[Mafia Story] Saving the daughter of the Boss

[Adam Kleizer]

Hello!
Last week I had the opportunity to test my game Mafia Story with 3 of my friends. (Get the playtest document here. This document lacks a good overview of gameplay, I hope when you've read this post, you'll actually know if you'd like to play it or not.)

Look out, this is a really long post!

The players:
Csabi, Peti and Tomi are hungarian uni students, just like me, we play since 5 years together and I knew they like the kind of play I hoped Mafia Story will deliver easily.

So we started with me explaining the rules to the three of them. They weren't sure if they actually understood everything correctly, but we decided to start play and let the "show don't tell" rule of life handle the situation.

The setting we decided on was Chicago, the middle of the 20s - a rather traditional mafia setting. Then we drew cards to see who's going to be the first group leader; I had the most luck.

The characters:
We started to create the characters. I decided the Boss (not Italian, so no Godfather this time) was a "racist car tycoon" just to get the feel of the whole character creation process to the others. We made up fifteen pretty freaky characters and we chose four of them as the protagonists of the story.
Peti had chosen "Jack Gleese", a "fat safe-breaker", Tomi played "The Fist" a "superannuated boxer", Csabi had "Paul Simon" the "opium addicted lovelace" and I played "Simon Corbey" the "insincere driver".
Making characters with 2-3 words long descriptions was real fun and we all enjoyed it. Later, during the narration phase we used other characters from the paper. Making interesting NPCs -usable during narration- was a side-effect of gang creation I really liked.

So, we distributed the starting values between style points and then started to discuss what the first job will be. We decided that the Boss's daughter just vanished during the night and the job was to "find the daughter".

The story:
I started narrating the first scene, set in the room of Miss Elizabeth Sherman (that's the daughter). Someone broke the window to get inside and the characters discovered no signs of the girl leaving prepared to a voyage, so we guessed she didn't leave on her own will.

The next step was to go to the "Mahogany Gambling Club", where Elizabeth had been the night before. We purchased some information from the door-keeper, so we now had some suspects: some strangers from New York and "George Michael" (yes, you read it right) the son of another big guy from the city - my friends are weird, this I knew before, but the fact this guy gained his wealth by producing candy and the characters name made me laugh everytime they said something about him (which occurred quite often as you'll see).

We decided to track these people down. George Michael seemed to like our Miss Elizabeth and he leaved the club just after her departure, in a car with two of the strangers. The other guys from New York very likely followed the girl.

The driver of the car revealed George Michael and the two strangers went to a bawdy-house, so we decided we'll ask some questions there. There we've run into Russel Whitegate the "corrupt cop" (we made this character during the gang creation phase), who investigated Miss Sherman's case. He informed us (against cash in advance of course) that George Michael was missing too and gave us the address of the hotel where the guys from New York took a room.

So we headed to the hotel, where we had the opportunity to ask some questions from the receptionist. He was a quite smart guy, so he didn't fell for the trick of old friends wanting to surprise the guys. This leaved us no other option than to pay him down to tell us the number of their room... And that's where I used my first token to give an order from the Boss. A courier (again a character from gang creation) informed us that someone demands a ransom for the girl. He brought us the suitcase with 50 grands we should carry to the docks. We had around 30 minutes to get there. We decided that's plenty of time, so we first check the room in the hotel.

Where we found John Spencer, a guy from New York with a machine gun in his hands. We had luck he only spotted two of us, so he found himself in a situation where "The Fist" could explain why they call him so. We found out they wanted to get the same amount of money for George Michael from his father. Seemed like their plan was to observe how we slaughter each other and then get the money.

We headed to the docks with the money. We had the opportunity to explore the dry dock and warehouse where the handover should take place. The guys from the Michael family were there and we had a little discussion. We had a nice view from upstairs when they overhanded the money and got shot dead in exchange. I decided to shot at them and "The Fist" and Paul have had no luck in hindering me. I think that was the place where Tomi had no cards left, we haven't sacrificed enough Authority points so we didn't complete the job, thus had no refreshment of style points. The new job was to "get the girl back to the Boss", which was really just a rephrasing of the old job - one of the things I didn't like about this playtest.

Here we had a nice combat situation. In the end The Fist had the money from the Michael family, but got shot in the shoulder. I shot the boss of the New York City guys, but unfortunately had to shoot through Miss Sherman's right arm for this. George Michael laid dead in his own blood on a truck which had the luck to meet the wall of the dry dock. And finally, the cops were about to arrive to the location. We decided to run, but still didn't have the girl with us. Two of the kidnappers still had her in their hands. We successfully tracked them down, and our dear friend Russel Whitegate from the police arrested them and let us go for 10 grands.

We had to flee with in car which had a flat tyre because the bad guys shot at us. This had to conclude in an accident. We had no real wounds but the voices of the police sirens drew nearer then we liked it. Jack knew a nice place where we get no attention. It was an opium nest run by Qui Ching (an NPC from gang creation). I think this was the time we ran out of narration ideas and started to occasionally pass narration to the next player.

Qui Ching realised he could get something from Mr. Sherman for his daughter so he demanded a meeting. He had the opportunity to negotiate with the right hand of the Boss, while I used my second token for an order: we should kill Qui Ching. Not a good move to demand something from a racist when you're from China, you know.

Here we had the job done. Style points got a refresh we really needed by now. The new job was to sort the problem with the Chinese guys.

We waited for Qui Ching to return to his opium den. Unfortunately we couldn't find the money we got from the Michael family. An assassin had it, again a character from the gang creation phase. She had no real desire to let us assassinate Qui Ching. The Fist had luck again and deprived her of the gun before the Chinese got back. She got killed by them. The only social conflict during these two sessions was about whom she whispers her last words - the location of the suitcase with the money.

We had bad luck, the thugs of the Michael family arrived and obviously thought we are responsible for the death of George and the guys who brought the money to the docks. Qui Ching knew a back exit, but it had such a bad air, filled with opium or some other drug, we had just little control over ourselves. And that's where the story ends for now.


What I liked:

• Good story, without preparation time.
• Gang creation made a bunch of interesting characters the narrator could use.
• Rules seemed not to be too complex. Complex - yes, too complex - no.
• Most important thing: it was real good fun.

I didn't like:

• Our "roleplay everything" attitude didn't allow for social conflicts. We just resolved them all by roleplaying. I know this is accidental however - the first playtest with an earlier version had not enough physical conflicts, depends on the style of play and story.
• Bad, bad numbers for milestones. We didn't reach a milestone in over 8 hours of play. Of course we didn't have nearly enough conflicts (like 12-15 overall), but this needs a change. Need more milestones and less orders per milestone.
• We made a nice story, but sometimes we didn't really know what to do with narration. This needs a good tool like the gang creation for NPCs.