[Agon / DRYH] EN World Game Day Actual Play

[Nev the Deranged]

So! ENWorld's Game Day at Games Plus in Mt. Prospect, Illinois was yesterday. I played some Agon, and ran some Don't Rest Your Head. Both rocked. Here are the bits I remember, hopefully my fellow players can fill in their recollections as well, although I'm not sure which of them are on here and which of them are on there.

Agon, in the AM. Competitive Greek heroics. It took us a while to get up to speed with this one, partly because we did full-on character creation. However, I think Reidzilla was right to start us off at zero, because chargen is a fundamental part of the game, and gave us a feel for what we were about. We didn't all make the best decisions at this point, but we were all newbies and everything worked out fine. Tim made the decision to be the son of Hermes, giving him a huge bonus to every single roll, which made him pretty much the glory hog of the whole game. We let him get mauled by beastmen, though, so it was ok. I think after 2 or 3 sessions of this game, it would really hum. I was kind of surprised the quest was as short as it was, but I don't know if Reidzilla tweaked it at all due to time constraints or whatever. Theoretically, as I understand it, there were three quests we could have accomplished in an all-day sitting had we been so inclined.

Anyway, I liked it enough to buy it, I really like the tactical mechanics, and I think the one-upsmanship and comradely machismo of greek heroes on a quest together would be really fun to play to the hilt once the players are more familiar with the rules. I also think the game lends itself well to both narrow character schticks and more well-rounded approaches.

All in all, a good time.


Then I ran Don't Rest Your Head for Tim Koppang, Pvt. Patterson, and ...The Guy Who Played Bishop (sorry man, I suck with names). I am actually glad we ended up with 3 players, because I had a hard enough time juggling that. 4 would have been too chaotic for me as a first time GM, I think. That said, it went way better than I could have expected. From the get-go, everyone came up with pretty scary characters. Bishop was a serial killer whose path was to see how much he could get away with without getting caught. Patterson (Azriel) was a blood-fetishist gothbaby whose Madness talent was a demonic form (a minion of Lordi, perhaps?). Tim's character Clive was the most normal, stressed out from juggling several part time jobs to make ends meet. In fact Tim spent most of the game trying to get Clive back to his job at the gas station and away from the strangeness going down in the City. He did eventually make it... but alas, the strangeness followed him.

Fictionwise, they were all members of a goth rock band, Serious Moonlight. They had just finished a gig at Mad's Place, a club they played regularly. During the show they noticed several audience members who were just watching them intently, not rocking out like the rest of the crowd. After the gig they were packing their gear into the van in the alley behind the club, when a fan runs up to them with a gun. Before they can really react, he cries "Please! Make it STOP!" and BLAM! splatters his own brains across their van. They are understandably shocked by this. Hank Madigan, who owns the club with his partner Maris Haier, comes running out the back and sees the corpse. He asks what the hell happened, and as they are explaining, the six audience members appear at the end of the alley and begin advancing on them all. Hank is yelling at them to just get in the van and go, he'll take care of it, but they aren't listening.

At this point we had our first conflict. Bishop said he was climbing in the back of the van toward the driver's seat, so I had three Audience Guys come around each side of the van, coming after Clive and Azrial respectively. Because of the way DRYH works, I ran each conflict separately.

Clive is trying desperately to call the police on his cell phone, and manages to do so by projecting a wave of apprehension at the three Audience Guys (his Madness talent is empathic projection) (oh, and pardon me if I jump tenses a lot, I'm not much of a writer). So he gets his phone. Meanwhile Azrial has started to vamp out, growing fangs and claws. Taking down two of the Audience Guys with one claw each, he grabs the third and bites into his neck... and is sprayed with a gout of black, acidlike blood (Pain dominated! Woot!) which burned his mouth severely.

At this point, a line of flames springs up between the PCs and the remaining Audience Guys, and they jump in the van and peel out, leaving Mad (Hank's nickname) to face the three alone as they step through the flames and don't seem particularly distressed by their smoldering clothing and hair.

And I'm gonna take a breather here, because my brain is fizzling out. More later, any of my players can feel free to jump in with their thoughts too.

