[Doctor Xaos] Age of Aquarius, Age of Chaos

[Eero Tuovinen]

We started a campaign of Xaos with my playtesting pals; for some reason it seems that the only games we play with these people tend to be either Finnish games in playtest or Ron's games. I guess it's a combination of some sort of Ron-sympathetic vibes on my part, and liking his games.

Anyway, four players relatively well-versed in superheroes. A couple of long-term followers of American superhero comics (myself and Markku, to be specific), a couple of more generally global-emphasizing, but still knowledgeable players (A-P and Eero II). A solid mix of players with varied story game experience and interesting creative chemistry with each other.

The first session, including Xaos generation and the first episode of play, took four hours. I'd have gone in for a second episode back to back myself, as I enjoyed myself (the game plays just like it looks, sort of like a cross of MLwM and Zombie Cinema with an interesting campaign system - very much a direction in which I've designed myself as well in recent years), but Markku had family hassles, so we'll continue next Wednesday instead.

The big promise of the game is that Doctor Xaos will be one cool villain-hombre, and it did deliver here - we utilized the Cheese rule as necessary and ended up with a reasonably serious villain with that right mix of real-world significance and comic book tropes so he's still in the genre while avoiding all the lame conventions. I didn't feel any particular joy in the specific organization of the Xaos-creation process, but it did serve, and the actual specific questions are both necessary and sufficient for ending up with results. I believe that a character sheet organized in the correct order for brainstorming (so you'll fill it in order, and that order is natural for how the creative work proceeds) would be a good tool here, to make it all more elegant and less "wait let me read out this list before we go further".

Our Xaos is a visionary utilitarian futurist, an elder fellow who goes by the name of Aristotle Vulcanis in the corporate circles; he's got some serious mojo out in the financial-political world, and an ambition to remake the course of civilization to free humanity from the perceived dead end of modern megatrends - nationalism, corporate economy, reliance on fossil fuels. I compared him with Raz Al-Ghul at the table, but he's actually sort of similar with Adrian Veidt from Watchmen, now that I think of it. The cool part is that he was born in the early 19th century in the Tsarist Russian colony of Azerbaijan, in the Talysh Khanate, to a small Greek-related minority blessed with unusual longevity (like, they age about at one third of the speed of everybody else). No other supernatural elements so far, except we do know that if the shit hits the fan for this consummate manipulator, he might go all old school psionic on his foes - like blood vessels bursting in the eye-balls psionic, think Firestarter more than Jean Grey. Mostly his villainous methodology revolves around exertion of economic and political forces, memetic culture war and such Warren Ellis bullshit, presumably without getting his own hands dirty.

(The most striking fact about Xaos to me is how his psychology as a "long-timer" has shaped his thinking and goals. He's seen the oil industry of Baku and the Russo-Persian imperial ambitions transform the biosphere of the Caspian region over his long life; he's seen the conservative Orthodox community of his parents' time break up and dwindle, and he is the last of his kind simply due to natural attrition and senseless waste of life; he knows that old age is finally catching up to him. He's the sort of a person who never took up driving a car, because he knows that statistically his life will end in a car crash if he spends a 100 years regularly driving - that's what happened to one of his last kin, a cousin who offed herself in the '70s in a traffic accident.)

The Style choice motivated us the most here, as one might guess - that psionic/intrigue style rather jumps out of the page next to the other options. We discussed the style for a bit, both Technology and Intrigue had both proponents and resistance, until I realized that I should actually advocate for what I most want rather than trying to mediate between everybody else's wishes.

I played the minor villain, and I rather like him as well, as I should. Oliver Starr is a Dutch astro-engineer thoroughly frustrated with the slow development of space technology, and willing to do something about it. His Cyberstar persona (complete with the '90s cyberpunk-geek dress sense - think leather coat, wraparound data mirror shades and a purple flight harness / computer backpack on top) is an ever-so-subtle means of funding his efforts at organizing a faster, more engineer-oriented space industry, with all the naivete that an engineer can muster when it comes to socioeconomic facts. (My explicit psychological heuristic for Oliver at the table was "You know about how really smart engineer types can have the most amazing blind spots about society, psychology, economics and all that humanist bullshit when it comes to the world outside engineering? Well, Oliver has all of them.) Cyberstar gets things done with a technological paradigm involving mass deployment of drones with complex AI heuristics, and we know that he has a gun that "shoots milliscale robots" (as in, each bullet is a small robot - "nanobots" are for fantasy writers) for when the going gets rough.

