Psi*Run: Actual Play

We played Psi*Run last night (I was GMing).

You play ‘Runners’: amnesiacs with super-powers. The game begins with you escaping … and you’re being chased by a shadowy organisation (the ‘Chasers’). The game has a tension between whether the Chasers will capture you or whether you’ll answer enough questions about your past to be able to escape them.

The players all commented on Psi*Run’s brutal, brilliant resolution system. One player said it gave him the opportunity to fail in five different ways on the same roll. Another player said it was so good, it should be in many many more games: he saw it as a worker-placement mechanic.

I’m a huge fan of modern, urban chases, so in terms of Colour this game was pretty easy to GM. I applied a lot of setting details from my recent trip to Auckland: a crash on the beach near the Mission Bay clubbing district, nosy beach-living neighbours, a guard dog from the awesome B&B we stayed at (who was turned into a cuddly zombie by the misapplication of empathic projection powers).

Runners were separated from each other. One of them turned a few drinking teenagers into a kill-squad through switching his danger sense from passive to active mode.



What I learned as the GM

This is a game I feel like I should be able to GM well, but I need to apply a few techniques to in order to make it easy and fun for me.

Throughout it, though I felt like I needed to create more sources of GM antagonism in the story. Without constant tension, there are few reasons for the players to make dice rolls (which create jeopardy and advance the game). Some of the rolls I called for felt a bit arbitrary to me.

Anyone, some potential sources of antagonism include:

• the chasers (which, of course, are central to the game)
• traditional law enforcement
• civilians
• on-going blowback from psi-powers.

I also felt that ‘Advance the Chasers’ needed to be a GM move: if there's a pause in the game and the players turn to the GM expecting them to say something, advance the chasers by one location. (And the same for if the characters don't move at all: there’s a paragraph about this in the game, but it’s not specific.)

Another thing I’d do differently next time: each Runner has questions they need to answer about themselves. I should've drawn on those questions when they were read out for the first time, writing them down as potential situations to throw the Runners into.

A few rules questions

• Can the characters narrate advancing through multiple locations quickly, putting lots of distance between them and the Chasers? I think so, but that’s where I need to introduce more antagonism (as above)
• If a Runner establishes a barricade (as in one of the game’s examples) does it have any effect when the Chasers reach it? The Chasers’ success in bypassing the barricade depends on what d6 the Runner puts into 'Chase' rather than the Runner’s initial success with the goal of ‘Create a barricade’, right?
• How can one character help another?
• Has anyone give any thought as to how you’d play a sequel game where the Runners turn the tables on the Chasers? Would it just be the same rules? Would the ‘Chase’ part of resolution system still apply?

(Psi*Run is available here. It’s Game 28 in my Play 51 Games in 2015 challenge.)

Wield: a fun game that I need to get better at GMing

I ran my first game of Wield last night, for four players. You play vatcha (intelligent magic items like The One Ring or the Luggage from Discworld), and the poor saps who own them.

One of the players described it like so:

"Tonight, Matt and I had a duel of wits as adversarial artifacts and their bearers. I played a magical finger and a scholar bearing a magical gauntlet. He played the magical gauntlet and the owner of the magical finger.

Yes."

Some observations, in no particular order:

• The central tensions between the vatcha (the magic items) and the heroes worked well.
  
• It wasn't quite as easy to let the players generate their own stories as I thought. I may need to steal the idea of player-generated Bangs from Sorceror and my own 'take note of highly charged situations and play them immediately' technique from Monsterhearts.
  
• The web of social relationships in the game challenged my savannah-optimised primate brain. With four players, it was just on the edge of what I was able to handle. Most team-based games (eg. D&D, Shadowrun, Leverage) have an easy-to-track 'us versus them' dynamic. In terms of games with (fictional) social complexity, I think it goes: Monsterhearts --> Wield --> The full version of Left Coast
   
• I definitely needed to create my own play aids, in order to understand the combat rules. I've broken it down into a 5-step process, which is easier to follow and adjudicate.
   
• Combat and overcoming obstacles are lethal. They're great situations to force vatcha players to decide whether to give the heros more power (and therefore more control).
   
• After consulting with some Wield GM-gurus, I can see the following player arrangements working:
• A 3-player game where everyone plays artefacts and heros
• A 4-player game where everyone plays the hero for the vatcha on their right or (for a far more focused game, you have two vatcha players and two hero players) 
• For 6+ players, have half the players playing artefacts and half playing heroes.

• I found it much easier to invent destinies for all the heroes. Those destinies also gave me tonnes of NPCs and locations to track (which is a good thing). ... The rules say to randomly assign heroes to the vatchas. When I created heroes, I riffed off what the vatcha players were coming up with. That made me suspect I could be better for the GM to assign heroes to players (at least at first).
  
