[kpfs] Nastier than the Sabbat

[Warren]

As requested by Ron over on Story Games, this is the only game of kpfs I've played in, and overall, it went pretty well.

The group was Me, Tom, Steve & Rich - friends who I have been gaming with for several months now. They are part of the group I struggled playing Vampire with initially, but that game wrapped up and I've ran Dogs for them a couple of times, which was very well recieved, and we hope to start a PTA game in the next few weeks and then (hopefully) Stranger Things. In general, the group has branched out from WoD, with short runs of Nobilis, Paranoia XP and so on before the next 'big' campaign is planned.

After the first time I ran Dogs, pretty much everybody loved the system, and Tom (the main WoD GM) picked up the Dogs & Puppies PDF double-pack right afterwards. One night, a few months ago (work has gone insane for 50% of the group, including me, so playing time has been scarce since May) we were a couple of players down, so Tom decided to run a one-shot of kpfs.

One of the guys (who was going out later) was skeptical about it; "There's no setting to it?" My reply of "Yeah, It's just like the real world, only darker." raised a few smiles. As did the text itself.

Character generation was a blast. We decided to use our real names as our characters names as that is what the text implies, and we thought it would be fun. I ended up with a pathetic guy who had accidentally reversed over his mom's cat. Rich had a bit fat greasy guy who ran a kebab stand in the park who hunted squirrels and the like, then served them to his customers. Steve someone who had "punched a dolphin to death" and been fired from his job at the local zoo/aquarium. We decided that we were all sharing the same shitty little bedsit together.

We had an initial scene in the park by Rich's kebab stand where we ended up killing a Dog and running off with the owner's mobile phone. This revealed that we needed to gain Evil to be effective, and that we were, as a group, pretty pathetic. But everybody was grooving on it, laughing at these poor guys. The end of the scene also set up some conflict between Steve & Rich. Steve had done most of the dog-catching, but Rich swooped in for the kill, gaining the Evil and annoying Steve. (Note, due to same-name-ness, I should make it clear that Steve-the-player & Rich-the-player both seemed cool with this, although it was clearly stated that Steve-the-player would get his own back).

We then got to the "main plot", which was us getting a call from Satan asking us to mess up some crackpot religion (a Scientology ripoff from the looks of it) that's setting up in town. Which was OK, but it felt to me very much like the "patron gives you task" model that I saw quite a bit in the WoD games we played, and not really tied into to the characters. But hey, we lived to serve Satan so we went for it.

We all agreed that we needed to get some more Evil to take on a big ole' church, so we broke into a pet store at night and had a disturbing amount of fun coming up with outrageous ways to gain evil (and outdo each other). I can't remember the specifics, but I know someone decided to choke a gerbil to death by vomiting into it's mouth. I crushed a couple of hamsters to death with my bare hands. Once we were Eviled-up, we headed towards the new church-thing.

It went a bit slowly here. I think Tom was defaulting to the standard "Mysterious Big Bad" model from the WoD, and there were various big guys in suits at the door, a busload of new-agey robed worshippers. We snuck in via various means and got to see the head priest performing some sort of ritual. We were discovered (I can't remember exactly how -- I think we did something stupid and drew attention to ourselves), beaten and thrown out.

Recuperating back home, we decided to try and get more Evil by revisiting that pet store. But after the outrages of last night, we discovered that a security guard had been posted, so we tried to sneak in there. This is where we had some problems with the system, and afterwards we moved to the simpler dice+fiat system than the Sorcerer-derived version recommended by the annotated edition of kpfs. We didn't get in and Steve got to stab Rich in the back with a knife, in retaliation for the dog in the park earlier. I had to step in a calm everybody down. Again, in the real world, all the players were having a riot, although there were some grumbles about the lack of effectiveness of the PCs.

Looking at the rules, Steve noticed that seeing eye dogs are +2 evil, so we set out the following night to find a home for the blind. We found one, and posed (badly) as a taxi-service for a pair of old dears and their dogs. We managed (with quite a bit of Evil use) to get the pair out to our van, then stole the dogs and drove off into the night, laughing (both IC and OOC). Then looking at the ways to kill them, Steve decided that he would "rape the dog to death" in the back of the van. Nobody could beat that, and I think we all (including Steve) a little taken aback at the depths to which we had sunk. But we went on anyway. The other dog simply got cut up by Rich, whilst I drove.

We ended up back at the church temple thing, and managed to get in again, albeit being searched for by some of the church goons. We discovered some holy book, and an altar and big glass icon, so with the power of Evil and sheer bloody mindedness, we covered the icon in human shit, put the remains of the dogs on the altar, and blew the main seating area up. I'm fairly certain there was some other stuff we did to the place, but I can't recall. That was it for the night.

Afterwards we decided we had been more nasty, evil and unpleasant in this three-ish hour session than in all of the Sabbat Vampire campaign we had been in previously. Although, Tom pointed out, much more pathetic and wretched. We all had fun, but I don't think many of us have the stomach to play it again.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

One reason I was looking forward to seeing this report is that 'puppies is Vincent's Big Fuck You Valentine to White Wolf games, and in fact at the time, to role-playing itself. A couple of points follow from that which seem relevant to your game.

