[Scarlet Wake] ...and Wacky Hijinks Ensued

[Nathan P.]

Warning: fairly long post. This one's going to be a synopsis, with a second post for analysis.

So http://eclipse.netlab.com.au/" target = "new"> Scarlet Wake has been sucking me in. After reading it I started itching to see how it actually played. I don't have a group at the moment, so I went to the weekly meeting of the on-campus gaming club, sat down and asked if anyone was interested in playing.

We ended up with 6 people. As it turns out, this is too many. I'll go into why in the next post.

So I explain the game, and the others seemed to grok the concept pretty quickly. Someone asks what kind of genre we want, and someone says "high fantasy", and someone else says "techno-magic", and we end up going with steampunk fantasy with lots of magic and evil-ness. We also started off on a fairly comedic tone, and ended up with these characters:

(capitals indicate Name, Style, Weapon, Luck and Grudge in that order)

Vengeful God, an Honorable Knight weilding a Blue-Tinted Katana and wearing a Ruby Earring, who wants to kill the mixed group of thugs and kids that Slaughtered His Dog.

Iron Dragon, a Ruthless Brawler with a Steam-Powered Cybernetic Arm who wears his Mothers Rosary Beads and is seeking revenge for the Arm Chopped Off In Battle.

Chaos Demon, one who Harnesses the Power of Chaos to increase his Strength and Aurua along with his Lucky Vambraces, who is seeking to regain his Stolen Sword and kill the theif.

Sneakin' Demon, a Stealthy Backstabber with a Venemous Dagger and Pendant of Chaos who is tracking down the miscreants that Razed His Village and Deprived him of his Livlihood. (my character)

Black Widow, a Ninja/Witch with a Staff and Purple Sash who seeks those that Burned her Farm and Ate her Livestock

A mage-electicity guy who took his character sheet, so I don't know his stuff. I think he got cheated at a poker game.

We then created our Lists, which took a pretty long time. We ended up with 13 individual bosses across the 6 lists, which raised some mechanics issues that I'll get to later.

Synopsis of play: I go first, narrate my Snippet about raiders burning down my village and me tracking them to The Town. I go into a bar first thing, both because I haven't had anything to drink in two days, and to get information. I sit between two morose-looking men, a large brawny type (Vengeful God) and a lanky mage-y type (guy I don't remember). These two little kids are also hanging around in the bar, and they start taunting me. I yell at them, and they say they're going to go get Freddy.

All three of us at the bar freak - Freddy's the first Boss for all of us. He's a nasty 8-year old kid with a mean double-recurved mechanical slingshot, the second in command to Johnny, the mastermind behind both the razing of my village and the killing of Vengeful Gods dog. I think he was also the son of the guy who cheated the mage guy out of all his money. (1st Boss on our three lists)

Me and VG decide to Compete for the Boss-Killing rights. Other guy says he'd be satisfied with getting a couple swings in, but not killing the Boss, so we rule that he can participate in the (later) combat, but not get any Name if the Boss gets taken out. Sneakin' Demon and VG start arguing, and then brawling on the floor. VG gets some good punches in, but Sneakin' finishes the fight with a blow from his poisoned dagger.

About then Freddy and a gang of younger kids run in, all with slingshots. Mayhem ensues - me and the mage guy slaughter the Peons, he hits Freddy for a couple of Karma and then bows out. Me and Freddy go at it, and he ends up beaning me on the head with a rock - I'm in a Bind.

This is basically the end of my turn, but the next player wants to see how the Bind turns out, so we play that out. Freddy ties me up and somehow manages to hang me on the chandelier. I narrate my struggling and slithery attempts to get out (I'm trying to improve my Style), rolling my Style, Luck and Grudge (Freddy took my Weapon) against Freddys Style, Luck and Crime. I end up winning the third roll - on a Fluke, no less. I wriggle out of the ropes and do a graceful backflip in the air, landing on my feet.

The guy whos turn it is now wants to see VG get out of his Bind, so we do that. We decide that he's struggling against the venom on my dagger, trying to purge it from his system. We roll my Weapon and Luck against his Style, Luck and Grudge (he doesn't want Freddy to get away). He wins, and gains a point of Style as he stands up, the poison dripping out of the slash on his arm. He slams me out of way and charges out the door after Freddy.

