[Snow Day!] another actual play report

[Eetu]

Seeing the other actual play report about Snow Day! got me to post this report:

Last thursday, me and my three friends played a session of Fort Joey Must Fall! I was the GM, and the three characters were Amber, a seven year old rich kid, Jimmy, a 13 year old and Carter, an 8 year old.

The reason I chose Snow Day! for our session was that I really really really loved the setting and the flavor of the game, which I think the text brings out masterfully. Usually my players don't like to wade through rules text so I usually explain game rules by dialog, but now I just gave them each the rules to read and no-one complained. The rules are short, simple and easy to understand, and as already stated, the flavor is wonderful. After reading the rules everyone was just in the right mood (except that the player of Carter was dead tired).

We decided to enhance our immersion by making a thermos of warm cocoa and bringing a bucket of ice-water to the table so any time one wanted to feel the cold of winter one only had to stick their hand in the bucket. But the most ingenious prop was how we simulated the feeling of having slush down your clothes. We dipped pieces of cloth in water and twisted them dry so they wound up only somewhat moist, and then tied them around our hands. It really made us feel like slush had melted on our skin inside our winter clothes due to body heat :).

Now, when we got to actually gaming, Fort Joey did fall, but our comments on the system are not as unilaterally favorable as those of the other actual play group.

There is a lot of drive towards competition between the player group and the GM built into the game - for Fort Joey Must Fall, does it not? However, the mechanics didn't seem to support competition that much. In normal conflicts, the only thing you could do was to choose between a Reality or Fantasy check and in snowball fights, the main antagonistic event of the game, even that option was taken away. No matter how ingenious your tactic, how fine a snow monster you have to aid you, by the book the dice are rolled the same. I think if you want the focus of the game to remain competitive, you should really think about adding modifiers to the dice throws. Even if they're just GM-arbitrated.

It's actually quite strange how our game got so competitive, usually my gaming group is quite averse to competition, but somehow now it really was brought to the front. This also led to odds with the immersionist aspect that we also had, when the PC kids started to really use uncharastically mean tactics against the other children, always opting for an iceball where possible.

We also felt that the penalty of losing all your snow monsters if you lost a snowball fight was pretty harsh - the snow monsters are perhaps the most fantastic and dear created element of the game for the players. The option to Cry Uncle! however alleviated the problem.

On the subject of creating snow monsters, there is little incentive to create monsters with multiple abilities. They don't get any stronger and can still only do one action per round. We would have liked a more balanced setup, where multiple snow monsters and a single über-monstrosity would be about equal investions. Also, as there is no game-mechanic possibility to give bonuses to an ability or any other game-mechanic to affect a snowball fight, any and all "attack" abilities were essentially the same mechanically

The ice monsters created in the game were:

A huge ice tank with:
- A bench for riding
- A bucket for slinging snowballs
- A hose for +3 slush damage (a modification of the rules here)
- Garden cutters for cutting ice spikes
- A megaphone for commanding other ice monsters (another rule-modification, gave +1 to their rolls)
- Two garbage bin covers for shields (another rule-modification, made the tank invulnerable while cutting ice spikes)

A moral-wrecker:
- Previous home of the megaphone, shouted stinging ridicule to other kids (like "Jimmy's dad is stronger than yours!" or "The girls in your group have the hots for the boys!")

Mister Snow-Mister:
- Buttons for a mouth with which to speak niceties and offer candy
- Doggie-poo disguised as candy for making kids sick

A snow-unicorn:
- A skiprope for reins to ride it
- A candle for a horn that could gush flame
- Something I don't remember for granting girlie wishes ("make a rainbow appear between the boys defending Fort Joey!", "make this doggie-poo shine (so it looks like chocolate)", "make the Fort pink")

A snow-albatross:
- Seagul feather for flight
- Two toy buckets for holding iceballs to drop on enemies

A snow-snake:
- Made in the family pool to be able to swin inside snow
- Eating utensils to make it possible for the snake to eat snowballs

The enemies featured a snow-sumo-wrestler, a snow-catapult and a snow-dinosaur.

As for conflicts in the game and different checks, reality checks were used for climbing through a second story window to steal a chair, to sneak into a nearby terrace bar to grap a second chair, and of course throwing lots of snowballs.