1. The original system is contemptuous of system (or rather, of mechanics-based resolution) and therefore relies heavily on GM fiat for anything really important. As far as I can tell, Vincent wrote the kpfs rules not to be playable in a fully-useful sense, but because that's how he saw all the complicated stuff in WoD games actually being done - grab a number and roll, but the GM runs things his way anyway.

2. It was also written with contempt for the culture of play that Vincent saw in White Wolf games - the transparent desire to be monstrous or rebellious as a cover for fundamental weaknesses, specifically moral fiber and imagination. The characters in kpfs are, in effect, the players of Vampire.

3. At a relatively shallow level, the point of the game is to stop playing the game. Most people see this pretty quickly. It's unfortunate that anyone picks it up thinking it'll be a "fun Forge game!!", without realizing that Vincent wrote it before he arrived here and with pure rage at its target (see #2 above).

4. At a deeper level, the point of the game is different and much more interesting. I'm not sure many groups arrive there. You can find out more about it by checking out my ancient review of the game (see Reviews link at the top of the page). Ken Hite paraphrased the same point when he said, "Puppies is about mercy, Dogs is about justice." Again, though, reaching that point also has the general effect of not needing to play further.

The reason I bring all this up is because there's no point in examining kpfs for resolution rules-construction; its rules for resolution are a bit stupid, to be blunt (although deliberately so in a way; Vincent's "learning to love dice again" saga is too long to go into here). The pointlessness of the Evil cycle, on the other hand, is a key feature because it relates to #3-4 above. And it relates to what I want to ask you about.

Which is ...

... after playing kill puppies for satan, did you and your group ever return to playing a World of Darkness game in any highly-committed way? If so, which one? What happened during that game, and why? If not, why not? If I'm reading your previous description right (and boy! was I pessimistic! check it out, everyone!), you caught this group at the perfect moment for them to self-reflect and totally alter their complete value system about how and what to play.

In which case, 'puppies probably helped serve this purpose to an extent that Vincent would never have believed at the time of writing. Which makes it one of the fine success stories after all, scurfy underwear and all.

Best, Ron

[Warren]

Hi Ron,

The extended group has gone back to (o)WoD twice since that kpfs game. Firstly there was a Mage game run by one of the other members of the extended group which was interesting as it was quite a cool setup, but there was a fairly obvious 'plot' that went in one direction in the classic WW style. And it fell apart after three sessions, IIRC.

My character was a drug-addled untrained Dreamspeaker who notably had "Medium" & "Nightmares", and a lot of the main plot-hooks were presented to me -- dreams of reincarnation, spirits of vengeance, ancient artifact swords, and so on. Other plot elements were handed out to other players (Rich, Tom & Steve mainly), but the whole situation was very confusing, and I don't think anybody had a handle on what to do next.

I think the GM at that point went down the "Chandler route" and gave us Bang-is things to deal with. So the Technocracy started to track us down and life in general was also falling apart with riots and so on. The rest of the group (which included the rest of the kpfs group) went pretty much "sod this" and couldn't see any reason not to move away from my character and the prepared plotline. At which point the game halted, fairly amicably.

More recently, Tom started up a short Ratkin (Wererats, not the TSoY's race) game in the Ukraine in the early 90's. This went reasonably well, although it opened slowly. We were told my our tribe (or whatever they are called) in Kiev that we would need to form a pack and head to this other (fictional) town so we could set up a new enclave there for the tribe to expand into, as Kiev was massively overcrowded.

But instead of opening on us in this new town (as I would have done), we played out the train journey from Kiev to this new town. This left me fairly cold, but I think the others liked the opportunity to get into character and just chat and so on. Once we got there, we found that there was already a bigger pack in charge of the town, and strange spirit of the town's theatre was calling to us. But that's about as far as we got before work exploded for about half the group (like finishing at 10pm or later six nights a week), and the games haven't been happening as often, and I haven't made it back since then. I don't know how much enthusiasm there is for the group to pick it up again once things calm down however.

There is some talk about long-term a Demon:The Fallen campaign starting at the end of the year, but I don't know how concrete that is yet. People seem interested in what I've told them about PTA, so I'm hoping to be able to run that soon.

[Warren]

Added: I think the group has seen what kinds of things are possible when they can affect the game in a bigger way than they are used to, and they like that. The GMing, I think, is still based off of a "plot" model to a large part. Partly because that is how they think things should be done, but also just everybody is very comfortable and very, very familiar with the WW rules and approach. I also think that there is a liking of the WoD background, which is what drew them to it in the first place.

Another telling data point, that may be of interest: After the Dogs games I ran, Tom went out and bought the PDF within a week and decided to run a Firefly-inspired one-shot. We created characters and the accomplishments went really well, with Rich (notably) grabbing the player ability to add to the scenes.

But the game proper stumbled a bit when Tom insisted that we kept track of money and so on ("The Serenity crew are always poor, so what will motivate you to take jobs if you don't know how much money you have, and how much it costs to repair your ship and things?"), and he didn't use the Town creation system (or any Firefly variant thereof), so the initial situation fell a bit flat. People liked the system, but it suffered from a lack of direction (as there was no engaging situation there to deal with).

Personally, I think Tom, at least, is trying to navigate a way between "directionless un-situationy play" and "using a preplanned plot". And certainly, his Ukrainian Ratkin game felt as if it was rather more situation-y (as opposed to a preplanned plot) but unfortunately we never got a chance to get into it before work hit.