[WGP] Jumper Hellboy and an Art teacher take on star girl and a yeti.

[sirogit]

I'm 3 sessions into a WGP game. We choose a setting that's 'kind of like sunnydale', a suburban community that's serene conformist outside with corruption and evil powers and people punching each other into moons inside. (never mind I've never watched any buffy) set primarily around high-school (never mind I've never been to high-school) with the Struggle of Self vs. Altruism.

I like what the system does a lot. Its almost like Burning Empires except with spartan rules for conflict resolution, but does a lot of work in terms of assisting pacing and giving people tools to threaten the people they love.

Compared to similar systems I've played which distribute NPC authority (Polaris, Its Complicated come to mind) the players of the enrichment scene NPCs seem to be in a weaker position to push for the NPC's causes; they explicitly have less authority in how the NPC is portrayed and the NPC's backstory. As a result, a lot of the time the player's set up their oppositional NPC's to be pretty flakey straw-men (I wouldn't peg this as off-genre at all... I just re-read Dark Knight noticing the abundance of flakey pop-psychologist-types serving little purpose than to show that only empty-head con artists would question the motives of pajama-wearing street crusaders.)

This made me somewhat disheartened when the player who was causing ruckus with his old hellraiser crew decided that they should be pansies instead of genuine threats, espicially because I liked one player's portrayal of the leader.

The second issue I've come up against is not knowing what the point of players winning Auxilary decks is. My understanding is that they allow the players to choose what deck to draw from, but what's the advantage of that? Are we assuming players have kept track of what cards they've already drawn from each deck? Or did I miss something?

Thirdly, I'm not sure how to do The Plan reveals. The last one I did came out a little lame. "There's this scheming mastermind (Also cute girl) who has your pictures on your wall and little notes on how she's gonna fuck with you guys." Part of the reason may have been that it was a stretch to include all of the characters's apsects in one plan. Could people chime in on how to make plan reveals somewhat more awesome?

I haven't addressed the struggles as strongly as I'd like. Part of that is that I haven't been playing the Villains Obsessions as strongly as I could (A couple of them are still in that shadowy guy behind the chair phase). Part of that is that I expect, similarly to PTA, that there's an unwritten rule that the stakes should, if at all workably, center on how a situation resolves in terms of the Struggle.

After this game I would probably like to run the system again to learn it better.

Also, I made some diagrams about how Enrichment and Conflicts flow. I'll be posting them up in a follow-up.

[sirogit]

Site with diagrams for the conflict process and for the enrichement process: http://csmsp.awardspace.com/wgpstuff.html