The actual episode was pretty short, which I'm personally totally fine with - I'm all for a game harshly gate-crashing any and all storyboarding fantasies that players might entertain, and that's what happens when a superhero player knocks on their second turn, one and a half rounds into the game, barely after everybody's managed to set the stage for their characters. (I only got one turn myself.) We got a delightful Xaos plot, a successful side ploy from Cyberstar (he skirts the edge between cool and cheesy in play, as he should), and a graceful retreat from Xaos, whose reaction to the appearance of an unknown, seemingly powerful superheroine was to call off the operation and retreat to re-gauge the situation.

The only part of the rules that I was uncertain about is this: is it really the case that the superhero players may have to make the call as to who they're resisting before the minor villain establishes himself? We had Xaos on my left, with play starting to Xaos's left, which meant that the superhero players had their first turn before me, which in turn meant that they had to choose what they're doing in the episode before I had established myself. (Unlike Xaos, the minor villain does not do a pre-play intro, it seems.)

What happened in practice was that the first superhero knew that I'd be attempting to make money (part of Cyberstar's brilliant "forcible readjustment of global economy in support of the space exploration policy"), so they set the stage with their superhero guarding some money deliveries tangentially related to the location of Doctor Xaos's plot (which we knew about at this point because the episode starts with Xaos establishing what they are doing and where). I countered on my own turn by approaching from a different angle with a somewhat different plan from expected, but fundamentally this order of play meant that the superhero player set the stage for my villainy, instead of reacting to it, as one might expect play to go.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Correction: the session took three hours, rather than four. I forgot that we had a slow start with A-P coming in half past noon, and then we ate some delicious things I'd prepared before starting with the Xaos generation. We weren't quite that slow.

[Eero Tuovinen]

I read the rules a bit more regarding my rules conundrum: the Dr. Xaos playbook actually includes a clear note about letting the minor villain establish themselves as well at the start. In our case the Dr. Xaos player missed that (as well as giving me a resistance token, in fact - we'll need to revise a bit on Wednesday, as I think Xaos wins a 0-0 situation against the minor villain, and thus I should have fallen under his sway here), and thus we had the situation I described. Could maybe add this bit in the minor villain's playbook as well, in which case I'd have noticed it there during play.

Ron: I know that you're pretty wedded to this playbook form of presentation for the rules, but I'll say that my initial impression is that it's more trouble than its worth. (It's not just this minor rules snafu talking here, but rather a general impression.) What the distributed rules-reading mostly gives us is a much, much higher amount of rules errors as every player is personally responsible for actually reading and understanding rules text. It also duplicates much rules text (as most things are identical for the different players) and makes it more difficult to narrate and explain rules communally. So it's slower and more error-prone, and particularly slow for checking the rules during play, when compared to a neat, compact single text that gathers everybody's rules in one place.

A smart compromise might be to make the minor villain's playbook a "master book" with all the rules and procedures for everybody, with smaller and simpler playbooks for the other roles. This way the same person who is rules-mastering the game actually has the reference tools to ensure that the game is progressing according to procedure.

[Ron Edwards]

I nearly choked on my orange wedge when I read "four hours." You guys always role-play like you're discussing Kierkegaard! "Finns discussing Kierkegaard," that should be a meme somehow. All right, three hours is a bit better, but still! Setup is supposed to be fast!

I speculate ... could be wrong ... that you as a group got too invested in the Issues before play instead of letting people introduce them at the end of each Episode. That seems like way, way too much depth for Doctor Xaos based on a single Portrait Moment.

The characterizations are great. Cyberstar is fantastic - his gun reminds me of Doom's old "boulder-gun," remember that? It sprayed pebbles that expanded into a huge fuckin' avalanche of boulders. My advice? Go for maximum, outrageous, ridiculous intensity with him.

Of the many thought-provoking points you included, the one about the playbooks is interesting. The point is actually to eliminate rules discussions entirely, so where it says, "Do this" in his book, and "Shut up while he does something" in yours, there's no need to process it even a tiny bit. It may help to make the Lesser Villain player more of a rules-master, though - I'm already saying this person should be familiar with the game.