We then realize that we only have half-an-hour left before the building we were in closed, so we decides to go around the table and hear everybody else's Snippets, which were fun and interesting and put the other three players in front of the same weapons store at the same time.

More to come...

[Edit: HTML fix]

[Nathan P.]

[Another Long Post]

In classic style:

The Good

Everyone wants to continue the game, and really enjoyed their characters and the process of creating them.

Everyone seemed to have a good time.

They got the concept right off the bat, and the group worked together to make characters and Lists that were both fun and challenging.

We really got into the competitive aspect of the game - when I was fighting Freddy, the others were discussing whether to spend Kick now, or wait until a harder boss so they could really screw me. It was cool, and make me realize the tactical edge to the game that I hadn't really taken from the text.

Snippets were great, and everyone loved doing them and hearing them. I think this was because we just barely sketched out out characters during creation, so having your first chance to flesh them out was cool.

The Bad

Oh man. Six players was waaaay too many. The consensus at the end was that three players would be ideal, with four pushing it. We're talking about splitting into two groups of three to continue the game. Pretty much all of the other problems or issues we ran into stemmed from having too many players, and I feel the solution will be "play with less people". Anyway...

We used rigid list creation, but ran into trouble with the number of Peons. Trying to work out the math to give every character 50 Peons while having the same number of Peons for each of our 13 unique Bosses was way too much effort, so we figured that, on average, each Boss gets 10 Peons, so we had 130 Peons total to distrubute among the Bosses. That went smoothly enough. Looking over the sheets, we ended up with anywhere from about 45 to about 60 Peons per character. So....I dunno. How does that strike you, Ben?

Character creation takes exponentially longer with more people, because of the List. It took us an hour to finish mapping out the Peons and such and start playing. Its not that long, but with this facially simple of character creation it felt pretty long.

It was really hard to keep people interested in a scene if their character wasn't in it. Even with assigning AC's, there's really only so many random people you can throw into a scene and have them all matter. For Snippets, however, everyone payed attention, and had a lot of fun. Afterward, we all agreed that having everyone narrate a Snippet before the first turn would be cool, to pull everyone in and give everyone a little taste of the spotlight right off the bat.

The Competition for Boss-killing rights really slowed play. Again, this was primarily because we had 4 people just sitting there while 2 of us rolled dice, and it wasn't a particularly exciting set of narrations either. I would say that was the low point of the game.

Afterwards, the players said they were uncomfortable with the whole no-GM thing, but I think this more because of paradigm-shift than anything else (they all mostly came from D&D, White Wold and Palladium backgrounds). I was actually impressed with how quickly and completely they picked up on the narration-sharing, which I think had something to do with the overall style and themes of the game. Which was cool.

The Ugly

I forgot that Bosses get their Name trait added to their AP, so Freddy really should have kicked my ass harder. I think this is because characters start the game with no Name rating, so I didn't think Bosses got it, or something. Silly me.

The hand signals thing was met with some incredulous looks, but it worked out fine to actually do. Someone said "I think it's to fit in the overall style of the game", which made me happy.

In my third roll to get out of my Bind, I tied on a 8 and then tied on a 12, before finally winning. There should probably be a sentence in there about tying on a Fluke roll, and if it stacks (a double-Fluke!) or means nothing, or whatever you want. Just something I ran into.

When multiple characters are cooperatively fighting a Boss, do you just add their rolls, or can they "target" their attacks (like one taking out Peons and one the Boss, if fighting both)?

The text seems to imply that you can take less than 3 scenes in your turn if you want, and we played this way. Clarification on this?

Going after a Boss thats on multiple Lists on your first turn was kinda wonky - we kludged up reasons for Characters to be present without really giving them a chance to narrate or anything. I don't know if you want to address this specifically or not - maybe recommand that everyone get one turn before anyone can go after a Boss?

People weren't into the "coolness" aspect as much as the "killing things" aspect. Again, this is probably due to the humor elements and actual setting of the game, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

It was suggested that there be a Master List that all of the Boss's stats could be written on, so that players who were playing a Boss that wasn't on their list didn't have to look over the shoulders of other players. Everyone, including myself, thought that that was a wonderful idea.

The Summary

It was a fun time. I'm going to pursue it, and see if we can split into two different groups and see how things go. I'm really interested to see how play goes with three people, instead of six. After the game, we all stuck around and talked about the system, and the problems we saw and how to fix them for about half-an-hour - which was great. These people really got into it, especially when half of them hadn't met each other, and I had only met two of them, before we started playing.

