[InSpectres] Sam Spaderman, Supernatural Private Eye

[jburneko]

Hello,

So, the other night I was talking to a friend of mine that I've been out of touch with for a while and I talked about my change in roleplaying tastes and the indie scene here at the forge and so fourth.  One of the examples I brought up was InSpectres and on a whim we decided to play a one-on-one solo game which had interesting results.

The game reaffirmed itself as a multi-player game.  By the end of the session my friend had used all of his franchise dice and was down to a single die in Contacts.  He had basically seriously blown every Stress roll and I never called for a Stress roll above three, and even then I only called for a three die Stress roll once.  Although I suspect that part of the problem was that we started with a five die franchise and played a full ten die game which I think was a little long because things felt like they should have started wrapping up around six or eight dice.

It's kind of funny but my friend decided to call his character Sam Spaderman in reference to Sam Spade, of course.  This is particularly ironic because the resulting plot reminded me A LOT of The Maltease Falcon.  It's doubly ironic because it turns out that my friend has neither read the book nor seen the film.  Highlights of the plot included:

My friend revealed during the opening media interview that he was previously a bartender who owned his own bar.  He stated that his partner had been murdered outside the bar and that he had witnessed a ghostly apparation walking away from the scene.

The client ended up being the wife of a minister who had bought Spaderman's old bar and was converting it into a church.  It seems that a ghostly apparation was harassing the parishoners on Sunday mornings.

The ghostly apperition turned out to be Spaderman's old partner and in fact he had been killed by the minister who was "cleansing a sinner" in an effort to acquire the "den of sin" and convert it into a "house of god."

While reseaching how to deal with ghosts it was revealed that a ghost can be exorcised if the murder is re-enacted.  While doing this research an anoying photographer showed up who was doing follow up work from the original media interview.

While having dinner with the Reverand's family Spaderman was introduced to the Reverand's wayward teeny goth daughter who was a little TOO interested in Spaderman's work and wanted to be called "Devil Whore."

In the end Spaderman tried to get the crime re-enacted by telling the photographer to meet him outside the old bar at midnight.  He then made an ananomous phone call to the reverend and acted like he was trying to blackmail him.  When the reverend agreed to meet him, he told him to meet him outside the bar at midnight and that the reverend would know him by the camera he was holding.  He then told the police that a murder was going to be commited outside the old bar at midnight.

This was all rolled as one giant Contacts roll that didn't come up too well and so things didn't go according to plan.  "Devil Whore" showed up and interuppted the scene.  She ended up taking the rifle her father had brought and threatend to commit suicide.  Spaderman stepped in, rolled Contacts earned his last Franchise die and convinced "Devil Whore" not to kill herself but instead to blame her father for being a bad parrent, so she shot him instead, thus recreating the crime and exorcising the ghost.

Things I called Stress Rolls for:

When Spaderman first met the reverand's wife he tried to chivirously kiss her hand.  She took it the wrong way, slapped him and accused him of making moves on her.

Encountering his dead partner the first time.

Having the over-zealous photographer follow him around and get constantly in his way.

Meeting "Devil Whore" and having her be over interested in his work and having to survive dinner with this obviously disfunctional family.

Being nearly arrested for child prostitution in a misunderstanding between himself, "Devil Whore" and the police.

Finally (the three die roll) for discovering "Devil Whore" carousing with a bunch of dead WWII vets in the bar with his dead partner serving drinks from the pulpit of the church (where the bar used to be).

There may have been one or two more but I can't remember them.

This brings me to my bigest problem with InSpectres.  Stress is almost entirely the domain of the GM.  Anytime I want I can contrive into existance an event that causes stress.  I could declare a blackout.  I could create a traffic jam.  I could set the building on fire.  I can have the players swallowed by an interdimentional hole.  It's all GM, GM, GM!  This leaves me with a really uneasy feeling as to whether I'm being fair or not.  I can never tell if I'm dealing out too much or too little stress and perhaps if I'm not just throwing out stress for the sake of stress.  In any event it almost always feels arbitrary on my part.  Since Stress is integral to InSpectre's Premise I can't ignore it or minimize it and it doesn't work like SAs or Humanity from The Riddle of Steel or Sorcerer because those are all player triggered.

