the cartel is forcing him to provide cover for their members, shifting the frame on to people like this college football star.

The plan then expanded to take in the cartel. The crew figured that, if they could expose the connection and the influence the cartel was exerting, both could go down. So they played both sides against each other, getting the cartel to send a hit squad after the DA ((Cartel Hit Squad d12 complication, filled with four Thugs d8. The hitter got the drop on them and didn’t break a sweat.)), and the DA to go to the real feds. In short order, the DA and his brother were in separate interview rooms spilling their guts, trying for reduced sentences, and the wrongfully convicted young man was back with his family.

After the game, we again had a post-mortem conversation. Everyone enjoyed this session more than the previous one, both for the freedom of choice it offered and for the clear structure behind things. That said, the consensus was that, while The Leverage RPG is fun, we’re not sure it can sustain an interesting campaign.

The game does a fantastic job of doing caper games. It is, without a doubt, the best game I’ve ever seen for that. But it only supports caper games, which is kind of one-note for a campaign. Sure, it’s easily hackable, and big chunks can be lifted out into other styles of game entirely ((I’m currently re-reading The Black Company by Glen Cook, and the game would work really well to model a lot of the scenes in that book.)), but out of the box, it focuses on one type of game. It does that type very well, but…

I think a part of the problem with this is that the group is made up of players, not TV writers. See, in the writer’s room at Leverage, they can make each job very different by choosing different scams to run from the outset. For players, though, the tendency is going to be to focus on the kinds of solutions that worked last time – gamers like to weight their odds. That’s going to lead to a sameness of play that I think would wear thin after a while.

It does, however, offer some great possibilities for a less-frequent, less-intensive, limited campaign style. Have to think about that.

One of the things I noticed in play was that none of the players wanted to risk rolling on their weak roles. Hell, most of the time, they didn’t even want to roll if it meant using their secondary role. Again, this is a reasonable expectation among players in a game where most things can be accomplished in a variety of different ways. But it does remove some of the interesting moments when a character is forced to play to one of their weaknesses. That’s another thing I have to think about – how to make it attractive to use a trait that isn’t optimal for your character.

One thing that I didn’t do during my prep work that I wound up really regretting was coming up with a list of complications to drop into play. I found myself really scrambling to pull stuff together towards the end of the game when I realized I had a bunch of unspent complications sitting on my table. A little list would have taken almost no time to put together, and would have saved me a lot of stress during play. After the game, of course, I came up with a dozen complications that would have been fun to play and taken things in interesting directions, but by then it was too late.

Anyway. We had fun. Thanks to my players for giving this a try:

  • Aleksander – Charlie the Hitter, who was Tougher Than He Looked
  • Clint – Duncan the Grifter, who was a Charming Rogue
  • Kieran – Jack the Mastermind, who was a Bastard
  • Vickie – Carmen the Hacker, who was Hot Tempered

Dateline – Gammatoba

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Gammatoba, What's he playing?
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Slowly catching up.

Sunday before last was the latest installment of my Gammatoba mini-campaign. It was a small group; we had only four players, the minimum for quorum. Still, we’re in sight ((Two sessions, at my guess.)) of the end of this little excursion into the wacky post-apocalyptic wasteland of the Red River Valley.

In the previous session, our heroic mutants had managed to acquire the Illudium Q-36 Space Modulator and recharge the energy crystals for the crashed flying saucer. They ran back to the ship, minds awash in images of raining fiery death down upon their enemies from their sky-chariot. And then they got to the engine room, tried to plug in the parts, and I smiled and said, “Let’s roll some dice.”

You’d think I had stomped on a puppy.

I ran the repair as a modified skill challenge. I set a moderately high Science DC to get the parts installed properly, and didn’t tell the group what the DC was. They rolled appallingly well to get the space modulator slotted in, and I was getting a little worried that the repair would be done in two rolls – not really bad, but I wanted it to be interesting.

I shouldn’t have worried. They blew the roll to install the power crystals by more than 10, which I had already decided meant there would be a mishap. I had one of the four crystals discharge, blasting the primary character working on the repair with a bunch of energy, almost killing him. Plus, now one of the crystals had no power. They continued on, with a few more failures, though none as severe as that first one. With each failure, I had them roll a supplementary check of some sort to avoid making things worse: a Dex check to keep from dropping a crystal, a Mechanics check to keep from breaking one of the power couplings, things like that. They did break one of the power couplers, and then had to repair that before they could proceed.

Finally, after some interesting play where the characters successfully used different skills to augment the Science check, they managed to get the crystals properly installed. The ship was powered at 75%, and I decided that the computer would automatically prioritize certain systems: life support, engines, computers, sensors, communications, and gravity. Weapons and shields were offline, and would remain so until the ship was at full power.

This made the players sad ((Yay!)), and they decided to go back to the Ishtar ziggurat to try and trade for their own crystal charger. After getting jumped by some Mad Tooth construct soldiers in the ruins, they made it to the Ishtar site and got another audience. The fish priest explained that they really didn’t want to trade away one of their portable solar crystal chargers, because it would cut into their market for power services. However, if the heroes would do them a very large favour, they might consider it.

The favour? Seizing the Carney Key Library, with its wealth of Ancient information, from the Mad Tooth gangs that had claimed it. Once the Library was in the hands of the characters, they could signal the Ishtar, who would come take possession, and bring the crystal charger with them.

Seeing as the original plan had been to loot the Library for Fort LoGray, the group agreed to this, figuring a solar charger and a flying saucer should pretty much guarantee their admittance to the Fort LoGray Legions. They scampered back to the ship, and decided to use it to fly themselves in to the Mad Tooth compound, and land on the Library roof to secure the building.

We had some more fun with them trying to fly the ship. I decided that there were four consoles: Piloting, Navigation, Power Control, and Tactical. Most of Tactical was dead, but that was where the scanners were. One character manned each console to get the ship pulled free of the collapsed building – we ran it as a series of mini-skill checks, with me deciding what rolls were called for based on what they were trying to do, and narrating the outcome based on which rolls succeeded and which failed.

So, they managed to pull free from the rubble with a horrendous screeching sound, got a feel for the speed and control of the ship through trial and error, and then took her up several miles, where they found that the horrendous screeching sound had been the hull tearing as the ship pulled free of the ruins. They hastened back down to a safe altitude, and located the Library on the scanners. They came in high, and then dropped down, seeing the Mad Tooth Arks running for cover, and the giant crayfish warrior-accountants readying for battle, strapping on their armour plates and stowing their abacuses on their backs ((The giant crayfish warrior-accountants come from a throw-away comment in the background of one of the characters. The other players aren’t pleased that he came up with something that I’m using to hurt them.)). Then a series of flubbed rolls had the saucer plow into the ground in front of the Library, with the Mad Tooth forces converging on it.

And that’s where we left it.

