[Infected] Children of the White Flies

[Paul Czege]

Hey Eric,

We playtested on Friday, September 28th. The playtest group was myself (as GM), Corinne Knipe, Matt Gwinn, and my wife Danielle. We had fun, which isn't such a common characteristic of playtesting, so, kudos. Most comments and questions are coming up in my second post. First, a play by play:

We discussed Setting & Film Style, and decided on: industrial revolution England.

We discussed how the protagonists might be related to one another and decided on: they all live or work in the same neighborhood of storefronts.

We decided that I would determine the Origin, Vector, and Symptoms of the infection. It is very obvious in retrospect that the game would have gone gonzo much more quickly if I hadn't owned these details.

Our game was rather slowly paced. More like a Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde film than something by Romero. Perhaps this was an artifact of only me knowing the details of the infection.

For Origin I wrote: alien.

For Vector I chose: white flies.

For Symptoms I chose: multi-lensed fly eyes and climbing walls by clinging to them. But I pretty much abandoned these Symptoms before ever revealing them. As the scenes played out other symptoms made more sense.

Danielle made: A widow running her husband's business (a bakery), with a son who doesn't want the business, and an apprentice who's taking care of things. Her Motivation was Faith.

Matt made: Bourbon Tolliver, a plumber and sewer worker who was a bully when he was younger. He's an asshole as an adult because people remember what he was and hate him (so he's actually pretty much what they expect. He loves a women who sells flowers. And his Motivation was Forgiveness.

Corinne made: Westin Carmichael, a young American from Chicago studying abroad, maybe gay, renting a room above one of the shops. His Motivation was Escape.

Danielle had a nasty headache and had to drop out of the playtest after chargen, so I ran the game for just Corinne and Matt.

Scene 1: I frame Corinne's character Westin walking briskly down the street, trying to stay out of the rain. I describe a carriage going out of control and overturning into a storefront ahead. Westin rushes to the coachman. I describe his broken leg, and that he's bit off the tip of his tongue. He's in shock, and bleeding all over his face. I decide he goes into cardiac arrest. Corinne names the coachman Lawrence, and says that Westin tries to save him. It's revealed that Westin is studying medicine. I say that Westin notices a white fly on his forearm to justify my use of an infected die. Corinne rolls and fails. So...as a named NPC we can't just have Lawrence die. We play it out as Westin actually resuscitating Lawrence, only to be shoved aside by the arrival of a real doctor. I forget the rules about needing to have the spotlight token and needing to have two points of infection showing and tell Corinne that Westin gets a point of infection. I describe a red welt on his arm where he'd seen the white fly.

Scene 2: Corinne frames a scene for Westin. He's in his flat, throwing books, making a scene in front of his teacher boyfriend. His funds have been cut off by his family, that doesn't approve of his lifestyle. "I'll have to do back alley abortions to support myself." He collapses on the bed. Corinne grabs an NPC sheet and names the boyfriend Benjamin. So, the conflict is...whether Benjamin is drawn in by the dramatics. This resolution was problematic for us. I'd been playing Benjamin as the opposition, uninterested in being won over by Westin. But Corinne had created him as an NPC. So in the conflict, who would roll Benjamin's dice? We decided that I would. But the decision felt like we were contradicting the rules, which were pretty explicit about the creator of an NPC getting the benefit of its dice. Corinne failed the roll, and Benjamin threw him out.

Scene 3: Matt framed a scene for Bourbon. Lawrence the coachman from the first scene and his sons were throwing garbage into the sewer and Bourbon confronted them. I wanted to use an infected die in the scene, and that meant getting violent. So I had Lawrence draw a pistol. He shot and missed. I described a weird, alien glow from the open sewer.

Scene 4: I framed a scene for both Bourbon and Westin. Bourbon was again in the sewer. A fetus wrapped in newspaper was thrown in, and when Bourbon burst out to confront the perpetrator it was Westin. Matt introduced an NPC, naming him Constable Perkins. We weren't sure how much power Matt should have over Perkins, but Matt basically just threw him in as blocking Westin's escape, and Corinne had Westin stab Perkins, so there wasn't much roleplaying to Perkins at all. It's probably worth specifying how much power a player has (if any) to create and introduce NPCs and determine what they're up to in a scene. I again used an infected die, so I described some white flies in the illumination of a gaslight lamp.