The current format of five small books or booklets is currently subject to playtest. You've definitely brought out what I need to highlight if that's the format I keep.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Oh, Cyberstar is plenty intense. He's pretty much just a (brilliant) geek with stage fright, so how does he make his entrance for his grand kidnapping plot? Shouting "Cyberstar! Rockstar! Guitar Hero!" (I don't know, maybe it's some sort of a battle cry?) and driving a wicked GH solo on his modded Guitar Hero setup (three times Netherlandic champion, rah!) is probably not the way to catch any cool points, but at least it got him over the performance anxiety involved with Grand Theft CEO :D

That's actually a good guess about the Issues getting development pre-play. I would not say that we went too in-depth about it, but it is true that lots of ideas were raised and left to hang about, all through the process of creation - potential backtory, visuals, political and philosophical themes, etc. (I'm very comfortable with where we're at creatively - there's exciting potential at the table regarding Xaos, but lots of defining and exploring to do as well.) A minor note about rules usability is that it's sort of counter-productive for the game prep section to list the Issues at the end of Xaos creation and then say that you shouldn't do anything about them after that - would be better if you said first that this next bit won't need deciding on right away, because as it happened we got a minute into it before I read the next sentence ("Oh, Ron says here that we're not supposed to establish anything about this part yet - never mind guys.").

Incidentally the player playing Xaos here (A-P) didn't feel the need to give him much of a character moment at the end of the episode, perhaps because we had him down pretty well already from the prep, and because he nailed it in play. I think we learned that Xaos drinks medical-grade ethanol with purified H2O as his poison of choice, that being the substance of the Portrait Moment :D

It is possible that the game text needs to pay attention to the desired creative emphasis somewhat more. In hindsight the text does not explicitly tell you to get very deep into defining Doctor Chaos beyond the bare essentials of superpowers paradigm, plan and resources, but it felt entirely natural to build up to these things through a wholesale vision of what the character would be like, so it never occurred me to hurry it along. Sort of like creating a Master for MLwM, we only stopped once everybody was eager to see the creation in play.

It occurs to me that making choices such as the choice of Style without basing it on a more expansive thematic plan is a bit difficult, the way the creative responsibility is set up. A single player could make an arbitrary choice alone based on a gut reaction, but how do you arrive to a consensus about having e.g. a magical Xaos without giving him a bit of a magical theme and backstory and symbology and so on for the players to judge, contribute to and accept? Seems like the consensus process mandates a relatively in-depth discussion of what Xaos is like. After all, I don't fundamentally care about whether Xaos is magical or conspiratorial - I care about him having a compelling shtick.

I do grok the creative idea in saving the juicy detailing and backstory to be established in play. Perhaps the text could have some sort of depth barrier in the creation phase (like I don't know, a rule about not delving too deep, or a character sheet that is simply terse and factual, discouraging speculation) to preserve mystery and make the first Portrait Moment have more punch. I've certainly considered something like this for Zombie Cinema, having seen how people tend to plan and plan in preplay instead of just randomizing some poor survivors and seeing what happens in play.

Regarding playbooks and rules discussion, our experience - and this is obviously just some random people and their play culture reacting - was that rules fiddling was practically increased because we had to keep asking each other whether the other guy had surely already read and executed their own bit for this step - and as we saw, this didn't actually catch everything, as the Xaos player missed the entire paragraph about opposing the minor villain in step 2. Also takes time to keep reading the rules, as doing it distributed means that we go at the pace of the slowest reader in the group - and simple statistics is going to ensure that there is one, and they're going to be slow and probably misunderstand the text anyway. There's a lot to be said for the more conventional "one guy explains the rules with a reference in hand" model, I feel - we'd have been much quicker in play without the ambiguous uncertainty about whether everybody else had remembered to do their thing at the proper time.

Certainly things to ponder. We'll see how this starts feeling as we play more; I expect this to be the sort of game where nobody needs the playbooks after a couple episodes anyway, as the rules are so simple and streamlined in the abstract. (A one-page rules reference like Zombie Cinema has? Yes please!).

