[SAN!] system changes, highlights: "Jimbo's Saga" "Fantastical Wizard of Frotz"

[Marshall Burns]

Okay, I haven't been posting about it, but we've been playing the HELL out of this game.  Seriously, I can barely pull my players away from it.  If I ask, "Which game should we play?" first thing out of their mouths is "Super Action Now!"  Which is good on one level, because it's been fun every time we played it, but it's also not so great on another level, because I've got quite a list of other designs I want to test out, not to mention published games that I want to play.  I mean, SAN! is great, but man cannot live on absurdism and slapstick alone.

But, anyway, system changes.  The most exciting development in the design has been an alteration of the dice mechanics.  Here's the old way:  you describe your goal and your method of achieving that goal, trying to ping as many traits as possible; then, you roll all the dice conferred by those traits, which is between 1 & 5 each, on d6, d8, d10, and d12 (the more constrained the trait, the bigger the die; the more prevalent the trait, the more dice).  You roll a TON of dice in this game, which is a blast by itself if you own enough dice (I bought one of these puppies and never looked back).  Then you total all the values of the dice and compare it to the contesting roll, and the bigger one wins.

The new way is basically the same, but with some changes that make a ton of difference.  First off, the sizes involved are now d6, d8, d12, and d20.  Second, you don't total the values; you count how many of them come up 5 or higher, which is a "success," and the side with more successes wins.  If you get zero successes, that's a botch and things go terribly, terribly wrong (much more frequently than the old "Snake Eyes" rule where you had to roll all 1s to botch).  Much, MUCH faster, and, in a game where rolls come a mile a minute, much, much more fun.

Now those die sizes might seem weird, but they work much better.  See, here's the odds of a "success" for each size of die:

d6: ~33%
d8: 50%   (+17 from d6)
d10: 60% (+10 from d8)
d12: ~67% (+7 from d10, but +17 from d8)
d20: 80% (+13 from d12, or +20 from d10)

See what I mean?  It makes the progression much more even to take out d10 and d20, making each size increase actually worth it.

Other changes to the system:  some tweaks to the TILT economy; Twist cost dropped to 3, FUdge down to 5, and introducing the Super Endowment, which enables you to endow one thing with as many traits as you feel like for 5 TILT.  Oh, and Change only costs 1, and you can use it immediately again on the same player for free, but the player you used it on has license to get as crazy as they want, up to and including a Twist for free.

Example
HEATHER:  I get real angry to try to intimidate him! My "Rage!  Aaarrrg!" trait is 4d12!
GREG:  CHANGE!
HEATHER:  Um, I start crying to win his sympathy!  My "Pretending to cry to get what I want" trait is 2d20!
GREG:  CHANGE!
HEATHER:  I throw 5d20 turtles at him!
GREG:  What?

And, finally, to go with the Knack (a really, really specific feat that you succeed at uncontestably 99% of the time) we now have the Shortcoming, something that you BOTCH 99% of the time.  Why would you ever try to do it if you botch it 99% of the time?  Because it's funny.

And, I wanted to relate some highlights of some game sessions.  My two favorites right now are "Jimbo's Saga" and "The Fantastical Wizard of Frotz."  The interesting thing about these games was that our characters were actually working together, but we were still Bringin' It as hard as we could through NPCs and Twists.

In "Jimbo's Saga," Courtney played a sullen, teenage goth girl named Joy (who could do ear-shattering screams and, later on, summon the spirits of the dead), Stephen played a car salesman named Andy (who could blind people with his smile and win just about anybody over), and I played Jimbo the Barbarian (who wore chainmail boxer shorts and could do barbarian stuff).

As we were setting up the situation, we decided to start it in the middle of the city.  Wait a minute, a barbarian in the city?  So I'm gonna have him be all freaked out by the cars and weird buildings and cellphones and stuff, right?  Like HELL!  I had him interpret everything he saw according to what he was used to, without a moment's hesitation.  So that gorilla playing three-card monte on the sidewalk (seriously) was CLEARLY a savage man-ape sent to kill me by my arch-nemesis, the Skull Faced Man!  And that big white balloon man with flailing arms on top of the car dealership?  CLEARLY a grisly spectre that needs to taste the might of the mystical blade of Kor!  And that sullen goth girl?  CLEARLY a priestess of dark gods, not to be trusted at all!

