[Bliss Stage Playtest] First Session

[coffeestain]

Last night, we played a short session of Bliss Stage using the playtest rules available prior to the 12/14/05 set.

Setting
The game was set in Madison, WI and had two players, Chris and Sarah.  Both have some experience with Dogs in the Vineyard and Chris has a pretty considerable background with other more mainstream games.  We determined a few things about the state of the world:

-  Little creepy arachnid robots encased all of the local Bliss Stage adults into creepy cocoons for storage.
-  Humans are a consumable resource of some kind for the aliens and the children were left active to breed, basically creating a reproducing herd with an 18 year lifespan and no need for a butcher.
-  Alien hunter-killer robots (like squidies from The Matrix!) were introduced as a response to humans entering the dream world.
-  Hunter-killer robots can sense intrusion into the dream world and focus in on the real-life location of said breaches.  Pilots generally have 7-8 minutes to interact with the dream world before they're found.
-  Dream time doesn't function at the same rate as normal time.  This allows each mission to have a real-life time limit at which point the anchor has the choice to abort the mission and abandon the pilot to the Bliss.
-  Anchors sit next to the pilots and have a pistol, just in case they decide it's more humane not to abandon the pilot to the Bliss.

Sarah decided to play Sydney Evans, a 13 year old using the Innocent Sweetheart template.  Chris played Tim "Little T" Brody, a 15 year old using the Rising Hero template.  The authority figure was Dr. Marcus Wincott, formerly a professor at U.W. who stole some experimental sleep deprivation drugs from a testing facility to stay awake and sane for the past 5 years.  He's close to running out.  I figured it'd be creepy if he was a child psychology professor, but we never really got that far.

Issues
As far as the actual play, here are some items we ran across:

- All templates are not created equal.  I know it's a temporary method of character generation, but the inclusion of 2 Trauma into any of the archetypes was not properly offset by relationship intimacy.  The Innocent Sweetheart (0 Trauma) absolutely breezed through her 2 objective mission while the Rising Hero (2 Trauma) barely scraped through his and could gain no Interlude benefits due to an overwhelming number of Betrayal Scenes.  The removal of Betrayal Scenes may make this more playable, but I'm still not sure there's a mechanical incentive to start with a 2 Trauma archetype as the relationships don't seem to weigh heavily enough against the initial Trauma and Bliss.

- Placing a - in Nightmarishness during a mission increases both the Trauma and the Terror of the pilot by one.  Which comes first?  We came to a situation where the pilot had one Trauma and  one Terror and received this result.  If the Terror was increased first, the pilot would end with 3 Trauma.  If the Trauma was increased first, the pilot would end with 2 Trauma and 2 Terror.

- Mechanically, there's no benefit to trying to stave off the last Stress to a relationship as it takes the same number of Interludes to reduce all the Stress as it does to build 1 Trust.

- There appears to be a bit of a mission "death spiral" easily caused by any - result and no way to recover.  This may be a consequence of no dice rolls actually providing a positive result to the pilot other than ending the mission sooner.  While this may be intended, it caused Chris to mention that he often felt himself "dreading the next roll".  I think this might relate to the endgame point below.  One of the things we mulled over was the following two additions:  "This result removes 1 Terror from the pilot." to + Nightmarishness and "This result removes one Stress from this Relationship" to + Relationship Damage.

Endgame 
In this thread, Ben asks if we feel an endgame is necessary and my playtest group responds with an emphatic yes!  We were having a difficult time trying to decide exactly what type of game we were playing and what our reward for playing effectively was.  Pure tragedy seems to run counter to the genre conventions, so our final decision was that the ideal campaign should result in a victory at great personal cost to the pilots.  If this is the intent, we don't feel the rules support it.

Currently, there is no real reason for the pilots to succeed in missions.  In fact, mechanically, there's great incentive to aborting missions prematurely in order to gain more Interludes without excessive risk.  (Again, this point may be mitigated somewhat by the removal of Betrayal Scenes.)  We offer the following suggestion if this is, indeed, viewed as a problem:

Mission Failure
Any time a pilot terminates a mission without achieving at least one mission success, they lose a point of Trust with their authority figure.  In addition, no interlude scenes may be taken with the authority figure until the pilot is able to achieve at least one mission success.  If a pilot ever loses their relationship with their authority figure, they're removed from pilot duty and become either a secondary character or an anchor.

Likewise, we feel the game should support a victorious endgame such that characters must endure until it is realized.  Unfortunately, I can't offer any terribly good suggestions about how this could be realized.  The best I can come up with currently:

Various game states can trigger an endgame mission or series of missions.  If these missions are successful, the result is the defeat of the aliens.  If these missions are unsuccessful, the players are temporarily set back and must trigger a different endgame.  Some triggers might include x number of successful consecutive missions, all pilots having certain levels of Intimacy/Trust with their anchor and/or authority figure, all pilots being over a certain level of Bliss, etc.

