[InSpectres] Operation Icebox

[Svend]

I was asked to bring along a game to run at a recent local RPG-con (Kapcon 14), just in case they had a few slots they needed to fill.  Five or six years ago, I ran a Call of Cthuhlu game which had as its background "Operation Highjump", the American Navy's investigation of the Antarctic in 1947.  It had been a lot of fun, with serpent men, Nazi zombies and a formless spawn of Tsathogghua or two; but all the resources I gathered for that game have been lost in the space between flats.  So I decided on a slightly different tack - I'd run it as a pulpy, military-style InSpectres game!  This was the origin of "Operation Icebox".

The first step was to convert some of the normal InSpectres terms into pseudo-military jargon: "Gym Card", "Library Card", "Credit Card" and "The Bank" became "Boot Camp", "Military Intelligence", "Commissary" and "Pull" (with roll results that ranged from "No, you're doing me a favour" to "Never call again!").  The other change was "The Confessional", which became "Debriefing"; I couldn't think up another name for franchise dice in the time available.

The next step was to create some genre-appropriate characters.  Because it was a Con game, and most of the players probably wouldn't have played InSpectres in any form before, I wanted the characters to be easy to pick up and play.  So we had Sarge, the grizzled veteran; Moose, the guy who's big, strong but not too bright; Greenhorn, the innocent newbie; Doc, the medic; and Koslowski, the cynical coms operator.  I printed out short character sheets, a brief summary of the roll results and rules for each player, and then went off to the Con.

***

One piece of serendipity was that I knew that I might need another character, so I bought along an extra character sheet; when we started the game, I gave a brief run-down of the existing characters, and asked them to come up with another war-movie archetype that didn't overlap with them while I set up some music.  This meant they got to have a brief chat of how the other characters might work, and they came up with a deaf ex-artillery guy.  I let them distribute the characters as they wanted, and then gave them a brief run-down of how the rules worked - one of the players had played before, but the rest seemed to pick it up fairly quickly.

I was fairly fast and loose with the scenario structure as well.  I introduced the characters in the briefing room - Lieutenant Hicks (their commanding officer) and a "civilian contractor" in a Hawaiian shirt, Mr Smith.  They were shown a map of a small sub-antarctic island that they would be investigating, with a bunch of German writing on it - which gave someone the first taste of the InSpectres style of play, along the lines of:

"What does it say? Can I read German?"
"Let's see - make an Academics roll."
<dice>
"A six - excellent.  I guess you speak German.  What does it say?"
"What?  Ooohhh."

We actually cut away to give that player a chance to make something up, and spent a scene or two letting the characters load themselves down with whatever stuff they thought they needed - and then it was into the dingies with Other Privates One through Three, the Lieutenant and Mr Smith, and off to the island.

The fact that I had a lot of stuff that I could throw at the players meant the game felt quite fast-paced.  When players seemed to be stalled out for what to do with their successes, I either cut away to give them time to think, or made some suggestions (as did the other players after a while)  This seemed to help break them out of indecision, and I'm pretty sure that they felt they retained ownership of the characters, since they would often do something completely different.  For example, Moose and the gunner used a light-mortar round to take out some zombies, but the Lieutenant had been caught in the blast, so the medic ran in to check him out.  The player rolled a four, and I suggested that he might now be a zombie; but the player decided that he was mostly fine - except that now having children was out of the question.

There was quite a wide variation in the amount of time people used the Debriefing Chair - some people used it two or three times in the mission, and some people didn't use it at all, though I did remind them about it.  Not many traits were assigned, either; on the other hand, it was used at one point to declare that the smoke from ammunition shed that the ex-gunnery guy had accidentally blown up would be mistaken by the ship for the "bombard this area" signal.

(One weird synchronicity - in the CoC version, the demolitions guy also blew up the ammunition shed, and one of the soldiers went insane and called in an artillery strike on his location...)

We had quite a lot of fun with failed fear checks, and the skill checks were quite clearly faux-adversarial, with much sinister cackling from me when ones were rolled, and the occasional cheer from the players when a six turned up.  The pacing worked surprisingly well, with them getting the requisite number of franchise dice (20) at a nice climax point - they blew up the cavern the formless spawn was emerging from, and captured Mr Smith (who had turned all Evil Sorcerer on them).  Once we fixed up all the damage the fear checks and dice-pool uses, they were about two dice ahead.

