[Fabricated] Drinks at the Lunar Cafe

[Jason Petrasko]

A short Introduction to the game and some nifty art can be found here: Budding Website.
I'll link to PDFs used in play as they come up. The game rules were not complete in anything except the barest of forms, but I still would like some input on specific questions. I'll get to those at the end of the post.

Game Tagline: Dance & be merry. The game with Robots that Rock Out^TM.

To explain the situation readily: You play a android unit imprinted with a human intelligence. You can have one of six sexualities at any given moment, an AI built into your body that wants nothing more than to take you over, and the rest of your node (think node = family = players) are all competing for the same resource pool.

The premise: Thrive in an almost totally inhuman world, where no standard social conventions stand. Enjoy the insanity that is bound to ensue. Of course there are more serious premise questions lying under that. What is 'human'? In a universe where all my programming can archived, what defines me? How serious the play becomes is totally up to the players. If the game can actually address any of these remains to be seen.

The game is GMless. Every player plays a unit in a node, sent out together into the city of Utopia One in order to accomplish some mission for the system. The universe around the players is all controlled by them, each having an opportunity to 'subroutine' and influence end points in their range (end points being non-player units, etc).

So I gathered up a few players: John, Jeff, Mike, and myself. 4 was the target number of players in the design, with support ranging from two at minimum and six at max. This was a good beginning. There are six types of units in the game, here is the PDF that contains those sheets: Utopia One Standard Loaded Units. The game works through three basic modes. The Load Process gets every player a unit and setups play. Next, you enter the Run Process and execute a mission. Once that is complete or something triggers a termination, you go into the Unload Process. This allows successful units to archive their programming, letting them basically use their character again in another session by loading the archive during the Load Process.

Preprep
I gathered up 100 nickels and dimes to use as call privilege (CP) counters (this is the size of the pool for all the units in the game). I grabbed some small wine glasses, so each player could have one to hold their CP. I shuffled two decks of cards together for the deck, and used card protector slips to assemble the Glitch Deck (Glitch Cards #1, #2). There we only 12 cards total, but for a short debug run I figured that would suffice (and it did). Printed out the unit sheets (Units), and gathered a small six-sided die for each player plus three large ones.

Startup (Load Process)
I'm very interested in getting to this game into a final state which can be published. Instead of managing things myself, I gave the Load Process handout to John and let him tell us what to do. That handout seemed clear enough, I didn't need to fill in any missing gaps or resolve any confusion. John won the roll off, and selected the first unit. So based on seating, the unit choice went: John, Jeff, Mike, and ended with myself. Each of us got 15 CP to start (60 between players, 40 left in the network pool). John selected a type 6, passing six CP to Jeff. Jeff took a type 2 and passed two CP to Mike. Mike chose a type 1 and passed one CP to me. I went with a Type 5 and passed five CP to John. This made Jeff the prime unit with the most CP, and he named everything. He really got into it, and we shared quite a few a laughs as he chose the most ridiculous names. At the end of the Load Process we had formed the node 'Odessa', containing the following units:

Jeff - 19 CP - Prime Unit - Type One - Carbon of Odessa (Black)
... Softstyle: Ethereal Alternative
Mike - 16 CP - Type One - Daisy of Odessa (Yellow)
... Softstyle: Jazz Fusion
John - 14 CP - Type Six - Jesus of Odessa (Red)
... Softstyle: Polka
Me - 11 CP - Type Five - Kermit of Odessa (Green)
... Softstyle: Power Rock

In this debug session, I had not yet drafted any missions. So we simply skipped the mission selection. Normally the prime unit gets to elect the mission for the Node, and that will cost them some minimal CP. Instead we 'booted' into these two programs: Lunar Cafe Location, and the Alpha One Kernel. The game must always have two programs running, the kernel and location types. These describe the results of specific unit actions, costs, and so forth. Here are these two handouts: Alpha One Kernel Program, Lunar Cafe Location Program.

I'll return with a second post, talking about the play of the game, after a short recess for much needed breakfast.