The New Centurions, Issue #7: Into the Void

By | | New Centurions, What's he playing?
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Last Friday was the latest episode of Clint’s New Centurions game. We picked up pretty much exactly where we had left off last time – about to take a bug-bus into another dimension to face the invaders on their own turf.

Our expedition was delayed slightly, as we met up with a few of the emerging heroes in our world, such as Captain Vitality ((Here’s an interesting little bit of GM trickery for when you can’t come up with a good name: come up with a bad name, and make it obvious that it’s a bad name. Case in point: Captain Vitality was somewhat abashed about his name, as it had been given to him by a fourteen-year-old. I did a similar thing in a D&D game when I created a magic sword studded with blue gems that I then named Vermillion. Viridian was the word I had actually been looking for, but I messed up, so I made the sword touchy about the fact it had been named by a colour-blind enchanter.)) and Kid Dynamo ((Not, apparently, named after the song by The Buggles.)), and also to rescue some civilians being mind-controlled by the invaders’ parasite-firing guns. But eventually we managed to head off to the portal to the alien realm, leaving our new allies and a warrior made of rock to guard our way home.

Along the way, in the chaos of the invasion and the dozens ((Perhaps hundreds.)) of attacks on civilians, S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. ((Y’know, I thought the acronym thing was a neat idea when I made it up, but it’s really annoying to type t properly. And I’m enough of a curmudgeon that I refuse to drop the capitalization and periods. A cautionary tale for creating names.)) became aware that his mentor and tech specialist was no longer online. This rattled him enough that he made several less-than-heroic suggestions along the way, garnering a set-back die for the GM to use.

Once through the dimensional portal, we found ourselves in empty space. Queen Celeste was able to lead us to the voidship that our bug-bus came from, and we attempted to sneak in with the bug-bus’s recognition codes. We made it all the way to the docking orifice, but then got locked out. When there was no instant destructo-beam deployed against us, and we saw the invaders walking around on the surface of the voidship with no breathing apparatus, we decided to jump out on the surface of the ship and try to make our way inside to break stuff and generally make the bad guys stop with the invading.

The voidship proved to be the same kind of organic tech as the bug-bus, but much larger, of course. As we made our way through the cysts, polyps, and giant hairs on the surface, we woke up a large, nasty worm creature that apparently lives in the flesh of the voidship. It swallowed Paladin, but Widowmaker teleported up onto its head and used her gravity smash to pummel it while Falkata and Queen Celeste cut into the thing’s belly, meeting Paladin cutting his way out. S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. managed to use his advanced predictive algorithms to get the thing to impale itself on one of the tree-sized, spear-like hairs ((Using a hero die to do a power stunt.)), and then the others finished it off.

We crawled into the thing’s burrow, and made our way inside the ship, and that’s where we left things for the night.

I have to say, after a rocky start, the campaign is really starting to click. The major difficulty was the whole switching-systems thing, but we players are starting to get the hang of how to do things in the game, and how to make exciting, heroic choices. Clint’s mixing comic book sensibility with Cthulhoid flavouring in the current scenario to create an interesting, exciting adventure, and the larger questions in the background are keeping the mystery and interest levels high.

It’s a fun game, and I’m looking forward to the next issue.

Feints & Gambits: Uptown, Downtown

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Feints & Gambits, What's he playing?
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Slowly catching up. Hopefully be up-to-date by the end of this coming weekend. Thanks for hanging in there.

The last Feints & Gambits game was a small one – we were in the grip of a minor blizzard, as well as illness and (I think) a choir performance, so I counted myself lucky to get quorum to run this game. And I really wanted to run it, just to finish off the storyline that I had intended to take one session, but which dragged out to three.

I had encouraged the players to discuss their plans for this session on the game forum, which they did ((And I only had to bribe and threaten them a little bit.)), so that I had an idea of what they were planning and so that we didn’t spend the first two hours of the game with the players rehashing everything to come up with a plan. Then, of course, with only half the players showing for the game, some of the plans fell by the wayside.

Still, they had two main objectives: first, to see if they could snatch Doyle, the head of Doyle Developments, the company behind the attempts to purchase the neighbourhood; and second, to see if they could calm down the hot-headed residents of the neighbourhood to prevent an escalation of violence. They stuck pretty close together this time out, maybe because they felt they had less of a safety net with the other characters offstage.

So, first up was an attempt to kidnap Doyle. Now, this plan struck me as a terrible idea – a group of street-level toughs trying to snatch one of the wealthiest men in Dublin – but I didn’t just want to tell them they couldn’t do it. Nor did I want to spank them with either his bodyguards or with the consequences of a successful kidnapping ((Or a failed one. That would be bad, too.)).

This is something I want to talk about a little bit here. I was concerned about the players’ expectations and assumptions about the world, and their place in it. I was getting a little bit of a D&D-esque “We can do anything because we’re the PCs” vibe from some of the discussions, and that caused me to do some thinking about how I’m presenting things in the game. I think that I’m not communicating things all that clearly. See, I want to stick by the decisions that the characters made regarding power level; I was pretty clear at that point, that they were going to be only a little bit up the ladder from normal mortals. What I failed to explain was the source material conceit that the supernatural factors view getting mundane authorities investigating things to be the equivalent of trotting out the nuclear weapons.

What am I saying? I’m saying that there seemed to be a difference in understanding about consequences between myself and my players. That’s a dangerous thing to have in a game. It can quickly lead to a perception that the GM is being unfair and needlessly punitive. Or that the GM is being needlessly lax and straining credulity by the kinds of things he lets the players get away with.

I didn’t want Doyle to be safe to mess with just because he was mundane. In fact, I wanted just the opposite.

I decided to handle this by flagging the difficulty of grabbing him during their recon stage, trying to highlight the fact that taking him would be difficult, and would have real repercussions in the game. To that end, when they went looking for where Doyle lived, they found that he had a big house in the country, but also a penthouse in a city hotel. They called the house and found that he was in the city, so they staked out the hotel for a while. When they had had no sight of him for several hours, they realized that he was probably coming and going in a secure car through the underground car park, and that they’d have to flush him out if they wanted  to get a look at him and his security ((Beyond the fact that he was obviously security-savvy enough to keep observers from seeing him come and go, of course.)).

Nate decided to hex the hotel’s security, and pumped enough power in it to take out the entire electrical system. That let the gang see Doyle and his escort leave the hotel and go to another. When Aleister tried to get in close to Doyle and see which room he was taking, he was backed off by several large, professional-looking bodyguards. They decided to head back to the first hotel and break into his penthouse to see if there was anything incriminating there.

Kate managed summon up the fading echo of a burglar to help them break in, and they searched the place, spending a fair bit of time going through the contents of the suite. They found nothing indicating Doyle’s involvement with the attempted land-grab, nor that he had supernatural connections, or indeed anything incriminating. They did find copies of deeds, papers of incorporation, and passport in his safe (along with some watches and cash), which they helped themselves to.