Eagerly awaiting a response,

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

I agree with you that six players is too many for this game, but I'm also going to toss in some observations from running a campus role-playing club.

1. Full character creation is not usually possible. If you do it, reserve time specifically for that purpose with people who are coming next time, which is not usually reliable - so the key is, don't carry out full character creation.

2. Pregenerated characters should be made entirely mechanically, which is to say, to demonstrate the range of possible options. Have some space on them for the player to round out - these should not be trivia ("hair color," which will remain blank) but rather one of the relevant game mechanics which they need.

3. You need a one-sheet with the most relevant rules summarized on it, with copies for everyone. This is the single most valuable game-organizing tool in existence. I am not talking about a cheat-sheet style teeny-tiny print thing that repeats every rule, but rather a fairly friendly, easy to read sheet which begins with "what's the point" and describes both overall play and a couple of the routine resolution mechanics.

Scarlet Wake is high on my list of to-play games at present, so I'm really, really interested in further discussion of your experiences. Were there any real showstopper moments, similar to the restaraunt fight in Kill Bill?

Best,
Ron

[Ben O'Neal]

First, I'd like to say I think those character concepts are cool. A ninja/witch? How awesome is that! My favourite is steam-powered cybernetic arm dude. That would be awesome to narrate, especially cos you gotta have the sound effects!

We really got into the competitive aspect of the game - when I was fighting Freddy, the others were discussing whether to spend Kick now, or wait until a harder boss so they could really screw me. It was cool, and make me realize the tactical edge to the game that I hadn't really taken from the text.

Awesome. Call me crazy, but I prefer people to "discover" the tactical and strategic elements, rather than just tell them that they are there and what they are.

Oh man. Six players was waaaay too many. The consensus at the end was that three players would be ideal, with four pushing it. We're talking about splitting into two groups of three to continue the game. Pretty much all of the other problems or issues we ran into stemmed from having too many players, and I feel the solution will be "play with less people". Anyway...

I agree. Six players would almost certianly be too many for the rules as they currenltly stand. When I wrote up the first revision, I wrote it all from start to finish in exactly the order you read it, and before I knew the proper structure of turns and scenes. I was just guessing the theoretical maximum. I should have fixed that in the current revision, but in truth I never really noticed it because my group is only 3 people and I'd never heard of how a 6 person group worked out. Thanks! Now I know that 4 is the maximum.

We used rigid list creation, but ran into trouble with the number of Peons. Trying to work out the math to give every character 50 Peons while having the same number of Peons for each of our 13 unique Bosses was way too much effort, so we figured that, on average, each Boss gets 10 Peons, so we had 130 Peons total to distrubute among the Bosses. That went smoothly enough. Looking over the sheets, we ended up with anywhere from about 45 to about 60 Peons per character. So....I dunno. How does that strike you, Ben?

Well it looks like you did a good job of getting it all sorted and working with a minimum of fuss, and that's good. But I can't really see how what you did is any easier than the written rules. I mean, I start with 50 Peons, I know I'm sharing a Boss with you and him, so I consult you both to decide how many Peons this Boss will have and what their ranks will be, then we all subtract that number from our 50, and move on to the next Boss. Even if you pool all the Peons together like you guys did, you still have to negotiate with everyone who shares a Boss to see how many and what Rank Peons they will have.... so I can't see how one method would be any easier than the other, just different. 6 or half a dozen. I'd only be concerned if a player ended up with less than 40 Peons, because then they would be at a disadvantage when it comes to gaining Fuel.

Character creation takes exponentially longer with more people, because of the List. It took us an hour to finish mapping out the Peons and such and start playing. Its not that long, but with this facially simple of character creation it felt pretty long.

Well, yeah! More people = more complex = more time. But I'm pretty happy that 6 people only took an hour to collaborate their Lists. A D&D3e character takes that long unless you know the PHB off the top of your head. But when you also take into consideration that once you've spent your hour creating your whole character sheet, you now have everything you will need to create for the whole of your character's campaign, it doesn't look so bad. Once your sheet is done, that's it. No pre-session prep for anyone. Just show up and play. So logistically, that one hour replaces countless hours for a typical campaign using many other systems.