***

I hadn't playtested the game - in fact, I'd only finished doing the handouts that morning - so I had no idea how long it would go.  As it turned out, it didn't quite take an hour and a half.  Since it was a three-hour game slot, and the players were quite enthusiastic to take their characters on another tour, we took a brief toilet break and snack run, and then we were off to a tropical Pacific island formerly held by the Japanese.

Unlike the previous game, this was run completely on the fly.  I asked for requests for elements they might see, to get them (and me) thinking about what might happen.  The pattern was essentially identical to the previous one - a briefing from a (different) Mr Smith, some Technology rolls to find out what they could scrounge, and then off the boat, up the beach, and into the jungle. (The players were pleasantly surprised that Lieutenant Hicks was still with them, albeit with a new Purple Heart.  And the description of Greenhorn was changed from "innocent newbie" to "young newlywed"...)

There was plenty of humour - for example, Doc was looking for any evidence of paths, and managed to find and accidentally "investigate" an abandoned latrine.  (He was given the attribute "horrendously pungent" for the remainder of the game, which was quite well played.)  However, the minor positive that he decided on was that a hidden entrance to the secret base was hidden down the hole...

I didn't do as many fear checks as I had previously, and I think the game would have been better if I did.  In fact, that was probably one of the biggest advantages for having some preplanned elements - it let me shift my focus from "what's happening" to "how is it interacting with/affecting the characters".  There were some checks - for example, when the flying, fire-breathing croco-bear came crawling out of the vat of green goo, or when the Lieutenant (on guard above) thought that the silo-roof opening was an attack, and tossed a grenade down on them.  But in general, when I threw a challenge at them (like the mecha-sumo in the officer's quarters, or the Grey alien in the interrogation cells), I tended to get them to make appropriate skill checks, rather than fear ones.

I don't think this game was as paced as well as the previous one either.  The main reason I say this is once the players had accumulated the necessary franchise dice, they (and I) didn't feel that the investigation had ended satisfactorily; besides, there was a good quarter-hour until the end of the session!  So when I suggested we could wrap it up, they overruled me, and they managed to find a secret door leading to a previously hidden part of the base, where (over the course of three or four more scenes) they discovered hidden plans and notes about the facility.

Finally, after their triumph, there was some general discussion about the characters, and what might happen to them; and a bit of chat about the game in general.

***

Looking at the game overall, there were a number of players that I didn't know, and who didn't know each other - I was slightly worried that this might make people self-conscious, but it didn't seem to be a problem.  The fact the game was being run in the morning of the second day may have helped - I know I would have had trouble being that spontaneous and creative in the afternoon.  I think the problems I had with the fear checks and pacing would be helped with a bit more prep time and a little more experience running InSpectres.

As a side note - something happened regarding the game that I was totally not expecting.  At the end of the Con, I was given the award for running the game that received the highest overall rating by its players in a single session.  So the problems that I saw in the second half probably weren't as bad as they appeared to me.

Sometime soon, I'm thinking that I might try to adapt it to a Wodehousian style, with the Confessional replaced by "Dear Diary" (and/or "You know what happened, Jeeves?"), and talking about Bogglement rather than Fear.  But that may have to wait for next year's con.

[clehrich]

I love reading InSpectres writeups!

Franchise dice --> Unit Resources ?

One note:

Sometime soon, I'm thinking that I might try to adapt it to a Wodehousian style, with the Confessional replaced by "Dear Diary" (and/or "You know what happened, Jeeves?"), and talking about Bogglement rather than Fear. But that may have to wait for next year's con.

I'm a little leery of that, to be honest.  It really depends on everyone being extremely comfortable with that particular idiom, and I think in a con situation you're gambling with the real possibility that few if any of the players are so.

Since I see you're in Wellington, I wonder if you might consider a possibility that came up one time with an Australian group.  I don't have the thread handy, but the basic thing was InSpectres wasn't working for them all that well.  It turned out that this was because they'd set it in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and nobody really "got" the shtick of the place.  After some discussion, somebody suggested setting it in Australia.  The poster mentioned Cultural Cringe, which my NZ friends say is something you all know about too, but we had to ask for an explanation.

