[kpfs] not enough grief, or puppies.

[Iskander]

After a hiatus of at least a decade, I GMed for the first time last Saturday, and chose kpfs to break my magically reformed GMing hymen. The game's subtext appealed greatly to me, and I wanted to challenge myself to drive the players somewhere interesting, while testing my ability to keep them engaged and entertained. On balance, I think I succeeded with the latter, but I'm certain we didn't go anywhere near any lines with the former.

Since it was all of our first time playing kpfs, I ran with the 'bust gerald out of willard' scenario. The inspired location/map of Willard encouraged me to think I could comfortably keep a handle on the geography without sweating maps and so forth, although I had to tweak my (British, boarding from 8-13) pre-prep school a bit to fit the labs in, since my (British, boarding) high school was a huge campus mixed into a city, and would have been much harder to make sense of. Apart from that, my prep consisted principally of writing up index cards of NPCs with quick-reference annotations for who/what they were and where they hung out.

The two players were Jason, a friend of four or so years with whom I've gamed quite a bit (AFMBE, UA, BW) and who often runs games of his own, and Conrad who's a new friend (met through nerdnyc) with a lot of gaming experience. Conrad's a devout (left-wing progressive) Mormon, and I made sure beforehand that any taking of the Lord's name in vain would not cause him actual player discomfort on that basis alone.

Neither cheated with charge, sadly.

Jason's character Murphy "Murph" Edwards was a video store clerk loser with 2 people hating him and a starting evil of 1. I neglected to take actual note of Murph's stats, but if memory serves he had: cold 2, fucked up 3, mean 2, and relentless 4. Murph had killed the sweet, beloved basset hound next door for his evil... poisoned it, I think.

Conrad was Philbert, a miserly accountant loser with cold 4, fucked-up 4, mean 1 and relentless 2, he started with only 1 person hating him and evil of 2. Happily, both were excellent sports and riffed off each others unpleasantness comfortably, making a good gaming team. Philbert locked the neighbour's little girl's new kitten in a box and hid it in their attic, checking occasionally until it was dead. I should have followed my gut trepidation about those stats, but being in a hurry to get to the meat(loaf) I swept on to the action.

Inspired by Vincent's description of being rude to his customers, I was suitably revolted and disgusted by their chargen puppy-killing choices: I'd already decided that it would be a good thing to play up my revulsion while mechanically rewarding them for ostensibly making my stomach churn, that seems to me to be a way to drive them to greater excesses. Also, I was playing Music To Watch Girls By in the background.

Unfortunately, due to some miscommunications, we started gaming a couple of hours later than anticipated, and Conrad had a time limit (he had to be up early the next day for church meetings: delicious, delicious irony.) That left us about two hours to play, and I rushed into chargen without making sure that everyone had a clear understanding of what types of character (I thought) would serve us best with my explicitly stated goals. This came up later in play when it became clear that Conrad has envisioned a character who was deluding himself that he wasn't killing puppies for satan. That necessasitated a brief time out to talk through the implications of that, and I was very glad that he was confident enough to twist that conception on the fly into a guy who was clearly pretending that he didn't mutilate pets, but knew damn well what he was up to. The interruption was quite fluid, and again I was impressed that both players took to kibbitzing quite naturally. Kudos. Still, it was definitely a huge mistake on my part not to talk through the character concepts as well as the stats. A fucking stupid mistake, too, which I felt lucky we were able to work around.

Murph made the meatloaf joke, and Philbert nevertheless tucked into it... not quite with as much gusto as lizzie wire, but no matter. The reverend paul tried (and failed) to eat anchovy paste on a cracker repeatedly; I rather over-egged the rev's ghostly pudding: I had determined that he'd been killed by dr. skippy, and would tag along weirdly for most of the game, planning to have him cause a lot of trouble, later. I was least well prepared for the birthday party, though, and that's where my second major mistake came in: I let them get to the Willard gate without spending any evil. Stupid GM.

See, my Willard had a couple of cute Shetland ponies in a field to the right as you go up the long drive to the imposing converted Victorian mansion, with modern extension. In an ideal world, the players would not have hesitated to leap out of the van they stole to kill those ponies in as appalling a way as they could manage... but they didn't. I had already failed, although I didn't realise it until later.

Gaining entry to the administrative wing of the hospital at night was relatively easy, but again, I screwed up. They hadn't really been that interested in franklin's story, so rosalie had encouraged them along (she was after the satanic spellbook in the arcane high security center, and busting gerald out was a convenient excuse to get a couple of idiot satanists to make a distraction). They also had no clue where gerald was going to be, and that led to my next mistake; there were plenty of password-protected hospital computers around, and Conrad wanted Phil to spend a point of evil to get past the password... I should have let him, instead of making it a 2-point task. Dumb.