All in all, I felt like the players really helped contribute cool stuff, and also let me contribute the cool stuff I had in mind. Really, I can't ask for more than that out of a game. I usually let them narrate when they won a conflict, and they did a fine job of it, even the two who have a mostly D&D background. The Guy Who Played Bishop told me during a break that even though it was very different from what he was used to (more freeform, I think he said) he was enjoying it. And he was certainly getting into it, especially since a lot of events ended up revolving around his character. Tim had his characters split off early on and basically said right out that he was defying any attempt to keep the "party" together. I was ok with that, although it did make it more difficult to frame him into conflicts that related to what was going on with the other two. He helped though, so it went ok. He did tell me a couple times that I needed to ratchet up the conflicts, and as I took that advice, I realized he was right. DRYH lends itself to a steady cranking up of the pitch, at least for a one-shot.

I didn't use the background outlined in the book, which the author has said was just suggestions, not meant to be "canon". I did use a lot of "Dark City" tropes, combined with some ideas of my own. One way I tried to keep tying Clive back in with the other characters is by having newspapers, any time someone saw one, always be current- and by that I mean up to the minute current- on events in other parts of the City. Another was by sort of recycling characters, bus drivers, cops, pedestrians, almost like they were on a kind of "loop" like characters in a computer game that just do their particular schtick over and over.

Also, everyone kind of worked together to bring their characters to satisfactory endings, which was awesome. The story was "finished" for these characters, but left unresolved enough that I can easily see picking up a new set of characters in the same paradigm set, dealing with the repercussions of this "chapter".

All in all I was really pleased with how easily everyone caught on to how the dice pools worked, it's really an intuitive system. Nobody held back on their Exhaustion or Madness, either, which was both good for a one-shot, and fitting for the edgy-out-of-the-gate characters they had created.

I will perhaps post more of the fiction when I am better rested and more coherent... I go now to Rest My Head...

Dave
nevthederanged@aol.com

(ps. Pvt. Patterson, I know you were fishing for the possibility of me running more indie stuff, and the answer is yeah, it could happen. I'm busy a lot, but I'm definitely down for working it out if you have players who are interested.)

[John Harper]

Glad you liked Agon, Dave. You're right about half-divine heroes kicking major butt in a one-shot. There are some special one-shot scoring rules on the wiki to address this, which may be worth checking out if you plan to run your own at some point.

[Nev the Deranged]

Glad you liked Agon, Dave. You're right about half-divine heroes kicking major butt in a one-shot. There are some special one-shot scoring rules on the wiki to address this, which may be worth checking out if you plan to run your own at some point.

Cool, thanks. Assuming I can actually get some players together, it's going to more or less be up to group consensus what we play, but Agon will be in the mix, and I know Pvt. Patterson enjoyed it, so it's definitely a possibility. I can definitely see the Dogs influence in the Island Creation, even if it doesn't work exactly the same way. It might be fun just to roll up a few islands and see what comes up.

Thanks!

D.

[Nev the Deranged]

To get a bit more into the OOC stuff (which I know is preferred here), I will say that despite my trepidations, DRYH is a very easy game to run off the top of your head. The system fully supports just making stuff up, and the character sheet questions really give you a lot to work with. I didn't do as well as I'd have liked at working from the stuff my players put down, but I did use it, and in a longer game I'd have made copies of their sheets for easier reference. That way I could have them to glance at, and more importantly to peruse between sessions for Bang inspiration.

I had planned to do more prep work, fleshing out the NPCs and locations and paradigms of the setting; but in the end I'm glad I didn't. It would have been harder trying to keep my notes straight than it was to just fly by the seat of my pants and let the players have the majority share in the game. I know this is how most of the Forge-y games are supposed to work, but this is the first time I've actually experienced it from the GM side. It was quite liberating, and at times, exhilarating.

As an example of this, I had two NPCs in mind, a location, a Nightmare with lieutenants and minions, and a Macguffin. That, along with a built in reason for the players to be together (they were all in a band), turned out to be all I needed. RE: the NPCs, Hank "Mad" Madigan, and Maris Haier, owners of Mad's Place, the club where the band played. I knew they were both Awake, but I never got around to nailing down their Talents before the game. This worked greatly to my advantage, because I ended up coming up with Talents for them on the fly that doubled as plot devices to move my players along and set up conflicts. The same happened with Ace, another NPC Awake I made up on the spot. Early in the game, I needed to prod the players to the next scene, so I gave Hank the Madness talent of "Firecasting", and had him start a blaze that encouraged them to make a hasty exit. It also had the bonus effect of really sending home the "holy CRAP, things are NOT right" vibe to the players. In the next scene, I needed Ace, whom they had just talked to on the phone, to show up quickly, so I gave him a sort of teleportation talent that got him into the scene immediately, and added a bit more to the players sense of spooky weirdness. And finally, in the penultimate scene, with one player Crashed and not due to wake up before the end of the game, one player basically in control of all the Nightmare's minions, and the third player with nothing meaningful to do, I brought Maris in as an even more serious threat (since Awake are ultimately more dangerous than Nightmares, mechanically), giving her Exhaustion: Gunplay and Madness: Conjuration (allowing her to conjure shells directly into her weapons, giving her the effect of unlimited ammo).

