[Mythos] Actual Play(test): Guyver meets Undead

[Eric Bennett]

Well, I finished the first playtest of Mythos last night, and I must say that overall I am very pleased with how things turned out. It taught me that some things I was planning on doing were quite foolish in play, and some other things that I had only lightly been considering were actually pretty darn good ideas. I'll start with a summary of the session, just to orient this post. Go easy on me, though. ^_~ I've never done an AP post before, let along a playtest.

We had a quick, very loose pitch session before the game. It took us about five to six minutes to settle on playing residents of a small mountain town which has just had an alien ship of light crashland nearby. We did a Style Sheet for the town and a Sheet for the Ship, though we didn't really touch the town's sheet. However, this was both because of the way our game was focused and due to some time constraints. After getting the situation worked out, we did our characters, winding up with...

myself, playing Zadok Bradley, a local UFO nutjob.

(items in italics were bought during the course of the game)
Stamina 2
Lore 4
Composure 3
Will 4

UFO Nut 5
Nature Lover 2
Ex-Military 3
General Conspiracy Theorist Loon 3
Blessing of the Alien Overlords 4

Motivation: Make contact with the alien visitors.

R., a friend of mine who has done a lot of roleplaying, usually of the White Wolf sort. R. played Officer Norman Branks, the town sheriff.

Stamina 4
Lore 3
Composure 3
Will 3

Town's Police Chief 5
Linguist 2
Trombonist 1
Farmer's Son 2
Logical Atheist 3
Alien Slayer 4
Super Alien Sword Arm 5

Motivation: Keep the town safe.

D., another friend who has pretty much never done this before, on top of being extremely shy. (She is my litmus test on accessibility of the game. If I can make it so that she can get it and get engaged, then I will have succeeded in translating my gamespeak into normal human language.)

D played Tina, a local teacher

Stamina 3
Lore 2
Compsure 4
Will 4

New Person in town 3
Science teacher 5
used to be a bodybuilder 2

Motivation: Curiousity about the alien ship.

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Now, as can probably be told from both the session concept and the characters, this was a pretty B-movie affair. While the mood of the finished game is going to baseline to more serious horror, I felt that B-movies were a good place to shoot for a light test like this session. 

However, in light of this and several other comments made during the game, I think I'm going to be dividing Style Sheets up between the "totally freeform" and some "templates". Imagine catagories like in a collectible card game, where different card types have different pertinent information, providing for variety with a bit of structure. Said structure is likely to be mostly suggestion, so that once players become comfortable with making Style Sheets they will be able to do so freely. However, that is a goal for another playtest.

The play itself consisted of three scenes, and while the transitions were a little choppy (which points me to needing to give some guidelines to scene setting and escalation to Conflict along the lines of setting Stakes, something I totally forgot to do during the game) they proved to be fun in general. There was not a lot of serious roleplaying going on, which I blame on the players and myself having to get our heads around the rules, and that taking up most of our mental room for the moment. Especially with explaining things and tossing ideas back and forth, the roleplaying itself kind of fell to the wayside. However, I believe that in future games, once the player has the rules down they look like they will be fairly easy to work with.

Scene 1: The Swamp

This scene focused primarily on the journey of the characters through the swamp to alien crash site. Fairly early into it someone started calling conflicts, so we all burnt some Resources and pulled cards. Now, a decision was made on the fly to determine how many cards the GM/antagonist drew. He got to pull the value of two traits from an applicable Style Sheet, and then add the same amount to his hand for each addittional player in the Conflict. So, for example, our swamp scene GM pulled 6 cards from traits on the swamp sheet, then added another 6 when the other player jumped in.

This is where I started to get very happy with things. The back and forth flow of bidding cards really helped give some punch and interaction to the narrative, without feeling bogged down. It took us to near the end of this scene to start sorting out a good way to distribute Omens (Karma with a more thematic name) from the conflicts, but in and of themselves the cards added a nice element of strategy, as one could bid a single low card, knowing that the opponent had to burn at least one card to beat it. In this way, someone could save their high cards for a later round, after wearing down their opponent.

These and other strategies occured to us as we played, though a few questions were raised in this scene and the next, but I'll address them at the end of this post.

Scene 2: Crash Site

This is the first scene that a player narrated in an element to a Style Sheet, and D. spent two of her Omens to add bullet holes to the description of the alien wreckage. This seemed to go smoothly, with another element added by R. However, I think in retrospect that the primary reason Style Sheets went so unused was that, at the time, the Omen flow was severely constricted. Hopefully my new solution will fix that problem, but we'll see.

The big Conflict for this scene turned out to be some innocent alien civilians, who would up getting shot by the sheriff and their necks broken by the science teacher. The players seemed more than comfortable with the narrative control that they could wield using the cards, so I was very happy with this scene. The group became more comfortable with the card mechanics a this point, so things didn't take more than a few minutes to play out.