That’s when I told them the lights came back on, and they hung around a little longer. Then I had the elevator start up, and they decided to high-tail it out of there. Nate used a little earth evocation to drop the elevator a few feet ((Thank god for elevator brakes – he pumped the spell up pretty high.)), and they scrambled down the fire stairs to the alley and escaped.

Back at The Hole in the Wall, Kate tried a divinatory ritual to help her piece together a full picture of Doyle’s company and its holdings. This took some time, but ended with a detailed chart of who did what all through the hierarchy of the various corporate entities, which they turned over to the reporter they’d been dealing with ((I’m gonna have to stat her up, I think. At least give her a name. She’s turning into a regular contact.)). Facing Doyle’s inaccessibility, the group then decided to move on to their second objective.

This went a little more smoothly: they got the name of Shaina Sadiki from the reporter as someone respected in the Pakistani community in Dublin who might be able to help them calm things down. After talking their way into meeting her, they had to convince her that they were sincere in their desire for a non-violent solution, whereupon she invited them for family dinner to talk to her grandson, one of the main agitators among the young men in the neighbourhood.

They managed to convince him that violence was a bad idea, and told him that things should be resolved in a couple of weeks when the article the reporter was writing was published. The article came out sooner than expected, and wasn’t what they thought it would be. Instead of an attack on Doyle, it turned out to be the story of how, when he found out that there was violence being committed by employees – remote employees, to be sure, but employees nonetheless – he turned over all the information he had on things to the police and co-operated with the investigation. Instead of him being an evil land developer, he came across as an ethical, concerned businessman. Who also made some restitution to the area, and paid the hospital bills of the injured.

The group isn’t sure whether that’s just cover for getting caught, or if he was genuinely unaware and, frankly, neither am I right now. It’ll depend on what I need Doyle for in later games.

And that’s how we wrapped the storyline. I think everyone was glad to see it end. The dragging was my fault; in a group as large as this one, with a system that many of them are learning, I didn’t provide a clear enough forward direction, which left the group floundering around to try and latch on to anything that would move the story forward. I will keep that in mind for putting together the scenarios in future.

But there were no deaths, no tantrums, no meltdowns, so I’ll take is as a lesson learned and move on.

Now I have to schedule some more sessions.

Dateline – Gammatoba

By | | Gammatoba, What's he playing?
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Wow. I’m behind on my blog posts. Nine days and two games since the last one. Sorry, folks. I should catch up this weekend.

So. The last Gammatoba game – almost two weeks ago – went a little differently than I expected it to. The brave mutants of the Red Valley, in their expedition to Great City One to prove themselves worthy to join the Fort LoGray Legions, had found a crashed flying saucer. After clearing out the strange creatures and automated defenders, they managed to get the computers online enough to run a diagnostic on the engines. They discovered that the Illudium Q-36 Space Modulator ((I think I might have called it a Q-13 Space Modulator, but I can’t remember, now. I meant Q-36.)) was damaged and needed to be replaced, and that the energy crystals were drained.

I let them know that the inhabitants of Xi were the best bet to get another space modulator, while Ishtar were most likely to be able to recharge the energy crystals. I had pointed out a Xi cube and an Ishtar ziggurat on their way into the city ((I wanted to show them something from Xi, Ishtar, and Area 52, so I described the cube, the ziggurat, and the crashed flying saucer, immediately derailing my plans for the game right at the start. So, I wanted to bring in the other two alternate world sources of Omega Tech, by having them deal with them to get the saucer flying again.)), and expected them to mount an assault on both the other sites.

The group surprised me. So far, the most complex their strategies got was, “Get ’em!” ((I’m being unfair, I know, but that’s the style of play they’ve shown so far.)) But instead of charging in, they decided to barter with the others to get what they needed. So, I sighed to myself, tossed the encounters I had prepared aside, and started improvising madly.

The meeting with the Xi Trade Construct went well, and everyone seemed to have fun with it. It was a neat chance to riff on some interesting ideas I’d picked up from a bunch of sf novels and movies about AI and transhumanism ((And also to get the group to trade in a whole bunch of Omega Tech in return for the space modulator.)). Over at the Ishtar ziggurat, I had them meet with a priest in his fish outfit, who agreed to recharge the energy crystals in exchange for retrieving some sacred scrolls from the Badders who had stolen them.

This let me recycle an encounter that the group had avoided previously, beefed up somewhat to handle the higher level of the party. The fight went pretty well, with some neat tactics on the parts of the players, and some close calls for them, as well ((The hidden badder guards opening with a barrage of grenades can really put a damper on the player’s actions.)).

So, things wrapped up with the characters returning the scrolls to the Ishtar, and getting the crystals recharged. I think there’s probably two sessions left in the Gammatoba mini-campaign, then we’re going to return to Storm Point.

I’ve got some plans for that brewing, too.

 

From the Armitage Files: Rot Tal

By | | GUMSHOE, The Armitage Files, What's he playing?
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**Potential Spoilers**

The Armitage Files is an improvised campaign structure. It uses a number of stock pieces, such as NPCs, organizations, and locations, that are strung together by individual GMs to fit player action. The adventures I create with it may or may not match any other GM’s version of the campaign. That means that reading these posts may or may not offer spoilers for other game groups.

**You Have Been Warned**

Saturday was the latest chapter in my Armitage Files campaign. We started the game early, coupled with some wonderful Indian take-out food. It was the first time in months that the entire group ((All four of us.)) was able to get together for the game, and it was a lot of fun.

I had given the fourth document to the players at the end of the last session, but they decided that they wanted to go back and tie up the loose ends in the APL investigation that had caused them some problems previously. They had avoided going back after them last session because they were down a man, and so followed up some peripheral leads, but thought that they had uncovered some valuable information that might help them this time ((As they concluded through play, they actually hadn’t found anything last session that would help them with this case. It turned out that the connection they thought they had found was the product of their own paranoid fancies.)), so wanted to take another run and Jahraus.

The session turned out to be something of a spotlight session for Aaron Moon, whose Cryptography and Language spends allowed him to decipher the strange mandala-like communications in the APL newsletters. I spun him a riff based on John Dee’s Enochian language, medieval sigildry, the language of the elder things as explored in Beyond the Mountains of Madness ((They had seen some samples of this in Danforth’s journal.)), and a number of other things that came to mind. The image I was trying to convey was that of an alien mindset behind the mandalas; concepts that were translated imperfectly into forms that the investigators were able to perceive, similar to the impression Roxy had got from Fred Jahraus when they had met.