It was really hard to keep people interested in a scene if their character wasn't in it. Even with assigning AC's, there's really only so many random people you can throw into a scene and have them all matter. For Snippets, however, everyone payed attention, and had a lot of fun. Afterward, we all agreed that having everyone narrate a Snippet before the first turn would be cool, to pull everyone in and give everyone a little taste of the spotlight right off the bat.

I've never had this problem, but I think its related to the number of people in your group. Using the spotlight analogy, instead of players all recieving a moderate amount of spotlight constantly, in SW, you recieve a huge amount of spotlight sporadically, mixed with a moderate amount of spotlight. I really enjoy the "downtime" between my turns, because it allows me to relax and mentally regroup after the intensity of a 30minute turn, and it also allows me to try out a change of pace and new varieties of  events as I participate in the other player's stories. Every session my group and I have ever had has been chock full of variety, and really does feel like a rollercoaster ride as I have a blast playing Peons, ACs, and Bosses, then go full on playing my character, being the director, and generating my PC's story on the fly for 3 scenes, before passing my turn over to the next player so I can catch my breath.

But with 6 players, I can see that the "downtime" would quickly become "bored-time", especially if they haven't even had a single turn yet (and so don't need to appreciate the downtime).

That's just how I see things. But I definitely take your point about everyone getting to narrate their Snippets before "proper" turns start. It will be something I take on.

The Competition for Boss-killing rights really slowed play. Again, this was primarily because we had 4 people just sitting there while 2 of us rolled dice, and it wasn't a particularly exciting set of narrations either. I would say that was the low point of the game.

Well, I think 3 things about this.
1: Why the hell were you so boring? Just kidding. But seriously there's no excuse for any narration to be less than awesome.
2: I had my first experience with competition just the other day, and it turned out pretty cool. I was Tengu, who was fucking with their minds with crazy illusions like making the world appear as though it was made out of black glass, and the two PCs had just met each other, and couldn't decide if the other PC was real, or just a part of Tengu's illusion, so to play it safe, they challenged each other to a poetry contest, where one would write the first line of a famous stanza, and the other had to complete it. Damage was interpreted as both mental anguish about the other PC taking away their chance for revenge, and also psychological damage tied in with the illusions of Tengu. In the end they cooperated. But my point is that you really can do anything you bloody well want with your rolls. I can see, though, how there might be less for the Antagonists to do during this time. Perhaps having the PCs compete at the same time as being attacked by Peons (which would be super cool to narrate)? I'm not sure what else I could do about this though... I'll have to think hard on it.
3: There's always the Troubleshooting Rule.

I think it's probably best if players have had a bit of time to play normally before they have to compete with each other, just to help get them familiar with the range of options available. I might have to make this clear in the final text.

Afterwards, the players said they were uncomfortable with the whole no-GM thing, but I think this more because of paradigm-shift than anything else (they all mostly came from D&D, White Wold and Palladium backgrounds). I was actually impressed with how quickly and completely they picked up on the narration-sharing, which I think had something to do with the overall style and themes of the game. Which was cool.

I'm with you on this one. Both my players were pretty much pure D&D3e players, one is always the DM and the other has always just played. The eternal DM had trouble at first narrating only the entrances to Waves, and not the results, when he was an Antagonist, and the player had trouble coming to grips with not being able to look to anyone else for guidance. But after a few turns they discovered just how much control and freedom they have, and as a result our games have become better every session, and the last session was perhaps the most fun I've ever had playing an RPG. So I'm pretty sure that the "Oh no, there's no GM! Whatever shall we do?" thing will go away after each player has had a few turns.

I forgot that Bosses get their Name trait added to their AP, so Freddy really should have kicked my ass harder. I think this is because characters start the game with no Name rating, so I didn't think Bosses got it, or something. Silly me.

Oh well, at least he still kicked your ass. :)

The hand signals thing was met with some incredulous looks, but it worked out fine to actually do. Someone said "I think it's to fit in the overall style of the game", which made me happy.

That also makes me happy :) (Psst, I'll let you in on a little secret: the hand rules are pretty arbitrary, at least for the number of Peons. Me and my group just call out the number we want, but still use the hand signals for the more complex instructions where it would take longer to describe the effect we want).

In my third roll to get out of my Bind, I tied on a 8 and then tied on a 12, before finally winning. There should probably be a sentence in there about tying on a Fluke roll, and if it stacks (a double-Fluke!) or means nothing, or whatever you want. Just something I ran into.

