InSpectres - All Female Branch

[jburneko]

Hello All,

So, a large number of people couldn't make my regularly scheduled Werewolf game so I pounced on the opportunity to do something else.  I asked three of my normal players to come anyways because I wanted to try out this other game called InSpectres.  It hadn't hit me until we were all in the room that I was one male GM playing with three female players.  This was going to be interesting.

Characters:
One ex-fortune teller (not weird.  Just your basic terot card reader, etc)
One ex-elementry school teacher.
One weird agent who was a Sorcerer well Wizard, given how Sorcerer is most often used around here.

Coolest Image Produced During Play
The three agents suiting up to go out in the field.  The fortune teller in a spandex-like cat suit, the Sorcerer in black trenchcoat and shades, and the ex-school teacher in a little yellow rain slicker.  Hmmm... Well, it was funny at the time.

We ended up playing through 2.5 whole adventures.  We tried to go through a third round but discovered that we really didn't have the energy.  Man, InSpectres is fun but exhausting.

(By the way, I used Jared's little random chart in the book to produce all of these situations).

Scenario 1)

Situation Presented by Me: Some maintenence men were working on repairing part of a sewer in the shady area of town.  They were approached by 3 gang members who shot at them.  However, the bullets passed right through them and instead blew up a building behind them.

Result: The area had accumulated large amounts of negative psychic energy sparked by a gang war that had started over a Romeo & Juliet-esq situation.  Besides having the ability to cause spontaneous physical destruction the energy had also atracted a demon who was kidnapping people with high amounts of negative energy and imprisoning them.

Highlight: The Agents returning to the office to discover that the CEO's office door had turned into a flame bordered portal with nothing but a stary void on the other side.  After botching a Stress Roll the CEO falls to her knees and simply repeats, "My office!  What's happened to my Office!" while her two co-workers banter about what to do about their lunch that was stored in the office.

Climax: The agents race through the sewers to seal a portal where all the negative energy was leaking in from while being persued by the aforementioned demon.  It was determined that an untainted soul who lived in the area was required.  Said person ended up being dangled above the portal via a crane while the others cast the closing spell and thus sucking in the demon and the energy back from whence it came.

Scenario 2)

This was by far the best of the three scenarios.

Situation Presented by Me: An irritable sporting goods store owner complains of a gargolye like statue that has mysteriously apeared in his store and is scaring away customers.

Result: The statue was an imp summond by a Sorcerer with a grudge against men she's dated in the past.  This Sorcerer also turned out to be the cousin of the Sorcerer Agent among the players.  

Highlight: The parents of the two Sorcerers are in the Sorcerer Agent's office scholding them both out for tampering with the Dark Arts.  Meanwhile, the ex-medium is negotiating with the Imp King, the god worshiped by the Imp summoning Sorcerer.  The Imp King was demanding a replacement for the loss of his servent.  During all of this the ex-school teacher is trying to co-ordinate ordering chinese food from the local delivery place.

Climax: In the end the parents drag the Sorcerer's cousin away while the teams technology expert, the ex-school teacher, challenges the Imp King to a Quake frag match for possession of the ex-medium's imortal soul.  This was probably the most tense die roll in the entire game.  But in the end the ex-school teacher wins and the Imp King takes his leave but not before the school teacher offers him a bit of curry.

The third scenario is not only incomplete but very weak.  We really shouldn't have even started it, so I won't go into here.

Observations:

1) Stress Rolls Are Very Important.  Coming from my background of Chill, Deadlands and a little Call of Chthulhu the 'equivalent' Fear Checks and such would generally very badly hose the players, if called for too often.  As such I would generally make such allowances as, you only need to make a fear roll the first time you encounter a ghost and not on subsequent encounters with said ghost.  Well, I learned very rapidly that such a philosophy DOES NOT WORK with InSpectres.  

At first I was very worried about the Stress Roll Element because it seemed that frequent stress rolls would hose the players even WORSE than in other games because they only had nine points to play with and it seems to me those would go away very fast thus leaving the players powerless.  What I came to realize is that, without the Stress Rolls saping the players abilities you get two undesired results.