From the GM perspective, it made me look pretty good, as I was able to draw in themes and ideas that I had laid down in previous sessions, right back to the first one. I tend to try and lay pipe, as the book refers to it, pretty heavily in the game, whether I know where the pipe is going or not at the time. That way, I have a wealth of things that I can call back when I need them in the current game, weaving the various sessions into a richer, more coherent story. The trick, of course, is being able to remember all the stuff I seed in the game. Sometimes, I do – I have a pretty good memory for this kind of thing – but sometimes, the players remember it and bring it in, which is even better. I got a mix of that in this session, which worked very well.

The bulk of the messages in the newsletters were pretty simple, calling for those who could read them to gather in Arkham. The latest newsletter carried a couple of different messages, though: a warning about how they had been discovered, and a reference to a red low place in the earth. Solis figured this last was the source of the reference to the Red Hollow Case in the previous document, but they hadn’t been able to locate anything about Red Hollow as a place anywhere nearby. Roxy suggested that the place name might be in a foreign language, and sure enough, they found a small farming village in New Hampshire called Rot Tal, which is German for Red Valley ((This was a bit of a dodge on my part; when I had originally developed this scenario, I had no good idea to attach to Red Hollow, so I dismissed it as a viable clue. Now, coming back to the APL, I found that I needed to re-incorporate it, but didn’t want to invalidate the information I had given the investigators previously. A few minutes with Google Translate gave me Rot Tal.)).

I wound up doing a bit of scrambling getting ready for this session, because I changed my mind about what the spine of the story was going to be about an hour before the game was due to start. I had been using the default sinister version of the APL previously, but I had an idea that would allow me to advance more of a through-line for the overall campaign. So, about an hour before the game began, I tossed what I had prepared and rebuilt the scenario around my new idea.

Keep that in mind. I scrambled to rebuild an entirely new scenario in the hour before the game.

Our intrepid investigators made their way to Lebanon, New Hampshire – the nearest town to Rot Tal ((Rot Tal is not a real place, but if it were, it would be near Lebanon.)) – picked up some supplies ((Which, of course, included dynamite.)), and went to lurk in the trees above the little farming village with high-powered binoculars. They saw that a lot of the homes, farms, and businesses had been abandoned – this is the Great Depression, after all – but that there still seemed to be some people walking the streets.

On the second day, they saw Fred Jahraus, his mother, and several of his “foster brothers” move into a few of the bigger houses on the main street. They decided to watch that night and the next day to see what happened, going down snoop the next night if nothing more interesting had come up. And so, they settled in, and I got ready to run my big set-piece for this scenario, with the Jahraus group calling their brother ghouls up to cleanse the town of humans, so the rest of the ghoul nation could gather safely ((This is not the default sinister version of the group, but the new idea I came up with in the hour before the game.)). It was going to be big, and bloody, and horrific, and would show the dangers of procrastination to the investigators.

And then Aaron Moon pointed out that the only people who had committed any crimes in this entire investigation into the APL were the investigators. What if the APL weren’t bad guys?

Now, I was kind of caught flat-footed by this,and was prepared to dismiss it out of hand. But then I thought, “Y’know, he’s right.” I’ve been wonking on about how the investigators are turning into sociopaths. Did I want to discourage or reward efforts to move away from that? On the other hand, I had this whole new scenario that I’d put together in an hour! Did I want to just toss that out?

That’s not a really good reason to dismiss player input though, and I know it. A bigger reason was that the whole ghoul massacre thing was more in keeping with the overall themes and storylines of the campaign. But I didn’t want to just dismiss the idea of a peaceful resolution out of hand.

So, I copped out, and threw the decision to the dice. I got the player to pick low or high, then I rolled a die behind my screen to see which option I was going to go with. He picked high, I rolled high, and I threw out the scenario for the second time that evening and started from scratch.

The denouement of the scenario was Moon going, alone and unarmed, into town to speak with Jahraus. They had a sort-of conversation, where Jahraus told Moon that he and his fellows were awaiting rescue, which should be coming in a month and, while there was some risk, no harm was intended. He tried to explain things clearly, but apparently couldn’t express some of the concepts in human thought and language. I drew a lot of inspiration for this section of the scenario from this marvelous clip of Carl Sagan explaining the fourth dimension, complete with Jahraus showing Moon the fourth dimension and almost breaking his brain.

I threw in a number of hints about the throughlines of the campaign, though I’m not sure how many of them were picked up by the players, and had a lot of fun roleplaying Fred Jahraus again. One thing that I did make pretty clear was that, while Jahraus and his fellows intended no harm, not causing harm was not their top priority.

Some tidbits that Moon brought back from his little fourth-dimensional head trip included the fact that, in that perspective, Jahraus and company looked like swarms of strangely coloured bumblebees, and that humans look like tall, strangely jointed creatures with probabilities and potentials boiling off them like fur. He is concerned that the Jahraus things are the moebius wasps that the first document warned them about, and that the yeti-thing that gave him the bullet is, in fact, his future self.

The investigators decided that they would leave Rot Tal for now, coming back near the end of the month to see what happened and try to minimize any harm done by the rescue. It was near the end of the evening, so I wrapped things up with two small scenes to keep the creep factor going. First of all, Moon came down to his kitchen to find a book sitting on his table that matched the descriptions of The Tears of Azathoth that he had heard rumours about. Before he could gather the necessary alcohol and firearms to sit down and read it, it vanished. And Roxy found that her bedroom showed signs of someone having gone through it. A search uncovered a flat stone wrapped in soft leather between the mattress and spring of her bed. She smashed it without looking at it, and got Dr. Solis to help her dispose of it, just like they did with the previous stone.

Next session starts a new investigation. I can’t wait to see what it’s going to be.

Leverage: The Double-Switch Job

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Friday night, I got four players together to run a second playtest of Leverage: The Roleplaying Game. My plan is for this playtest to be somewhat more involved than The Quickstart Job, and includes full character creation with the recruitment job and a job of my own devising. That means two sessions: one for character creation and the recruitment job, and one for the full job. And the first one was, as I said, on Friday.

One of the things I was worried about was the fact that I could only get four players, when the game seems highly optimized for five. I could probably have snagged one more player by expanding the initial invite list, but when I started thinking about that, I realized that it might be a good idea to see how well the game works with fewer players ((Another question becomes how well the game works with more than five players; at some point, I may try and test that.)), so I decided to go with it.

The main issue with having only four players is that there will be one of the five roles ((Theoretically, you could wind up with more than one role going spare if the players double up on primary roles, but the structure of the game seems to encourage diversifying.)) that does not have a primary – a character who has taken a d10 in that role. That means the team has a slightly reduced tool set for completing the job. While that initially bothered me,  I began to think about other strongly role-based games, like D&D 4E, and how they play with one or more of the core roles lacking. They work just fine; it just changes the options the characters have in approaching the various obstacles in the adventure.

