[Stranger Things] Two Nights a Stranger, playtest session one (longish)

[Rossum]

Last Tuesday, I hoped to get into a new game of Paranoia XP one of my gang planned to run, but some folks had left town and it fell through. I volunteered to run a one-shot instead. The players chose Stranger Things over Kill Puppies for Satan. I nabbed the PDF, printed and comb-bound it, got some extra character sheets and some of the high-quality map tiles, and read.

Stranger Things is a game by John Harper that uses the Trollbabe system. Caveat- I have never played or read Trollbabe. Players of Stranger Things are half-human half-demon characters called Strangers, set in a city of myth and legend inhabited by humans and demons called the City of Forgotten Gods. It's part Hellboy and part anything by Neil Gaiman (in my mind, the story Ramadan is bang on).

This isn't my usual roleplaying group, though I've been in a few sessions of D20 D&D, Cyberpunk, and All Flesh Must Be Eaten with them. They're in their early twenties (I'm thirty) and are willing to give new games a try and have their minds shaped. I know they have a few regular White Wolf games they play (notably Exalted). This was their first indie/narrative power to the players/playtest game, AFAIK.

We got together for 8 PM. Started play at 10, broke at one AM. So actual play time was about three hours. Character creation took a little longer than I would have liked, due mostly to out-of-game reasons and a few stumbling blocks.

Initial stumbling blocks, in no particular order:

• I couldn't find a clear way to explain what their number meant in terms of Shadow. I think it's just an awkward phrasing that only became clear with examples.


• Magic was extremely hard to nail down, due to the "Magical Effects" section's emptiness in the playtest draft. My rules of thumb was: If a power came from their physical appearance or just seemed in their idiom, I called it a supernatural gift. Anything that could be translated as a mutant power became a demonic power. Only one player chose human sorcery, so she's got potions and elixirs.


• I explained that a "carried item" was anything that held particular significance to the character beyond regular gear or clothes or weapons. This eventually seemed to sink in, and players did choose carried items that they didn't know anything about, so I think it worked.


• In this session, I only had one Conflict that we wound up rolling for, so I'm pretty sure that the difference between conflict resolution and task resolution simply hasn't been adequately demonstrated. More on this below.


• The players liked the glyphs. I had all of them select one and put it on their character sheet. I suspect that a glyph is somehow related to one's true name. Know the glyph, you gain power over the person.

During character creation, I took the lead from John's emails and text, actively seeking input from the other players: "What do yall think?" A player would ask me if they could do X, or would Y make sense, and I would come back with, "Well, what makes sense to you?" I think I adequately fostered the collaborative spirit, though I think it was definitely a little weird for this group.

I intended to run a single session of Stranger Things as a one-shot, but I've got at least one more session to run. Perhaps I tried to do too much with the players' stories, but the short play time became a factor. One of the first things a player said at the end was "When are we playing next?" This could turn into a longer-running game easily, I think.

Players/characters, in the style of the example Strangers from the book:

• Jackie: Keteb's (aka Lawrence) number is 3.  He has scaly white skin, fangs, talons, lanky black hair, and a long spiked tail. His supernatural gifts allow him to burrow underground and hold his breath indefinitely. His yellow eyes capture light, allowing him to see in the dark. His fighting style is demonic, with tail, claws, and poisoned fangs; his magic style is demonic; and his social style is comforting and friendly, but quiet and shy. He has a scarab beetle pinned to his shirt and carries a small hourglass. He wears a cape over his buttoned shirt and simple slacks.


• Kat: Annelise's number is 7. She is a pale, androgynous figure with a voice like the tinkling of ice and metal. She has white skin and long pale hair; when she opens her eyes or mouth, a blue/white glow pours out. Her supernatural gifts render her unharmed by cold and lets her walk up walls. Her fighting style is human (rapier), her magic style is demonic, and her social style is direct and friendly. She carries a pocketwatch with a chain and fob, as well as a set of tarot cards with demonic-themed pictures. She wears a broad, brimmed tricorn hat with a feather, a poet's shirt, bracers, and riding pants and boots.


• Kevin: Alastair's number is 6. He has deep pale blue skin, and jet black hair. Sharp blades of bone protrude from his elbows. His supernatural gifts allow him to extend these bones to sword length and project emotions into other. His fighting style is demonic, his magic style is demonic, and his social style is cool and intimidating. He carries a fire lighter that his father gave him, and a silver ring he took from the first person he killed. He wears an expensively tailored suit and a bowler hat.


