[d20] The Comfort Zone

[Andrew Norris]

I started a reply to the "Spycraft -> Wushu" thread, but realized that while my experiences were similar enough to warrant a reply, what I really wanted to do was describe my latest gaming session in detail. I'd love for anyone and everyone to dissect the game from a theoretical standpoint, and I'm happy to answer questions about it. Heck, this is my first time face-to-face GMing in almost a decade, so I just want to talk about it. :)

I ran a D20Modern game this past weekend which started as a very matter of fact, by-the-rules game, but metamorphosed into something very much like Wushu. I think our consensus was that if the session had been a TV show or movie, it started off as "Law and Order:SVU", took a brief pass through "X-Files", and ended up in a cross between _The Matrix_ and _28 Days Later_.

Preparation

I've been reading the Forge for several months now, and so my initial impulse when I managed to get a local group together to game was to do something in Unknown Armies with a focus on Premise similar to what I've read about in Actual Play of Sorceror. However, the players were all familiar with D20 Modern and D&D 3rd, and the easiest carrot to get them to sign up was to go with somewhat familiar territory. I did provide a Premise, "How much does the world around you have to change before you do?", although I didn't make any attempt to introduce full-blown Narrativism to the players.

The basic setting, a truck stop and convenience store off Interstate 40 called "The Comfort Zone", was taken from _Exit 23_, an introductory adventure for Dark*Matter. In practice, this really meant that I just printed out the map from the PDF and threw everything else away.

Our four PCs all held official positions of some kind (two military, one FBI, one police detective); however, this actually served to increase dramatic tension, as they all felt the need to assert control over a situation that was rapidly spiraling out of control, but all had different ideas on how that should be done. (All IC conflict was welcomed with grins by the players, so I don't think we had any problems with OOC conflict or obstructionist play.)

The players and the PCs were:
Daniel - male military sniper with a history of anger management issues.
Mike - female military investigator (CID).
Jeremy - male FBI agent with a real beater of a car.
Josh - female police detective from out of state.

Play

The session involved myself as GM, four players, and about five hours of play. Beer and pizza were present, and I can definately say the presence of both had an influence on how the game played out. (Looking back I think I had about two beers more than planned, which helps explain our drift in tone.)

We opened with credits rolling over four separate individuals pulling into the Comfort Zone over the course of five to ten minutes. (My first prop of the night came out as I showed them the religious flyer a passer-by left on their windshields.) It was near dusk in January, and a light snow was rapidly picking up.

The PCs went about their business for a short time, when two shots rang out in the men's room. At this point I was playing very much 'by the book' for D20, with rolls for initiative and round-by-round movement as the four PCs sized up the situation. I thought this would be resolved rather quickly, but instead about one minute of game time took forty-five minutes as we dealt with the fact that we had four PCs, all armed, responding to a crime. It wasn't the scene I planned for -- it was better. Ten minutes in we had a Mexican standoff with characters swinging their guns back and forth, calling "Stand down!", as they made sure that none of them were responsible for the crime.

Investigation of the end stall revealed a dead man in a black suit, a briefcase, and an open ventilation grille over the toilet.  My second "Wait, this isn't what I planned!" moment happened right then -- obviously, none of the PCs were going to disturb the crime scene, and so the plot hook (contents of the briefcase) was left unused. They couldn't jump up into the vent without disturbing the body, either, so that was out. I took a deep breath and decided we had some solid Sim - Exploration of Character going on, and everyone was having a good time, and went with it. The party had established bona fides and worked through a tense situation, and was actively seeking to work together.

At this point the PCs split up to question the people inside the Comfort Zone, make sure no one had run off, et cetera. Other than a few short scenes, we never had all four PCs in the same room for most of the game, so I made a point of describing the scenes cinematically, encouraging the players to do the same, and trying to make sure that the players who weren't in a scene had something interesting to watch. (I think this worked, as the 'peanut gallery' factor was high -- active and inactive players alike were kibitzing OOC about what was currently happening.)

An aside here. While I'd prepared a large amount of material for this game, I realized that I'd been too busy cleaning up the apartment that day to finalize a lot of things. In other words, I had a murderer, and a reason for what they did, but the extras weren't cast yet. We'd introduced a heavy-set trucker in passing in an opening scene, but they exhausted any clues he had to offer quickly. So I decided we had a not-too-bright cashier and a young couple with a secret. Good enough. The description and demeanor of the cashier was easy enough, as I just mimicked one from down the street. (This later became really amusing because two of the players had actually *met* her on the way to the game, so their mental image was quite vivid.) The young couple, Reg and Jodie, are sullen and unhelpful.

I don't really know how to handle investigation scenes that involve questioning witnesses, never mind when every PC is trained to know what to ask. This definatly affected the tone of the game -- the PCs were hyper-competent while the NPCs were scared, confused, and honestly just dumb. It felt overly cynical to me, but I think it worked all right.

More Play, and Things Get Weird
After some more kibitzing around we established the two scenes that would fill the last two hours of the game. Half the party was in the Comfort Zone (which is now running on emergency power) questioning the "couple with a secret", Reg and Jodie. the other half was headed north through the heavy falling snow in pursuit of fresh tracks. I turned down the lights and popped on a suitably creepy soundtrack CD.