Scene 5: Corinne frames a flashback scene for Westin. He was performing a back alley abortion. I drove the antagonism. The pustule on his arm was leaking. When the pus had trickled down to make contact with the young prostitute she went into violent cardiac arrest. Westin tries to save her and fails. The goal for Westin was to get paid. So instead of dying, we decide she lives, but is brain damaged. The scene ends with the girl's madam slapping Westin, and telling him to "get rid of that thing". And no question about her actually paying him.

Scene 6: Matt frames a scene for Bourbon. It's a town hall style meeting in a church. Constable Perkins is there, all bandaged up from the stab wounds he'd sustained. Bourbon gives evidence against Westin, but Matt decides he wants to be infected. It plays out with the townspeople getting heated up and convincing themselves that Bourbon is the "baby killer". And he's borne to the ground by the mob.

Scene 7: I frame a scene in the dark of night. There's a church with flying buttresses supporting its mostly stained glass altar walls. In the arch of one of the flying buttresses is a cocoon, crawling with white flies. They're eating at the cocoon. It splits open and you see a slimy hand with dark fingernails, wearing a policeman's ring. It's Constable Perkins transformed. His shadowy, hunched, altered figure drops to the ground. There was no conflict or dicing in the scene.

After the game, Corinne and Matt both argued that all of the GM's scenes should be like this one, that the GM should "own the infection," and when he has the spotlight token he should basically just do scenes like this, without dicing, that reveal and expand upon it.

Scene 8: Corinne frames Westin going to Benjamin's room, dirty and with blood stains on his clothes, to ask for money. I have Benjamin having brandy with another man. Westin is infected, so Corinne plays up the violence. Westin puts his scalpel (the same one from the abortion) into the other man's neck. Benjamin gets infected trying to pull Westin off the other man.

Scene 9: Matt frames Bourbon in a cell, being visited by the flower girl he loves. He names her Andrea. I have her tell him she's seen him staring at her, and that she has no sympathy for his plight. She walks out. Bourbon tries to stop her. He fails. And she's infected.

Scene 10: I frame Bourbon sleeping in his jail cell. The slimy and altered Constable Perkins lets himself in with the keys, intent on killing Bourbon. Matt decides that Andrea the flower girl was nearby, and returns help him against Perkins. They win the roll. Then Bourbon rolls to try and find Westin, and wins, so Bourbon and Andrea enter Benjamin's apartment to discover that Westin has tied Benjamin to the bed, gagged, and that Westin himself is in a cocoon in the corner. There's a fight, and Westin escapes.

There were a couple more scenes, but my notes are incomplete. Bourbon manages to die proving his innocence to the town in the market square when Andrea goes on a mad attack and they simultaneously slay each other. (So Bourbon gets his Forgiveness goal.) And Westin manages to stow away on a ship headed to America. (So Westin gets his Escape goal.)

After the game I explain that the white flies were a little like leafcutter ants. They lived off the cocoons, so they cultivated the virus that caused the mutation.

Paul

[Paul Czege]

Second post, comments and questions in no particular order:

1. You'd sent some rules revisions the morning of the 28th. And three previous rules patches. So before play I worked through printouts of the rules changes and applied them to a photocopy of the ashcan pages. I tried to just cut sections of the printouts and tape them over sections of the initial rules text. But generally the replacements didn't match the sizes of the initial paragraphs. So things got taped onto adjacent pages, and as flaps (tape hinged) over other sections of rules, and there are cross-outs and arrows. I'm really sold on the report cover publication method for ashcans if a designer expects iterative patching. But I think you missed an opportunity to just send pdfs consisting of whole replacement pages. It would have been easy for you to just keep a record of pages you'd changed in your master rules text, and make a pdf of just those pages when you wanted to send out a patch. And always include a revised table of contents. If you needed to insert pages, they get numbered 13a, 13b, etc. The beauty of the report cover is that it facilitates the page replacement.

2. On p. 12 you write that you had pretty strict guidelines in an earlier version of the rules for when the GM should use 1, 2, or 3 infected dice. I'd like to see those guidelines. (But you should know that by the later scenes of the game I had pretty much abandoned using infected dice.)

3. In your patch about the PCs becoming monsters you mention that if you're a monster, "now no other PC or NPC can help you in your final conflict to reach your goal." How does PC help work otherwise? The other player has to decide to help you? All of a PC's dice? Including infected dice? Or some subset decided by the other player?

4. In your patch about "PC Infected Dice" you write "when you have to pick out a player to receive an infected die, you may not pick the GM or a player who already has 3 infected dice." In your patch about "Harm for NPCs," you write about losses when Desperate and wins when Crazed requiring you to "pick one named NPC to take one point of harm." So it's unclear whether or how a player might ever be assigning infected dice "to another player," or if rather, it's your choice and the Desperate and Crazed outcomes are deprecated in their requirement of picking an "named NPC" for the harm.