I went into the game feeling underprepared, but the game backed me up. I'd probably handle most NPC Awake the same way in future games.

On another note, I think the fiction of the session is more important and relevant in a game like DRYH, where the setting is malleable, especially if you're not using the suggested background. I can see how each session's fiction feeds into the next in a very organic way, both "plotwise" and "paradigmwise", how the "world" works as opposed to how the rules work. Maybe this is a no-brainer and it's just new to me, at least in the context of RPGs, but I dig it.

For example, Tim's character, Clive, spent so much energy trying to find familiarity in the City that he eventually changed it to meet his desire. It drew from him, and in turn put a bit of itself into him. I didn't consciously think of it that way during play, but in retrospect it seems so obvious. I also don't know how much Tim was aiming for in that regard. There were several instances like that, and maybe that too is common to gaming. I feel sort of like... well, like someone learning a new art, which I guess is true.

[Tim C Koppang]

Dave,

I think I'll keep my comments (in this thread for now anyway) confined to your DRYH game.

After the big zombie escape scene in the back of the club, our band, Serious Moonlight, drove off into the night. We were all pretty freaked out and eventually Bishop pulled the car over next to a cemetery. I'm pretty sure he picked a cemetery for purposes of color more than anything else (after all, we were a goth band). However, after phoning the recently deceased fan's contact for information, we were confronted with three slow-hands (quick-moving monsters, ironically named). The ensuing combat left my character, Clive, alone in the band's van, and the other two behind the door of a mysterious mausoleum, which only "awoken" people could perceive.

Clive attempted a rescue, but to no avail. The slow-hands caught up with him; and by the time he crashed the van through the cemetery, Bishop and Azrial had descended a staircase into "the city". Clive eventually followed, and once all of the characters were in the city together, Dave began to describe it in all of its Dark City glory.

And I think this is where I began to have trouble with the game. I'm not sure if it was the game itself (I haven't read the rules) or with the direction Dave was steering us all in (sorry Dave). Either way, I thought the game started to lag a bit as Dave let us loose to explore the city. Although I was digging the Dark City zombie vibe, once I had a handle on that vibe, I wanted to get back to the heart of what I thought was the conflict in the game. Namely, I thought there would be more about our band and this mysterious thing affecting our fans. Instead, I felt a bit trapped by the city and, frankly, floundered around a bit looking for something to engage with.

Eventually Dave picked up on my frustration and was happy to humor me. I thank him for it because as he's already described, once Clive began attempting to re-live his old life in this new dark city, things at the very least got spooky enough to deliver a suitable climax -- at least for a demo game anyway. The whole thing wrapped up with Bishop claiming dominion over the zombie-like creatures inhabiting the city via some weird crown and a bit of magic. Although Bishop was dethroned by a vengeful Azrial, Clive survived. We ended as I narrated a final scene for Clive. After crashing (falling asleep from insomnia-induced exhaustion) for some undisclosed amount of time, he awoke backstage in a random club. Guitar and beer in hand, he went out to play the gig. But he was alone, and as he peered out into the crowd, he realized that the entire audience was made up of those same zombie freaks that he though he left behind in the city.

All in all, I had a fine time once we got past the slump in the middle of the session. I know that Dave told me that he hadn't GMed a game in some time, so I actually have to give him credit for rolling with things: I think I might have come off a bit demanding.

But I am left with a few questions about DRYH itself.

How do people usually handle talents? I ask because right now I could easily see things quickly devolving into a simple super-hero game with exhaustion being used only as a mechanical resource rather than as a means to push conflict. Are they supposed to be more like super-powers, or something subtler?

Generally, I like the basic dice pool mechanics. But what exactly is supposed to happen when pain dice dominate in a scene? It seems as if pain is the only outcome without a mechanical repercussion for the characters. That doesn't seem quite right to me.

Finally, we didn't use the hope/despair tokens much. I am wondering, though, if the GM is in any way limited in his ability to use despair tokens. In other words, could a GM essentially force a player to crash by imposing extra exhaustion on him via despair? That seems a bit overpowered -- as if it undercuts the entire point of exhaustion.

