Impromptu InSpectres

[SFEley]

Hey all,

Short-time reader, first-time poster.  I thought this would amuse the crowd here as an account of a first-time InSpectres game that generally succeeded despite some concerted efforts to screw it up.  This happened at the end of a dedicated "random gaming" afternoon, that began with Nuclear War and continued into an endless game of Munchkin that tired everyone out.  A risky time to pull out a new RPG, but we tried it anyway, mostly because I had just downloaded the game a week prior and was hellbent to get my ten bucks worth out of it.

THE PLAYERS:
* Myself - The owner of the game, and the one who talked everyone else into playing it while waiting for dinner to arrive.  ("C'mon, it'll just take an hour.")
* Anna - My wife, who really wanted to study for her upcoming exam, but got conned into trying this when I convinced her we really needed a fourth player.  ("Character creation takes five minutes!  It'll be fun, just try it until dinner is over.")
* Ben - Also a fan of the 'weird little RPG' concepts, and was the only one besides myself who was really enthusiastic about the game.
* John - An eager player of just about anything, but usually plays characters with a higher Charisma than he's got, if you know what I mean.  I think there's one in every group.

If the handicaps of everyone being tired, and having a short timeframe to play it, weren't enough, Ben and I threw a curve ball into it by deciding (based on a dare earlier in the afternoon) that he would GM and I would play a PC.  I had read the rules; he hadn't.  It sounded amusing to us to let the guy who didn't know the game run it -- and it's a testament to the simplicity of InSpectres's rules system that it basically worked.

So I gave everyone the nutshell premise and walked 'em through character creation and the core mechanics while Ben skimmed through the Plot Structure part of the rules.  It took twenty minutes rather than the promised five, of course, due to role-playing time dilation.

THE CHARACTERS:
* Jim-Bob Brinks (played by me).  Grew up on a farm, went to technical school to get away from it, decided to join InSpectres when his brother "got possessed by a demon" and went off to France to live with another man.  (What else would explain that, huh?)  Moderate Athletics and Technology.  His talent: ornithology.  He liked watching the birds on his farm.
* Roberta Maria Vasquez (played by Anna).  Her mother was a psychic; she had no talent herself but learned how to talk the talk for it at home.  High Academics.  Her talent: music.
* David Franklin (played by John the oddball).  Interested in InSpectres because he was, ahm, molested by succubi at an early age.  Yes, more than one.  High Academics as well.  His talent: demon sex.  (We sort of stared at him, but we were all good enough Improv players to know to accept rather than deny.)  

You will notice that nobody took strong points in Contact.  This was strongly noticeable during the investor interview and the adventure to come.  For our franchise, we decided that we were the new office in Stone Mountain, Georgia (where I live, coincidentally enough), operating out of Jim-Bob's house.  7 Franchise dice to begin, with a mission goal of 14.

At this point the buffalo wings that we had ordered out for arrived, Ben thought he had the hang of the mechanics and story, and we settled into...

THE STORY:
Jim-Bob, Roberta, and David are having an evening planning meeting at "headquarters" -- Jim-Bob's garage -- eating buffalo wings.  (Just like the players.)  They're just talking about how to spend their money when Roberta says she won't finish the wings, because they're talking to her.  Jim-Bob chuckles, but David seems worried.  Neither of them hear the wings, however, so Jim-Bob goes over them with the Ectoplasmic Field Audiometer.  Turns out they're not talking -- they're *humming*.  Humming Beethoven's Fifth.  Roberta claims it's because they're done talking to her now.

Much concern breaks out over this apparent brainwashing us through our food -- who would have motive, since we haven't even had our first client yet?  The phone rings.

David answers it while Jim-Bob goes into the kitchen to look for paranormal signs.  The caller is an old man who's concerned about "problems with all the pigeons."  He asks about our rates, Roberta pulls up "a thousand dollars a day, plus expenses," and David tells him "eight thousand dollars."  The man agrees to five, tells us he'll arrive in half an hour, and hangs up.  (Ben at this point tries to fast-forward half an hour.  Does it work?  Ha.)

Meanwhile, Jim-Bob is in the kitchen checking out the microwave that heated up the food.  He finds a strange sigil on the lightbulb.  Sabotage!  Roberta accuses: "This wouldn't have anything to do with your ex-wife, would it?"  (While this wasn't framed as a Confessional, we decided it had fundamentally the same effect, and I cheerfully wrote down 'vengeful ex-wife' on Jim-Bob's character sheet.)