• As well as creating a relationship map, I probably need to track the history that the vatcha players create. I definitely need to track each vatcha-hero combination: I was getting really lost in doing that.
  
• There's nothing that really points the vatchas at each other. As a result, the stories can drift apart a bit. That's probably fine in a multi-session game. I'll need to think about how you'd optimise it for a convention game.

So, I'd run this again ... after I refine some of my player handouts and streamline some of my 'how to introduce and frame the game' notes.

I'd also think about providing some pre-generated vatchas (to speed up a convention game). I've created 'playbooks' for the vatchas but I think it probably needs to be even faster to hit a climax in a three-hour slot.

Restless: a freeform survival horror game

Played Restless last night: 's freeform horror game of survivors being hunted by an unstoppable evil force. This was a one-off game arranged via Facebook for a university games club. Every time I emphasised how lethal it would be, my prospective players would laugh and say tell me it sounded great.

They were right.

Players divide into 'survivors' and 'desolators'. Desolators describe the world and portray the Restless (the monsters who are hunting the survivors)

I played a desolator, along with Chris. I had some thoughts going in that were heavily influenced by The Darkest Hour (invisible electricity aliens).

Chris was interested in a different angle, and mentioned the Reavers from Firefly as a touchstone. We took that idea of frenzied humans as our starting point. Then I said I'd like there to be something unnatural about them: like they can hide in shadows or crawl on ceilings. Chris came back with the idea of 'possession' and we locked it in.

Not too much detail or backstory, but just enough for us to start jamming with.

The game is played out in sequences (or set-pieces from a horror movie). These are called 'verses'. The game gives you strong guidance for what happens in each verse. The order of verses is randomly determined.

Each verse provides prompts for actions to describe or settings or memories to invent. It felt a little like the verses encoded hard and soft moves into them.(*)

* Apocalypse World terminology.

Starting The Game

Our first verse was called 'Dreams and Nightmares': it made for a great opener, as it deals with memories, flashbacks, and difficult emotional terrain for each of the survivors. It really humanises them.
 
Right from the start of that card, we realised that (for the survivors could choose where to camp and how to defend themselves) the desolators would have to provide some setting details that weren't in the verse:

• What are the Restless?
• How long have the Restless been destroying the world?

It also seemed like we needed to empower the desolators to ask questions that:

• Lead the survivors into danger
• Explore the survivors misery, miserable lives

Giving desolators the power to ask those types of questions kept the game flowing smoothly, and steered clear of violating the Czege Principle ("When one person is the author of both the character's adversity and its resolution, play isn't fun.").

Specific Feedback On How Verses Work

I also wonder whether the desolators should be the ones to read out the information on each verse. I suspect that could:

• preserve suspense about what will happen next
• encourage immersion in the survivors
• simplify some of the instructions you need to read out (I'm thinking of "The going is tough" from 'Bushwhacking') ...

... but I'm not sure how important that is to Jonathan's vision of play. We just rotated players reading out cards and it worked fine.

The game is very very late playtest, so this probably hasn't come up for any other groups. While we played I did wonder about the phrasing of the cards. Because they're read aloud, some sections felt like they could be phrased as very specific questions to the survivors or using the imperative.

An example.

In the 'Bushwhacking' verse, it says "The survivors then quickly decide on an alternate route", but maybe making it "The survivors need to decide..." or "You need to decide..." would make what's required clearer.

 

Developing What The Restless Are

Between verses, you can swap from playing a survivor to a desolator (and vice versa), or choose to play a new or returning  survivor character.

This was great, creatively, for our group: two survivor players in the first verse leapt at the chance to play desolators in the second. And they were fantastic at it: much better than me. I love the idea that the game allows you to rotate how you creatively feed into the game based on your enthusiasm and energy.

In passing on the desolator role, I felt I had to brief the new desolators on what we'd established... and then give them permission to establish a fact each for themselves. We applied that protocol throughout the rest of the game. It led to some creepy imagery, including:

• Thick black streams of oil announcing the arrival of the Restless
• Anyone who had an open wound had a chance of becoming a Restless, regardless of whether a Restless was anywhere nearby.

Establishing A Social Contract For Tone?

Initially, people took the game's situation and character creation very seriously. Over the second and third verses, it became a little comedic: perhaps people were distancing themselves from the significant chance of character death? It became serious again towards the end of the third verse and during the fourth.

Next time I play this, I think I'll introduce the social contract from EPOCH (and adapt it a bit):

At the beginning of the game you inform the players of the purpose of EPOCH (a game of character-driven horror) and emphasise that during Tension Phases it is inappropriate to ‘break character’.