Fantasy checks were the source of some of the most engaging moments of the session, used for example to check if the digging machine at the nearby worksite was really alive and guarding the mallet there, if Amber's family housekeeper was possibly a witch and finally when Jimmy who was 13 and thus didn't believe in witches anymore actually deduced that she had to in fact be a T-1000 terminator robot.

I don't remember the name of our Cunning Plan, but it involved using the tank to cut ice spikes, Mister Snow-Mister to act as a trojan horse, the albatross to do aerial bombardment and the snake to slither in and eat the defenders stash of snowballs.

The fort did fall, but it was a close call. By this time we were all so tired that we didn't continue with protecting the fort. A shame really, because I had advanced the time so slowly, we were only at like five or six o'clock in the evening and I really liked the bedtime and midnight magic rules.

All in all, I think the game has wonderful potential, but could use some more options for differing tactics in conflicts and more "plot protection" for the ice monsters.

- Eetu

[hanschristianandersen]

Hi Eetu,

Welcome to the Forge!

While I'm glad that the Stanford playtest group enjoyed Snow Day, I'm doubly glad that you shared your experience with it - there's some real meat to your observations.

First off, I'm intrigued that both your group and the Stanford group brought actual cocoa and actual cold elements (opened the windows / wet rags) to the game.  (Shades of Seadog Tuxedo?)  I'm wondering if perhaps I should enshrine this in the rules itself.

Second, you're absolutely right that the rules concerning Ice Monster survival are very harsh.  Too harsh, in retrospect.  I thought that Ice Monsters would be "disposable" gimmicks - "Let's make a snow hippopotamus!  Oops, it melted.  Well then, I'll make an Icicle Tricycle!  Oops, it melted too." et cetera.  I didn't realize that players would get attached to their creations, which was a major oversight on my part.

Off the top of my head, I'd shift the balance of things as follows:

-Allow Ice Monsters to be patched up, but never quite as well as they were the first time around; the first time you fix a monster, you can't heal three of the slush points.  The second time, you can't heal six.  And so on.  I'm getting this mental image of a kid lovingly repairing a battered old companion, even though it's on the verge of falling apart, simply because "it's my most favoritest snow monster in the whole world."  (Of course, you have to have all the necessary Parts; if an Ice Monster melts, and other kids swipe its Parts, then you can't put it back together.)

-Further, going inside for cocoa doesn't have to melt your ice monsters right away, but you should keep in mind that an ice monsters that aren't properly supervised are likely to wander off and cause all kinds of trouble.  You can choose someone to stay outside to keep an eye on them, while everyone else goes in for cocoa.  Of course, you have to reach a consensus on who stands watch and who goes back inside...  Naturally, if you go inside for too long, (for example at bedtime,) the monsters do indeed melt.


Your comments about competitiveness, tactical options (or lack thereof), and rules-modifications are all equally deserving of a response, but I won't have time to properly respond to them until sometime tomorrow.

[Bob McNamee]

Maybe using Gold stars would be a way to patch up snow monsters?

[Mike Holmes]

Some interesting stuff here. If you can get me a revision by the end of this week, I think we can work it in. Again, your call, Hans.

I knew this game would engage people's childminds. :-)

Mike

[hanschristianandersen]

Mike,

Yep, I think I can get a revision in by end-of-day tomorrow.  


Eetu,

Lessee... where was I... ah yes, tactical options.

There is a lot of drive towards competition between the player group and the GM built into the game - for Fort Joey Must Fall, does it not? However, the mechanics didn't seem to support competition that much. In normal conflicts, the only thing you could do was to choose between a Reality or Fantasy check and in snowball fights, the main antagonistic event of the game, even that option was taken away. No matter how ingenious your tactic, how fine a snow monster you have to aid you, by the book the dice are rolled the same. I think if you want the focus of the game to remain competitive, you should really think about adding modifiers to the dice throws. Even if they're just GM-arbitrated.

The more I think about it, the more it makes sense that a group looking for GM/player competition had problems with Snow Day.  It was never designed to support that kind of gamist priority.  While it's true that the assault on the fort looms large in the text, the fort and all of its special rules are simply one expression of Snow Day's core rules and value system.

The numerical equivalency between a mundane snowball and a fantastical ice monster attack is the centerpiece of that value system.  Fantasy and Reality are opposite and equal, and the game refuses to say which is the more important of the two.  Why even bother describing the ice monster attack when you could just throw a wicked snowball?  Or, why bother with another boring snowball when you could come up with something really colorful and inventive?  The choice then resides in each player's own personal priorities.