• Rachel: Asyra's number is 8. Her mottled skin gives the appearance of shapes and colors underneath it, shifting constantly. Her supernatural gift allows her to control these colors as desired for stealth, and walk through shadows to appear in another nearby location. Her fighting style is human, with thrown daggers and held knives. Her magic style is human, using potions, spells, and alchemy. Her social style is charming. She has a live skink about her person at all times; it has been with her since birth. She also carries a pair of dice that can alter the games of chance she runs. She wears baggy pants, tucked into boots; a shirt that laces up the front, and keeps her weapons in a sash around her waist.

To begin the game, I had no idea what I was going to do. I took a page from an oft-asked critical question of games- "What do the players do?" and threw it at the players. "What do you do?" I left it open-ended to see what they came back with. Most notably, the character of Alastair became much better because of this. I asked Kevin the Question: "What do you do?" and he came back with the concept of a successful assassin type, good at his job, rich and suave. Keeping with my strategy, I turned this back at the player: Alastair's at the end of his story- thanks for playing. So what? That's not very interesting. Kevin started to get it at this point, and changed his concept such that the character has lost interest in mere killing. Now, we've got an assassin that seeks ever more different ways to kill the client in order to regain the lost rush. This, I can work with.

After the character concepts were hammered out a bit, with increasingly more input from the other players (Annelise is a weaponsmith and jewelry worker, and wants to find out what's up with her demonic tarot cards. Asyra runs crooked card games to help the less fortunate- like "Madame Oz's Orphanage." Keteb has lost his memory, and only knows that he has an obsession with thieving pocketwatches and timepieces), I handed out the map tiles.

The tiles went over extremely well. I don't have Trollbabe to grok what "Scale" means in terms of much of anything. I just went with handing each player two tiles, keeping the rest for myself. This was a big focus almost instantly- everyone looking at the pictures and captions, asking what they were ("What do you think it is?") and what the possibilities were. A strong suggestion I'd make here is to somehow label the tiles for later reuse, say with letters on the reverse faces. Unless one intentionally wants the map to shift between play sessions, of course. I'm going to tape the tiles together once I get consensus on their layout- the cat had his input between now and game time.

Following along with suggestions for the first session, I had each player choose where in the city they were. Keteb is near the obelisk labeled "Mysterious," Annelise is at the "Tinsmith's," Alastair's at his home near the "Cursed Tavern," and Asyra is setting up her card game along the rest of the night crew by the "Dubious Stairs." This totally worked for me. For starters, the players got their control, and I got the opportunity to fuel whatever story and plot to interest the players. "Where are you and what are you doing?" One of the players spoke up, saying "I thought that we would have situations that the GM would present to us and we'd react." One of my golden moments for this session was responding with "This is not that kind of game." Proaction, baby!

Events that happened:

• Keteb experiences the recently renamed Memory Obelisk, an ancient center of the city. The obsidian is eroded from hundreds or thousands of years of exposure to the elements. It's in the center of a plaza as the focus point of a sundial. It becomes a moondial as the waxing quarter moon shines through a crack onto Keteb, and the sounds of a woman's screams echo throughout the plaza on the wind. Then the obelisk starts to weep.
• A tiny, hunched gypsy woman asks Annalise to forge a pair of swans out of quicksilver, as she has heard that only a charm crafted by a Stranger can cure her sick husband. The woman pays with a bit of silver coin (think two bits and not a chunk), which gets worked into the charms.
• Alastair's target is Balthazar, a man with gambling debt to the organized crime in the city. After he gets taken by Asyra, losing sixteen silver coins, Alastair makes a public spectacle of the killing, throwing Balthazar into the bottomless pit. (Here was our only conflict in session one.)
• Asyra brings the night's take to Madame Oz's orphanage. We discover that Madame Oz takes in demon and human children. She's a banshee. During the visit, a small human girl is killed- signs point to a mysterious ancient kind of vampire that makes no sense.
• Other cool things: Russian alchemy in Zuja's Grey Market, rumors of a giant that cannot be killed, human crime bosses with a weakness for fine cigars, and the Gypsy Camp with Konstantin- a pikey. (This guy is awesome, and sprung fully formed out of my mouth.) I know I need to bring in more demons, though this session as been pretty human-centric.

During the game, I noticed that I kept wanting to say, "Okay, roll Spot Hidden/Awareness/Notice/Perception." I think I've had a minor revalation that calling for such rolls is one of my stall techniques while I come up with whatever is happening next.