My favorite moment in this game:  we were riding on moose-back at the Grand Canyon, because a burning bush told Jimbo he had to jump off a cliff while drinking a goat's blood to rid himself of a leprosy curse inflicted upon him by a horde of iguanas that turned out to be inside the aforementioned balloon/spectre (seriously, and just getting the blood was an adventure in itself, with poison ivy, an exploding kangaroo, and a barn haunted by the ghost of Jack the Ripper).  The entire game, Andy had been trying to win Joy over as a friend, while Jimbo (who had already been made Andy's friend) was keeping a suspicious eye on her, and Joy hated both of them and was just coming along because she was bored.  At the Grand Canyon, Joy finally says to Andy, "I hate you."  Guess what?  Andy's GOTCHA! was "I can make anyone who says they hate me immediately into my friend."  And, so I went on this ridiculous in-character speech as Jimbo, waxing poetic about the sunset over the Grand Canyon and how even the most unlikely people, even priestesses of dark gods, can turn out to be friends in the end, and Stephen INTERRUPTED it with a Twist that a giant rock came hurtling out of nowhere and hit me, and the rolls determined that it knocked me off the moose and down into the canyon.  That whole series of events was so PERFECT, I couldn't stop laughing for like five minutes.

In "The Fantastical Wizard of Frotz," Stephen played a god of the past named Enoch Methusela, who was Father Time's uncle, Courtney played a gold-hungry troll named Jinx, and I played a mime named Mel who could conjure invisible objects with real physical presence by miming them.  When we had made the characters, I said, "You know what this sounds like?  A Wizard of Oz kind of thing."  Which is what we decided to do.  Enoch wanted a beard, Jinx wanted a hairbrush, and Mel wanted a funnybone (so he could make people laugh), and they met each other one at a time and joined in on the journey to see the Wizard in the Miserable City.  There was also an NPC who joined, a break-dancing robot named Sinbad who wanted an off-switch so he could stop break-dancing.  Of course, we incurred the wrath of the Wicked Weasel of the West, and the Wizard had us perform a variety of ridiculous tasks before he would grant our heart's desire (including mowing his flesh-eating demon grass, retrieving his collectible Zippo lighter from an excited elephant, and defeating an enormous man-eating toad--speaking of all this, the "From the Hat" rules are AWESOME).

Best moment in this game:  in framing the scene in which we confront the Wicked Weasel of the West, we pulled from the hat "An angry armadillo attacks! Angry 3d12; Alliteration 2d20" (which I had put into the hat) and "A is for Amazing Alligator Attack!" (which Stephen had put into the hat).  Did I mention that the "From the Hat" rules are AWESOME?  Seriously, it is ridiculous how often weird, hilarious synchronicity like that crops up; at least once per game.  And that Amazing Alligator attacked Jinx the troll, biting his arm and just hanging there.  Guess what?  Jinx had a "Skinning animals" trait, and had in a previous scene made a stone knife worth four or five dice, and, as the alligator hung from his outstretched arm, took that knife like SHHHCK! and skinned that alligator like a frickin' squirrel.  Oh, and the way we killed the Wicked Weasel of the West was priceless:  Jinx had this bubbling cauldron full of "Irrestible but scalding hot coffee" (pulled from the hat in Jinx's introductory scene), and it was so irresistable that the Weasel dove into it, and it was so scalding hot that he was boiled alive, and his coffee-stained bones floated to the surface.  Probably the most gruesome thing to happen in SAN! yet.

Such a wonderful game.

-Marshall

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Marshall,

Confusion: is the d20 included or not?

Best, Ron

[Marshall Burns]

Oh, crap, yeah, it is.

The sentence " It makes the progression much more even to take out d10 and d20, making each size increase actually worth it" should have read "take out d10 and add d20."

Whoops.

-Marshall