[Nev the Deranged]

Hey, thanks for jumping in, Tim. I knew I could count on you for the straight dope *g*.

I think I'll keep my comments (in this thread for now anyway) confined to your DRYH game.

That's cool. I've said all I really plan to about the Agon game for now.

After the big zombie escape scene in the back of the club, our band, Serious Moonlight, drove off into the night. We were all pretty freaked out and eventually Bishop pulled the car over next to a cemetery. I'm pretty sure he picked a cemetery for purposes of color more than anything else (after all, we were a goth band). However, after phoning the recently deceased fan's contact for information, we were confronted with three slow-hands (quick-moving monsters, ironically named). The ensuing combat left my character, Clive, alone in the band's van, and the other two behind the door of a mysterious mausoleum, which only "awoken" people could perceive.
[quote[

Yeah. I was totally flying by the seat of my pants, for which I apologized before we even started. I also wondered by Bishop's player (was his name Roy? I wish I'd kept those namecards I had you guys make) picked a cemetery, but that worked out okay. His character was a serial killer, so maybe he was expressing that. The slowhands only move quickly when you're not watching them. As long as someone's keeping an eye on them they are so slow that it's almost hard to tell if they are moving at all. Of course they always hunt in packs of three, so... good thing there were three of you, eh?

Right from character generation on, Tim, you were on somewhat of a different vibe than the other two guys. I blame myself for this, because I went ahead with chargen while you were chatting with the HinterWelt guy who just walked right up and inserted himself, which I was a little annoyed with but decided to just roll with it. I should have waited until you were done so we could all stay on the same page, but I wasn't sure about how much time things would take, and we all paid for it during play as you kept angling your character one way while the other guys were going another. Chalk it up to newbie GM blunder. What makes it worse is that I did it again later on, I don't remember exactly when, but you went to use the restroom and I kept going with them. By the time you got back, you and they were well and truly separated, not just characterwise, but story-feel wise.

Clive attempted a rescue, but to no avail. The slow-hands caught up with him; and by the time he crashed the van through the cemetery, Bishop and Azrial had descended a staircase into "the city". Clive eventually followed, and once all of the characters were in the city together, Dave began to describe it in all of its Dark City glory.

Hmm. I'll admit, I was really sweating it here. I wasn't sure what to do once they were in the mausoleum. This is one of those instances where just when one of the players and I said something ("stairs" in this case) almost simultaneously. I tried to play up the transition by focusing on sonic cues, distance, echoes, etc. Not sure how well I did with that. I think I was drawing from House of Leaves for that stuff.

I think I had the slowhand throw Clive through the mausoleum window because I wasn't sure how well I could handle splitting the "party", which you went ahead and did anyway. Which was fine. In retrospect, maybe I should have left Clive aboveground and seen where that went. Once they got into the City itself, I was not-quite-panicking. They kept trying to engage NPCs that weren't even really NPCs, just color. I knew as soon as I said there were a few people that I should have made the streets eerily deserted instead, because these two psychotic characters were going to be roughing them up. They actually held back more than I expected, but I still had to fall back on making them really one-dimensional. I tried to just make that suit the feel as much as I could, but, as Tim points out, it was somewhat half-baked.

And I think this is where I began to have trouble with the game. I'm not sure if it was the game itself (I haven't read the rules) or with the direction Dave was steering us all in (sorry Dave). Either way, I thought the game started to lag a bit as Dave let us loose to explore the city. Although I was digging the Dark City zombie vibe, once I had a handle on that vibe, I wanted to get back to the heart of what I thought was the conflict in the game. Namely, I thought there would be more about our band and this mysterious thing affecting our fans. Instead, I felt a bit trapped by the city and, frankly, floundered around a bit looking for something to engage with.

Right. You'd think I'd have done some, I dunno, planning, regarding that sort of thing. =\  See, the "zombie" thing didn't actually have anything to do with the band. I just took way too long to introduce the Macguffin (the Crown of the Noth King), because, well, I completely forgot about it until the moment I brought it into play by fiating it into Bishop's pocket. The "zombies" (actually Nothlings dressed as rockers) were actually after Hank Madigan, who had come into possession of the crown. You guys just got caught in the middle. In retrospect, I should have made what little plot I planned out more directly involve you guys, or at the very least I should have remembered and actually used the bits of plot I had worked out. You had a hard time finding something to engage with because there wasn't anything to engage with. I had no idea what to do with Clive as he kept trying to find his normal job, so I just kept fumbling and recycling until it became so clear I was out of ideas that I just gave up and let him find it.