5. In your patch about the "PCs becoming infected" you have a rule that the PCs gain infected dice when their player has the spotlight token in their possession and there are at least two infected points on the table at the end of the conflict. I had forgotten this rule when we played, and gave Corinne's character an infected die for only one infected point on the table in her first scene. And it really jump-started the wildness of her storyline. So a possible variant for a shorter game would be give an infected die for only one infected point on the table.

6. Your re-roll rules for Desperate and Crazed are Trollbabe-esque. Perhaps a mention of Trollbabe in the Acknowledgments is in order.

7. You have a patch rule that ties always go to the GM. What about player vs. player ties?

8. We like the older rule that the player wins ties when Desperate or Crazed. Why did you change it?

9. An alernate rule for ties suggested by Matt is that a player could win a tie if they choose to become infected.

10. In reading the "Pens and swords" section of the text I had some questions. How is it established that a player has been helped by an NPC? (Later I figured that it's established when the player grabs the NPC and asserts that his character is being helped.) As GM, should I frame scenes with lots of NPCs that might be candidates for becoming named NPCs?

11. We didn't use the Motivations cards. We just rolled a d12 against the list of twelve motivations on p. 5. I like cards, but as an indie publisher I can't imagine dealing with card printing for a set of twelve cards that don't get used in play or have a thing to do with the game's resolution system (ask Tim Kleinert what a pain in the ass it is; the Mountain Witch cards are done by a different printer than rules) when a little chart can basically get the job done.

12. With the spotlight token scene framing rotation mechanic the GM should never frame a scene for the player to the right, or awkwardly the player ends up with two scenes in a row. And also, because I used my first turn with the spotlight token to frame to my right, that player ended up using two of the three NPC cards in the first two scenes of the game. But not framing to the right means the GM only ever frames scenes for the other players, which is also undesirable.

13. Honestly, I'm not sure I'm sold on the rotation of scene framing. As GM I wasn't sure what I owned and what I didn't. And I'm not sure I wouldn't be bored if all I ever got to do was reveal and expand upon the infection (ala Scene 7) as the players suggested.

14. Matt and Corinne said the scene framing was hard for them because they didn't know the details of the infection.

15. Corinne thinks "Infected" is too "on the nose" as a title for the game, and suggests an alternate: You Are Ours.

16. I'm not sure I like the rule that a player can only gain infected dice when he has the spotlight token. What's behind that rule?

17. It was super easy for the players to get their Goals, because by their last scenes they were each rolling a bunch of infected dice, and I couldn't figure out how to creatively justify rolling any infected dice myself against them. And so in both scenes I was just rolling a few non-infected dice for an NPC. So the rolling for Goals wasn't particularly dramatic, and basically, the players just narrated the endings they wanted.

Paul

[Eric Provost]

Hey Paul, good stuff.  That's plenty of information for me to digest.

Before I address your questions and concerns, I have a couple questions of my own, if that's cool.  I figure that the better I understand how things went the better I can address where things weren't awesome.

I know that Bourbon's motivation was Forgiveness and Bourbon's motivation was Escape.  But you don't mention if the players used those motivations to author goals.  Did either of the characters have goals that arched over the entire story, or were the motivations used to author goals that just encompassed a single scene?

You don't mention reel changes or the amount of time you had to play.  Did you use the new rule that says to change the reel when a third of your time is up?

Did you or either of the other players feel as if you were forced to create conflicts where conflicts where not naturally occurring in the fiction?

I'll probably be back around either later on this evening or sometime tomorrow morning.  Hopefully with some well-digested responses to your initial posts.

-Eric

[Paul Czege]

Hey Eric,

Yeah, it's a lot of information. But I wanted to let it all hang out. That way if we mis-read a rule, or misinterpreted something, you know not to trust our feedback.

Corinne and Matt could maybe answer the Motivation/Goal question better than I can, but my impression is that they took the Motivation itself as a general "goal," and just kept things loose in play until something satisfying of the Motivation seemed creatively possible. Did I miss something in the rules text that says the player should take the Motivation and write it into a much more specific Goal?