Something to note here: R bought the first B-movie type trait, his Alien Slayer 4, with the Omens he had earned in the previous scene. This really set the mood for the rest of the night, and I think pushed us over the edge from maybe running a game that could be an X-files episode and over into Sci-fi Pictures Original territory. All the players were cool with it, and we ran with it...so I'm not sure what to say about this save that it happened, and led to what we did in the next scene.

Scene 3: Control Ship

This was the last scene we did for the night. R narrated an interior room with some generally spooky alien gear and architecture, then we hit on what turned out to be the first conflict of the scene. It was a non-action conflict, which pleased me as I was getting a touch worried that we weren't going to test it that way that night, but I also chalk that up to a lack of examples for the players. The next playtest draft will include such.

The first conflict was getting the alien device to work, and the interplay of the cards and twisting control of the narration flowed pretty smoothy between R (in the GM role) and myself in character. Playing off what the other person has tossed out made for some pretty dynamic sequences both in this conflict and in the later one, and it was this conflict where I added my first B-movie triat, the Blessing of the Alien Masters. It was at this point that I noted down two things. Firstly, it might be a good idea to at least discuss with the other players what a trait covers, as I used the Blessing for all kinds of genre tropes: psychic attacks, healing the alien masters, an energy bolt. The second was that there needs to be some mechanic to call BS on someone else's pulling in of a trait, and I agree with that. I'll work on possible solutions to that for the next test.

The last conflict of the night, which followed rapidly on the heels of my narrating the backstory of the aliens (and had we been playing with more Omens, this would have been "bought-in". Rectified in future sessions, I'm sure.) was a great little sci-fi battle between the police chief and my crazy UFO nut/living instrument of alien will. I think it was this sequence that really sold me on the cards and bidding.

Starting from a simple psychic attack, we escalated to random kung fu, and then from there into full-out alien weapons versus alien powers. Having that purely tied into the "color" of the sequence functioned pleasingly, as we were able to go where we wanted to without troubles. After the big brawl, we did a fairly arbitrary wrap because D was falling asleep, and admittedly so was I after some rather late shifts the nights before.

So, in conclusion...resolution works, except for three cases that need effort put into them.

1. What if someone has no applicable trait?
2. What if someone calls BS on another's trait use?
3. What are the story mode consequences of running out of a Resource type.

Additionally, things I need to work into the text include.

Explicit Kickers.
Style Sheet "templates."
Scene setting guidelines and examples, to help folks out with this unusual type of play.

And with that, I think my brain is emptied. Reactions? Comments? Questions about anything I might have mentioned but failed to fully explain?

Elated but exhausted,
Eric Bennett
I'll post some possible answers here later.

[Eric Bennett]

Oh, I just realized I forgot to explicate something. Those six points I raised as needing to be worked...what has other folks experience been in other games, specifically setting up Kickers and dealing with the "no applicable trait" issue.

[steelcaress]

Interestingly enough, my "no applicable trait" issue was raised in D&D3E.  We tried to find an applicable trait for Gambling or Carousing, but nothing really fit.  We just came down to a couple of the standard ability scores (like WIS or CON) and lowered the difficulty scale, but it still wasn't happy.  It's easier in games like Risus, where if you can think of a way that a trait might apply, you get to use it, but not at full strength if it's a stretch.  Ninja 5 is going to be a heckuva lot more useful in combat than Hairdresser 5.

Calling BS on another person's trait use: I'd probably call a player vote, with the swing vote being the GM's.  You wanna make sure it doesn't turn into a popularity contest, though.

Also, I visited your Wiki, and it says there everything's percentile-based, this looks more like White Wolf scale (what I use in most of my homebrews).  Not saying there's a dice pool there, but I could take the characters as written and stick 'em in my game (or a World of Darkness game) and the numbers wouldn't be out of sort.

[Eric Bennett]

Also, I visited your Wiki, and it says there everything's percentile-based, this looks more like White Wolf scale (what I use in most of my homebrews).  Not saying there's a dice pool there, but I could take the characters as written and stick 'em in my game (or a World of Darkness game) and the numbers wouldn't be out of sort.

Whoops. I need to sort that thing out soon. The draft posted on the wiki was an earlier version of this. I didn't want to get rid of because, you know...mining for ideas in the future. The placeholder at the mythos.pbwiki site is going to be replaced over this weekend, when I get the draft I am working on now done. Sorry about that. I'll likely have another, more robust playtest by then as well, and I'll post the link to a pdf of my draft.

On BS: That sounds like a workable system, and it was what we used during the game. I was just curious if there were other useful methods folks had worked up.

As for "no applicable trait", I think I might just have it default to the current level of an applicable resource pool. That likely won't generate too high a number.  I think.

Thanks for the comments,
Eric