Despite having a this-many-people-hate-me of only 1, Philbert spectacularly rolled three consecutive ones: the first couple of times he burnt evil to succeed, the third time they both ended up in a fight with nick tavers, and to my dismay, they had tazered him unconscious and tied him up almost before blinking - although Philbert took some damage in the fight. They also foolishly decided to keep stunning him while they tied him up... which lead to nick's untimely demise, and was going to prompt a phone call from satan... later. I'd already established that neither of them had cellphones, so having Phil's cellphone ring was going to amuse at least one of us (me) greatly.

Things were heating up for the characters - out of evil by now, and considering going back to the ponies - but surprisingly close to the high security wing already. (Damned old houses and their sneaky stairways). They had one unconscious guard about to come round and discover that Murph was not very good at tying people up, and beth was just about to find nick's corpse, but came upon Murph, and promptly put a very large handgun to his head. Phil hid - which was a good thing fo him, because he was going to be absolutely smitten with beth... but here was what I consider my third big mistake: they were going to have to backtrack to get evil, instead of having it around there. The nurse's station could easily have had some exotic goldfish; there was no reason not to have a friendly golden retriever keeping the night staff company. Stupid GM.

Alas, that's where our game got cut short. Conrad's wife was locked out of their Harlem apartment, and we were playing in Astoria: a subway ride of a good hour away - if you're lucky. So, there was no question of continuing, and I was content to leave it hanging, with Murph on the verge of brain-splatter at beth's unforgiving hands, and Phil about to receive a phone call from the guy downstairs that would wake the other guard up...

We'd enjoyed ourselves plenty, but hadn't got close to what I was expecting to be the bloody meat of something more raw, and I could see that it would be hard to get there. To summarise where I think I went wrong (and what I'll fix for next time... there will be a next time) was:

• Insufficient player interaction in chargen: it was wholly my responsibility that Conrad set out with what I think was a handicap, and thanks to his grace that it was not a problem.
• Insufficient grief early on. They should never have been able to hotwire the minivan, needed more reasons to burn evil early, and therefore go looking for things to kill. After the chargen deaths, we didn't make it to any more dead puppies, which was disastrous.
• When the players want to spend evil - let them. Encourage them to drive that vicious circle, and run helter-skelter down the spiral after more power.
• Provide many more puppies; the pair of ponies just wasn't enough, although they were very cute, I recall.

Things I think I got right:

• Wincing, being disgusted by their actions. This felt right. I'm not sure precisely why, but possibly because it was perversely encouraging to them. I think it contributed to the glee with which Conrad had Philbert tuck in to the meatloaf, at least.
• Kept things moving: I think I managed this, and did so without railroading... but I hope they'll chime in with their thoughts below.

Despite the mistakes, I really enjoyed the evening, and I think both the other players had fun - they certainly seemed to be enjoying themselves, so on one level it was a success. I also deflowered my GM self again with gusto, which was a kick. I was a bit disappointed that we didn't get to anywhere particularly interesting, but next time I figure I have a better idea how to run this ... unfunny roleplaying game.

Iskander / Alexander

[Random Goblin]

First, despite anything else I say, the game was a blast.  I really had a great time.

For a first time GMing in a decade, it was fantastic.  If I didn't know you weren't a regular GM, I would have assumed you were.

The truncated play time really did have a negative effect on the game, and I'm sorry about that.  If we could have played longer, it would have allowed us more time to tune our characters and character concepts.  Also, it would have allowed Iskander to do in-game course corrections instead of having to "learn for next time."

On the other hand, when I've tried out new games with other groups in the past (when the game was new to everybody or most everybody), it's often been kicked off with a short, "get to know the game" session where everybody figures out not only the rules but also the feel of "how the game should be played."  And that's essentially what this was.

The one real criticism I have is that there weren't enough opportunities for puppy-killing.  A couple of times during the game I thought "hmm- we're going to need some more evil points; maybe we should go find some puppies to kill."  But had we done that, it would have seemed jarring and against the flow.  In other words, if we had self-motivatedly gone searching for pets to murder at random times, it would have not only broken the flow of the plot, but it also wouldn't have seemed much like it had anything to do with the rest of the game.

The puppy-killing side-quest would have seemed like an unrelated minigame with almost no connection to breaking the cannibal out of Willard, other than it would have given us evil points.

On the other hand, if there had been three stray cats hanging around the van we stole, we would have done them in gleefully, and it would have established even more concretely what kind of sickos our characters were, without detracting from the game at large.

Tanks full of goldfish, a guard's Retriever, all of these would have been perfect.

Just making things harder on us by itself would have just forced us to go on the pet-slaying side-quests we were avoiding, and it would have exacerbated the disconnect between the plot and the puppy-killing.

But making it harder on us and providing us with plenty of opportunities to hurt small animals, and you'd have had one perfect game of kpfs.

By the way, the wincing was good.  It was actually believable.  I thought you were genuuinely disgusted by Phil's actions, and that just egged me on.