[Jason Petrasko]

Ok, after a long talk with Meserach on #indierpgs about the totally confusing nature of the PDFs, I'm going to draft up a short guide to the currency and terms of the game before I continue the thread. This will provide a clear view into the rather crunchy system.

[Jason Petrasko]

Alright, I've got the PDF that shows the relationship of currencies and flow of the game here: Currency Guide.

Playing, Issue #1
The game started with the two programs running from the previous post, and without a mission. Like I told the group, this would lead to purely competitive play. Without a mission to offer any reward for cooperation. We began the game in Wire Mode, and being entirely too enthusiastic, I took my unit out of the game before it even started. In order to get into live mode, you have to power up. According to the (borked) rules, you have to call GOD (Global Operating Design) and issue a commandment to a unit to power it up. All this costs CP currency. I failed to do so, and in the process drew a Glitch Card from the deck that caused my unit to Crash. When you draw a Glitch Card you can't actually perform, and you can't buy it off with CP, you Crash and your unit drops into Hold mode. Basically it disconnects from the system. I learned some stuff here, right away, which I'll call issue #1. Regardless, after that Jeff's prime unit Carbon of Odessa powered up and then synchronously every other unit did too (prime units cause synchronous events like that). Not being connected, this of course didn't apply to my unit Kermit.

Sharing Drinks over Laughs
Once the other players got their units into live mode, we took some time to explain the flow of power cards. Basically the game goes with a: Draw power, Use power, repeat flow. The faster you want your power, the more that costs your unit. Unit can't be repaired at all, so its kind of 'how far will push this unit?' affair. Units earn Glitter (live mode currency) by following the proper forms. These are described on the program handout. One of the things that is big at the lunar cafe is drinking. My position out of the game was helpful, since I was able to spend my time concentrating on explaining and suggesting options. Eventually things got rolling, and Mike had his unit Daisy subroutine a drink. Using subroutine, a player can have their unit control end points at a location. He subroutined for the drink to appear. Wallah, Mike pays the CP and Daisy is standing at the bar in front of a Solar Firewater. Bubbling a fiery red, the drink is the stiffest in the place. Let me introduce the mechanism of drinking, as this basically consumed the rest of the session.

The Mechanism: Drinking at the Lunar Cafe involves an Integrity challenge versus the strength of the drink. When a unit wins, they earn a Glitter. When a unit loses, they suffer a Glitch (draw one from the deck). If the strength of the drink (the challenge rank) meets or exceeds 12 it is considered impressive. Impressive wins allow all kinds of actions in response to earn Glitter, like Smacking the Bar.

The ensuing game consisted of these laugh inducing highlights:
1- Daisy does 2 Snaps in a Circle to summon a Waiter with another Solar Firewater, runs out of power for the turn. Jesus drinks the drink.
2- Jesus orders a Lightshow Tall Cocktail. Carbon drinks it all. Jesus Bitch Slaps Carbon.
3- Carbon orders a Solar Firewater and drinks it. Carbon then Smacks the Bar numerous times. Daisy Smacks the Bar. Jesus Smacks the Bar.

The Remaining Issues
Issue #2: Not enough Dancing. Jesus busted a move once. This had a lot to do with jumping right into Live mode, since you program dance moves during the Wire mode of the play.
Issue #3: Smack the Bar is broke. Yep, its a bit too easy to earn more glitter with that action-form.
Issue #4: CP costs for Subroutines are a bad idea. Since earning CP is the mechanical end goal of play, spending it to control the things around you simply doesn't make good play sense.

Overall the play was fun. The game is thick and crunchy, but I feel that really reinforces the idea that your unit is part of a larger process- in this case the system known as GOD.  The session was not long enough or challenging enough to really push the units to their limit, but given the lack of a mission that made sense.

So finally the reason I'm posting here: I really want the game to balance cooperative play and competitive play. As it stands, even with the help of the mission, I wonder if that will be enough to support and encourage cooperation. I'm not really sure how to approach this, and I'm open to any suggestions.