I'm concerned that adding a layer of meaningful tactical choices will diminish the meaningfulness of that out-of-character choice.  Your own examples support that concern; as currently written, the Ice-Packed Snowballs, with their power to nullify Ice-Monsters, are far too powerful, and thus to do otherwise becomes deprotagonizing.  I think that a band of marauding 15-year-olds with a wagon full of pre-made snowballs is plenty terrifying already even without that kind of veto power.

So, I'm not going to add a tactical layer to the mechanics.  As for modifiers to die rolls, well, let me think about that some more.  I've got some ideas I need to chew on.

(At the same time, I think that ice-packed snowballs are very true to the subject matter; I'll see about coming up with a different implementation.)

Still more to come, probably after I get home from work.

[Eetu]

The more I think about it, the more it makes sense that a group looking for GM/player competition had problems with Snow Day. It was never designed to support that kind of gamist priority. While it's true that the assault on the fort looms large in the text, the fort and all of its special rules are simply one expression of Snow Day's core rules and value system.

The numerical equivalency between a mundane snowball and a fantastical ice monster attack is the centerpiece of that value system. Fantasy and Reality are opposite and equal, and the game refuses to say which is the more important of the two.

I'm all joyous and happy about focusing on exploration of the setting and color, and agree that the juxtaposition of Fantasy and Reality is in the end what it's all about. I guess the point then comes to making it clear in the text that this is the purpose of the game, and not the competition. I think that currently, there is much lean to the other direction and point to the evidence that normally my group doesn't do gamism at all, yet that was what at least half of the game content actually was. As all background to the game was me giving them the rules to read, they had to get the idea from there, same as I did.

I'll still be glad if modifiers to the rolls are included, but agree with you that  additional tactics-related rules would probably just mask the real questions about the relationship between Fantasy and Reality in the world of a child.

In relation to the fixing up snowmonsters issue, we handled it in our group so that if your snow monster was driven over its slush-limit, it melted and couldn't be rebuilt, but the parts could be used in other monsters. If it only took some damage, you could patch it up to full power after the battle. I like the idea that the rebuilt snowmonster be a bit battered and worn, but would personally let them heal maybe all but one point of damage. It's too heartbreaking to see your favorite snowmonster gradually fall apart - a one point penalty would still drive home the feeling of a patched up and battered monster but it wouldn't seem like the monster was fast spiralling towards oblivion. If you play so that completely slushed monsters are gone for good, this might lead to more heroic-old-companion-snowmonster-saves-me-and-sacrifices-himself-type of actions.

- Eetu

[Mike Holmes]

Those sound like some interesting ideas for healing snow monsters. Basically, the player has the option to play sentimental and heal up the snow monster, or let it melt and build another one. The lessons of ephemerality delivered seem pretty powerful to me.

Mike

[hanschristianandersen]

Here's what I came up with.  Note that unlike the contents of this post, the actual text changes are consistent with the text's writing style.

The GM can impose a bonus or penalty to any action, whether because the action is particularly easy or hard, cool or lame, or for pretty much any reason at all.  This lets individual groups bend the game slightly to their agenda; this could be used to measure difficulty, or it could be used to reward ingenious tactics, or it could be used like Exalted or Sorcerer-style stunt/description incentives.  The text leaves this wide open, so that individual groups can apply it in accordance with their own sensibilities.

With this in place, the next step was to reword or rework some of the rules to be expressions of this sort of modifier:

The Fort Towers get to replace their awkward wording about "throwing snowballs as if you're a year older" with a simple modifier that accomplishes the same thing.

Ice-packed snowballs no longer cause your ice monsters to melt, but they do impose a +1 penalty on all your reality checks for throwing snowballs, cuz they hurt.

Ice monsters can be repaired, even if they've melted completely, but each repair imposes a cumulative -1 penalty to all the ice monster's fantasy checks.  When an Ice monster melts, it drops its Parts; you can't rebuild it if you lose the Parts.

---

As for the issue of "making the text clearly convey the purpose of the game", well, I'm sort of stumped.  I feel like I've been staring at the text too long to have much perspective on it, and I'm really fond of the text as-is.  Maybe in a few months... but not in time for the IGC publication.



On a complete tangent, I think that the Snow Day elements (ice monsters made out of parts, icicle spikes, assaulting the fort, etc.) could make for a great Cheapass-style board game.