Pretty soon we had a suggestion: InSpectres does Cultural Cringe.  And as a Con game, that seems to me amazingly easy.

Your characters:

[*]Steve Irwin (sp?), the Crocodile guy
[*]Paul Hogan
[*]Anyone else who really makes New Zealanders wince, preferably with very thick accent and a lot of silly mannerisms[/list:u]Encourage Steve to go on a tear about how the vampire is stroppy, have lots of "G'Day!" and "Good on you!" and "Good oh!" and so on.  Really wallow in the horror of Kiwi Culture Gone Bad.

I think I can practically guarantee gales of laughter.

[Svend]

I'm afraid that NZers don't have cultural cringe about Paul Hogan or the Crocodile Hunter, any more than Americans have cultural cringe about William Shatner - though it's certainly true that there's a lot about Australians that makes us wince (and vice versa). ;)  But finding equivalent NZ examples should be, as you say, fairly straightforward.

One of the reasons I was thinking about the "Jeeves & Wooster" approach is that I'd successfully run a game with that background at several NZ cons before.  Called A Tickilish Romp, it started with two of the characters crossdressing as men to sneak into a gentleman's club, only to overhear the other characters making a bet about being able to woo one of the girls by the maskerade ball on Friday.  The rest of the game was basically the men trying to advance their goals and/or win the bet, while the two women dealt with the men's machinations and messed with their heads.  It's good fun, and was modified from a game of French swashbucklers with essentially the same plotline.  In that case, the only rules I really used for that game were that if you had a word-rating in a particular skill, then you won in a contest with no rating; if you both had a rating, then you compared the descriptors and considered the situation, and the winner was generally obvious. (For example, "Barmy" Simon de Carabas had a Fisticuffs of "Bluffing", but an Intimidate of "Good".)

Huh - as it happens, I have the character sheets on-line, though the "Running the game" section seems to have stalled at "To be written":

http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~svend/game/romp.html

People seemed to be pretty comfortable with the setting, though that may simply be self-selection - I was pretty clear in the description of the game, and I'm pretty sure even the title telegraphs that it's not likely to be a dungeon-crawl.  I was more thinking about using a ruleset that gave the players more authorial control, without going quite as far as something like Universalis.

The main thing I'm worried about with using the InSpectres as a model is - what does the group represent?  At the moment, I'm falling back to thinking of it as the character's Club.  Also, it seems appropriate to give players a way to reduce how Boggled their characters are - possibly one or more dice per foolish plan that they come up with.  I'm thinking here of modelling how Bertie is stumped and tongue-tied by a ferocious Aunt, and then comes up with a "brilliant" plan of how to deal with the dilemma, which puts him back in excellent spirits. (In fact, perhaps going along with a plan should help "heal" Boogle dice, since other characters seem to find comfort in Bertie's schemes - until they go horribly wrong, at least.)  And since they're more temporary than the standard die losses, it might be better to have one Boggle pool, that applies to all skill rolls...

But maybe this is a discussion for a different board?

[clehrich]

I'm afraid that NZers don't have cultural cringe about Paul Hogan or the Crocodile Hunter, any more than Americans have cultural cringe about William Shatner - though it's certainly true that there's a lot about Australians that makes us wince (and vice versa). ;)  But finding equivalent NZ examples should be, as you say, fairly straightforward.

Good oh, give it a whirl and let us know how it goes some time.

People seemed to be pretty comfortable with the setting, though that may simply be self-selection - I was pretty clear in the description of the game, and I'm pretty sure even the title telegraphs that it's not likely to be a dungeon-crawl.  I was more thinking about using a ruleset that gave the players more authorial control, without going quite as far as something like Universalis.

I love it.  I find few enough folks who have even heard of Wodehouse, but you can get a game together at a con.  Maybe I should move?