A) The GM's input is drastically reduced because on three or even two dice the odds of rolling less than a four are pretty slim.

B) The players rarely end up using any of their Franchise Dice and thus the bank rules never come into play and the Franchise grows almost exponentially between scenarios.  By the third scenario the franchise had accumulated over 30 dice.  They started with 10.

Moral of the story: I need to be more agressive when GMing this game.

2) Question: Do the players HAVE to make a roll when gathering information?  As a GM I found myself slightly disappointed in that I rarely to NEVER got to interject my ideas as to what was going on behind the scenes.  If the player's say their doing research can they effectively, 'punt to the GM' and not make a roll?  This came up once as the player was short on ideas and she wanted me just to make something up.  I made her roll because without the roll you have no idea whether the information is helpful or a hinderance.

3) I think it's been stressed before but I'd like to reitereate it again, the 'average joe' element of the game is not just window dressing.  It is VERY IMPORTANT and makes the game work.  I think the player with the ex-school teacher is the only one who really got this as she was the one who was constantly instigating all the 'everyday' stuff: The lunch trapped behind the portal, ordering the delivery food, and landing a date with one of her contacts at a transgender bar.

4) What does rolling poorly on a research oriented Academics roll mean exactly?  'You learn nothing,' is boring and seems counter to the spirit of the game.  I took it to mean, 'The GM makes up the information and it should really put the team in a sticky situation.'  This was how the man-hating Sorcerer ended up being the cousin of the team's Sorcerer.  The player rolled a high one on a background check.

5) Confesionals were used but not really to their potential.  The players seemed to have a hard time using confesional's that created open ended FUTURE situations that we would have to eventally pass through.  They were mostly used to alter the current situation by modifying something in the past or in the moment.

Example Confesionals From Play

A) When the demon in the first scenario first showed up I said they could hear it approaching but that they couldn't see it yet.  After the players started fleeing a player used this confessional:

"Of course, we wouldn't have paniced so, if we'd realized that in this dimention the demon was only six-inches tall."

B) A confessional was used to introduce the Sorcerer's parents arrival in the second scenario.  This was, in my opinion, the best use of the Confessional.

C) A confesional was used to effectively by pass an Academics roll to insure that a certain line of reasoning would come into play.  It was somethign like,

"What we would latter come to learn is...."

And that's about it.  Overall it was a LOT of fun.  One player of summed it up as, "This is a lot like Chill but without all the frustration."  Hope this was insightful.

Jesse

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jesse,

Check out my InSpectres again! grrrl version thread for my very similar experience.

I think that Confessionals are best set by the players in terms of their primary utility. Some people seem to like them best for assigning descriptors to one anothers' characters, usually using past scenes as a justification; others seem to like them best for setting up more material for future improvisation; still others seem to like them best for pre-fixing outcomes (ie we see the character discussing the next scene with his leg in a cast). There's no way to fix these standards for the players, so it's a matter of making the options clear and then letting them go as they will.

The real issue here is that many players are completely unused to having actual contributive options in play, and so any discussion about it before play tends to be heard as "blah blah roll one die for everything blah blah."

And why so much play, by the way? I find one session of InSpectres is sufficiently fun and wild to be enough for an evening of play. Granted, it's a bit short, but it pays off. Two seems excessive, and even to think of a three in a row is beyond me.

(H'm, is this another chance for yet more gaming/sex analogies? Could be, could be.)

Best,
Ron

[xiombarg]

(H'm, is this another chance for yet more gaming/sex analogies? Could be, could be.)

As a tangent, if the "Erotic In Nomine" game one of my players is talking about running ever gets off the ground, expect to see a very... strange... Actual Play post from me.

[jburneko]

Hello Ron,

On Preplay Confessionals: I made a BIG deal about the confesionals before play and stated how it seemed from other posts and stuff that newbies tend to forget about the confessionals.  I made sure the idea would stick in their minds by drawing the analogy to reality TV shows and by running over the examples in the books.  In the end I'm glad they weren't forgotten completely, I just wish they were used more.

On Length of Play: Ah, I wondered if anyone would comment on that as it seems most people go for only one round.  First of all, this is my weekend group.  The weekend games start at noon and in general run for about six hours.  So, I knew my players wouldn't be generally satisified with such a short run.