Hahaha! This same thing happened to me! I tied on a 15, and I was all like "Oh shit! What the fuck did I put in that "lose a point if you fail on an odd tie" rule for? That rule sucks! I could lose a point from my Weapon!", and then I rolled and tied on a 16, and I was all like "Sweet! Double points!", and lucky for me, I won on the re-roll, increasing my Weapon from 2 to 4. So I traded my Chunky MP5 with all the Addons for a set of wicked blades that flick out from my arms like that chick from Blood Rayne has. I called them "Masamune Viper-Blades". That scene also ended up being the best damn scene in history, and we all cursed the earth that we didn't have a way to record it.

Oh yeah, Fluke rolls don't stack. Treat any successive Fluke roll just like the first.

When multiple characters are cooperatively fighting a Boss, do you just add their rolls, or can they "target" their attacks (like one taking out Peons and one the Boss, if fighting both)?

When you roll, you distribute the result among anyone you want, however you want. If you put more onto a character than they can put onto you, you deal damage to them. If you put less onto a character than they can put on you, you take damage from them. If another PC puts damage onto the same character as you are putting damage, it stacks. So yeah, you "target" them.

The text seems to imply that you can take less than 3 scenes in your turn if you want, and we played this way. Clarification on this?

Yep. Just like you can take less than 10 minutes on a scene.

Going after a Boss thats on multiple Lists on your first turn was kinda wonky - we kludged up reasons for Characters to be present without really giving them a chance to narrate or anything. I don't know if you want to address this specifically or not - maybe recommand that everyone get one turn before anyone can go after a Boss?

Yeah, not as a rule, but as a recommendation, that would be good. It's better if players have an understanding of how "default" combat and scenes and stuff works before they tackle shared scenes and stuff.

People weren't into the "coolness" aspect as much as the "killing things" aspect. Again, this is probably due to the humor elements and actual setting of the game, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

My first thought is that this would be a "GM relic". In your typical classic setup, the GM is responsible for coolness, and the players are responsible for killing and exploring. It's also likely that having so many players meant that no-one really had to face the responsibility of making their character cool. If they break down into smaller groups, I'm pretty confident that they'll quickly realise that just "killing junk" won't be enough to show how they can Step On Up.

It was suggested that there be a Master List that all of the Boss's stats could be written on, so that players who were playing a Boss that wasn't on their list didn't have to look over the shoulders of other players. Everyone, including myself, thought that that was a wonderful idea.

This is a great idea. My group has the same problem when it comes around to Boss-bashing time, and I'm kicking myself for not thinking of it myself.

It was a fun time. I'm going to pursue it, and see if we can split into two different groups and see how things go. I'm really interested to see how play goes with three people, instead of six. After the game, we all stuck around and talked about the system, and the problems we saw and how to fix them for about half-an-hour - which was great. These people really got into it, especially when half of them hadn't met each other, and I had only met two of them, before we started playing.

I'm really glad you had fun! Thanks also for taking SW to your gaming club and introducing it to new people. Looking forward to hearing more about how your SW gaming goes.


Ron:

1. Full character creation is not usually possible. If you do it, reserve time specifically for that purpose with people who are coming next time, which is not usually reliable - so the key is, don't carry out full character creation.

In SW, actual character creation, as in, creating your PC, takes about 5 minutes. 8 points, stick them on four traits, each with a minimum of 1 and a maximum of 5, then describe each trait. Done. It's the List which takes up time, because you're planning out the whole game right there. So I'd suggest that just making the first one or at most, two Bosses should suffice for that sort of situation. Actually, to tell the truth, I never created my whole List. I've just been creating each Boss as I get to them, building up my PCs story as I go. I'm up to Boss number 4 right now, and I haven't even given a moments thought as to who Boss number 5 might be. So it's perfectly plausible to play this way.

2. Pregenerated characters should be made entirely mechanically, which is to say, to demonstrate the range of possible options. Have some space on them for the player to round out - these should not be trivia ("hair color," which will remain blank) but rather one of the relevant game mechanics which they need.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this, but maybe that's because you are noting points in generalities, and I am thinking in specifics to my game, where pregenerated characters can't get much more "almost finished" than default chargen. As I've said, 8 points, 4 traits. It doesn't get much more hand holding than that before I'm playing the game for you.

But in general, for other games with more complex chargen, I can definitely see what you mean.

