Unsung: SWAT (session 1)

[xiombarg]

Well, after all sorts of scheduling mishaps, I finally got to run Unsung tonight (Wednesday) on IRC. We used my latest draft of the ruleset:

http://ivanhoeunbound.com/unsung_playtest.html

The game surrounded a SWAT team in NYC. We had three characters.

* The squeaky-clean Christian Guerrera. His dad was a dirty cop, and Christian is trying to clear his name. A negotiator and strategian.

* Jason Frix, recently back on the force after a forced leave of absense after his wife and child were killed by gang violence. The "cop on the edge".

* Ricky Wilsons.  Ricky is the replacement for the team EOD (emergency ordinance destruction,  AKA the Bomb Squad) officer, Mack Owenthal, who was blown to small bits last  week by a bomb apparently planted as a distraction by a gang of bank robbers. Ricky has been through the basic schooling for his specialty, but is otherwise completely green. This doesn't engender any confidence amongst his team mates. He's a blank slate waiting to be written on in terms of whether he'll grow into the job or whether it will eat him alive.

I'll post character sheets if people are interested. Ricky was played by our own Mike Holmes, and was built on slightly less points than the other two. Jason Frix had a Responsibility of 5, which turned out be interesting...

Below are links to the logs. The first link is a slightly edited log of the narration, and the second link is the OOC chatter, including die rolls.

http://ivanhoeunbound.com/unsung1_nar.txt
http://ivanhoeunbound.com/unsung1_ooc.txt

I think it went pretty well. Comments from the peanut gallery -- especially from those who played -- are welcome. Next session I'm going to have a bomb threat to put Ricky in the spotlight -- this session focused more on the interaction between Jason and Christian.

[MachMoth]

OMG, I was about to send you guys some money to hire a witch doctor or something.  To call that a scheduling mishap is very much an understatement.  No sir, not natural.  

Anyways, glad to see it finally tested.  It isn't a game I wanted to play all that much, myself, but one I just had to see in action.  Great job, and best of luck on the next and future sessions.  I'd mark my calender, but I don't think it could handle that kind of eraser stress.

[Grover]

Y'know, I found it surprising how gung-ho the cops were even at the start.  This may be a genre convention choice you were making, but I think the SWAT team went over the top in the methods they used to apprehend this guy.  Three people got shot trying to bring this guy in on a weapons possession and drug dealing charge.
Now, admittedly, this is a guy who is going to try to pull the media in and make you look bad, but on the other hand, he's not just a low life criminal.  If he disappears, he's basically gonna have to leave his music career behind.  To say nothing of the fact that the draconian drug laws we've got basically mean the government gets to call dibs on his stuff because of the drug charge.  So I don't think there was any need to go in as aggressively as you did.
Now, if you had good reason to believe he was going to violently resist arrest, and were determined to minimize the damage, I still think you went about it the wrong way.  I don't think you needed to behave as aggressively as you did with the bystanders.  With 4 people with assault rifles around, I don't think it was necessary to do more than clear a path to where you needed to go.  An even better solution would be to pick a better time to go in.  At 3 or 4 in the morning, there will probably be fewer gang members around, and no young children.  As a bonus, your target will probably be asleep.
Once you got to the apartment, I don't actually have that many problems.  Once he pulls a gun on you, shooting him is reasonable (to me - I'm not talking about game terms here :)  An interesting point that lawyers might go after:  IIRC anyone killed during the comission of a felony makes a murder charge for the felons.  Now, nobody was killed, but I'm pretty sure that violently resisting arrest is a serious crime.  That might give the rapper serious problems in relation to the girl who was shot, as well as the cop.
Anyway, it looked like fun, I just like to pick nits - can you tell I'm a bit of a simulationist ;)

[Mike Holmes]

Hi Grover, welcome to the Forge.

The thing is, if you look at the OOC log, some of this might become clear to you. That is, we didn't really do any planning at all. We decided early that we really weren't interested in the tactics of the situation, and just wanted to get our characters in trouble. As such, we just asked the GM to frame us into the action.

The game isn't about doing well in the tactical situation, in fact it's all about characters in situations that go to hell. In the OOC log, you'll see that, in fact, it was we the players who caused most of the shooting to occur as an accident (I had my character fire, ineffectively as it happened, as a green response to the situation). That's one of the mechanics of the game, that the players make things go wrong for each other, and put the characters in situations where they might just lose their cool.

So, basically in telling us that our characters did a bad job, you're complimenting us as players. Thanks. That's exacltly how Unsung is supposed to go. If we'd gone in, apprehended the bad guy, and it had all been a clean and crisp operation, then we woudn't have been doing or jobs.

Read the rules if you haven't already, and you'll see what I mean. Nobody really cares what happens to the Rapper in this case. We're only interested in the ramifications to the various PCs. What's important is that Frix may be spiraling out of control, that Guerrera is being pressured to do something unethical or make an enemy, and that my character is learning by observation, which will be telling when he has a choice to make.

Mike

[Lxndr]

Remember, we have:

The newbie bomb-squad guy
The former leader of the group, who's on the edge
A new leader, who's probably almost TOO MUCH the straight-man for this sort of job.

And two NPCs, one of them almost as green as our bomb-guy, the other vaguely pragmatic but we haven't seen much, personality-wise.

The one thing that Grover pointed out that, in retrospect, I think we should've done, is go in late at night, instead of while kids are going to be around.  But I guess that's why we're not cops, and our characters are.

Ah well.  It's a learning experience.  We still had a great time, and as Mike pointed out, the lack of tactical choices (though our characters surely had a good reason for them) really helped the gameplay.

I'm looking forward to seeing the Ricky/Frisky/Christian odd-relationship triangle go even further.  Setting my guy up as the "new leader" with Jason being the "old one" was a last minute tweak that helped me, at least, really find my voice with my character.

As for a bomb threat, I considered Gifting Ricky with a bomb somewhere, but never found a good spot.  c'est la vie, eh?

[Mike Holmes]

The one thing that Grover pointed out that, in retrospect, I think we should've done, is go in late at night, instead of while kids are going to be around.  But I guess that's why we're not cops, and our characters are.

We didn't ask to plan. It's dramatic liscense. The kids made it more interesting. Do you need an exaplanation to make it more plausible? Um, OK, we'd been told that he was going to be going underground probably only an hour or so later, and that if we didn't go in then and there with our current intelligence, that we'd likely lose the suspect.

There, problem solved. The point is that this isn't germane to the action that the game represents. So why make it a part of play at all? Kirt did just fine setting it up, IMO. This is improv, not a well scripted and thought out show. Given these circumstances, expecting complete plausibility is just too high a standard. We created a dramatic situation and the characters developed along appropriate lines. We win!

Mike

[xiombarg]

Also, frankly, I don't think going in late at night would have made a difference -- maybe the rugrats wouldn't have been there, but the teenage kids would have still been there, to a greater or lesser degree.

I posted the log on my LiveJournal and we might get a fourth player. I'm hoping she'll take over Candace, to give her a voice. (BTW, the NPCs were relatively quiet as I didn't want to eclipse the PC/PC interaction, tho I used Candace to heighten the Christian/Jason tension.)

So, Mike, any comments on the mechanics? You seemed to be bordering on some sort of comment last night. :)