[FLFS] HMS Superb -- Final Playtest

[Josh Roby]

Continued from [FLFS] HMS Superb -- Lingering Scenes.

My LAGames group, Mark, Judson, Alex, and I, completed our playtest of Full Light, Full Steam last night.  We used the revised scrip, and we got some good play in.

Thus far, the HMS Superb had been sent out to Harmony Rock, a utopian socialist colony founded outside the authorized zone of control in the asteroid belt.  They've been under attack by pirates, and normally the unauthorized colony would be ignored but a member of parliament's daughter is one of the colonists.  Their ambitious commanding officer dispatched the Superb to resolve the situation by whatever means necessary and oh, the MP would like his daughter back thankyouverymuch.

In the last session, the PCs had mostly rolled into town and got the lay of the land.  Thus far, it felt very Dogs-like to me, since the players had been presented with a moral dilemma (forcibly evacuate the colony or fight off the pirates) and they wrestled with whether the utopians (who practiced polyamory!  oh my!) deserved to continue or if they had made their bed and now should be made to sleep in it.  This was good; in fact, one of the strengths of that session was that the scrip and scene structure allowed the players to share knowledge about Fourier utopianism and naval culture.  It still seemed to me that we were playing Dogs-in-space, however, and that worried me.

However, at the outset of the second play session I was able to develop the 'something's fishy' vibe that I had only got to touch on at the tail end of the first session.  An American ship limped into orbit asking for help since they'd been attacked by the pirates, and the PCs went over to help out.  There's something beautifully liberating to be able to say, "Okay, the NPC's stakes are that he convinces you that they really were attacked by pirates," win those stakes, and set up that lovely lovely dissonance between player and character knowledge.  The players know that something's amiss, but the characters are convinced that that odd circumstance doesn't add up to anything untoward.  In any case, this yanked the game out of simple moral-dilemma territory and into a situation where there were Big Stakes and the PCs were the representative of the Crown and they had to tread carefully to protect national interests and all that other good stuff the game's supposed to be about.

The new scrip, which gives you three points on the first pass to a player and one point for every subsequent pass unless you end the scene, worked out very well.  Things were a little rocky at first since scene framing and scene ending are now tied to the scrips rather than group fiat, and we'd get to a point where we felt we were done and realize that we had to pass a scrip to seal the deal.  This sounds klunkier than it really was; once the players got into the swing of things, this actually kept things moving along at a pretty brisk pace (I kept forgetting about my scrips entirely, because I am a bad bad GM).  It also makes scenes end in a rather snappy fashion, either with a sort of closing quip regarding one of the present characters or a reference to a non-present character who is then in the following scene.

There was one slight speed bump to the scrip -- at one point we had managed to frame a scene with two characters, neither of whose players had scrips in hand.  Since scrip-passing accompanies narration and only those present can narrate, and you have to pass a scrip to end a scene, "by the book" they should have been trapped in that scene forever, clawing at their eyes trying to escape.  Judson suggested that players who are not playing characters in a scene can pass a scrip to someone in the scene by introducing a complication to that scene, which I think might be a good fix.  It keeps those not fictionally present involved and engaged, and allows for the free flow of scrips.

Afterwards we discussed the scrips and their effect on play; Alex voiced concern that he didn't feel that he was being rewarded for playing in character; he was being rewarded for making reference to others' characters, and he was only doing that in order to pass the scrip, not because he felt any narrative urge to do so.  Which is a fair criticism -- the scrip abstracts group characterization a pretty fair degree.  However, this is something that I think can be addressed with adequate explanation in the text.  Judson had the quote of the night: "Play to your thematic batteries and all the scrips come to you!"  He maneuvered his stern captain into a situation where all three of his batteries were in the spotlight, and he got all four scrips passed his direction within a couple minutes.  He'd then be able to pass those scrips, earning spoils and being able to resolve the scene and frame the next scene.  So playing up your character and especially your batteries gains you some very potent resources -- but it gives you options, rather than giving you XP straight up.  In the upcoming edit I'll make it clear that players should be playing up their own thematic batteries to attract scrips, which give them those options.

Interested in hearing your thoughts and questions on the new scrip, primarily, but anything else is certainly fair game, as well.

[John Harper]

There's something beautifully liberating to be able to say, "Okay, the NPC's stakes are that he convinces you that they really were attacked by pirates," win those stakes, and set up that lovely lovely dissonance between player and character knowledge.  The players know that something's amiss, but the characters are convinced that that odd circumstance doesn't add up to anything untoward.

Yes! We did this in a game of Stranger Things. I set the stakes (as the player) that were basically, "Does this NPC convince me that a lie is the truth?" I lost, he convinced my character, and we all grinned at the very functional dissonance.