By making this explicit and securing agreement from everyone present, you and the players share the responsibility for building game atmosphere. You can remind individual players of this during the game, should you be faced with a specific instance of player blocking.

Again, I'm not sure if that maps to Jonathan's vision of play, but it certainly maps to what I want out of playing each verse. Because each verse is reasonably short (in our game, 20-40 minutes), I think that social contract would be pretty realistic.

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All in all, a great game. It'll be going into my go-bag for things to run at Games on Demand and at short-notice.

Nearly halfway through the "51 Games in 2015" Challenge

In January, Epidiah Ravachol (of Dig A Thousand Holes) issued an open challenge to play 51 games in 2015 ( #51in15 ). The 51 in '15 challenge has a great constraint: you can only count each game once.


I'm about halfway through, and that constraint is really starting to force me out of my comfort zone.

Games played in last week:

21. The Princess Bride: Prepare To Die: a family-friendly Cards Against Humanity hack. It's OK, but doesn't scale super-well to 8 players using the rules as written. Our game took maybe 90 minutes to finish (maybe longer), and felt a bit gruelling. It's very dependent on the judge (the player judging a particular round) asking a question / setting criteria that help the majority of other players create a good card combination.

Bad Family: this playtest doesn't count towards my challenge total because I've already run it this year. However, I learned a lot about the value of drunk playtesting a game.]

22. Space Team: This continues to be super-fun. I think I've cracked an optimal strategy for how to play it, though.

However, as great as SpaceTeam is, it's still just a place-holder until I can play Artemis: The Spaceship Bridge Simulator.

23. Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mount Skullzfyre: I enjoyed this a lot more than I thought I would after watching it on Tabletop. Fairly low complexity and the randomness is actually fun because it's offset by selecting your initiative (when your spell will occur), spell design (whether you go for offensive or healing effects), and target selection.

24. Space Fluxx: It's Fluxx, but with all manner of science-fiction references from 1950s B-movies, Star Trek, Doctor Who and many more. I like Fluxx and thought this was good. My favourite Fluxx variants are Zombie and Monty Python.

Soth: three examples of how the game works

I recently ran a game of Soth at a local convention. This post describes a few moments from that game, and demonstrates how the rules were used.

In Soth, you play cultists in a small-town, trying to summon a dark god. If you complete three more rituals, Soth will rise. The question: can deceive your family and friends, while you commit murders perform the necessary sacrifices?

(You can buy Soth, here: https://payhip.com/b/Ux9O)

The cast of characters

The cultists in our game were:

• The Farmer / cult leader
• The Mayor's wife / holder of the Tome of Soth
• The pastor's wife
• A young lawyer, 
• A maimed WW2 veteran

Example 1

The cult has just completed the first of four rituals to summon Soth, sacrificing a homeless war veteran. The Farmer decides to feed the body in a wood chipper, then take the body parts out into the woods.

In the woods, he starts scattering the mince among the autumn leaves. And then meets a local truffle hunter and his dog. The Keeper (the person providing the antagonism in the game) has used the rules to introduce someone they don't want to see and start a conversation.

The Farmer tries to appear innocent, while the truffle-dogs starts sniffing at the meat-covered leaves.

In conversation, a cultist needs to use the Mask of Sanity rules: choosing from a list of increasingly worse options that signal all is not well with the cultist.

The Farmer starts explaining that the dog should really stopping sniffing around ... because he's disposing of infected pig meat. He finish his explanation with the phrase, "Praise Soth".

Soth uses a diceless system to evaluate how suspicious the cultists are being. When a cultist deceives someone, the Keeper evaluates how they did, using this list:

• Did the cultist pull it off flawlessly? (-­2 Suspicion
• Will the person being deceived think about it later? (+1 Suspicion)
• Was the deception pretty comprehensively botched? (+3 Suspicion)
• Is the cultist clearly connected to recent horrible crimes? (+5 Suspicion)
  
  -1 Suspicion if the cultist’s reputation would be an advantage in this situation.
  
  +1 Suspicion if their reputation would disadvantage them.

The Farmer pulls it off flawlessly, and his reputation is an advantage. The Keeper removes 3 Suspicion. To reflect that success, the truffle hunter later starts spreading a rumour in town that there's a disease affecting the local pigs.

When a cultist covers up a crime, the Keeper evaluates that, too. In this case, the mince-the-body-and-hide-it-in-leaves plan isn't totally perfect. The Keeper gains 2 Suspicion.

Example 2

Later.

The Mayor's wife has been slowly poisoning her husband, and he's now bed-ridden and in agony.

The cultists are meeting at the Mayor's home, in the kitchen. They're discussing how to transport the Mayor to the Town Hall, to sacrifice him. And they're deciding who they can sacrifice next to him at the same time.

