More Danger Patrol! The Mad Professor Landig

[Matt Wilson]

Last night we picked up where my character, Dr. Langston Bradbury, had just realized who we were up against. I spent the ten Action chips I had saved up, and Brabury sputtered: "Great galaxies, there can only be one person mad enough to try such a thing... the Mad Professor Max Landig." Yes, poor Max, once a respected professor and member of Danger Patrol, made a laughingstock for his theories on mind control. He had sworn revenge, but who took him seriously?

Right after that, John asked us if he could activate a plot device, which we'd get chips in return for. It was basically a bribe to let him railroad us a bit. We accepted, and in this case it meant being captured, with the scene cutting to us manacled to a wall.

Naturally there were some hijinks and a big fight with some robot zombie thingies, and yet another cliffhanger.

What's working really well so far is the combination of chips and cards to resolve conflicts. Imagine a karma mechanic for Sorcerer that would let you roll an additional die after you rolled your initial dice, or to add effect after knowing you succeeded. Stuff like that. The way it works, you earn chips if you succeed, which you can immediately spend to improve what you just did or save them. And if you don't win, you lose chips to the GM equal to whatever he/she beat you by.

I finally got to use one or two of my character's special abilities last night, the ones that come from being two-fisted. One ability I chose (there's a list for every type that you can choose a handful from) is Rage: if you take any damage from an attack, you deliver more damage against that opponent on your next attack. It's a lot of fun against damn dirty mooks who won't keep their hands off you.

At about the same time I noticed that I wasn't ever using a fair number of traits, John said he was getting rid of three of them, so the game is really tightening up in playtest. I haven't really had any complaints, but I'm seeing improvement regardless.

[rafial]

As another player in the DP playtest, I thought I'd use this thread as an opportunity to bring up one issue I have seen arise in play that hasn't yet been fully addressed.

When Dr. Bradbury attempted to disable the mind control rig Dr. Landig had placed on his own daughter (the dastard!) using a handy foil gum wrapper, things kind of broke down in play for awhile when the player (Matt) discovered, after having made the test and gotten successes, that he wasn't going to be allowed to get the effect that he had intended.

Part of this was John's (the GM) confusion about how this would interact with the basic resistance/danger mechanism.  After all, John had just put a whole pile of danger on the table, and normally our successes are just used to whittle down that pile, regardless of descriptive color.  However Matt had declared course of action with the expectation that he was going to make an end run around the danger.

Now part of the confusion reminded me of what happens in any FITM type game when the players have forgotten to fully hash things out in the free and clear phase.  That is, Matt should have known ahead of time what were the consquences of both success and failure.

The issue at the time was force field.  I think it would have been okay for John to say "Alright, you need enough successes to exceed the strength of the forcefield for it to work" or "No, you can't use the gum wrapper until you've thought of a way to bring down the forcefield", but that needs to have been stated before Matt picked up his cards, and not after, as happened.

I hadn't thought of DP before as being FITM, but the way we've been playing it, perhaps it is, and should be acknowledged as such.  I'm bringing this up, because I think resolving the meta-issue at hand here will inform the ultimate "how to play the game" text in the DP rules in an essential way.

[John Harper]

Ah-ha! You hit the nail on the head, Wil. This same thing came up during our Trollbabe series, I think. A more thorough "free and clear" phase along with good guidelines for when stuff "really" happens (in relation ro narration) should help a lot.