Things that worked:

Questions: I asked players many questions near the start of the session to figure out what the hell was going on. Allowing them to answer each other's questions worked.

Soundtrack: A game needs music. I selected my regular weird/spooky/tense/quirky mix, consisting of the soundtracks to Riven, Naked Lunch, and the Cook, the Thief, his Wife, and her Lover. It worked well.

Tiles: Not only did they work, but I kept about four for myself out of play. I was able to bring one of the tiles into play very effectively. "Where's this giant live?" (I play a new tile) "Here!"

Cutting: I kept them all relatively focused by cutting between their various scenes. I want to get them to bring in more details for each other's story threads next time.

My NPCs: I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to have a list of ethnic names and voices/mannerisms ready to pull out at a moment's notice. I have an out of print supplement called the Everyone Everywhere list. Best six bucks I ever spent on gaming. Online, go here: http://gaminggeeks.org/Resources/KateMonk/

What didn't work:

Magic: The current playtest draft has very little to say about what in-game magical effects are like. I didn't focus much on magic and winged it.

Conflict resolution: I didn't do such a good job here. One of the players near the end mentioned that they wanted to see what the combat system was like.

Overall, a very solid game concept here. The art so far is pretty cool, the fonts are great, and the layout has no problems. It's particularly nice that John's laid out the book to make room for three-hole drilled paper.

I've got some other feedback regarding the text itself that I'll present to John outside of the Actual Play forum. With luck, the next session will happen within the next week or so. Clinton alleges that he'll do a quickie Trollbabe example so I can see how the mechanics work.

Until next time,

MDK

Edit: bbcode tag closing

[philaros]

A strong suggestion I'd make here is to somehow label the tiles for later reuse, say with letters on the reverse faces. Unless one intentionally wants the map to shift between play sessions, of course. I'm going to tape the tiles together once I get consensus on their layout- the cat had his input between now and game time.

Keep in mind that each tile has labeled locations unique to itself - there aren't two "Dubious Stairs" or two "Madame Oz's Orphanage"s. So to reuse the tiles, all you have to do is jot down the place names in the same relative locations on a sheet of paper.

[Judd]

With all of that stuff happening, I'm not clear on how a whole session went by with only one roll.

I haven't read Trollbabe yet, so don't know squat about the rules but I'm just not clear on how that happened.

That said, every Actual Play I read about this game makes me hotter to get my hands on it.

[John Harper]

Mischa,

First, thanks for playtesting my game. You had it rough, since the "How to run the game" section is not finished. So far, I've been relying on GMs that are familiar with Trollbabe. You aren't, and I can see how that may have been a problem for you. Still, it sounds like your group had fun, so that's good.

The lack of conflict rolls concerns me. A lot. ST is not one of those games that you do by "just talking." The text says this all over the place, but it may not sink in much if you're used to playing in a different style. Every. Single. Scene. should have a conflict roll unless something very unusual is going on. The game is about conflict, and conflicts are resolved by the game system. Period. There is really no other way to really get things done in the game. Once you roll, the matter is decided, now and forever. That's the kind of resolution that the game should be driving towards, all the time.

Forget tasks and the resolving of tasks. The game text does not concern itself with that stuff at all. If you follow the rules in the text, task resolution can only crop up if old gamer habits try to bring it in. "Perception rolls" are the worst kind of wrong play for Stranger Things, and I'm glad you fought the impulse to do something like that.

Some stuff from your write-up that definitely should have been conflict rolls:
- The sick husband. Did the Stranger cure him with magic? Roll and find out.
- A small human girl is killed at the orphanage. Was a Stranger involved in that? They should have been. If so, there should have been a conflict roll. Or one afterwards, for sure (see below).

The idea is, every scene drives toward a conflict. You roll and use the game system to resolve the conflict. This means that something has changed. The story has to take a turn. The game system manages who gets the final say in the outcome. Then you move to the next chunk of story. Without conflict rolls, the game (like many other rpgs) can just wander around, endlessly setting up possibilities and never having to resolve them. The design of ST is meant to nullify this style of play.

The players need to be empowered to drive the story with conflicts. "There's a vampire killer? Conflict! My goal is to follow his trail back to his lair. Success!" Then later, "I creep into the lair, with my sunlight spell ready to go. I want a Flame conflict. I'm using my spell to destroy this child-killer once and for all!" Pow! Bam! The story can move just that quickly. Since anyone can call for a conflict at any time (there's no Director veto) players can really get a lot done, story wise, with this system.