That's when the Deputy Mayor rings the front door-bell. He's dropped by to see why the Mayor hasn't shown up for work [introduce someone they don't want to see].

The Mayor's wife tries to manipulate the Deputy Mayor, suggesting he come into the kitchen before checking in on the Mayor. Her manipulation succeeds because the Deputy Mayor is not an Investigator (someone who's actively tracking and blocking the cultists), and he has a positive relationship with the Mayor's wife.

The Keeper creates Investigators by spending Suspicion. Suspicion is also used to put the cultists under pressure. Earlier in the game, the Keeper created an Investigator: a church busy-body who is concerned the Pastor's wife neglecting her duties and spending too much time with war veterans.

The Keeper spends 1 Suspicion to have the busy-body waiting outside the house (show up somewhere inconvenient).

The young lawyer cultist has grabbed a cast-iron skillet. He smashes the Deputy Mayor on the back of his head when he walks through the kitchen door. The young lawyer is attempting to commit a crime.

I actually mis-applied the rules here. This should have been a conflict (see below), where the young lawyer had all the advantages. Instead, I applied the rules for when you try to murder someone. The Deputy Mayor isn't an investigator and no reason to be suspicious, so it succeeds.

In this particular situation, either way the results are the same: the Deputy Mayor is knocked out and ready to transport to Town Hall for the second ritual.

The second ritual ends with most of the evidence being destroyed.

... except for the evidence of arson. When you cover up a crime, the Keeper assesses its effectiveness. The Keeper gains 3 Suspicion for an obvious crime.

Example3

Later.

It's the final stages of the game.

The Mayor's widow has commanded a servitor (a summoned supernatural entity) to kidnap an unmarried adult and bring them to the final ritual

The pastor's wife has stolen the Tome of Soth from the widow's home, in order to be able to command the servitor herself.

The cultists have decided to perform the final ritual at night, on the front lawn of the church, under the queasy milky light of Soth (a bright new star in the sky).

Here's the situation:

• The lawyer and the pastor's wife are conspiring to murder the mayor's widow as a final sacrifice
• The servitor arrives with a sacrifice (whose arms have been snipped off in a prior conflict)
• The mayor's widow has been waiting, unseen, for the servitor to arrive. Now she walks onto the lawn where the ritual will be performed. She has no idea she's about to be betrayed
• The pastor and the church busy-body (an Investigator) reveal themselves [The Keeper spends 4 Suspicion to witness something inconvenient and bring a non-Investigator friend].

The pastor's wife immediately commands the servitor to kill the busy-body her husband's protecting. This initiates a conflict.

The Keeper establishes the characters' intended actions for this round.

• The servitor obeys its command. It seizes the initiative (a special action to try and act first in a conflict)
• The young lawyer moves to attack the mayor's widow, who fights back. Both of them also seize the initiative, trying to act first in their fight with each other
• The pastor's wife tries to kill the first sacrifice
• The pastor defends the busy-body

Characters act in this order:

• Servitors go before Cultists and Investigators
• Anyone who seized the initiative
• Cultists before Investigators
• low Clarity before high Clarity
• If Clarity is tied, roll d6 (higher wins)
• Characters without a disadvantage
• Characters with a disadvantage

So, the servitor acts first, trying to kill the busy-body. But the pastor is protecting her, so the servitor grabs the pastor to throw him aside.

The Keeper evaluates the effectiveness of a character's action, by assessing:

• their capability, position, and any effects of previous actions
• whether the intended action still possible or partially possible
• whether the character is acting at a disadvantage.

The servitor has giant strength, the initiative, a fearsome appearance, and no disadvantages.

So it flings the pastor far into the air: his body hits the church steeple and clangs the bell. The Keeper assigns an injury (ranging from 'stunned' to 'dead') and/or a non­-injury effect. In this case, the pastor is dead.

The young lawyer has a lower Clarity than the Mayor's widow so he acts first. The Keeper evaluates effectiveness: the lawyer is stronger, and charging towards the widow. A non-injury effect is appropriate: she's is knocked to the ground.

The widow goes next. Because she's seized the initiative, she can change her action without acting at a disadvantage. She elects to try and tussle with the lawyer and end up on top of him. The Keeper evaluates effectiveness and assigns an effect: the lawyer slammed into her with momentum. The two of them are on the ground, but no-one's clearly on top. They're still struggling.

The pastor's wife acts last. She is trying to murder the sacrifice. Not only does he lack arms and is suffering from massive blood loss, but he's a non-investigator.

Her murder automatically succeeds.


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The conflict continued but I'll stop there. It was a fun game: one that ended with a rare victory for the cultists.

Hopefully those examples are clear.  Let me know if you have any questions!




Soth is available at https://payhip.com/b/Ux9O.