[Eero Tuovinen]

I had a good writing day, so I'm topping it off by messing about with Doctor Xaos a bit. Here's the fruits of my labour:

* I read the rules some more (basically rereading every play book a second time through), and I've noticed four points of rules failure so far in the last episode: the Lesser Villain didn't position themselves fictionally before card-play started, Doctor Xaos didn't distribute a targeting token to the Lesser Villain, and Doctor Xaos misassigned the Xaos role for the next episode - it should go to the player who beat Xaos if one did, not the player to the left of Xaos. Perhaps most egregiously, an outcome of Xaos 0, LV (not opposing Xaos) 0, Hero (opposing LV) 0 and Hero (opposing Xaos) 6, the Doctor's plan should fail because everyone opposing him beat him, but he should win against the Lesser Villain, which in turn would make the LV fail.

* Inspired by these holes in our application, I decided to collect a linear rules reference for our next session to get it right this time - this game's about as complex as Monopoly, it's ridiculous if I can't execute the rules correctly on our second play-through :D You can check out the reference here if you're interested in my take on the organization (I reduced the episode into three phases, for one thing) and such - feel free to correct me if I misunderstood a rule.

* An idea about the game components occurred while putting that last bit together: an "episode sheet" would maybe be clearer and cleaner (as in, less floating objects on the table) than the targeting tokens as a way to track who's resisting whom in the episode. Thinking in boardgaming terms, this could simply be a pad of tear-away sheets. Filling the sheet would make it less easy for somebody to forget to distribute their targeting tokens, and it could also work as a sort of a campaign record if you wrote in the Condition, the particular episode plot, appearing heroes and the outcome as the episode progresses. I've had luck with similar session tracking sheets myself in recent years in my design.

* A question occurred in the close reading of the rules: what happens if the lesser villain succeeds in their Plan and is free at the beginning of an Episode? Do they just keep doing the same thing despite already being successful, or are they forced to choose to oppose Xaos because they cannot choose to work for a Condition that is already successful?

[Eero Tuovinen]

We played some more today - took longer than I'd hoped, people in Helsinki have notoriously hectic lifestyles with gaming at like third or fourth priority among all the other stuff. A two-hour session this time, with one episode, and I'm pretty sure we nailed the rules this time; the individual play-books were available, but mostly we went with the "chant" - one player (me in this case) reading through the play procedure and everybody doing their bit when called. Having one session of experience under our belts didn't hurt, certainly.

Markku took control of Dr. Xaos for this session and had him engage in a rather intricate multi-pronged terrorism operation in an effort to take down the oil industry on a global scale. In many ways pretty deconstructive of what superhero comics are like, to have a supervillain's plan actualize not as a singular dramatic action ("This bomb will cause an economic ripple effect, driving the world economy to ruin!"), but rather as a series of diffuse terrorist operations with rather real-world cause and effect intended. (Stuff like manipulating the Russian presidency, triggering an Iranian sequel to the Gulf War series, increasing the sulphur content of the American frack-oil fields by biological warfare.) I personally was more fond of the elegant single-location operation Xaos did in the first issue.

The superheroes were new and interesting. A text-writing remark - it would be pedagogically useful to emphasize in the final text how much the superheroes are supposed to arrive and appear in medias res, without an establishing scene; this time around both hero players sort of "wasted" their first turns on establishing shots which helped make their adventurous arcs in the episode feel rushed. I figure that this is best addressed as a text pedagogy issue, it's not a rules matter.

Lesser Villain Cyberstar attempted to stand against Xaos this time (inspired by the grand complexity of his plans for the most part - Cyberstar could not but become aware of this new force in the world, and he's actually a rather decent fellow), but was sweet-talked by the much, much more politically, economically and socially aware Xaos to join his side in the end. Ultimately the efforts of the heroes proved futile as Markku dropped a 4-card meld early and cleaned us zeroes out of the way. The rules (perhaps written more as descriptions in the text, but I took it as prescriptive) regarding the nature of the heroic defeat were decisive here, as the defeats had to be personal and meaningful rather than merely trivial; this opened the narrative in interesting ways for both heroes.

We now have four heroes with prior appearances, three of them ready for advancement should a player choose so. Two are ones I'd be glad to play, were I a hero player. I expect we'll see some hero advancement in the next session, which we planned for next Wednesday.

I personally rather enjoy the game, and everybody else seems to like it as well. I'd wish we had time for longer sessions closer together so we could just push the campaign through and see what answers might be provided to outlying conundrums. Ancillary activities have started to emerge, including "who would win in a fight" debates about the various characters - a clear sign that we should be playing more :D

[Ron Edwards]

The emergent "who would win" debate makes me laugh.