I primarily instigated the second run for two reasons.  The first was because the initial scenario really felt like a warm-up exercise.  Now that everyone understood the rules and the way the game worked I knew that a second scenario would turn out really cool.  And I was right.  That second scenario was the best.

The second reason was that I've recently signed up to run three sessions of InSpectres at a local con at the end of the month.  These sessions MUST last a minimum of three hours and four max.  I wanted to get the timing of the scenarios down.  It took us almost exactly four hours to run through the two scenarios.  So I will most likely be running two scenarios for each of my three sessions at the cons.

The third scenario was, I admit, a VERY bad idea.  It was mostly instigated by one of the players we affectionately refer to as, 'The Crack Adict.'  I think this girl would gladly game for several days and nights on end without food, water or sleep if provided the opportunity.  Sometimes we do seriously worry about her.  About a third of the way through I realized that I just didn't have it in me, and so I put my foot down and called the game.

Jesse

[Jared A. Sorensen]

Stress Rolls Are Very Important.  Coming from my background of Chill, Deadlands and a little Call of Chthulhu the 'equivalent' Fear Checks and such would generally very badly hose the players, if called for too often.  As such I would generally make such allowances as, you only need to make a fear roll the first time you encounter a ghost and not on subsequent encounters with said ghost.  Well, I learned very rapidly that such a philosophy DOES NOT WORK with InSpectres.  

Yes. The GM's real job in the game (besides kick-starting it all) is to call for Stress rolls. Without 'em...well, it sucks. Just look at Ghostbusters -- first scene in the library, bam! Stress Roll. Bill Murray getting slimed? Stress Roll. Yaddah yaddah...it drives the action.

Question: Do the players HAVE to make a roll when gathering information?

Well, you don't have to do anything. But Acadmics rolls are helpful in two ways: they allow the players to decide what's happening (thereby eliminating the standard guesswork) and they give the GM some ideas to work with. Best of all, the GM will now know what the players are interested in doing.

I think it's been stressed before but I'd like to reitereate it again, the 'average joe' element of the game is not just window dressing.  It is VERY IMPORTANT and makes the game work.  I think the player with the ex-school teacher is the only one who really got this as she was the one who was constantly instigating all the 'everyday' stuff: The lunch trapped behind the portal, ordering the delivery food, and landing a date with one of her contacts at a transgender bar.

The "working joe" concept is very important to the game, for many reasons. Hopefully, I made it abundantly clear in the book...

4) What does rolling poorly on a research oriented Academics roll mean exactly?  'You learn nothing,' is boring and seems counter to the spirit of the game.  I took it to mean, 'The GM makes up the information and it should really put the team in a sticky situation.'  This was how the man-hating Sorcerer ended up being the cousin of the team's Sorcerer.  The player rolled a high one on a background check.

If the Academics roll fails, you can say anything to "You don't find anything..." to "You find out <erroneous information>" to "Tell me what your character THINKS, keeping in mind that he's wrong." Or you could spring the "wrongness" on the players when they're all ready to kick ass (in their minds anyway). Fun.

And that's about it.  Overall it was a LOT of fun.  One player of summed it up as, "This is a lot like Chill but without all the frustration."  Hope this was insightful.

Yup. That's the idea. ;) Thanks, Jesse!

[jburneko]

I just had another thought about Stress Rolls.  I found that it was very difficult to find places to INSERT stressful situations because the players seemed to REALLY like the making stuff up through research element of the game.  

It was kind of weird.  Despite giving the players so much power they were still playing the game extraodinarily cautious.  Basically the patern was for me to present an open situation.  Then the players would make a flurry of Academics/Contacts rolls to bounce ideas off of each other until they had basically not only constructed a backstory for the problem but a fool proof method of dealing with it as well.  Then they'd act with perfect precision (how could they not?  They made it up) and sweep up the job with rapid efficiency.

The best I could do was to insert stuff while they traveled from location to location.  That's how the office door got consumed by the stary portal.  "We're going back to the office."  "Okay, you arrive at the office, and find the CEO's door has turned into a portal.  Make a stress roll."

