InSpectres Opens a Coventry (UK) Branch!

[Gethyn]

Hi!

Well, the stars aligned on Friday night for a totally spur-of-the-moment game of InSpectres. And it was a blast.

The players were initially not certain about it - we're all mid-30-somethings with kids and haven't roleplayed in anger for many years. Two of the players have only roleplayed about three times ever, but they're naturals. ;)

No-one else knew the game but I was certain they'd enjoy it. I pitched it as "Ghostbusters as a fly-on-the-wall documentary" and, in the face of no small degree of apathy, played the tried and tested gambit of "well, look, it's really easy and fun - we'll knock up some characters and if you still don't fancy it we can play scrabble instead".

Result? Halfway through character creation, we were all laughing our socks off and itching to play.
Mwa ha ha! My evil plan worked!

They also really got into the idea of making the business work - I described the situation as "the only character who can die is your business", and that seemed to hook them into the idea.

OK. So the characters were:

Honey, a chain-smoking, ex-prostitute of retirement age with a keen eye for a business opportunity and a flat above a Caribbean snack shop in one of the rougher areas of our real-life home town, Coventry ('Hillfields', for those who know it).

Clyde, a 17 year-old techno geek living at home with his parents. Clyde's player found just the perfect voice within the first two minutes of play - a sort of sub-falsetto, on-the-cusp-of-breaking delivery that was Comedy in a Can(tm). (For those of you familiar with Harry Enfield's "Kevin the Teenager" sketches, think of 'Perry' and you're pretty much there.)

Cara, an ex-special forces type, discharged for psychological instability. Modelled on Sarah Connor from T2, basically, but played for laughs.

We had your basic 5-dice starting franchise and a 10-dice job from DCI Gravel of the local police, who had a slight problem in the staff canteen.
In the middle of enjoying a nice plate of Lancashire hotpot, the Chief Inspector had transformed into a 12' tall troll.

Highlights (often from judicious use of Confessionals) include:

DCI Gravel turning out to have had a certain amount of *ahem* 'history' with Honey. Mainly involving oversized nappies and a lot of baby oil.

The main source of Clyde's arcane knowledge coming not from the internet but from his extensive collection of Hellboy graphic novels. And it turning out to be accurate, of course.

An extended sequence involving a ritual for freeing the Chief Inspector from his demonic possession that required a virgin sacrifice. Of any species. "Like a goat?" "Er. Yeah, I suppose so." "OK. No problem. I'm tooling up for a hit on the Hillfields Inner City Farm..."

Due to another perefectly timed confession from Honey, the goat-napping went without a hitch, but the existence of video evidence from Honey's past strongly suggested that the goat, um, wasn't a virgin...

There was also a possessed vaccuum cleaner in there somewhere; Honey failing stress checks *every* *single* *time* they were called for; a lot of passed stress checks from everyone else; and a climax involving the troll doubling in size and going on a rampage through the streets of Coventry; a very hasty exorcism; a giant donut; lots of explosives and a successfullly restored Chief Inspector (yay team).
Admittedly, the Chief Inspector ended up naked and flea-ridden, surrounded by police cars in the middle of a street awash with troll blood, sporting a nice new goatee (or goat-y) beard, and experiencing an overwhelming desire to eat newspaper, but everyone agreed it was a job well done.

They even turned a three dice profit, despite Honey hitting zero in all four attributes.
Hurrah for Characteristics, is all I can say.

Things I learned:

Stress is really harsh if your rolls suck.
Stress isn't so bad if you get Cool early on.
Once they got a couple of sixes on their Stress rolls, Clyde and Cara couldn't be touched, basically; whereas Honey just went on a Stress death spiral.
Anyone got any thoughts on that?

(Do you tend to give Stress as a result of failed rolls, by the way, or is that just being too mean?)