Eero, I'll be able to process your posts much, much better if you would please refrain from rules and text suggestions. I cannot stand reading it; it makes me instantly close the browser. Please say what happened, how it went, and don't go into author or designer mode. Keep notes if you like, about that, and we can look at them later.

Best, Ron

[Eero Tuovinen]

We played a third session yesterday, and managed to finish the game; as we were familiar with the game's pace and procedure, it was quicker, but most significantly we had the measure of the setting and the characters and so on, which made for quicker narration. The session took three hours for three episodes.

The story of the campaign turned out to have a pretty strong resemblance with something like Doom Patrol or Invisibles - a somewhat pessimistic, existentially questioning story and mythology resplendent with confused super-heroes, Aristoteles Vulcanis swimming among them and the little people populace like a shark, pulling at the strings of the modern civilization and watching everything unravel. It was very fitting how at the very end, when Xaos straight up walked in, wheezing in his old age, and shot Lord Protector Optimo point-blank, he ended the story with a series of prophetic pronouncements; his plan had succeeded, but the old man would not live to see it himself, so we would only ever have his word for how the future of the "new man, new Earth" would shape out. Considering how ever-more fevered his words became as death neared, I think most of us had little faith in everything truly going according to the psychohistorical theories of Aristoteles Vulcanis. It was all very much as if Watchmen had been written in the '70s.

Everybody at the table enjoyed the game very much, and we decided to play another round to get a better grip on the cards play (more on that below) and to attempt a shot at a somewhat simpler and more concrete hypervillain; while we never quite ran up short of legit storytelling this time around, Vulcanis was an extremely diffuse villain who apparently did little to encourage traditionally simple superhero hijinks - the heroes found many times that while they were shutting off the alarm system, the villain had been absconding with the jewels, so to speak. There already was speculation about maybe doing something Magneto-like - a guy with concrete and fearfully mighty superpowers. We'll see about maybe adding a few players (even at the risk of making scheduling even more of a hassle) to see how the game runs with six.

In total the campaign had five episodes in three sessions; episodes break down as follows:

# Time        Length    Winner               Hero play
1 3 hours     2 rounds  Hero/Markku (delay)  2 new heroes, one to develop
2 2 hours     2 rounds  Xaos/Markku          2 new heroes, both to develop
3 1 hour      2 rounds  Xaos/Eero2           2 new heroes, both to develop
4 15 minutes  1 turn    Hero/Markku (delay)  1 development
5 1 hour      2 rounds  Xaos/Markku          1 development, 1 developed hero

As can be seen, Markku had remarkable luck on the cards - one time he even drew a winning hand to start with. In general there was a clear culture of hurrying to finish without hunting for a Gin; without speculating about how the game should go, this was probably affected by the specific metastrategic understanding at the table - players who valued the outcome of a Gin more might delay winning to try for it, given a hand that had potential for it, but we clearly had a culture of finishing as soon as a hand worked. I'll make a point of discussing this with the players before the next round, so perhaps we'll see some more ambitious play; the way the rules work, the advantage in finishing early is rather minor, so players should opt to try for a Gin now and then for the sheer impressiveness factor, as far as I can see.

One remark about narrative technique: while I don't consider our verbosity a problem (we're having fun, telling great stories with lots of nuance, so what if it takes a bit of time), through-out the campaign we had a clear tendency of front-loading the narrations pretty heavily; Doctor Xaos was invented to a rather specific degree of thematic detail in chargen already, heroes would generally come in with almost the amount of depth a Developed hero would have; Xaos would explain basically their entire plan at the start of an episode; Portrait Moments would be relatively light - the tendency towards putting things down in bold strokes early on was palpable, and while we toned it down further into the campaign, it is clear to me that we probably played it more front-loaded than intended. I'll pay attention to this next time around as well, see if we might get to a sweet spot where we can introduce "Turing, the machine-empath" without explaining about his family background and psychiatric history in his first scene.

We talked about sending some fictive stuff to Ron in case he needs ideas for illustrating the book - I promised to do some write-ups, so I guess I'll email Ron with some things later.

[Ron Edwards]

I've got tons to say, but I'm pretty badly sick, surprisingly so, this week, and am having a hard time getting it together to reply. I'll be on it soon, I hope.