[The Gazette] I don't need hands to kill you!

[noahtrammell]

 For those who don't know, I'm a new member to the Forge who absolutely loves RPG's but hasn't had much experience in design.  I've been writing a micro-game called The Gazette which creates short stories set in the Old West.  It looks like the rules are going to clock in around ten pages.  The game only requires two players.
Today my brother and I ran a playtest that lasted for probably around forty-five minutes.  The game involves a Main Character contending with an Outlaw.  The resolution system uses Draw Poker rules with chips representing something along the lines of health, or the character's ability to stay in the story.
While it's perfectly possible to play a game with no violence, this game ended up becoming something of a bloodfest.  It started when my brother created a character named Peter Harrow who had no Relationship except with himself.  A retired bandit with a skill for knife-fighting, he was a hermit who rarely left his house except to buy lemonade.  This presented a problem because part of the game is the fact that the Outlaw character is supposed to make the MC sacrifice a Belief (such as "I will never take a life") and suffer a Cost (such as "If I leave this belief I'll never find it again) in trying to defend his Relationship with the Townspeople.
The Outlaw is supposed to be created in direct opposition to the Main Character.  I created an Outlaw called Red Joe, a notoriously violent outlaw who had been betrayed by Harrow many years ago.  Outlaws have Methods that give them extra cards in Conflict Scenes and Objects, or goals.  My Methods were Violence and Fear.  My Object was to kill Harrow and anyone close to him.
 
  We started the game with Red Joe coming into town and intimidating some Townsfolk with pistols and dangerous stares and the like.
  In Harrow's scenes, he described a few flashbacks and a lot of lemonade-drinking.  Part of the rules is that to use a Trait or Method in a Conflict Scene, one must first show it in a Revelation Scene.  This ended up working really well as both characters demonstrated their Traits, then headed for a showdown.  Red Joe was heading up to Harrow's house after grilling an old woman for its location, then thought better of it and decided to ambush Harrow from the hardware store.
  Peter Harrow, meanwhile, had run out of lemonade and was heading to the General Store to get some more.  At first he narrated walking straight in, but I asked him to end right as he was about to walk into the store.  He agreed, and I liked the way the freeform nature of the game worked.  It allowed us both to discuss things like placement, etc. in the fiction if one of us had a cool scene in mind.
  He was about to open the door when the old lady came up to him and tried to warn him about Red Joe.  In the rules, the Outlaw's actions must be narrated in the third person.  This created a kind of separation between me and the Outlaw, and I think made it possible to play as bad a character as Joe became.  As the old lady tried to warn Harrow, Red Joe shot her through the window and headed for the door, intending to take Peter down quickly.
  From there, the game went farther down a long, bloody road.  The point of the betting mechanic is that the more chips you put in, the more elements you can threaten in the fiction.  I walked out into the street as Harrow performed a rolling dive and started blasting the street, bullets pouncing off buildings and rocks like cats afire.  From then on, massacre became the order of the day for Red Joe's actions, as he had to keep on using his Violence and Fear Methods to stay ahead of Harrow in the draw.
  We tussled for a few rounds, going back and forth, then my brother narrated Harrow attempting to slice off Red Joe's hands.  It was then that something struck me.  First of all, bloody stumps are cooler weapons than revolvers, as has already been proved by Seth Ben-Ezra's playtest of Blood Red Sands.  Second, I had a very low chance of winning this hand and only a few chips left to bet with.  I looked at my brother and said "Okay."  I could stay in the game longer by letting my character get beaten up.
  The next two rounds were a flurry of knives and colorful descriptions of spraying blood and armstumps being used as clubs.  In the end, however, I still began to bleed chips.  During the last round, Red Joe went absolutely insane, revealing the dark depths of his twisted soul.  At last Harrow managed to land a killing blow, cutting off Joe's head and the rest of his arms, and Red Joe shuddered out of life, an insane smile frozen on his face.
  My brother was now able to give a final monologue of victory.  Unfortunately, he had abandoned his Belief to win the fight.  As a result, he was now unable to go back to being a man of peace.  In the true form of this particular game, he looked about at the littered corpses, and fell on his own knives, completing the collage of chaos and rather pointless death.

  Part of me wants to adjust the system to create a less...inane kind of story, but the other, much larger part wants to explore the idea that by taking damage you can stay in the game longer.  I have to admit it, that other part had quite a lot of fun, too.

[Christoph Boeckle]

Hi Noah

This seems like a really cool project to me. Any questions? Can we be of some help? What are your plans for the next steps (more play-testing, contacting other groups for play-testing, ...)?

[noahtrammell]

  Quite frankly, I don't think I'm going to go forward on the project.  The real point of designing was just to finish something, no matter how small. However, I am implementing a few of the ideas (harming your in-game character to stay in the battle longer) in my Game Chef entry Land of Ill Harvest.  Because of my general love of the mythic Old West, I'm sure I'll return to the subject matter, but probably not the game as it is.
  What did you find cool about the project?

[Christoph Boeckle]

Hi there

The two-player, short session, in-your-face and the use of the western tropes. Simple and grabby from what I could read. I really like Dust Devils for the in-your-faceness and the western tropes, so I was curious to see another take at the subject.

I understand your points. I think it was Vincent Baker, or perhaps Ben Lehman, who said that for any published game, they had about two other games, but that those were often instrumental at getting things done right in the "polished" ones.

I wish you a fruitful Game Chef!

[noahtrammell]

  Thank you very much, it's good to hear that someone was really grabbed by your idea.  Good luck in your endeavors, too.