Despite starting out as Ordinary People, Confessionals etc meant the characters got weirder and weirder as the game progressed. eg:

Clyde had his parents' entire house rigged to be controlled from his bedroom computer. Oh, plus his mum was a robot zombie who he keeps around to do the cleaning.

Honey had a past involving not only 'specialist' filmmaking, but a more than passing involvement in satanism.

Cara had a weird-tech steel breast (don't ask), complete with control panel and LCD display, which had some rather remarkable abilities, not least among them being Goat Transformation.

I mean, it was all fantastic and utterly funny, but it did veer a little from the 'normal Joes doing a abnormal job' spin on things.
I don't think it harmed anything, but anyone else find this happened with their games too?

All in all it was a great evening's entertainment.
No idea when we'd play again, but I'm sure it'll be one we'll bring out whenever we get the chance. :)

Gethyn

[Michael S. Miller]

This was a very amusing write-up. Thanks for sharing.

Stress is really harsh if your rolls suck.
Stress isn't so bad if you get Cool early on.
Once they got a couple of sixes on their Stress rolls, Clyde and Cara couldn't be touched, basically; whereas Honey just went on a Stress death spiral.
Anyone got any thoughts on that?

You're absolutely right about this. Someone once described it as "the guy who rolls a six on his first Stress check gets to be Bill Murray in Ghostbusters, that's why the other guys get coated in marshmallow at the end, and he's just got a little dollop on his shoulder."

(Do you tend to give Stress as a result of failed rolls, by the way, or is that just being too mean?)

I often do, particularly because failed rolls are often rather rare in InSpectres. I often find myself going along, and they're within a couple dice of finishing the mission, and no one has failed a roll yet. That's when I make things Stress-ful.

Despite starting out as Ordinary People, Confessionals etc meant the characters got weirder and weirder as the game progressed. eg:

I don't have my copy handy, but I believe there's a rule that each character can only have one Characteristic per mission. At least that's how I've always played it, and it works well.

FWIW, I also try to play multiple missions in in session, so that the Franchise Dice distribution comes into play.

[Gethyn]

Heh. The final scene with the exploding troll was very much like the "marshmallow scene" in Ghostbusters. One character utterly slathered in steaming innards, the other two barely splashed. Actually, that's a fairly vile image now I see it written down... :)

The characters' weirdness came not so much from Characteristics - they only had one each at the end of the game anyway - but from things that cropped up in moment-to-moment roleplay.

Perhaps I'm just too 'lenient' in the name of entertainment. :)

Oh, I almost forgot. The possessed vacuum cleaner was a Henry.
When Cara opened up on it with a shotgun it slowly turned around to face her...and had become *Evil Henry* with frowny mouth and angry eyes!!!! Arghhhhhh!!!!!
It was almost scary, actually.

G

[TonyLB]

Yet another testimonial driving me to carve time out of everyone's schedule in order to play this game.  Without having run it, my opinions are... well, baseless.  But I'll give it a go anyway.

I think that the unfairness of the Stress Checks is a powerful driver toward the thematic questions of the game.  These resolve around office culture, and come up precisely when you start denying people either vacation time or expanded resources.

For instance, I'm gathering that Honey (the CEO, right?) went off and had herself a nice long vacation on company funds after this misadventure, right?  While Clyde and Cara stayed in the office, toiling in the trenches, trying to expand the business.  You see how that just reeks of unfairness on many levels?

Once you accept that the results of the stress dice are not some external force, but rather an assessment of the mentality of the character, this unfairness becomes personal in just the right ways.  The dice rolls indicate that Honey is (or at least was on that day) a total stress-case, without the slightest ability to deal with the unexpected.  Clyde and Cara are carrying her.  Shouldn't they be getting some spiffy new toys for their trouble?  How do they feel when, instead of purchasing (say) body armor, the company is shelling out for yet another week of day-spa treatments for their CEO?  Yeah, yeah, she "needs" it... because she's so delicate.  Great.  Shouldn't she expect a certain amount of stress when she's starting a new business?