Meanwhile David looks over the weird symbol on the lightbulb, and identifies it in loud, booming tones as "The Mark of the HARPY DEMON!"

"Harpy demon?" the others ask.  "What does she want with our buffalo wings?  What are her powers?"

With a totally straight face, and an utterly confident tone, David (John) says: "She is the keeper of the DILDO FROM HELL!"

Predictable silliness ensues.  Roberta goes back to needling Jim-Bob over his ex-wife.  (At this point, we had accumulated five Franchise dice for various rolls involving dinner and the microwave, before even finishing the call from the client.  Ben let them stand on the assumption that it would all become relevant later.  It did, of course.)

There is a knock on the door.  Jim-Bob, so stressed out over his ex-wife that he's lost all Contact skill, won't talk, so David answers it.  It is (Ben's exact words) "An old man with a dildo from Hell."

David is freaked by this, so Roberta calmly goes out and retrieves the dildo in a plastic bag, and they interview the man.  Seems he's an old retired fellow who likes to feed the pigeons in a nearby park.  Only in recent days, they haven't been eating.  They've spent all their time humming oddly and circling slowly around a mysterious object -- yes, that one.  He likes his pigeons, so he'll pay them thousands of dollars just to fix the problem and get his pigeons back.  This gets Jim-Bob's sympathy as a fellow bird-watcher, and everyone else wants the money, so they take the job.  Roberta shows the old man a picture of Jim-Bob's ex-wife and asks if she's been seen around the park.

(At this point I stand up for a Confessional, wondering aloud how Roberta would know so much about my ex-wife, and declaring my intention to start snooping into her e-mail to see if she's been in contact with her.)

Research into the Harpy Demon indicates that her magic would only affect the female pigeons; the disappearance of the males is ominous and bodes poorly for David and Jim-Bob.  Suiting up is quick, and acquires for us only holy water, a "spell neutralizer bomb," (concocted via Technology and an Academics assist) and an improved Ectoplasmic Field Meter.  They head out in Roberta's barely-running car while Janine the secretary (an NPC Ben whipped up at the moment) asks how she'll heat up her Chinese food with the microwave busted.  Jim-Bob and David reassure her that it doesn't matter; the ancient Chinese never had microwave technology, only the ancient Japanese did.

The team gets to the park about twilight.  There's a mysterious concrete building in the center of it, with a mysterious glowing light and an opening just wide enough at the bottom to see hundreds of pigeons walking around inside humming Beethoven ominously.  Jim-Bob deduces correctly that this is not normal pigeon behavior.  David is the first one to crawl through the crawlspace, and beholds a glowing orb and a ten-foot-tall horrible bird-thing which (via a failed Stress roll) brainwashes both him and Roberta into abject uselessness.  Jim-Bob comes through next, and using his superior knowledge of birds, grabs ahold of one of the wings to wrestle it immobile.  Unfortunately this keeps him from getting to the spell neutralizer bomb at his belt, so Roberta has to reach for it -- and fails.  It falls to the ground and is buried under a writhing mass of pigeons.

A melee ensues with the holy water, in which David burns the Harpy Demon on one wing and Jim-Bob just barely keeps his grip on the other.  In a Confessional David recalls the Dildo from Hell, which Roberta left in the car, so she's sent running back for it.  In the meantime Jim-Bob (with his last functional Academics die) makes a wild guess, looks at the Harpy Demon, and says: "...Susan?"

While Roberta races back and David has his face ripped off, Jim-Bob and his demonic ex-wife have a tearful reunion.  "When I told you go to Hell, I didn't really *mean* it, honey..."  She squawks back at him, and Roberta runs in with the Dildo from Hell.  She pauses dramatically while everyone wonders exactly what she'll do with it -- and then she strikes the glowing orb in the center of the room, the one everyone else forgot about.  (That was, conveniently, the last Franchise Die we needed.)

This seals the gate to the other dimension.  The pigeons become pigeons again, and the harpy is transformed back into Jim-Bob's human ex-wife.  (A final Stress roll is forced on Jim-Bob at this to see whether he views it as an improvement or not.)  He admits to her, "All this time, and I still...kinda like you.  Except you owe me a new microwave."  Everyone goes on vacation, Jim-Bob and the old man start a philanthropic foundation to import new male pigeons in the park since the old ones had gotten sacrificed, and Janine the NPC secretary gets paid for the first time ever.  The End.