Tim, you did a good job of prodding me ("more conflict!"), and I'm sorry I made you have to do it. In my first post I gushed about how well DRYH handles low-prep, but really I should have done just a little more. At least come up with some more Bangs to toss out, or something, I'm not sure.

For what it's worth, the people of the City are not all Nothlings. Most of them are just people going about their normal routines, over and over and over again. I realize with my crappy portrayal of the generic citizens that they probably all seemed alike.

Eventually Dave picked up on my frustration and was happy to humor me. I thank him for it because as he's already described, once Clive began attempting to re-live his old life in this new dark city, things at the very least got spooky enough to deliver a suitable climax -- at least for a demo game anyway. The whole thing wrapped up with Bishop claiming dominion over the zombie-like creatures inhabiting the city via some weird crown and a bit of magic. Although Bishop was dethroned by a vengeful Azrial, Clive survived. We ended as I narrated a final scene for Clive. After crashing (falling asleep from insomnia-induced exhaustion) for some undisclosed amount of time, he awoke backstage in a random club. Guitar and beer in hand, he went out to play the gig. But he was alone, and as he peered out into the crowd, he realized that the entire audience was made up of those same zombie freaks that he though he left behind in the city.

I should note here that I tried to fiat Clive back into the story so he could participate in the big final conflicts for the other two, but Tim declined, and handled his own denoument without my help. I actually like his ending, sort of both creepy and normal at the same time. He's gone back to doing what he always did... only now he's doing it in the City.

All in all, I had a fine time once we got past the slump in the middle of the session. I know that Dave told me that he hadn't GMed a game in some time, so I actually have to give him credit for rolling with things: I think I might have come off a bit demanding.

Not at all, man. You were right to speak up, I was totally fazed on what to do with you. Actually I was fazed on what to do with the other guys too, that rooftop scene was totally lame until THEY rescued ME by making some shit up that gave ME a hook (how bass ackwards is that?) to pull their characters into the next scene.

I am pretty sure they mostly play D&D, but they took to having narrative authority much better than I took to GMing.

But I am left with a few questions about DRYH itself.

How do people usually handle talents? I ask because right now I could easily see things quickly devolving into a simple super-hero game with exhaustion being used only as a mechanical resource rather than as a means to push conflict. Are they supposed to be more like super-powers, or something subtler?

From the text, you can go however you want with it. Exhaustion talents are "realistic" skills that PCs can have to an insane level of competence, while Madness talents can in fact be super powers, or something subtler, depending on the feel of the game. That's one reason I wanted to do chargen together, so that you guys could set that dial to where you wanted it, and I could roll with it from there. It definitely ended up being more superpowerish than subtle-creepy, in this particular game. I think the rules would handle it just fine however you wanted to define them.

I was myself a little surprised that Exhaustion didn't seem to come up as often as I thought it would. Part of that was because everyone was rolling a lot of Madness nearly every roll. Another reason was that A) I wasn't pushing conflicts hard enough, and B) I failed to come up with good situations where the characters' Exhaustion talents were useful, and C) I didn't have a good grasp on the Pain thresholds to encourage certain levels of risk from the players. In the book, Fred describes how the number of Pain dice the GM chooses to roll directly corresponds to how much risk the player has to invest to have a good chance to succeed, and I forgot to jot that down on my crib notes, so I never quote nailed down what I was doing. Again, my bad.

That said, Clive's Crash and Azrial's Snapping came at perfect times, storywise, although that was probably more us as players rolling with it well than anything else. I wonder if, in a longer game, the whole Despair > Hope > Recovery economy would have been more of a factor. I kept forgetting to spend the Despair tokens I had, I guess I was saving them for some big finale (which is eventually what I ended up using them for).

Generally, I like the basic dice pool mechanics. But what exactly is supposed to happen when pain dice dominate in a scene? It seems as if pain is the only outcome without a mechanical repercussion for the characters. That doesn't seem quite right to me.

Finally, we didn't use the hope/despair tokens much. I am wondering, though, if the GM is in any way limited in his ability to use despair tokens. In other words, could a GM essentially force a player to crash by imposing extra exhaustion on him via despair? That seems a bit overpowered -- as if it undercuts the entire point of exhaustion.