I wanted to use the rule about changing reels when a third of our time had passed, but we spent so much time getting up to speed on the rules that the first reel would have been just two scenes if we'd used the time limit rule. So I switched reels when it seemed to make sense, which gave us around 12 scenes total, and around 4 scenes per reel, with the last several scenes being a bit rushed. I guess it was a question of whether to rush the early establishing scenes, or the later wrap-up scenes, and my gut said not to rush the establishing scenes.

A lot of indie games these days have an initiate scene, and then drive for conflict framework. We didn't have a problem with it. (Though personally I'm feeling a bit starved for the experience of details and embellishment in my gaming lately, and I'd probably be more fired up about Infected if it delivered on it a bit. Doesn't seem to fit your genre though, so don't take that as advice.)

Paul

[hardcoremoose]

Hey Eric,

For the record, this is Corinne, or Scott, or however you might best know me...

Regarding the Motivations/goals...I don't know if we were supposed to customize the Motivations in some way (I don't think the game needs it), but I very much did use the Motivation as a guide to authoring my scenes.  That I failed a lot early prevented it from becoming evident, but I was driving towards fulfilling my Motivation in every scene I authored, and as many other scenes as I could.

In other news...

I'm not big fan of the reel change mechanic.  Real-time mechanics tend to leave me flat.  Take it for what it's worth.

I actually didn't have trouble framing scenes, but I did find myself being a little cautious so as not to step on Paul's toes.  No problem there though...it worked fine.  And conflicts seemed to flow very naturally for me.

I do think the scene framing stuff needs to be tightened up a bit.  It did seem awkward for Paul, who had to pick and choose who to deliver scenes to.

Like Paul said, I think Infection dice should be a viable threat regardless of who's holding the spotlight icon.

You need to do something with ties, apart from just "the GM always wins".  Going back to your old mechanic seems better to me, but you might be missing out on a great opportunity to do something even better.

I really don't like the title.  I advocate strongly for something You Are Ours or You Will Be Ours...remember the old one-sheets for the Italian zombie film Zombie, where it had the phrase "we are going to eat you" scrawled across the bottom of the poster, beneath the rotting zombie face?  That was cool and creepy.

I want to emphasize that the above criticisms are fairly minor.  This game was a lot of fun.  Perhaps the most fun I've had with a rpg in a long time.  It perhaps suits me better than Paul, but it was easy to slide into...I could play this a lot.

[Eric Provost]

Alrighty.  Finally I have some time to reply properly.

First off, that's an awesome AP report.  Second, thanks for taking the time and putting all that effort in to stitch together that mess of patches and re-patches.  I'm hoping that the new document I sent out earlier today will resolve all that mess nicely.

Now lemmie see what I can do about those points you made, Paul.

1.  Agreed.  I won't miss that opportunity again.

2a.  I don't know if I have the specifics of those rules hanging around anymore.  There were two iterations.  The first one regulated your dice based on how many monsters were in the scene.  The second regulated your dice based on how difficult it was to 'escape' from the monsters.  I decided that I didn't like either when I realized that I hated not being able to have the PCs surrounded by monsters in the first reel.

2b.  Really?  This is a total stunner for me.  You didn't feel the urge to have the monsters showing up at every opportunity?  Really?  I'm not sure what, if anything, I could do to the rules to resolve that issue.  Suggestions?

3.  I've confused folks with this one before.  It's one of those things that I keep neglecting to articulate in the text.  I think I've cleared it up in the V2 ashcan, but here it is in a nutshell:  When another player wants to help you out, then they roll their dice and you roll your dice, but you treat all the dice the two of you rolled as if it were one person rolling them:  You.

4.  I'm a bit confused.  It seems like you might be conflating two different rules.  One of which is obsolete with the new patch.  I'd like to put this one on the back burner for later.  If the new document doesn't clear things up for you, let me know.  We'll iron it out.

5.  It's a possiblity.  I'll keep it in mind.

6.  Agreed.

7.  I was a little lazy in this aspect of the patch.  After a bit of consideration I decided to iron out that particular bump.  In a PC vs. PC conflict the tie goes to the agressor in the first round, and to the desperate and crazed in future rounds.

8.  With the change in how we're reading the dice, it felt like the right thing to do.  There will be fewer ties, so I wanted to give that little bit of edge back to the GM. 

9.  Interesting.  I'll keep it in mind.

10a.  That's correct.

10b.  Yup.  You know, it's kinda weird.  I never explicitely stated that the GM and players are free & encouraged to narrate in all sorts of NPCs that aren't central to the story.  It didn't seem necessary.  But somehow the system seems to discourage folks from bringing in lots of disposable NPCs.