The initial phases of character creation went pretty smoothly, with everyone picking their primary and secondary roles, distributing their attributes, and picking a distinction without any problem. We wound up with a Grifter/Thief, Hacker/Hitter, Hitter/Thief, and Mastermind/Thief. I found it interesting that, recognizing that they did not have Thief in a primary role, the group’s approach was to make sure that they had, shall we say, depth of field in Thief as a secondary role. The prevalence of the Thief role in secondary, to me, created a strong theme for the crew ((The fact that the Thief role is secondary to three characters, in my mind, almost overshadows the difference in the primary roles. Strong commonalities often act as a foundation of unity for a group, allowing the differences in the primary roles to shine out. For example, every member of The A-Team had been a soldier; they could all fight, despite the fact that each brought a different skill set to the table, as well.)) – they were, for the most part, stealthy, sneaky, covert types.

Attribute-wise, we had an even split in the group between the generalist and specialized attribute arrays. That says to me that the two options are nicely balanced, each offering something valuable, yet different. Now, that was my assumption, based on the fact that each array essentially gives you 48 die-sides to spread among your attributes, but equal numbers doesn’t always mean the two options are as good as each other. The test, in my mind, is whether people will use both options equally. In this admittedly small statistical sampling, they did.

Everyone seemed to have a good idea of their first distinction, based on the little bit of backstory they had come up with for their character concept, so that went quick. We wound up with Charming Rogue, Hot Tempered, Tougher Than He Looks, and Bastard. And then we got down to the recruitment job.

This was a little rough. Some of that roughness is my fault for trying to make things a little more elaborate than the way things are described in the rulebook, and some of the roughness is caused by the expectations set up in the rulebook for what will happen during this job.

The part that was my fault was caused by me wanting to inject a little more flavour of the full job into the recruitment job. So, I let the group set the mark and the client, and then I statted them up. They got to determine the plan for the job, within the restrictions that they would each get a spotlight scene. The issue here is that I let things get too elaborate, story-wise, while still keeping the spotlight scene restrictions from the basic recruitment job, meaning the crew had to work things into a very artificial structure. In retrospect, I should have gone all one way or the other: either make it a full job, with none of the restrictions, or stuck with the basic nature of the recruitment job.

The part that was caused by the expectations set up in the rulebook is a little different. See, the assumption that was left with after reading through the character creation session was that the characters would be complete after the recruitment job, with maybe one or two that were missing one or two things that could get filled in during the first job. A little bit of math shows this to be somewhat unreasonable, unless you’re running a full-session job ((Even then, it’s gonna be a tight fit.)).

When you start the recruitment job, each character needs to complete a certain number of things on the rap sheet:

  • Three roles still need dice assigned to them.
  • Each character needs two more distinctions.
  • Each character needs two specialties.
  • Each character needs two talents.

Now, the roles are moderately easy to assign – just try doing something in one of the scenes that uses a role you haven’t assigned. The trick is that, by doing so, you are by definition not playing to your strengths, moving outside of your comfort zone. I like this, because it very nicely puts some interesting stress on the character, revealing more information by how they respond under pressure.

It’s the other three categories that create the problems. Each distinction, specialty, or talent is introduced in play with a flashback. That means, in a four-player game like we had, you need a total of 24 flashbacks during the job in order to cover everything. Each flashback took about five minutes to work through ((Mastery of the system would, of course, reduce this time requirement, but given that the recruitment job is going to be one of the first jobs most groups do, I think it’s fair to say that mastery of the system probably won’t exist in the group at the time of running it.)), with time for the player to come up with a flashback, present it to the group, and incorporate its effects into the character.

That makes for two full hours of flashbacks. Two and a half, if you’ve got a full five-person crew. Considering that our play sessions run about five hours, and the first two hours of the evening were taken up with the first part of character creation and an explanation of the system ((Again, this time requirement would be reduced significantly with mastery of the system.)), that leaves an hour of play devoted to creating and completing the job in the present if you’re going to get everything in. That doesn’t strike me as a reasonable expectation.

It’s important to note here that not everything needs to get taken care of in the recruitment job. The book specifically says that if, at the end of the recruitment job, you still have some blanks on your rap sheet, don’t worry about it, because you can fill those in during play. The problem was that I hadn’t done the math on the time factor needed for all the flashbacks, and had assumed that it was unlikely that there would be anything left to fill in if we ran the recruitment job properly. That meant I was trying to cram everything in during the job, and that made things feel very forced and clunky.

I also think that the requirement of a flashback to introduce distinctions, specialties, and talents is not really necessary. In future, if I run this again ((Who am I kidding? Of course I’m going to run this again. I don’t want to start a new campaign right now, but I’m at least going to try another playtest with more than five characters to see how things scale in that direction.)), I’m going to say that you can establish these things after a good character moment – maybe even let the rest of the group pick the moment to establish a distinction for a character. Still allow flashbacks, but not require them. That would speed things along, I think.

Another thing I should have done to speed things along is to have cheat sheets done up of the available talents, to aid the players who hadn’t read through the rules in picking them on the fly. I didn’t do that, and it meant that a lot of times, the players didn’t know what kinds of talents they could pick, and so didn’t try to establish them.

I’m making it sound like the recruitment job was a train wreck, aren’t I? It wasn’t. It was less smooth than I would have liked, and parts of it felt forced, but it still worked and was fun. Considering how smoothly things had gone in The Quickstart Job, I was curious as to why it hadn’t gone that way this time, and so I’ve spent some time analyzing the issues. That’s why I’m talking about problems rather than what went right, here.

The job turned out to be interesting, and showed me very nicely how a good complication can be used as a twist in the job.

The basic set-up was that a real estate developer had a property owner beat up, trying to force him to sell ((Strangely reminiscent of the current storyline in my Feints & Gambits campaign, but only one of the players is in both games, and the set-up wasn’t her idea.)). The crew decided that he was a collector of antique swords, and also skimming off the company profits. The plan was to swap one of his valuable swords with a fake ((An interesting first scene for a group without a Thief primary, I thought. The Hitter/Thief managed it, though.)), then approach him to sell him the real sword. The asking price would be high enough to get him to tap into his offshore accounts for funds, which would let the hacker piggy-back in and copy his financial records for delivery to federal investigators. The money from the sword would then go to the client to cover medical bills and pay off the liens on his property.

Things went pretty much as planned, right up until we got to the end of the scene with the hacker copying the data, and I realized I had three complications that I hadn’t spent. I glommed them all together into one d10 complication, and said, “Huh. According to the financial data, he’s using his development company to launder money for the mob.” Mob Involvement d10.

That changed the objective of the plan to getting him to roll over on the mob, abandoning his luxurious life for witness protection. The Mastermind organized a series of flashbacks where the crew made the mark think that someone in the mob had given him up to the feds, and the mob was going to take him out to prevent him being arrested and testifying, ending up with the asset Worried About The Mob d10 to offset the mob complication. The wrap-up had the mark fleeing into the arms of the FBI ahead of imagined mob assassins, and the money from his cleaned-out accounts going to the client.