3. You need a one-sheet with the most relevant rules summarized on it, with copies for everyone. This is the single most valuable game-organizing tool in existence. I am not talking about a cheat-sheet style teeny-tiny print thing that repeats every rule, but rather a fairly friendly, easy to read sheet which begins with "what's the point" and describes both overall play and a couple of the routine resolution mechanics.

This is something I'm seriously planning on including. It's kinda hard to figure out what's important and what can be left out though, mainly because I think it's all important. But I'm sure I'll get it done.

Scarlet Wake is high on my list of to-play games at present, so I'm really, really interested in further discussion of your experiences. Were there any real showstopper moments, similar to the restaraunt fight in Kill Bill?

I'm also interested in hearing if you've had anything like this, Nathan. I know my group has had many, but I don't want to hijack this thread (and I'm holding off posting my own play-test experiences till our next game, where we all plan on having massively cool supernatural powers. My character is gonna be sooo damn cool!).

Thanks,
-Ben

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Ben, all of my points concern a person who is organizing a game for a campus club play-event, not for the game designer. Nothing I wrote has anything to do with the written content of the game. For instance, the one-sheet technique I'm talking about is not possible to provide in the game text - such a thing is written to a very small and personalized audience, among a group in which the writer is a member.

You seem to be responding to my points as if they were directed to you, as advice about the game content. That's not the case.

Regarding the List as part of character creation, please note that the group being described here did indeed treat it as such, because they did not play until they'd completed the Lists. So whatever you call it, or however you play, is not the point - we're talking about them, and how this group can get to more play more quickly.

Finally, and this is advice for anyone whose game is currently in late development or early release, when people post in Actual Play about it, I strongly recommend as sunny and accepting a posting-persona as you can possibly muster. It will serve you extremely well.

Best,
Ron

[Nathan P.]

Re: Ron

I agree with your points in general, for sure. For this game in particular, however, I think this worked out just fine, for the reasons I'll point out below.

1. Full character creation is not usually possible.

Well, character creation took about 15 minutes for the 6 of us, it was the List that took a while. In retrospect, figuring out the first one or two Bosses for everyone and then running with it would have been better, but it was a lot of fun figuring out who had what Bosses and how they all inter-related. We actually went from the top down, figuring out who our main Boss was and then making up the other ones in relation to that one.

2. Pregenerated characters should be made entirely mechanically, which is to say, to demonstrate the range of possible options.

For this game, I think that pre-gen characters wouldn't work, and here's why - the game is about how freakin cool your character is. The fact that it takes only slightly longer to create a character than to hand someone a character sheet and explain the character gives no excuse for pre-gen's that probably aren't as cool as the one the player would come up with on their own.

If anything, I would come in with a pre-gen List and appropriate genre, and then fit the characters into the List. I think that that would strike a good balance between coolness of characters and handling time for a demo or one-shot.

3. You need a one-sheet with the most relevant rules summarized on it, with copies for everyone

Agreed, and I'm gonna try to pull one together on general principles. Specifically, I want to include all the rules for Kick, so that people playing ACs know what their options are when fighting a character.

Were there any real showstopper moments, similar to the restaraunt fight in Kill Bill?

In a word, no. This was mainly because we didn't get far enough into the game to really start feeling the coolness, which is again a function of too many players. I'm very excited about playing in a smaller group and seeing what happens then.

Re:Ben

Well it looks like you did a good job of getting it all sorted and working with a minimum of fuss, and that's good. But I can't really see how what you did is any easier than the written rules. I mean, I start with 50 Peons, I know I'm sharing a Boss with you and him, so I consult you both to decide how many Peons this Boss will have and what their ranks will be, then we all subtract that number from our 50, and move on to the next Boss.

Well, the problem stemmed from the fact that the Bosses weren't evenly distributed. That is, there were 2 1st Bosses between the 6 of us, and I think 4 5th Bosses. So we got into a situation where one player would be out of his 50 Peons but still have Bosses to assign Peons to. So we decided to map the Peons to the Bosses instead.

I guess we should have worked harder to evenly distribute Bosses, but we were having a lot of fun with it as we went. So...next time, I guess we'll pay more attention to it.

But with 6 players, I can see that the "downtime" would quickly become "bored-time", especially if they haven't even had a single turn yet (and so don't need to appreciate the downtime).

Pretty much. Again, less people should fix things, and I'll definitly let you know how it works out for the 3-person groups.