It sounds like maybe your players just aren't used to this style of play yet, and are sitting back, waiting for you to ask them to make rolls, like you would in another game. Don't let them! Either call for conflicts yourself (try for at least one per scene) or constantly remind them that they have the authority. "Hey, you want to catch the killer? Okay, call for a conflict to find him at his lair!"

I also think that I have overstated the player's role in creating situations, too. The Director should create situations for the *players* to explore, by using their Strangers. Your player that said "I thought we would explore situations created by the GM," was actually on the right track. Of course, they should have lots of input into those situations (especially during the map phase), but the Director should be firing pre-made conflict-loaded situaitons at them from the start. I think maybe you did this, but it's hard to tell from the write-up.

This is something that isn't in the text yet, but ST is definitely not a "my guy" game. As in, "What would my guy do now?" No. ST is a game where the *players* make judgments about the conflicts at hand, and then, as authors, use their characters to address those conflicts the way they, as players, want to. There is no "let's explore my guy's imaginary life." The game is not meant to support that kind of immersive, exploration-for-exploration's-sake play. The fact that your Strangers have jobs is a concern to me. They're interesting, sure, but the game is about the situations the Strangers find themselves in (and how they judge them), not about the personal lives of the Strangers. There's a very good reason why "character back-story" and "profession" are not parts of the character creation system. Again, this looks like old habits to me.

The Magic chapter is being fleshed out a lot, but in general, any time a Stranger wants to resolve a conflict by employing the supernatural, it's a Flame conflict. Think in terms of resolving conflict. If they're using physical action to resolve the conflict, it's Blood. If they're using their personality or guile, it's Shadow. If they're using the supernatural, it's Flame.

Hmmmm. I just read over this post, and it has a kind of defensive tone. That's not how I want to come across. I really appreciate your feedback and I'm not trying to "defend" my game or anything like that. Your write-up is showing me that I have a lot more ground to cover in being even more explicit about how the game is meant to be played, and I think I'm just trying to get my thoughts down before they fly away.

Thanks for playtesting (I hope you can play that second session, or more!). And thanks a lot for posting your thoughts here.

[Rossum]

All,

Due to Katrina, it's very unlikely that my group will get a second session. Possibly via IM, but unlikely.

MDK

[Tim Alexander]

Hey Folks,

It's too bad we won't see another play of this with your group, and I'm hoping you folks are all doing ok after Katrina and that's it's primarily logistics. I wanted to pipe up a few things that might be useful if you mange to take this on another run through. First off, I actually haven't read Stranger Things, but I'm a Trollbabe fanboy and it seems that some of the stumbling blocks you encountered can be looked at strictly from the equivalents for Trollbabe, as well as first forays into using conflict resolution.

Let's take prep first, because in Trollbabe there's a real minimum of prep but the game suffers a lot if it's not done. Like, it falls apart if it's not done. Trollbabe hinges on creating a grippy situation for the PCs that serves as a focusing point for the players to make decisions and inject themselves. It's what most games of this ilk need, but they go about creating it in different ways. So, what the heck do you need to make it work?

1) Something is at stake
2) NPCs care about it
3) NPCs see the PCs as integral to the situation
4) Bad stuff happens if it's left unchecked

I think that pretty much covers it. It's what Ron lays out in the Trollbabe text. It sounds like Stranger Things needed this, but John hadn't gotten it into the text yet. Without this the game lacks the sort of focus that it needs to really be all it can be.

Second there's the whole issue of conflict resolution. Given all that went on in the play and yet still there was a lack of rolling I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that there's a lack of comfort in letting the resolution system decide things. I've found in play that Trollbabe's system is most readily hamstrung by using it to resolve things that no one cares about. It shouldn't be surprising that's the case. In your situation though it sounds very much to me like you're used to playing in games where the outcome of rolling generally sucks for you as a player and you've built up ways to get what you want through avoiding it. I may be off base, but that's a really common thing to have happen. Resist the urge to do this. Instead try to tune into those moments where the players really want something. There's a tangible something at risk. That's conflict. Figure out what's at stake, and roll the dice. The system is then built to essentially keep asking the players, "How much is this worth?" It's built so that when the player's really want something they generally get it, but it comes with a price. It's great fun if you let it do it's work.

Good luck,

-Tim