11a.  Agreed.  There's no way I'm actually gonna print those cards for publication.  I watched Jason M. go through that hassle with the Roach too.  I expect the final product will either have a page for photocopying, a PDF to print out, or a suggestion to just write the motivations down on scraps of paper.

11b.  I'm just a little dissapointed that you didn't use the cards I sent.  I think that the artifact of the card sitting in front of the players has an important, if subtle, effect on the game.

12.  What's so awkward about a character having two scenes in a row?  Also;  What's wrong with a single player authoring two NPCs in a row?

13.  I seriously need to work on articulating what I do with this thing as a GM.  I started with it just a little bit in the new document, but not nearly enough.  What I do with the game is something between what you did and what your players suggested that you do.  It's kinda like:  "Hey, there's this werewolf about to attack an old lady on a dark street corner.  Who's there and whatcha gonna do about it?  Anything?  Nothing?"  Only with more color and pacing.  Does that make sense?

14.  Matt and Corinne shouldn't have worried about framing up anything with the infection or with monsters.  That's your character.  I mean, if they did bring in antything with the monsters that's cool, but that shouldn't have been their goal.  They should have been looking to their motivations (both their own and the other player's) for scene framing motivation.  But, once again, I really wasn't clear about that in the text.

15.  Noted.

16.  The first thing behind that rule is a string of failures.  I've written maybe a dozen different rules for regulating when a particular PC gains an infected die.  All of them have been utter crap.  Also behind it is a personal desire to have the infection snowball (the more infection there is out there, the more infected the PCs will become) and an imperitive to never ever have to make a choice about who gains the infected dice.  I think I disliked that last iteration of the rule more than any of the others.

17.  This is partially a balance issue.  I think I may have addressed it (at least partially) in the new text with the rule that says that a player can't get help from PCs or central NPCs when they attempt to resolve their goal.

But something like this has happened in another playtest.  Then, like your session, the GM just didn't feel that bringing the monsters in during the particular conflict was appropriate.  The problem is that I have a hard time really getting to the bottom of this issue, because I've never felt that it was an inopportune time to bring in either the monsters or the infection.  Seriously.  I'm even having a hard time imagining a situation where I wouldn't be ready to bring in the hordes.  So, being unable to properly imagine the situation, I find myself unable to properly address it.

Maybe if someone can help me understand the situation of when & why monsters are innapropriate foils for the climax of a monster movie I can do something about it.  But until then I'm just stumped.  Genuinely stumped.

Anyway, that's some awesome feedback there, Paul.  If you squint carefully, you'll probably notice that some of that feedback went right into the new text.

-Eric

[Eric Provost]

Corinne,

I'm really glad you enjoy the game.  When you say that it's the most fun you've had with an rpg in a long time, that a helluva thing for me.

I don't agree with all your critisisms, but I welcome them anyway.  I'll certainly keep them all in mind as future playtests roll out.

-Eric

[Paul Czege]

Hey Eric,

Maybe if someone can help me understand the situation of when & why monsters are innapropriate foils for the climax of a monster movie I can do something about it.  But until then I'm just stumped.  Genuinely stumped.

I think maybe the problem in our game was that the characters had become monsters themselves by the middle of the movie. Corinne and Matt are monster movie fans. Bigger monster movie fans than I am. They wanted to become monsters. They weren't fighting to stay human. And so by the third reel it was like the players had sort of assumed thematic ownership of the end of the movie.

I think the players need to be fighting...fighting...tooth and fucking nail...to stay human. They need to be crazy and desperate. (It's not an "infected" movie, but I'm thinking of the characters in the movie Descent here.) And then I can pile on the monsters. Something needs to inspire the player to fight for their character's humanity.

I also think Origin, Vector, Symptoms might be too Simmy a way to inspire me to create a monster I'm going to love terrorizing the players with. Those should be details. I need to start with a vision for badass monsters. I need to know how they're horrifying, how they're cinematic, how they're relentless, and how they're unstoppable.

Paul

[Eric Provost]

I also think Origin, Vector, Symptoms might be too Simmy a way to inspire me to create a monster I'm going to love terrorizing the players with. Those should be details. I need to start with a vision for badass monsters. I need to know how they're horrifying, how they're cinematic, how they're relentless, and how they're unstoppable.

That makes a lot of sense.  I'll give some thought to that.

Something needs to inspire the player to fight for their character's humanity.

Why?  If the players want to embrace the infection and have their characters become monsters, how does that keep you from using the rest of the monsters and the infection to screw with their goals?