The investigators inside, while checking for surveillance tapes, found the body of the night manager. In the confusion, they both split up and lost track of the couple. They come under attack moments later, Reg firing wildly at our policewoman from behind a shelf of snack food, Jodie managing to stab the FBI agent in the stomach with a knife off the Home Shopping Network. Both PCs were wounded and there was a sense among the players that they wanted to end this scene, and so I suggested they might want to spend a Plot Point to narrate their preferred conclusion to the scene. The policewoman shoots out the supports of the shelf Reg is hiding behind, knocking him out cold, and the agent cold-cocks Jodie in the confusion and handcuffs her.

Cut to the sniper and CID agent running north through the snow. It's dark, they're using light amplification scopes to see. The players and I are sitting in the dark, the wind is whistling outside, I'm warm with beer, so I say to myself, "Let's give this thing a real turn." So instead of them chasing down the murderer, the tracks stop cold at a tree. CID agent scans up with the light-amp scope ...

And we go to slow-motion as a heavily scarred man in a white coat leaps towards her from the tree above. The player who's being attacked starts in with "Can I..." and I stop them with "Spend the point, and the answer is yes". I get a glass bead tossed across the table to me, and we get a Wushu/Matrix moment where the PC, while falling backwards, tosses her rifle to the side, draws a pistol in each hand, and unloads at her attacker.

Cut back to the investigation inside... I'm worried at this point that the players who aren't about to be in a massive firefight are going to feel left out, so I decide the best way to handle it is to let the investigators interrogate the couple to the point where they break down, and let them start revealing that they know the man in white. This seemed to work well, as when at one point I apologetically cut away from the firefight, one of the players who was in it said, "No, I want to hear what they find out, go for it." By this point everyone was happily immersed in the cinematic style, and absorbed what was going on as a player without letting it affect their PC's actions.

This post is getting *far* too long, so I'll try to wrap up. Our couple with a secret is drugged out on some kind of amphetamine, and the PCs have found vials of gray powder on them. They break down and start talking about how they've been taking "Pig", or "pigment", to "get Gray"and talk to their dead friend, "Little T". This information is interspersed with the firefight in which our CID agent is nearly killed, our sniper saves the day, and both end up inhaling a large dose of Pig when gunfire blows open a large packet the man in white was carrying.

By now our tone is changing moment by moment -- the investigation portion is played straight, but our two PCs outside are hallucinating heavily, and the embellishments are running rampant. There's the revelation that the couple believes that "Little T" had come back to them, and that all they had to do was "give him a new body -- some bum,or something." By the time the firefight has ended, and the participants have started regaining their senses, they realize they've unloaded a large number of bullets into a sickly-looking homeless person wearing a dirty white jacket.

At this point we're near wrap-up and nobody's touched the damn briefcase yet, so I decide that Reg had stolen it in the earlier commotion. They open it, and I hand them a bag of miscellaneous props representing what's in it. The party comes back together, compares notes, and infers that they know how to find the couple's drug source... and we close, waiting to close up loose ends next session.

Thoughts

I started using embellishments as something to be bought and paid for with a resource (Plot Points, in the form of little glass beads), but moved towards allowing them at any time to provide a bonus to a roll.
I prefer the latter, but the former worked to get the group in the mood -- when someone said "I'm burning a Plot Point" and tossed a bead across the table, they had carte blanche to describe the scene as they wanted it to go down.  There was a sense that spending a Plot Point allowed the PC to do the cool in-concept things that the player really wanted, even if the dice indicated a mediocre result.

The session did not go at all the way that I expected it, but looking back on it I still managed to get through all the bits that I wanted to cover. I'm not sure how that happened, except that God smiles on fools and drunkards. :) I've spent enough time on the Forge that I knew I wanted to avoid both railroading and illusionism, but in actual play, it was still hard to let go of both (as I've been a diehard Illusionist in the past.) I decided that I wanted the players to uncover enough of the central mystery to lead up to a follow-up session, but how that happened was completely up to them.

I found out that these players were willing to push the rules aside if stretching them made for a more interesting scene. We had no discussion of Social Contract, so I was worried that we'd have some differences of opinion there, but as it happened the player I thought would be most Gamist (who is also the most familiar with the ruleset, more than I in fact) nodded and said "That sounds cool" when we decided to fudge marginal results.

Props. I had a good half-dozen props, one of which was elaborate (a PDA loaded with pictures of things relevant to the scenario.) I didn't do nearly as much with them as I'd have liked -- because I put all but one of them in the briefcase, which wouldn't have been opened had I not fudged a bit. I also have to say I conflated IC and OOC props (if that makes any sense), as the PDA was both a prop itself, and a way to show images of things they'd seen in the game, things that couldn't possibly be in the in-game device. Any thoughts on how to handle this sort of thing would be greatly appreciated.

Focus and "Screen Time". The players ran the gamut from "Don't want to stop talking" to "Must be prompted to speak". That, combined with the fact that we were split either two or four ways throughout most of the session, made me concerned about keeping everyone invested in the game. I think it was fine, but I'd like to improve on it.

Again, questions or comments are welcomed -- I was happy with how the session went, but I want to both improve my skills, and gain a better understanding of Social Contract/GNS issues.