Just more observations.

Jesse

[Mike Holmes]

I just had another thought about Stress Rolls.  I found that it was very difficult to find places to INSERT stressful situations because the players seemed to REALLY like the making stuff up through research element of the game.  

Make the research stressful. Necronomicon anyone? And Contacts are almost stressful by definition. Phone calls can require Stress rolls. And godalmighty the kids can cause Stress like you wouldn't believe.

Remember that Stress can be caused by a wide variety of factors, not just physical danger. Their Stress rolls, not fear checks or combat rolls. This is one of Jared's best ideas ever, and I'm not sure people get it.

Using Stress rolls for everyday stuff is how you get across the Oddity of the Average Joe factor. InSpectres is just a job to these guys, and the Stress is just like the Stress from anything else in their lives. Oh, sure a big green blob trying to flatten you can be more stressful than many things, but try talking on the phone to an unhelpful CSR about some defect in a critical piece Parapsychological equipment while your co-worker drones on in the background about their relatiobnship problems, somehow expecting you to listen, and then spilling coffee on your self. That's gotta be at least three dice of Stress, maybe more if simultaneously the chineese food arrives and your coworker ignores the delivery guy, expecting you to pay.

Mike

[jburneko]

Hey Mike,

I think you're right.  I'm not thinking about them like general Stress rolls, as in everyday stress.  I'm still thinking about them like Fear and Sanity checks which isn't right.  We played again last night (different group) and I started to think along those lines.  I think the idea seems to have the Stress Rolls build.  You start with a lot of 1 die stress rolls in the begining for things like dealing with the beurocracy of getting a city library card or some such move up through 3 die stress rolls when things start getting weird and then hit them hard with the 5 die stress rolls when they start getting tossed around by demons.

This progression makes sense because really 1 and 2 die stress rolls are the only time you really have a prayer of earning any cool dice which will steel you for the harder hits.

Edited Note: Overall my players still seemed very resistent to the Stress roll stuff in general.  I still occasionally got arguments like, "I'm an InSpectre's agent.  I fight demons on a daily basis.  Why am I stressed out by some piddly little ghost?"  They seemed to LIKE doing research and making stuff up and narrating their own out comes and using the confessionals for creating funny situations and interesting backstories.  But they still were very grumbly about some of my stress call rolls.  I wonder how they would have  felt if I really had started calling for stress rolls everytime their phone bill was cancled.

Jesse

[Mike Holmes]

Overall my players still seemed very resistent to the Stress roll stuff in general.  I still occasionally got arguments like, "I'm an InSpectre's agent.  I fight demons on a daily basis.  Why am I stressed out by some piddly little ghost?"  They seemed to LIKE doing research and making stuff up and narrating their own out comes and using the confessionals for creating funny situations and interesting backstories.  But they still were very grumbly about some of my stress call rolls.  I wonder how they would have  felt if I really had started calling for stress rolls everytime their phone bill was cancled.

I think the problem started with the tone right from CharGen. The fortune teller is a bit bizzarre, and the trenchcoated wizard is way out there. This group is very much not Joe Average (Jane Average?). They started with an assumption of superhuman coolness, and now expect the mechanics to match. They're not getting that this is a comedy game, and the comedy comes from the making the abnormal normal. They want KEWL characters with KEWL abilities, and to beat up the bad guys. Well, that's what they'll get with InSpectres.

But you can save the situation by juxtaposing the characters' coolnesses against everyday stuff. How does a wizard react to having her phone disconnected by mistake? What about friends and family, how do they react (or is she like some 46.2% of all PCs an orphan)? The weirder the characters, the more you should focus on real life, the "realer" the character the more you should focus on the weird job.

Perhaps it's easier to start over from scratch. Or suggest next time that their characters have disappeared and they need to bring in mundane family members to try and take care of the business until the other characters have been found. If they see the light, they'll split their new characters off into their own franchise (I kinda like the idea of the PCs acting in the shadow of much more competent supernatural fighters; might make for a good dynamic).

Mike

[Ron Edwards]

Jesse,

This very issue got a workout in Zak's InSpectres thread a little while ago.

Best,
Ron