The way the complications I had left turned into a twist in the plot worked remarkably well. The rulebook says that, really, all you need to run the game and build jobs are a problem, assets, and complications. This was a perfect illustration of that fact, and one that I need to keep in mind for when I create the full job for the next stage of this playtest.

We wrapped up with a postmortem, where we discussed the issues I’ve outlined above, but everyone said that they had had fun. To help address some of the issues, I had gave those who had not completely filled in their rap sheets the option of doing so before the next session, or leaving the blank options to be filled in during play. The one thing I wanted to complete were the distinctions – most of the characters had one distinction still to be filled in. I got the rest of the group to decide on a second distinction for each character based on how they had done things during the job.

And that’s where we left things. In three weeks, I’ll be running this crew through a full job – they’ve already got a taste of how it works, but now they will have no restriction on number of scenes or who’s involved, or the number of flashbacks needed, or anything like that. I think it’ll go a lot smoother ((I’m using the word smooth, and its variants, a lot in this post. That’s because smooth is the best way to describe the system when it’s working well.)). I’ll let you know how it works.

Leverage RPG: The Quickstart Job

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I’ve been looking at the Leverage RPG for months now ((I got The Quickstart Job pdf way, way back when it was first released, and preordered the main rulebook immediately after reading through it. When the rulebook went to the printer, the good folks at MWP sent me the pdf, which easily lived up to the promise of the playtest scenario. So, it’s been almost a year since I first looked at the game.)), planning to write a post about it, but I didn’t want to do it until I’d had the opportunity to actually run the playtest scenario, The Quickstart Job. Last night, I got the opportunity to try it out, and it did not disappoint.

As may be implied by the name, The Quickstart Job is a short, simple scenario that introduces the rules and structure of the game, played with the characters from the TV show ((And if, by some chance, you don’t know about the TV show, you can find the details here and here and here. It’s a fun, light caper show.)). The adventure is a quick caper, trying to steal some corporate records at a party, with a nice twist thrown in to force the players to think on their feet. It’s set up to be pretty much a railroad plot, at first glance, obviously intended to be run quickly with people who are unfamiliar with the game system, leading through the steps of the con by the hand.

This is a good thing; it’s what a quickstart adventure should do. It keeps the extraneous complexity and subtlety of the system off-screen, showing off the cool things you can do in the game. And the plot is not as much of a railroad as it first appears, something I didn’t appreciate until I actually ran it ((One reason I’m glad I waited until I had run the game before writing about it.)). The complication mechanic adds a lot of little side action, forcing the characters to rethink the plan right in the middle of things going pear-shaped, just like on the TV show.

System

Quick overview of the system, which is a heavily ((And beautifully!)) tweaked version of the Cortex system, called Cortex Plus:

  • There are five different roles in the game, representing broad areas of expertise – classes, if you like – shown in the show. They are Grifter, Hacker, Hitter, Mastermind, and Thief.
  • There are six different attributes, representing the standard raw abilities of the character. They are Agility, Alertness, Intelligence, Strength, Vitality, and Willpower. Interestingly, each has a strong social function outside the obvious function.
  • Roles and attributes are ranked by die type, d4 to d12 ((In practice, characters have scores from d4 to d10 when starting out)), and rolls are made using the die from the appropriate role and appropriate attribute. Extra dice can be added by introducing something new and interesting to the scene, called an Asset. No matter how big the dice pool gets, though, only the two highest dice are totaled for the result.
  • The GM – Fixer, in this game – rolls the opposition dice pool, representing whatever obstacles the characters are trying to overcome. The Fixer dice pool works roughly the same way, except the Fixer gets Complications instead of Assets.
  • Plot Points can be used to gain Assets or include more dice from your pool in the result of your roll.

There are some subtleties and other mechanical flourishes to the game, but that’s the core of it, and I’m only going to talk about a couple of other parts.

First, in keeping with the source material, the game uses a very nice mechanic for flashbacks, allowing the players to spend Plot Points to retcon some action in a flashback, showing how they set things up for an advantage that they now want to use. I thought this would be a difficult thing to get the players using, but they were all fans of the show, and jumped at the chance to use the idea. It’s really brought out in The Quickstart Job during the wrap-up, and creates a different way of looking at the game: instead of trying to account for every little possibility during the actual play of the game, where things can get bogged down in the minutiae, you can leave the loose ends for the end of the game and tie them up then, when you see what they are.

Second, Complications. Complications are really the heart and soul of the game. The assumption of the game is that the characters are obscenely good at what they do. They are among the top people in their respective fields in the entire world. So, it is expected that, as long as things go according to the plan, they will succeed. Complications are how you inject surprising things that aren’t according to the plan and force the characters to think on their feet to deal with them. Just like the TV show ((I’m saying that a lot in this review, and I personally think that’s entirely appropriate for a licensed game. In fact, I think that’s eminently desirable. If you’re playing a game based on a TV show, it should feel like you’re playing in an episode of the show.)), the drama and interest in the game comes from how the characters handle the problems that pop up to skew the plan.

Complications arise when a player rolls a 1 on any die in his or her dice pool on any roll. It earns them a Plot Point, and lets the Fixer add a trait to scenario rated at d6. This trait gets added to any roll the Fixer makes where it would apply. So, a Complication like Heightened Security d6 would get rolled when a character is trying to sneak into a building ((Or talk his or her way in, or fight his or her way in, or hack his or her way in, or whatever.)). Extra 1s can grant more Complications, or can step up the die type of an existing Complication: d6 to d8 to d10 to d12.

One of the beautiful things about the Complication mechanic is that the Fixer can bank it, and is, in fact, encouraged to do so. So, when a player rolls a Complication, the Fixer can make note of it and not introduce it until a later time, when it would be more fun. This might seem a little prone to abuse, with the possibility of the Fixer saving up the Complications to hit a player at a very vulnerable point with You’re Screwed d12, but it’s really a way to make sure that the interesting, exciting parts of play get used at dramatically appropriate points. And if your Fixer does that, it just means you are more likely to fail at that particular action, not that the job falls apart.

The entire game is engineered towards making the characters show off how cool they are. That means that, in general, failure just means you have to think of a different way to do what your were trying to do. Even failure in a combat simply means that now the bad guys have you prisoner, and the rest of the team has to try and break you out, as well as finish up the job.

The Job

So, how did the playtest go? Really well, I thought, though not quite as I expected. I don’t want to give too much of the adventure away, because I hate spoilers, especially in reviews, but here’s the high-level look at it.

I spent about fifteen minutes at the start of play talking about the system, making sure everyone was up to speed on how to roll, what to roll, how to use Plot Points, and how to get more. Then, I got the players playing Nate and Hardison to read the briefing out loud to the other players, and we jumped right in.