The GM getting Despair is the only mechanical effect of Pain dominating. And yeah, that seemed a bit weak to me too, which is probably why I mistakenly added the mechanics for PCs losing conflicts to that part of the quick reference sheet, because it seemed to fit. That said, I was probably not making proper use of the Despair tokens when I got them- if I had been really hammering you guys with them, thus giving you Hope to spend, it probably would have kickstarted that economy and it might have hummed along like it's probably supposed to rather than sputter like it did.

I was thinking about the Token thing, and what it boils down to is that the GM can ONLY affect what pool dominates a scene, he cannot affect whether the character wins or loses; and the Player can ONLY affect whether the character wins or loses, NOT what pool dominates the scene- OR use them BETWEEN conflicts to Recover. So yes, the GM can totally force a player toward Crashing or Snapping, but that feeds into the players' ability to Recover, or succeed at conflicts, whichever is more important to them.

I understand your concerns, though. I think a one shot is probably not enough to say for sure.

Thanks a lot for playing and for speaking up, both in the game and now. I know Fred Hicks is really good about answering questions about the game (he's answered several for me, most of which I forgot to use), so if he sees this he will probably be able to shed some light.

D.

[Nev the Deranged]

CRAPSTICKS... I knew I meant to doublecheck the quotes before posting that. DAMN this no-editing thing >.<

*sigh*

[Nev the Deranged]

***EDITED AND FIXED, this version should be readable at least, if someone wants to kill the other one that'd be great. Thanks***


Hey, thanks for jumping in, Tim. I knew I could count on you for the straight dope *g*.

I think I'll keep my comments (in this thread for now anyway) confined to your DRYH game.

That's cool. I've said all I really plan to about the Agon game for now.

After the big zombie escape scene in the back of the club, our band, Serious Moonlight, drove off into the night. We were all pretty freaked out and eventually Bishop pulled the car over next to a cemetery. I'm pretty sure he picked a cemetery for purposes of color more than anything else (after all, we were a goth band). However, after phoning the recently deceased fan's contact for information, we were confronted with three slow-hands (quick-moving monsters, ironically named). The ensuing combat left my character, Clive, alone in the band's van, and the other two behind the door of a mysterious mausoleum, which only "awoken" people could perceive.

Yeah. I was totally flying by the seat of my pants, for which I apologized before we even started. I also wondered by Bishop's player (was his name Roy? I wish I'd kept those namecards I had you guys make) picked a cemetery, but that worked out okay. His character was a serial killer, so maybe he was expressing that. The slowhands only move quickly when you're not watching them. As long as someone's keeping an eye on them they are so slow that it's almost hard to tell if they are moving at all. Of course they always hunt in packs of three, so... good thing there were three of you, eh?

Right from character generation on, Tim, you were on somewhat of a different vibe than the other two guys. I blame myself for this, because I went ahead with chargen while you were chatting with the HinterWelt guy who just walked right up and inserted himself, which I was a little annoyed with but decided to just roll with it. I should have waited until you were done so we could all stay on the same page, but I wasn't sure about how much time things would take, and we all paid for it during play as you kept angling your character one way while the other guys were going another. Chalk it up to newbie GM blunder. What makes it worse is that I did it again later on, I don't remember exactly when, but you went to use the restroom and I kept going with them. By the time you got back, you and they were well and truly separated, not just characterwise, but story-feel wise.

Clive attempted a rescue, but to no avail. The slow-hands caught up with him; and by the time he crashed the van through the cemetery, Bishop and Azrial had descended a staircase into "the city". Clive eventually followed, and once all of the characters were in the city together, Dave began to describe it in all of its Dark City glory.

Hmm. I'll admit, I was really sweating it here. I wasn't sure what to do once they were in the mausoleum. This is one of those instances where just when one of the players and I said something ("stairs" in this case) almost simultaneously. I tried to play up the transition by focusing on sonic cues, distance, echoes, etc. Not sure how well I did with that. I think I was drawing from House of Leaves for that stuff.

I think I had the slowhand throw Clive through the mausoleum window because I wasn't sure how well I could handle splitting the "party", which you went ahead and did anyway. Which was fine. In retrospect, maybe I should have left Clive aboveground and seen where that went. Once they got into the City itself, I was not-quite-panicking. They kept trying to engage NPCs that weren't even really NPCs, just color. I knew as soon as I said there were a few people that I should have made the streets eerily deserted instead, because these two psychotic characters were going to be roughing them up. They actually held back more than I expected, but I still had to fall back on making them really one-dimensional. I tried to just make that suit the feel as much as I could, but, as Tim points out, it was somewhat half-baked.

