[Six Bullets] Blood Shot Eyes - Conception playtest

[Rich Stokes]

Did you mean to refer to something with the asterisks?

Ah, poo.  I wrote these really neat examples that I was refering too and then didn't post them.

Lemme see:

* For example, I lost the struggle with Scott's mook in the first scene and Martin got his eye spiked on the jagged wood, Scott decides to use the die he got from winning the conflict to give Martin the "Poor Depth Perception - 1d" trait.

** Shortly afterwards, I win a conflict and Martin shoots Scott's mook in the head.  Getting an extra die, I decide that I'll spend it on a new trait "Cold Blooded - 1d".  I decide that I'll also spend one of my other dice to make that "Cold Blooded - 2d"

*** The scene in the pub where Martin pulls the fuse and the power goes out.  I won the conflict and used he die I gained to create the trait "The Power Is Out - 1d" on the pub.

WRT scenes and the dice for them:

I can think of two ways to distribute the dice for a given scene:

First, the focal antagonist gets a big pile of dice at the start of the scene and uses them to create traits for the scene.  The exact number and how that's calculated is TBA right now, but lets say it's 2 per antagonist. So for example, at the start of the second scene, Graham grabs. 12 dice and uses them to create all the stuff in the scene.  He starts with  DI Cutter, DI Sledge, Dave and  a dark alley.  So at the start of the scene, the scene has the following attributes:

Scene 2
Dark Alley - 2d
Dave, Martin's mate - 2d
DI Sledge - 3d
DI Cutter - 3d

Graham also keeps 2 dice back to create additional stuff as and when it's needed.

People agree roles or perhaps they don't have to.  No reason why James couldn't have just narrated something to do with the Dark Alley for his narration without using any of the other characters.  It worked very well having the supporting cast played by individual players, but I can see all the scenes ending up being Protagonist vs N mooks + one Boss if we'd stuck to that.

The other way I can think of is to give each of the antagonists a pool of dice to use for scenes in which their antagonist does not appear.  Make the pools dependent on when their antagonist appears, so the guy playing the big boss gets fewer than the guy playing the lowly goon who was the first (chronologically) to die because the big boss could appear more often (possibly every scene even) than the goon (who can only appear in the last scene).  Then say that for each scene, they can use some of these dice to create stuff.  Extra earned dice can be put in this pool or the antagonist pool at the player's discretion.

For example, doing it this way, each of the players in turn creates something for the scene.  Scott decides to create DI Sledge and put 3 of his "other stuff" dice into that.  Nimrod decides he likes that and creates DI Cutter with three of his.  James pulls Dave's name off the revelation map and decides to play him, putting 2 of his "other stuff" dice forward.  Graham decides to plonk 2 of his "other stuff" dice into "Dark Alley" and then we're off.

As a side point, perhaps Antagonists can spend their own dice to "nick" stuff from the Protagonist.  So when Graham was creating his character, he just assigns 2 dice to "Revolver" and says, that's the one Martin was using in the first scene and bingo, Martin loses it, it started out belonging to Sgt Davies and Martin obviously acquired it at some point between now and the start of the first scene.

[andrew_kenrick]

Before I get onto your latest reply, I'd like to address one of your previous answers.

I think the bite sized conflicts worked rather well, but I can see the need for certain scenes not to just be "Kill the boss and his mooks as graphically as possible".  I had a great time with the 2 scenes we played, but I can see that getting boring if all the scenes followed the same format.  I don't think they would have, but there might need to be some guidance or mechanic for that.

I think this could go either way. I've had games which were literally just the conflicts between the protag and the antags, and that went boom boom boom done before you had a chance to get bored, lasting little more than an hour. But I've also had slower paced games which might have had several scenes strung together into a chapter, which also worked well. I'm hoping that the ideal game will be made up of both types of chapter.

It's been suggested that each chapter might work well extended out to last an entire session, with many scenes leading up to the final fight, but I'm not so sure.

Anyway, making sure it keeps up a decent pace and level of interest is important, and so far it hasn't proved to be a problem.

[andrew_kenrick]

I like the idea of keeping pools streamlined. So, there's a single scene pool that's also the reward pool, from which dice for the scene attributes are dished out as well as dice for npcs, and rewards once play starts. Then each player has his own single pool of dice that he uses as a common pool for his own character, for making any npcs out of and for contributing to the game and that sort of thing.

One of the things I noticed during the playtest was that we had several pools each and it got confusing and muddled. Several times I'd hand people a die for cool narration and they'd be unsure what to do with it. Single pools should hopefully eliminate that. Can anyone see a problem with this?

I do like the idea about going round the table and getting each player to contribute something to the scene. Perhaps once the protagonist has set the scene up, you could go round and everyone could add something with their dice or the scene dice. That way you'd double check that everybody had had some input and the opportunity to get involved.

As for the stealing of other people's attributes, that was in the playtest version of the rules but I forgot about it when it happened in the game! You can use someone else's attribute as though it were your own, if appropriate, but you have to give them a dice as "payment." Of course, this doesn't account for losing it though - maybe the protagonist has to pay twice as much? It worked well in the game though. Can anyone think of a more elegant way of handling this?