As mentioned previously, the scenes are set up in a very basic, linear, hand-holding style. That didn’t survive encounter with my players. They’re all experienced gamers, and all of them are fans of the show, so they took what they had and ran with it. The first scene was pretty basic, with three of the characters scoping things out at a party, and we went through that as written, with them making their notice rolls and getting – or not getting, in Nate’s case – the information they needed. The second scene involved an actual objective to achieve, and that’s where they went to town.

In seconds, there was an elaborate scam involving a cake, fake e-mail, a surprise speech, and the preemptive removal of a couple of security guards. The scenario gives three options to accomplish the objective, and they’re probably very useful for groups who haven’t gamed as much, or watched as much Leverage; my group came up with a strange mish-mash of all three, with some extra bits thrown in, involving four out of five of the characters.

I hadn’t actually expected there to be that much flexibility in the scenario, so I was a little caught off-guard, and panicked a bit. My first instinct, being less secure in the system and scenario than I might have liked, was to try and force them back onto the tracks, but then the wiser part of me said, “Nah. It’s a playtest. If it all goes to hell, it doesn’t really matter. Relax and go with it.” So, I took a minute or two to think ((Also, a convenient bathroom break, but that’s not all that relevant.)), and ran with it.

That was the moment when the game started to shine. Everyone was trying crazy things, everyone was throwing around Plot Points for Assets ((Which, for most of the evening, I kept calling Aspects. What can I say? Mechanically, they’re similar, and I’d just run Feints & Gambits the previous evening. But it was confusing for the poor players.)) and flashbacks, and I was layering on the Complications.

The game rolled along, and I nudged them past some points where they were getting bogged down by things that could better be handled in the wrap-up through flashbacks, and kept the pace going fairly well. Not quite as well as I would have liked, because I had to scramble a couple of times to figure out how to handle something, but that can be addressed by familiarity with the rules.

All in all, the game took about two and a quarter hours, and ended nicely ((Although, Eliot got pretty beat up at one point – no matter what the system, a sucky roll is a sucky roll.)) for the group. They achieved the objective, and helped a little old lady keep her home, and sent the scumbags who were threatening it to prison for a long time.

Afterward, as I like to do with playtests, we had a postmortem to talk about the system, and what worked and what didn’t. Then we called it an evening.

Assessment

I really like the system. It does what it promises to do, and it does it with style and flair. I have not seen a system that handles caper and heist play nearly as well, ever. Some specific thoughts:

  • The Quickstart Job seems to use an earlier iteration of the rules than what finally got published in the rulebook. Specifically, the rules for acquiring Assets and for Contested Actions are different. The ones in the rulebook are, in my opinion, cleaner and more fun.
  • Once the game jumped the rails of the plot, I really began regretting that there wasn’t a complete set of traits for the Mark – the main villain of the piece. And for the locale. It was easy enough to improvise things, but the addition of a couple of stat lines would have been very useful, especially in an introductory product like this.
  • The idea about using post-it notes to track Assets and Complications on p115 of the rulebook is solid gold. Even in this short game, there were about ten Assets created, and five Complications (some of which got stepped up as high as d12). That’s a lot for everyone to keep track of, and the notes were a life-saver.
  • No one in the playtest used their Distinctions ((These are another thing kind of like Aspects in FATE. They let characters either get bonuses to their dice pool or to get an extra Plot Point.)) to generate Plot Points, only for bonuses. This is, I think, the product of the short adventure and the larger-than-normal starting Plot Points for the characters. In campaign play, I think the characters would be more hungry for Plot Points, and use the Distinctions more to get them.
  • The game is really focused on doing one thing, and doing it well. By default, the situations for the adventures are going to be rather formulaic, just like in the TV show. That said, there are a number of hacks for the system to work in different types of settings and genres already on the net. For a start, check out Rob Donoghue’s blog on the subject. His Two Guys With Swords set-up makes me really want to run a short Fafhrd/Grey Mouser campaign.
  • The playtest scenario leaves out a couple of the coolest parts of the system in the interests of brevity. Character creation is wonderful and collaborative, and the basic assumption of play is that the group is going to plan the job at the session. And there’s great advice in the book for handling both of these things.
  • The game has a situation generator, which lets you randomly roll up the client, problem, mark, etc. for a job. It’s tremendous fun to play with, even if you don’t end up using the results strictly as rolled.
  • I messed up the fight action a little in the game, due to lack of rules familiarity. That was part of the reason Eliot took such a beating, though his abysmal dice luck was a larger contributing factor. Again, this will be addressed by more familiarity with the system, and was exacerbated by the difference in rules between the playtest booklet and the final rulebook. The two systems were warring in my head.
  • The game is optimized for five players. Fewer players, and you’ll have one role that’s not covered in a primary position; more players, and you’ve got some double primary roles. Now, in theory, either of these – or both – could happen even with five players, but the system makes it sub-optimal. It’s far from game-breaking, but could change the dynamic of play significantly.

So, yeah. Leverage RPG is a very fun game. It’s got me looking at the slot on the game calender that opened up with the demise of Fearful Symmetries and thinking.

Thinking hard.

But I think I will hold off on starting a new campaign for now. I think I’ll wait at least until the two splatbooks come out this summer. I’ve already got them pre-ordered.

I think I may run another playtest, though, with a job of my own devising and full character creation. Just to see how it goes ((Honestly. I can quit any time.)).

We’ll see.

***Super Important Edit***

I forgot to say thanks to my players for taking part in this playtest. I hope you had as much fun as I did. So, thanks to:

  • Penny – Sophie
  • Michael – Hardison
  • Sandy – Parker
  • Kieran – Nate
  • Aleksander – Eliot

Feints & Gambits: Drinkin’ and Fightin’

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Feints & Gambits, What's he playing?
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Last night was the latest session of Feints & Gambits. We had almost a full house; only one of the players couldn’t make it.

Mindful of the scattered nature of the previous session, I tried to keep things more focused this session, without drawing in too many extraneous threads to confuse the main story. This worked better, and the characters pushed on through the game, running down the leads they had, and discovering more information. We didn’t finish the story up last night, mainly because the one thing the characters haven’t decided on is what counts as a win for them.

I’ve come to realize that this is an insanely important decision for the party to make. In a lot of games, the victory condition is kind of a default for the game: save the princess, slay the dragon, rip off the megacorp, arrest the supervillain, find the treasure, whatever. It’s built in to the scenario assumptions from the start, and the characters are hooked into wanting to pursue that objective ((This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I hasten to point out. Sharply defined goals offer great motivation and a strong sense of accomplishment when the characters achieve them. It’s just not the only way to do things.)).