And this totally sets the stage for a next session, with higher stress stakes.  It would be terrific if one of the other characters ended up hosed by stress.  Then you can see whether Honey is so very generous with company resources when it's for somebody elses mental well-being.

GAH!  MUST RUN INSPECTRES!

[Gethyn]

TonyLB said:

Yet another testimonial driving me to carve time out of everyone's schedule in order to play this game.

Give in to that urge...it's *such* a great game. And it's not a whole lot of time either. I ran this on precisely ze-ro prep.
A quick roll or two on the random client table while the players were thinking about their character concepts and we were off.

And I agree with you on the Stress thing. Even though we didn't have time to run a second session, everyone's character was just "we went through all *that* for three friggen dice!?"

And yes, the CEO took the entire paycheque and headed straight for the health spa.

At the moment they're still at the 'all for one and one for all' stage, but I'm certain that would change pretty quickly.
In the game we played, that one character took all the knocks, so the other two basically felt sorry for her.  All it would need for things to get niggly from the characters' point of view is for more than one guy to be feeling that Stress burn when it came to payday...

My innner GM was already scripting the opening moments of the next session. You'd clearly have Honey breezing back into the office with a nice new hairdo, to find the other two characters utterly strung out, having spent the last month trying to answer the phone, do jobs and deal with potential clients, media interest and the devil vacuum cleaner without her.
If only she'd been there, they might have been able to turn a profit instead of barely breaking even, too.... ;)

G

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

This is an empty post composed of pure enthusiasm.

Best,
Ron

[Ron Edwards]

It has come to my attention that my post above is being misinterpreted.

I am saying:

"Yay for InSpectres!"

"Yay for Gethyn's great game experience and for his group!"

"Yay for posting in the Actual Play forum about such wonderful stuff!"

I'm talking about my empty post of unbridled enthusiasm. Which is legal on the Forge.

Best,
Ron

[Andrew Morris]

Stress is really harsh if your rolls suck.
Stress isn't so bad if you get Cool early on.
Once they got a couple of sixes on their Stress rolls, Clyde and Cara couldn't be touched, basically; whereas Honey just went on a Stress death spiral.
Anyone got any thoughts on that?

I have a question: what level were the Stress rolls and how were they distributed throughout the course of the game? For example, were there a lot of 1-die Stress rolls early on, moving up to 3- or 4-die rolls later on? Or the reverse? Or were they varied throughout the course of the game, without any noticable trend?

[Gethyn]

I have a question: what level were the Stress rolls and how were they distributed throughout the course of the game?

Good question. The Stress curve was one of the things I was most worried about getting right.

In the end, the rolls followed a fairly graceful progression:
Quite a few 1 die rolls early on for rules acclimatisation and 'speculative Cool gain' purposes, with 2 and 3 die rolls as things got hairier, culminating with a 4 die roll for everyone in the climactic final scene.

The only curveball in that mix was the egregious rolling skills of that one player. I don't think they rolled better than a 2 on any Stress roll in the entire game. Not a lot you can do against that sort of luck, I guess.

The reasons for the rolls started out as day to day irritations - equipment malfunction, fax running out of paper, mum vacuuming your bedroom during a  vital phone call etc - and became more extreme as play went on.

(Aside: one of my favourite Stress checks in the game was a 2 dicer for falling face down into a cow pat during the goat-napping raid. The player rolled double six and his guy actually got Cooler as a result. We decided everyone thought it was camo paint.)

It occurred to me a moment ago that it would be both thematically appropriate and deeply poetic for Stress to increase for a character based on exactly the same, utterly mundane trigger every time.

"Yes, Azathoth is rising from the toilet cistern. And no, your mobile doesn't seem to have a signal. Again. I guess that would be a little annoying, actually, yes. 4 dice Stress check, please."