The main thing I'm worried about with using the InSpectres as a model is - what does the group represent?  At the moment, I'm falling back to thinking of it as the character's Club.  Also, it seems appropriate to give players a way to reduce how Boggled their characters are - possibly one or more dice per foolish plan that they come up with.  I'm thinking here of modelling how Bertie is stumped and tongue-tied by a ferocious Aunt, and then comes up with a "brilliant" plan of how to deal with the dilemma, which puts him back in excellent spirits. (In fact, perhaps going along with a plan should help "heal" Boogle dice, since other characters seem to find comfort in Bertie's schemes - until they go horribly wrong, at least.)  And since they're more temporary than the standard die losses, it might be better to have one Boggle pool, that applies to all skill rolls...

Hmm.  Clearly Drones members are the way to go.  Why not set up a little more of the situation?

So Pongo Twistleton, visiting at the Glossops', has fallen in love with Honoria Glossop.  Bingo Little (married to Rosie these days) is doing a spot of tutoring at the Glossop house.  Gussie Fink-Nottle is hanging around there too, because Madeline Bassett is visiting Honoria, who's been a bit under the weather, and not surprisingly is chafing at Madeline's nursing.  Pongo isn't sure what to do, so of course he turns to Jeeves.  Jeeves will be going out of town on his annual holiday, fishing somewhere probably, but he comes up with a wonderful plan, which obviously Bingo and Gussie will have to be told about: Bertie is going to the Glossop house and will push Madeline into the weed-choked pond, and then Pongo will jump in and save her while Honoria is watching.  The idea being that Honoria will fall madly in love with Pongo's manly athleticism, Madeline will of course cling to Gussie for comfort, and Bertie will be even less likely to end up engaged to either of them than he is now.  Fortunately Sir Roderick Glossop is away giving a lecture in Austria, because of course he won't have Bertie on the place, as he knows Bertie is totally insane (keeps rabbits in his bedroom, after all).

The PCs:

[*]Bertie Wooster
[*]Pongo Twistleton
[*]Bingo Little
[*]Gussie Fink-Nottle[/list:u]Assuming your players know these characters and the rough situation, and you can describe it appropriately just to remind them, I think you're off and running.  God only knows what's going to happen.  Will Sir Roderick pop up?  Will Aunt Agatha visit?  Will the pushing-Madeline-into-a-pond go off without a hitch (certainly not!)?  Will Rosie get suspicious that Bingo is after Honoria again?  What about the little horror, Thomas or whatever his name is, whom Bingo is tutoring?

One interesting mechanic: is there some way that maybe the Confessional can be used for Jeevesian interventions (since obviously he's going to have to be called in by telegram)?  The idea being that at the very end, somehow, the crowning moment is something that completely hoses Bertie but has everyone else in the appropriate girls' arms (whoever that might be at the moment).

I so want to read the play account of this....

[hix]

Welcome to the Forge, Svend!

And after that Woosterian madness, maybe we can use InSpectres to play a game of Futurama.

Chris,
You're front-loading the situation that much for a con game, right? How much detail do you think an Inspectres-style Wodehouse game would need to provide if everyone was familiar with the genre?

Just a thought: Jeeves-and-Wooster style Inspectres might encourage players to shaft their own characters even more than usual. That'd be fun.

[clehrich]

Welcome to the Forge, Svend!

Oops, I missed the number of posts.

Welcome to the Forge!

Chris,
You're front-loading the situation that much for a con game, right? How much detail do you think an Inspectres-style Wodehouse game would need to provide if everyone was familiar with the genre?

I think it's time to take this over to Indie Design.  This really isn't Actual Play any more, as Sven already noted politely.  See you there!

[Jared A. Sorensen]

Very cool write-up...glad you all had fun with the game.

It's pretty funny, and almost entirely by luck, that every InSpectres game I've ever heard about (or run myself) has very similar elements:

The "Do I speak German? What? Ohhhh..." moment when players realize how to really play the game.

Laughing when misfortune befalls the other players, and THEN heaping up an extra abuse on their own character when it comes to be their turn.

Stress rolls driving the game -- if you don't have them happen often enough, gameplay always suffers.

Very episodic, formulaic plots (based on the The Call/Investigation.Suiting Up/Fieldwork sequence outlined in the book) that get really crazy when you get down to the story elements (story <> plot).

So yeah, sounds like a fun time.

[Yokiboy]

Welcome Svend, and thanks for the very entertaining writeup. Sounds like a very sweet con game. I like how easy it seemed to be to adopt InSpectres for another setting.

TTFN,

Yokiboy