And I think this is where I began to have trouble with the game. I'm not sure if it was the game itself (I haven't read the rules) or with the direction Dave was steering us all in (sorry Dave). Either way, I thought the game started to lag a bit as Dave let us loose to explore the city. Although I was digging the Dark City zombie vibe, once I had a handle on that vibe, I wanted to get back to the heart of what I thought was the conflict in the game. Namely, I thought there would be more about our band and this mysterious thing affecting our fans. Instead, I felt a bit trapped by the city and, frankly, floundered around a bit looking for something to engage with.

Right. You'd think I'd have done some, I dunno, planning, regarding that sort of thing. =\  See, the "zombie" thing didn't actually have anything to do with the band. I just took way too long to introduce the Macguffin (the Crown of the Noth King), because, well, I completely forgot about it until the moment I brought it into play by fiating it into Bishop's pocket. The "zombies" (actually Nothlings dressed as rockers) were actually after Hank Madigan, who had come into possession of the crown. You guys just got caught in the middle. In retrospect, I should have made what little plot I planned out more directly involve you guys, or at the very least I should have remembered and actually used the bits of plot I had worked out. You had a hard time finding something to engage with because there wasn't anything to engage with. I had no idea what to do with Clive as he kept trying to find his normal job, so I just kept fumbling and recycling until it became so clear I was out of ideas that I just gave up and let him find it.

Tim, you did a good job of prodding me ("more conflict!"), and I'm sorry I made you have to do it. In my first post I gushed about how well DRYH handles low-prep, but really I should have done just a little more. At least come up with some more Bangs to toss out, or something, I'm not sure.

For what it's worth, the people of the City are not all Nothlings. Most of them are just people going about their normal routines, over and over and over again. I realize with my crappy portrayal of the generic citizens that they probably all seemed alike.

Eventually Dave picked up on my frustration and was happy to humor me. I thank him for it because as he's already described, once Clive began attempting to re-live his old life in this new dark city, things at the very least got spooky enough to deliver a suitable climax -- at least for a demo game anyway. The whole thing wrapped up with Bishop claiming dominion over the zombie-like creatures inhabiting the city via some weird crown and a bit of magic. Although Bishop was dethroned by a vengeful Azrial, Clive survived. We ended as I narrated a final scene for Clive. After crashing (falling asleep from insomnia-induced exhaustion) for some undisclosed amount of time, he awoke backstage in a random club. Guitar and beer in hand, he went out to play the gig. But he was alone, and as he peered out into the crowd, he realized that the entire audience was made up of those same zombie freaks that he though he left behind in the city.

I should note here that I tried to fiat Clive back into the story so he could participate in the big final conflicts for the other two, but Tim declined, and handled his own denoument without my help. I actually like his ending, sort of both creepy and normal at the same time. He's gone back to doing what he always did... only now he's doing it in the City.

All in all, I had a fine time once we got past the slump in the middle of the session. I know that Dave told me that he hadn't GMed a game in some time, so I actually have to give him credit for rolling with things: I think I might have come off a bit demanding.

Not at all, man. You were right to speak up, I was totally fazed on what to do with you. Actually I was fazed on what to do with the other guys too, that rooftop scene was totally lame until THEY rescued ME by making some shit up that gave ME a hook (how bass ackwards is that?) to pull their characters into the next scene.

I am pretty sure they mostly play D&D, but they took to having narrative authority much better than I took to GMing.

But I am left with a few questions about DRYH itself.

How do people usually handle talents? I ask because right now I could easily see things quickly devolving into a simple super-hero game with exhaustion being used only as a mechanical resource rather than as a means to push conflict. Are they supposed to be more like super-powers, or something subtler?

From the text, you can go however you want with it. Exhaustion talents are "realistic" skills that PCs can have to an insane level of competence, while Madness talents can in fact be super powers, or something subtler, depending on the feel of the game. That's one reason I wanted to do chargen together, so that you guys could set that dial to where you wanted it, and I could roll with it from there. It definitely ended up being more superpowerish than subtle-creepy, in this particular game. I think the rules would handle it just fine however you wanted to define them.

I was myself a little surprised that Exhaustion didn't seem to come up as often as I thought it would. Part of that was because everyone was rolling a lot of Madness nearly every roll. Another reason was that A) I wasn't pushing conflicts hard enough, and B) I failed to come up with good situations where the characters' Exhaustion talents were useful, and C) I didn't have a good grasp on the Pain thresholds to encourage certain levels of risk from the players. In the book, Fred describes how the number of Pain dice the GM chooses to roll directly corresponds to how much risk the player has to invest to have a good chance to succeed, and I forgot to jot that down on my crib notes, so I never quote nailed down what I was doing. Again, my bad.