What I’ve been doing a lot in both the Dresden Files RPG and the Armitage Files campaign is letting the characters set their own agendas, and establish their own goals and victory conditions. With Fearful Symmetries and Armitage Files, the player groups are fairly small: two and three players, respectively. With double the number of players in Feints & Gambits, the decision process tends to involve a lot more discussion and debate before consensus is reached ((This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, either. It creates the greatest amount of player buy-in, gives them the strong sense of being in control of their characters’ fates, and in general keeps up the collaborative story building that the game set-up encourages. But it does eat time at game sessions.)), and heightens the planning paralysis potential of the game, which is to be avoided.

When we got to about 11:40 last night, the group was deep in a discussion about the best way to proceed, and had started circling back on their own arguments, losing both focus and momentum, so I suggested we call it a night and move the discussion to the forum for the three weeks until the next game, and they agreed.

So, what happened at the game itself? Well, first of all, Nate wasn’t there, as he had to go return the van he had acquired for that thing with the Guinness. Also, he had to explain the damage to it. Firinne and Aleister were still in pretty rough shape after having been bashed about by the thugs the night before, but Kate was looking after them. Mark had the papers he and Nate had stolen from the lawyer’s office, which they needed to examine. And Rogan showed up to say that she had spent the previous day trying to Aengous drunk to find out more about the Game the fey were playing ((She quickly discovered that Aengous either didn’t get drunk, or that drunk was his default state, and he didn’t get drunker. She, even despite her shapeshifting ways, was not quite so lucky.)). Everyone regrouped at the Hole in the Wall to plan their next moves.

They pored over the maps of the neighbourhood that was being bought out, but were unable to discover any mystical significance to the sites that were being purchased. Kate spent a few hours sorting through the records from the lawyer’s office and discovered that New World Developments was owned, through a network of shell companies and holding companies and false fronts, by Doyle Developments, one of the biggest land development firms in Dublin.

With this information, Aleister called Robin, the friend who had inadvertently drawn him into this by asking Aleister to get him some pistols for self-defense. When Robin didn’t answer his phone, Aleister, Rogan, and Firinne went to find out what was up. At his place, they found a number of angry young Asian men who told them that Robin was in the hospital, having been beaten almost to death. They asked if Aleister had got them their guns yet ((I did this to make it apparent that, while the characters were free to choose how they dealt with things, events are transpiring elsewhere, whether they’re aware of them or not, and that the situation is not under their control. Tensions are mounting in the community, and will eventually come to a head.)).

Deciding that something needed to be done about the thugs, Mark whipped up a tracking spell to find them. Kate made Aleister a healing potion to help with his broken ribs ((Based on the Reiki Healing spell in Your Story.)), and they all headed out on the trail of the men who had beaten Robin.

They found them in a pub in northern Dublin, and Aleister confronted them. This, somewhat predictably, turned into a bar brawl, and we got to see what Aleister can do when he’s got some room to maneuver and someone to watch his back. Also, that Mark’s head is very hard. With the three thugs unconscious – one of them out on the street under a broken window – and beer raining down from a broken tap, Rogan and Firinne each lifted a wallet from one of the fallen toughs as everyone made good their escape through the escalating brawl ((Well, Aleister didn’t escape so much as he called the guys he had just beaten up pedophiles who had molested his brother, and then stared down the rest of the crowd until they cleared a path to let him walk out.)).

Aleister followed this up the next day with a phone call to the chief thug and made a rather chilling threat about what would happen if Aleister caught him south of the Liffey ever again ((When he made the call, I had a child answer the phone and call for his da. I was interested to see where Aleister would draw the line – would he, even implicitly, threaten the child to get the father to understand the seriousness of things? The answer was no. Aleister has scruples.)).

Meanwhile, the group decided to take the papers they had found linking New World with Doyle to a reporter friend of Aleister’s, hoping that the papers could apply some pressure without the gang having to tell the police where they got the records. I took the opportunity to give them a quick course in political leverage through the mouthpiece of the reporter: she asked if they had kept copies, and they sheepishly had to admit that they hadn’t, and then asked for a couple of hours to do that. She then explained that she’d have to verify the information on the papers independently before she could publish anything, and that would take a couple of weeks. They reluctantly agreed to that.

And Rogan went to one of her family lawyers to see what he could tell her about Doyle Development. The lawyer told her that the head was Sir Clifton St. John Doyle, a flash man-about-town, and a wealthy and clever developer. When she mentioned the papers, he pointed out that none of the information they had actually implicated Doyle in the violence, or any unethical behaviour. He also offered some ideas about why Doyle would be using such a convoluted front to buy up the property he wanted, including not wanting competitors to find out what he was doing and drive up the price. He couldn’t offer any other information about what might be going on, but he did offer to set up a meeting with Doyle in a day or two, and she took him up on that.

That’s about when things got tangled in a discussion about what the next steps should be and, after a bit, I called the evening to a close. I find it interesting that it’s taken them two sessions to come to grips with the idea that this problem might have no supernatural component to it at all, but that’s where they’ve arrived, and that’s good. I don’t want every story to be about the fey or other mystical nastiness, though obviously a certain number of them need to be.

And now they’ve got three weeks to figure out what to do next. I wonder what they’ll decide.

Fearful Symmetries: RIP

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Fearful Symmetries, What's he playing?
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My Fearful Symmetries campaign has come to an end.

Izabela’s player has decided that she doesn’t want to continue with the game. Seeing as it’s a two-player game, and the two players are husband and wife, that means the game stops.

What happened? Well, I mentioned last post that Izabela was probably going to be retiring, because her player and the magic system didn’t really click. Upon spending some time thinking about what other sort of character would be a good fit for the game, but less mechanically complex to play, Penny came up with a concept she really liked. Then she started thinking about building the characters and said, basically, “Ugh. That means that I’ll have to come up with Aspects.”

She took that as a good indicator that her dissatisfaction with the system went beyond the complexity of the magic system. And, given that she wasn’t enjoying the game, and didn’t like the way the system worked, she very rightly decided that she should bow out of the game.

Now, I happen to love the system, but I can see why she doesn’t. There’s a certain level of meta-thinking that goes on when using the Aspects and whatnot in the game: places where you have to stick your head above the character-immersion waterline and look over your Aspects and your Fate Point totals and create something new on the fly that will apply to a given situation. I think that, for some people, it quickly becomes transparent, and builds a very cinematic style to play. But if you don’t click with the system, you don’t click with it, and you never get to that point.

This is an important point that I have had to learn over and over through my gaming life: not every system is a good fit for every player, or for every game. Some players like more, or less, or different structures to the games they play, and if the rule system doesn’t fit for them, then every time they have to use it, it breaks them out of their happy gaming place, and frustrates them. When it gets too bad, they stop playing.

So, yeah. That’s that.

I want to thank Clint and Penny for playing. We had a good run: 15 sessions, nearly a year of play, and some good, memorable moments.

It’s been fun.