Metal Opera: A One Night Band

[hix]

We played Metal Opera three weeks ago as a fill-in one shot game while a player was away. Thanks to everyone for their help in this thread.

The group decided to play with a cartoony look to the universe – in the style of Daftpunk's Interstellar 5555. Their starting situation was:

* The gig didn't fire last night.
* We're stuck in the worst hotel in the world with no money.
* Everybody knows us - and not in a good way.
* The mini-bar's empty.
* We sunk all our money into our tour t-shirts and someone stole them before the gig.

We agreed to play GM-less because the game seemed like Universalis in terms of narration and plotting. But as soon as we needed an NPC, I took a GM role and spent most of the night driving forward plot developments.

* The Robotic Hotel Manager threatens to disinfect the hotel room with the band in it!
* Band leaps from the 82d floor to escape.
* They convert a hover-bus-load of nuns to the power of rock.
* The revolution starts in Sector 5 of New Neotopia.
* The city goes unnaturally quiet.

Any time I ran out of ideas (or the current set-piece ran out of steam) we rolled to see who'd contribute a new idea to put the situation back in the crapper.

The first time we did this was to decide who would set up why it's gone quiet. Unfortunately it was the player who'd suggested the quietness in the first place – which felt a little like her throwing the Ball out and us throwing it straight back to her. In the end, though, it worked out well

* The Band is attacked by jet-pack-businessmen wearing evil mind-controlling tour T-shirts.
* They anger the Tyrant of the Mind (TOTM)...
* ... and fall into the Machine converting tour tshirts to evil mind-controlling tour T-shirts.
* Changing the Machine's setting from "Evil Mind Control" to "All-star-rock'n'roll-freakout!"
* Revealed! TOTM and the Band's lead singer, Miss Priss once had a one night stand.
* TOTM travels back in time to kill the Miss Priss of 15 years ago.

One of the players gained a lot of narrative control when the band fell into the t-shirts. When he specified that they weren't evil, that threw me – I wanted them to fight their own evil tour merchandise. However, I decided to apply the lessons I learned here and in theatre-sports, rolled with it – and the story became sooo much more fun.

* 15 years ago, New Neotopia was controlled by evil holographic bunnies.
* A city block of buildings falls on TOTM.
* The band's Sound and Lighting tech revealed as the amnesiac future self of TOTM.
* The Band battles their own soft-metal playing evil twins.
* They rescue Miss Priss's soul from TOTM and ensure the formation of Steel Wool Jersey.

The ending was probably the coolest thing about the game. You see, it was lame. No one was satisfied. And I led the complaints about how much it didn't feel right, it felt anti-climactic. So one of the players suggested we re-do it. She was right. It was like the dying-in-the-desert ending of Wayne's World 2 followed by the spectacular fireworks ending of Independence Day. IOW, it felt right for the game we were playing.

Other (minor) notes:
The way I ran it, the whole session was one continuous escape/chase/fight - absolutely no scene framing – not bad but pretty one-dimensional. There was a lack of engaging characters with individual stories and a lot of falling down from high places and fighting.

For various reasons, I had 3 minutes to read the rules and that's why we played with d10s (as opposed to d6s). This meant that characters' Rocking Scores increased way more quickly (50% chance of it happening) which was great for playing an entire game in 2 hours. It also meant we were less likely to match and take control – but happened often enough.

When a player achieved the Power of Rock in a particular score, I basically made them the Noble (as in Nobilis) of whatever effect they'd just used. For instance, one character who looked like the devil took over the army of rabbits, made Aku-like flames appear from their eyes and bent them to his will.

Metal Opera: no prep, simple to run and lets you defeat evil holographic rabbits.

[Ron Edwards]

Wow, this sounds like The Yellow Submarine role-playing game.

Any advice for aspiring groups who wanna try it? Rules to look out for, things that are important for everyone to know?

Best,
Ron

P.S. Quickly editing this in: You, uh, have read the Grimjack issue #76, "Battlerock," right? 'Cause this game is that issue crossed with the above-mentioned movie.

[hix]

On first thought, here's some stuff that seemed to work for our group:

Metal Opera has three Tyrants. I chose (in mid-session) to focus the game on just one of them. This definitely stopped things getting too unwieldy.

Make sure all the players are on-board with getting themselves aggressively In The Crapper. We had some quite diverse ideas, which I kept having to juggle – for instance, most of the mechanical appliances that attacked the band were mini-bars ... and that had nothing to do with evil t-shirts. However, I suspect the climax (Up In Flames) could be clearer, more satisfying if the initial suggestions are all inter-linked - building off the preceding player's trouble.

I assumed that maxing out only one of your scores enabled you to get the Power of Metal for that particular character – and contribute to the Band's Power of Metal. But this had some interesting ramifications.... Mechanically, the score that's Most Important to the player potentially has the most control over the story. But the Least Important Score is easiest to max out.... This felt odd when we were playing. So I guess, focus your roleplaying – what actions your character will take - on your most important and therefore most difficult to achieve score.

Let the players show off with dice rolls whenever they want to. It only makes the game go wilder.

You can set game duration by playing with d6s or d10s (longer or shorter). Likewise, the game will run short if you let characters achieve the Power of Metal in their Lowest Score; longer if you insist they achieve the Power of Metal in their Highest Score; and longer still if you make them achieve the Power of Metal in all their scores before preceding to the climax.

Longer games would benefit from splitting the band up and giving them individual back-stories. But hey, Metal Opera was pretty damn good one-shot material for us – it wasn't heavy (unlike the Nobilis game we just ran) and it skewed towards comedy.

And no, I haven't read that issue of Grimjack, or - actually - heard of Grimjack, or seen Yellow Submarine. More cultural artifacts for me to track down.