I'll leave it at this for now as the post is becoming long, but we'll certainly give it a go with the updated rules.  I'll see if I can encourage Chris or Sarah to add their thoughts as well.

Regards,

Daniel

[Ben Lehman]

Hi, Daniel!  Thanks for playtesting.

The pilot types are wildly unbalanced.  Right now Promiscuous and Eager Young Soldier are way too weak.  I'm going to change this pretty soon, I think, but I haven't decided how exactly I'm going to go about it.

I'm curious -- do you have a record of what the rolls were and what categories were prioritized?  It's my impression that an early (-) result in the Relationship category will derail a starting character, whereas an early (-) in Mission or Nightmarishness won't so much.  (My hunch is that later on, Nightmarishness will get worse and Relationship will get better.)

Did the pilots bring in all of their relationships?  If not, what did they leave out?  What Anchors did you use, and did their special abilities come into play?  Did you play any interlude scenes?

Answers: Terror, then Trauma (the way that's worse for you).  I'm aware of the problem with Trust.  The death spiral nature of missions is purely intentional.

Thanks again!  Useful stuff.

yrs--
--Ben

[coffeestain]

Ben,

I don't have any exact records, but I can tell you the general pattern and our observations.  We didn't run any actual Interlude scenes because of the absolute pounding our Rising Hero took during his first mission, but we took them into account.  After Chris got beat down, we ran him through a number of permutations of the same mission to see what mechanical effects there could be in a 5-6 mission stretch including optimal Interludes.  In contrast, Sarah's Innocent Sweetheart went through her first (identical) mission with barely a scratch.

The first Rising Hero mission went pretty much as I outline below.  The mission required 2 successful objectives:

Chris assigned 4/3 and 3/4 giving him 4 categories requiring 6 total dice and 7 dice.  I threatened Mission Success and his 3/4 relationship.  He placed (0) (0) in Mission Success, (0) in Nightmare, (+) in 4/3, and (-) in 3/4.  He gained 1 Bliss.  Chris brought in his 2/3 relationship giving him 4 categories requiring 6 total dice and 6 dice.  I threatened Mission Success and Nightmarishness.  Chris placed (-) (-) in Mission Success, (0) (0) in Nightmare (as he couldn't afford another Trauma), (0) in 3/4 and (0) in 2/3.  As you can see, at this point, Chris will have to suffer the effects of 2 more rounds of rolling with no spare dice before he has a chance to succeed at HALF of his mission objectives.

We tried running the same scenario with a number of other tactics, including using 1/2 relationships as expendable ablative armor (which only really helped about 50% of the time and burnt Interludes).  Invariably, it was determined that Mission Success was first priority and Nightmarishness had to be (0) or higher, otherwise Trauma would completely overtake the scene.  The results were rarely better and the pilot's mission was a complete wash after any moderate to poor roll with a poor roll also leaving the pilot unable to function well during the next mission.  I was never cruel enough to threaten two relationships, but that could be brutal, particularly in the first scene of a multiple scene mission.

- It seemed to us that every scene you spend in a mission will cost you.  The cost is exponentially higher (to the point of being unbearable) to the Rising Hero because of his initial 2 Trauma as it is to the Innocent Sweetheart at 0 Trauma, even though the Innocent Sweetheart has fewer total Intimacy to draw on.

- With 2 Trauma, 1/2 relationships hurt more to bring in than they do to leave out.  With fewer Trauma, however, they can be decent expendable resources.  However, if you expend them you're burning away all of your Interludes (which isn't an issue any longer with the removal of the Betrayal Scenes).

- We, to our shame, completely forgot about the anchor special abilities.

- If the Rising Hero were to go through one mission scene as conservatively as possible and then abort the mission, he would be able to remove all his Trauma and function well with no mechanical penalty.  We figured this is undesirable as an option, but it is an option currently.

Now, while I'm not certain what the use of the Humanization scenes is, the removal of Betrayal scenes is a very good step in allowing higher Trauma characters to achieve some success.  We spent a lot of time when allocating dice trying to determine how to potentially succeed in the mission while still being able to make certain necessary changes/repairs to the character.  What do you think the effects of changing (-) in Relationship to "The relationship loses one Trust, gains one Stress, and cannot be used again until a mission objective is completed successfully" be?  Do you feel it would still allow the players to make relationship sacrifices in order to achieve goals, but also allow them to be a little more heroic in missions?  "Let's see, I can stress a relationship to bring it into the conflict and use it, but I can also trash a relationship to get me past this hurdle..."

As an additional question, I assume that in the (-) result in relationships the Trust is removed before the Stress is added.  Is that correct?

Regards,

Daniel