That said, Clive's Crash and Azrial's Snapping came at perfect times, storywise, although that was probably more us as players rolling with it well than anything else. I wonder if, in a longer game, the whole Despair > Hope > Recovery economy would have been more of a factor. I kept forgetting to spend the Despair tokens I had, I guess I was saving them for some big finale (which is eventually what I ended up using them for).

Generally, I like the basic dice pool mechanics. But what exactly is supposed to happen when pain dice dominate in a scene? It seems as if pain is the only outcome without a mechanical repercussion for the characters. That doesn't seem quite right to me.

Finally, we didn't use the hope/despair tokens much. I am wondering, though, if the GM is in any way limited in his ability to use despair tokens. In other words, could a GM essentially force a player to crash by imposing extra exhaustion on him via despair? That seems a bit overpowered -- as if it undercuts the entire point of exhaustion.

The GM getting Despair is the only mechanical effect of Pain dominating. And yeah, that seemed a bit weak to me too, which is probably why I mistakenly added the mechanics for PCs losing conflicts to that part of the quick reference sheet, because it seemed to fit. That said, I was probably not making proper use of the Despair tokens when I got them- if I had been really hammering you guys with them, thus giving you Hope to spend, it probably would have kickstarted that economy and it might have hummed along like it's probably supposed to rather than sputter like it did.

I was thinking about the Token thing, and what it boils down to is that the GM can ONLY affect what pool dominates a scene, he cannot affect whether the character wins or loses; and the Player can ONLY affect whether the character wins or loses, NOT what pool dominates the scene- OR use them BETWEEN conflicts to Recover. So yes, the GM can totally force a player toward Crashing or Snapping, but that feeds into the players' ability to Recover, or succeed at conflicts, whichever is more important to them.

I understand your concerns, though. I think a one shot is probably not enough to say for sure.

Thanks a lot for playing and for speaking up, both in the game and now. I know Fred Hicks is really good about answering questions about the game (he's answered several for me, most of which I forgot to use), so if he sees this he will probably be able to shed some light.

D.

[iago]

Pain dominating creating Despair coins *should* only seem weak so long as the GM doesn't use the Despair coins aggressively, at the exact right times to force the players to gain another point of exhaustion when they really don't want to (by spending the despair to cause Exhaustion to dominate), or similarly, causing madness to dominate when that'd be bad (by spending the despair to cause Madness to dominate).  At its best, this is used at those critical times when crashing and snapping are imminent.

Pain's tendency to dominate is also -- to some extent -- an insulation for the players against their own dice dominating.  Usually if pain is dominating, it's because pain was set very high.  If pain was set very high, then the player had to invest heavily in madness and exhaustion in order to get enough dice to beat it.

This can produce the (somewhat counterintuitive) effect in DRYH that lower pain conflicts tend to be worse for the players later on in the game, when their exhaustion's built up a bit or they're low on fight/flight responses.

[Nev the Deranged]

Pain dominating creating Despair coins *should* only seem weak so long as the GM doesn't use the Despair coins aggressively, at the exact right times to force the players to gain another point of exhaustion when they really don't want to (by spending the despair to cause Exhaustion to dominate), or similarly, causing madness to dominate when that'd be bad (by spending the despair to cause Madness to dominate).  At its best, this is used at those critical times when crashing and snapping are imminent.

Pain's tendency to dominate is also -- to some extent -- an insulation for the players against their own dice dominating.  Usually if pain is dominating, it's because pain was set very high.  If pain was set very high, then the player had to invest heavily in madness and exhaustion in order to get enough dice to beat it.

This can produce the (somewhat counterintuitive) effect in DRYH that lower pain conflicts tend to be worse for the players later on in the game, when their exhaustion's built up a bit or they're low on fight/flight responses.

Hm. Yeah, I can see this. I did use the Despair tokens I had for exactly that- forcing Clive to Crash and Azrial to Snap, but I held off until the last couple scenes, when maybe I should have been spending them throughout.

After the first conflict, I was rolling mostly 6 Pain, and then when things got heavy, I jumped right up to 12. The players were pretty much always rolling everything they could get their hands on, so I had to roll big to give them any kind of meaningful opposition.

Again, I think the system would flow more smoothly in a longer game, an inexperienced GM trying to cram it into a 4 hour timeslot isn't going to make any system look it's best.

Thanks, Fred!