That's just how I see things. But I definitely take your point about everyone getting to narrate their Snippets before "proper" turns start. It will be something I take on.

Hot.

Well, I think 3 things about this.
1: Why the hell were you so boring? Just kidding. But seriously there's no excuse for any narration to be less than awesome.

I think it's because it was literally the first rolls of the game, so we were looking stuff up and hadn't really got a good hold on our characters yet. But yeh, we were kinda boring. Minus points for us.

2: ...I can see, though, how there might be less for the Antagonists to do during this time. Perhaps having the PCs compete at the same time as being attacked by Peons (which would be super cool to narrate)? I'm not sure what else I could do about this though... I'll have to think hard on it.

Yet again, too many people. If there was only one other person, they would have been the Bartender trying to keep us apart, or something, and it would have been cooler.

3: There's always the Troubleshooting Rule.

Eh. I don't think I would use it until a couple sessions have gone by, anyway.

I think it's probably best if players have had a bit of time to play normally before they have to compete with each other, just to help get them familiar with the range of options available. I might have to make this clear in the final text.

Agreed. The problem, though, was that we all had shared 1st Bosses, so jumping right into the action meant that the characters were competing right off the bat. Maybe you should have a rule/suggestion that all 1st Bosses be unique? That way everyone can get up to speed, get into a couple Binds and such, before running into everyone else.

So I'm pretty sure that the "Oh no, there's no GM! Whatever shall we do?" thing will go away after each player has had a few turns.

Yeh, me too. Sweet.

I tied on a 15, and I was all like "Oh shit! What the fuck did I put in that "lose a point if you fail on an odd tie" rule for? That rule sucks! I could lose a point from my Weapon!", and then I rolled and tied on a 16, and I was all like "Sweet! Double points!", and lucky for me, I won on the re-roll, increasing my Weapon from 2 to 4...Oh yeah, Fluke rolls don't stack. Treat any successive Fluke roll just like the first.

Clarification: So each one counts on its own (in odd-or-even-ness), as opposed to extending the first one? I mean, if I tie on an even, then an odd, then lose, it counts as losing an odd fluke (the second roll), not an even fluke (the first)?

My first thought is that this would be a "GM relic". In your typical classic setup, the GM is responsible for coolness, and the players are responsible for killing and exploring. It's also likely that having so many players meant that no-one really had to face the responsibility of making their character cool. If they break down into smaller groups, I'm pretty confident that they'll quickly realise that just "killing junk" won't be enough to show how they can Step On Up.

I agree. People kept on looking to me to do things like set the scene or explain whos in the bar, mainly cuz I was "running" the game. So they would say things like "I attack the little kids" (Freddys peons), and I would be all "uh...what do you do to them?". I'm fairly confident that this will fade out in small groups, especially the one that I'm not in.

I'm really glad you had fun! Thanks also for taking SW to your gaming club and introducing it to new people. Looking forward to hearing more about how your SW gaming goes.

Well, thank you for such a tight game. I don't know if I mentioned it, but the main praise that the group had was that it was so tight and focused, and I think everyone realized that their confusion-ness was due to playing for the first time, not because the game was unclear or vague.

Also, people were very interested in incorporating any revisions you made as you made them. Just so you know.

[Ben O'Neal]

Ok, I have like 5 minutes....

You seem to be responding to my points as if they were directed to you, as advice about the game content. That's not the case.

My bad.

Finally, and this is advice for anyone whose game is currently in late development or early release, when people post in Actual Play about it, I strongly recommend as sunny and accepting a posting-persona as you can possibly muster. It will serve you extremely well.

See, now I'm worried. When I was typing up that post, I was being "sunny and accepting". In my head, as I typed, I was stoked. However, my sense of humour is sometimes really subtle, and probably not best served by a complete absense of intonation, facial emphasis and body language. If it seems like I was anything less than enthused and grateful, then shit, that's totally not how I intended it.

Clarification: So each one counts on its own (in odd-or-even-ness), as opposed to extending the first one? I mean, if I tie on an even, then an odd, then lose, it counts as losing an odd fluke (the second roll), not an even fluke (the first)?

Exactly.

I'm totally cool with the rest of your post.

Thanks again,
-Ben

P.S. Enthused and Grateful. I'm :) right here!

[Ron Edwards]

High five! Did I mention that I really like the game?

(empty post, kinda, but sometimes it's worth it if we end up likin' being here)

Best,
Ron