* * *

Afterthoughts: we all had fun, and the resolution made me appreciate the innate ability of players -- supported by a decent system -- to pull together a tidy, internally consistent storyline out of utter nonsense.  The ex-wife bit, which began as a throwaway taunt by Anna, ended up the crux of the whole thing, and everybody's talents got used to a decent extent, even the musical humming.  I wasn't too thrilled with all the dildo stuff (I grew out of the "it's all about sex" style of gaming around 11th grade) but it was a funny enough image, and it ended up a fairly standard McGuffin in the plot rather than dropping into something particularly gross or annoying.

On the GM experiment, Ben did a pretty good job for a gamemaster who didn't know the rules.  He didn't quite get the mechanics of Stress tests right -- he used them mostly for temporary penalties, e.g. "brainwashing from the humming" -- but it worked well enough in context and I wasn't going to throw the pace off by trying to correct him.  He also had a hard time (as indeed everyone did, including myself) finding the right balance of GM narration vs. player narration, erring a little toward GM narration for successes and player narration for penalties.  Of course the concept was new to us all, so often he was just filling in gaps where we were being too tentative ourselves.  And there were a few mechanical issues that just sort of fried his brain -- "What's the roll for a Perception test?  How do you do combat?"  Yes, we did eventually figure out that you don't *have* to, but it was still a little weird.

People were generally in favor of the game, but I don't know if we'll run this particular franchise or these characters again.  I didn't personally consider Jim-Bob to have much "staying power" for me, and I'm pretty sure the others felt similarly about their characters.  They really were just random characters thrown together in five minutes, and I suspect that in an ongoing campaign we could all do a better job.  I wrote down the remaining Franchise dice just in case.

Conclusion?  As a system, InSpectres is very forgiving, self-correcting for places where players stumble over its concepts.  It's probably a much better game if you put more thought into it than we did this time, but if you've got an hour-and-a-half to kill over dinner, even if it doesn't achieve high art, it still seems a pretty sure bet to entertain.

Hope you all enjoyed reading this.

Have Fun,
 - Steve Eley

[hix]

Sounds fantastic! InSpectres is rapidly rising to the top of my Buy List.

[Dr. Velocity]

Not usually one to follow the popular crowd like a puppy, I have to admit InSpectres is also continually seeming to garner surprised and delighted praise, and its also a 'weird rpg', which I tend toward as well. Sounds like a terrific job has been done on this game!

[Ron Edwards]

Welcome Steve! Great to have you posting here.

InSpectres is my current first choice for a "hey let's play" game. With any luck, when Ben looks over the rules a bit more, you can explain to him and the others how the Stress and Franchise dice interact over the long haul ... and then you might see them flogging you into playing the game, instead of the other way 'round.

One thing puzzled me: you wrote,

... despite some concerted efforts to screw it up

but in your account, it seemed like no more than the usual minor reluctance and a bit of understandable uncertainty about the scope of narration. Were there any actual concerted efforts to screw up play? Can you elaborate on that?

Best,
Ron

[Jason L Blair]

InSpectres is my current first choice for a "hey let's play" game.

Could this be the return of Shmuel the Kosher Werewolf?

Steve,

Your post was a blast to read; thanks for posting it. I think your appraisal of the system is right on. The first time I read InSpectres, I was really intrigued by it. The time I got to play it really shone some practical light on it. I've been itching to play again for a year now, so I'm gonna predict that Ron is right about them bugging you to play.

[SFEley]

One thing puzzled me: you wrote,

... despite some concerted efforts to screw it up

but in your account, it seemed like no more than the usual minor reluctance and a bit of understandable uncertainty about the scope of narration. Were there any actual concerted efforts to screw up play? Can you elaborate on that?

Well, that was mostly hyperbole for "despite a deliberate less-than-ideal playing situation."  I was primarily referring to the agreement to let someone GM who'd never read the rules -- we both knew this would result in screw-ups, but did it anyway because we hoped those screw-ups would be more amusing than annoying.  

Ben's a solid improv guy and I knew he'd do all right on either side of the game, but it would have been *smoother* if it was run by someone who knew the rules.  Not necessarily funnier, of course, but smoother.

It was that experiment, actually, that prompted me to write the session up (which took about as long as the game itself, BTW) >8-> and post it here.  Jared wrote in the manual "you don't even need a GM to play this game...it just about runs itself."  I thought he'd find it interesting to know that, while we didn't quite go *that* far, the game can succeed with a GM who only knows enough to keep the pace going.