Ultimately, it seems weird because the point of the game is for the players to manage the business and deal with their stress and try to allocate those earned franchise dice in a meaningfull way.  BUT if the business goes under or the PCs can't survive jobs and missions then isn't that really just the GMs fault for not watching his Stress allocation?  Something always seems out of place with the Stress mechanic and I don't know how to look at it to make that uneasiness go away.

On the up side there's a successful technique I've used before but I really honed during this game.  I keep a running list of elements that have been introduced into the game so far and I always try to make things fold back into that list somehow.  I noticed that my friend did the same and also put in the effort to fold things back into the existing elements.  Most players don't do this and a lot of InSpectres games tend to balloon out into these absurdly contrived barely logical chain of supernatural events.  In this case we got a nice little soap drama about a dysfunctional family and murder.

Another plus was that my friend dumped the majority of character creation points into Contacts.  This made his character a very active character.  He was out there asking questions, manipulating people and otherwise DOING STUFF.  This to some extent solved the Stress problem because I could make Stress, to some extent, flow from his actions.  Oh, you kiss her hand?  She takes it the wrong way.  Oh?  You're going to dinner with the family, they have a fucked up teen daughter.  Oh?  You're going to the police for help, they think you've got a child prostitute with you.

The problem I run into a lot is that a player will put four dice into Academics and then basically contrive a long series of things to research, making roll after roll after roll until they've earned about 90% of the franchise dice without ever leaving the office.  This doesn't leave much room for me to interject Stress.  I mean if they're using the internet I could have a black out occur but again, that feels arbitrary and contrived and like I'm punishing the player for using their tallents.  But if I don't do that then the whole game becomes the players basically just brainstorming a backstory for whatever supernatural event I introduced and then going out and fixing it in one or two die rolls.

Hope that was interesting.

Jesse

[W. Don]

Hello Jesse:

My group and I have sold our soul to Jared. ;o)

Cracked open InSpectres about one month ago and we're going through some sort of gaming Rennaissance in our little group. The way we seem to be playing it makes the whole game sort of like a giant trampoline. You go up (wheee!), you go down (yikes!), but you just go bouncing up again! (wheee!).

As is often the case, I GM -- and I'm totally digging the whole bass player deal (boom ba boom ba boomba). The player's are definitely having fun! No matter how many times I yell out, "Stress!!!". I think one of the game's strengths is how Stress and Cool work together -- the fact that you can't be Cool unless you go through Stress. The players saw this right away and just dived in.  

If you're afraid that you are somehow "punishing" the players, don't be.  With a Confessional or two, they can always bounce back up! We've somehow learned this, and now everyone relishes the Stress roll! Stress is cool.

Hope that helps. :o)

Oh, and the way we play it, as far as logical events and continuity is concerned, is much like yours. I've found that the players themselves take pains to adjust the storyline as per the events that have unfolded during the campaign. They seem to have sensed that ballooning the campaign in all sorts of silly abitrary directions just doesn't quite do. There's very little I've had to do to encourage them in that direction, except play bass man. They took to it themselves. Interesting phenomenon, really -- I'm still scratching my head about it.

Cheers,

- W.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jesse,

I get lots of mileage from assigning Stress for Academics rolls ... by going "Call of Cthulhu" on them. The way I see it, an attempted Academics roll is literally the same thing as saying, "Something really weird and mystical is going on." So if it results in Stress? I put the really weird and mystical thing (whether implied by them or made up from my own li'l punkin head) right into their face.

A tentacled demon materializing from the pages of the book and squeezing its way down the player-character's throat, to nestle in comfort in his or her stomach, is a fine example of what I'm talking about.

"Safe offices," forsooth. That file cabinet full of dubious news items and ketchup-stained copies of the Necronomicon should be one of the scariest items in the game.

Best,
Ron