Perhaps that's not much of a revelation, but it was a light going on for me, anyway.

G
who can't tell you how relieved he is that Ron cleared up the intention of his 'empty post' just now... :)

[Andrew Morris]

The Stress curve was one of the things I was most worried about getting right.

I don't think there is a right answer, other than whatever feels right for you and your group. I know that I generally prefer to ramp up the Stress rolls consistently, but others might like them to come more frequently, or at a higher level.

Not a lot you can do against that sort of luck, I guess.

True, true. But as Tony pointed out, this kind of disparity isn't really "losing" in this game, it's just another source of fun, depending on how you play with it.

[Gethyn]

Andrew, exactly so.

I was gratified to find that the players really got this part.
They're a mature bunch of people (dodgy goat jokes aside, of course) but I did make sure I innoculated them against the way play was going to work ("roughly speaking, my job will be to Stress you out...and that's where a lot of the fun will come from").

Without that, the Stress blowout we experienced could have been responded to with feelings of victimisation, I think.

Out of interest, has anyone actually had that problem - players getting all poor-me about their Stress rolls?

As it was, all of the Stress in the game was received with good spirit and used as fuel for some really amusing roleplay from everyone.

I found InSpectres definitely creates a 'win-win' sort of experience in that respect.

G

[Jared A. Sorensen]

Great write-up.

I've noticed a tendency for InSpectres players and GMs to either forget, ignore or just plain not read the rules for Confessionals:

1 per player per game
1 Confessional per scene
1 Characteristic can be granted in one Confessional
1 Characteristic can be granted to a player per game

I'm not a big fan of the "WAHOOOO CRAZY CRAAAAZZZZZYYY!" style of InSpectres, what with tons of Confessionals and such. But that's me. Play it however the hell you want to, so long as your PayPal check clears. ;)

- J

[Mike Holmes]

In terms of stress checks, Andrew is right. Just do what feels right at the moment. The less "planned" it feels, the more the players will enjoy the randomness of stress. Part of stress is that it something that occurs when you don't expect it. Match the player's experience with the character's there. It's not a thematic thing in the scenario (everyone else has pointed out that it is after the fact), it's color when it happens.

In any case, you aren't worried about characters having lowered stats, are you? That just makes things more funny, IMO. Failure is what's funny in life; nobody laughs at success.

Mike

[Gethyn]

I've noticed a tendency for InSpectres players and GMs to either forget, ignore or just plain not read the rules for Confessionals:

1 per player per game
etc...

Are those the same kind of rules as the invisible ones on earning Franchise dice we were emailing about the other day? ;)

I remember reading and using the other items in your list, but certainly not that One Confessional Per Character Per Game one.
I was working off this bit in the rulebook (pg 51):

The only hard and fast rules for Confessionals are these:

• Address the other players as if they were watching the Confessional on television.
• Confessionals should always add; never negate or detract from the game.
• Only one player can give a Confessional per scene.
• Each player can only give and receive one characteristic per game.

Is there a rule somewhere else in the book I'm missing?
(Not, of course that I'm arguing with you about how it should work - you being the author and all - I'm just curious as to what I've skipped over. Nothing I love better than a good, revelatory slap on the forehead.)

On the wacky-wacky style of play, I think that can be ascribed to a combination of Narrative Power Rush and lack of attachment to the characters. There was no sense that we were in it for the long haul so I think the players were running their chracters at the level of likeable cartoons.

Not, as you say, that it was a bad thing - I think it was perfect, in fact.
Our goal at the time was Fun with a captial Fuh, which was achieved in metric bucketloads. :)

G

[Mike Holmes]

On the wacky-wacky style of play, I think that can be ascribed to a combination of Narrative Power Rush and lack of attachment to the characters.

This is an oft reported phenomenon, actually, amongst long-time gamers who have a sudden "I get it now, cool!" response to lots of director stance power. What did we call it? The Silliness Effect, or something?

Mike