[Apocalypse Girl] The full-game playtest report

[Mike Holmes]

How about instead of the gun killing off all larger than X, how about it kills off only those with the same power as the number rolled? So the lowly one-engine has as much chance to die as any other. Except for one with 7 power or higher, which becomes immune to the gun. This gives incentive to build bigger engines to try to get to 7. Which is balanced by the counter-incentive against this that was mentioned - they become more tempting targets to try to take over, or reduce.

Here's a more complicated way to go. The player drawing the gun selects one of his engines to risk as the "shooter." Then roll a die and count engines to the left including one's own, and then moving on to the player to the left (all engines would have to be kept in a line from left to right). The engine indicated is then also at risk. Keep rolling a die and counting engines in the circle until you get back to the original player, or past him, that being the last roll and last engine indicated. Early in the game, this might be the original player, so it might incentivize waiting at first.

The gun dice are rolled. For each targeted engine, starting with the first to the left of the shooter, the owning player may roll up to as many dice from the engine that he has available, at most as many as the gun dice (he may gamble and roll less than the gun dice if he likes, perhaps if the gun dice rolled low). Or perhaps as many of the dice available as they wish to roll (though we don't want to overincentivize the large ones). If he rolls higher than the gun dice, the target is unaffected, else it is killed. Or, alternately, use the cancellation method, and each uncancelled gun die means a drop in power. Or somesuch.

What's cool about something like this is that you can then have table position as a strategy. You might put your most powerful shooter on the left as your "point" so that you can select it to be the shooter. Or a sacrificial small one. On the left so that several rolled ones on the targeting die won't end up shooting your own stuff. Further you can have an expenditure of dice to move engines around in your structure. There can be rules about having to enter something into your structure next to the thing that either spent from to create the engine, or spent from to convert the thing - ala Illuminati. You could even have an expensive "shielding" option where you could maneuver an engine behind another such that only the front one was in the targetting circle (when the shield engine is killed, move the background one forward). All sorts of options this opens up.

Two notes, generally, on the design. First, haven't played it, obviously, but to me, it sounds like the one die per round thing would be most fun. I'm a fan of incrementalism, and it means that the strategy is more intense, IMO. I could be wrong about that, though.

Second...anything you can do to add dimensions that move it further from parlor narration, the better. You already have extremely strong links to the setting and character elements mechanically, and you do have a fixed set of resolution options into which all types of actions can be divided. So it's pretty good from that POV. But if you could put in just a tad more cross-dimension of some sort, I think that might be cool.

BTW, I probably missed this but, how do you keep track of whose dice are whose? Color? Position? If not, then one of those things might be useful to add another dimension. How do you keep track of what the dice are for on a card? I mean, how do you know if loyalty is being attacked vs power being attacked? I imagined dividing the card up into four squares, with the remainder on the side a place for the name and the meaning. The quarters would have the scores diagonal from each other, and the dice in the other two diagonal boxes. Then you'd go against the score next to the dice to adjust the score above or below it. Or some such convention.

Mike

[Sydney Freedberg]

B.J., I've finally had a chance to really grill through your report. I think the Gun issue has been thoroughly discussed -- though hardly solved, so I'll concentrate on some other cool points you made:

If Core is captured, all engines ruled by the Core are also captured (never came up).

A sensible houserule, but I think I might go for a something more like what Unco Lober suggested, i.e. having Engines that lose their Core, or which have Loyalty reduced to zero, become unaligned tools for anyone to use, like the Gun.

With Amanda enslaved and everyone exhausted (while I was still pretty much fresh), I had more dice lying around than the rest of the bunch together.

Hmm. Question: Was this because you were earning so many Charge dice from all this destruction and enslavement? Or did your "crawler" strategy just give you more Engine dice than anyone else?

Mixing high-school humor and epic struggle is a very good way to keep the plot moving, as anime writers have often discovered. It's probably best to focus on character-driven scenes, but make sure to run a few Big Illuminati-Esque Political Events to provide a backdrop for the struggles before Armageddon

Ha! That seems about right, given this is "Buffy without superpowers." I also like how this seems to reflect Ben Lehman's idea of "escalating inward": you start with the mega-conflicts, but the little personal things are what really matter in the end.

By the end of Turn 6, I had a collection of little killing machines numbering 15 or so, but nothing heavier than 1/1...Even with a weakened gun, pumping out a huge flow of 1/1 engines, particularly for the last player in order, is an ultimate strategy in terms of bang for your die.

I'm beginning to agree that the system as written really favors building lots of little engines and discourages building a few strong ones, even if the Gun is rewritten to only do damage to Power or Loyalty scores it matches rather than any score it rolls under -- some friends of mine played with just such a rule this past weekend and the most mechanics-savvy of them pointed that out at once.

That playtest report's to come, but I'm out of time right now. Teaser: As suggested by Mike, I did make them use the "one die at a time" rule, just to see what would happen, and, boy, did that not work -- but it didn't not-work in the way I thought it would not-work.

P.S. Also in response to Mike: I very much had the classic Illuminati (not the CCG) in mind when I attempted, but did not complete, rules for building structures of cards. I'm diverging from that model a bit as I work it out, though. Again, details to come -- when I invent them....

[Ramidel]

Hmm. Question: Was this because you were earning so many Charge dice from all this destruction and enslavement? Or did your "crawler" strategy just give you more Engine dice than anyone else?

It was the latter, but not quiiite in the way you were thinking. More engine dice=less need to use the few charges I grabbed. I never actually -used- a Charge in the whole game. There's a huge momentum effect when you build up Engine dice.

Ha! That seems about right, given this is "Buffy without superpowers." I also like how this seems to reflect Ben Lehman's idea of "escalating inward": you start with the mega-conflicts, but the little personal things are what really matter in the end.

Yes. Also, this creates something of a bonus in terms of plot interaction...people will actually do sub-optimal things because they're attached to engines (or because they're the Dragon and someone -else- is attached to engines...). Fluffy the Cat was a prime example. Geneva lavished love, affection and dice on the little guy, and most everyone pretty much kept their hands off the cat...with the exception of Ryan, of course. Was this kind of character attachment, at the expense of saving or destroying the world, intentional?

[Sydney Freedberg]

Was this kind of character attachment, at the expense of saving or destroying the world, intentional?

Absolutely.

This kind of attachment is essential for making apocalypse girl a "narrativist" game, and indeed for making it a "roleplaying game" at all. There are lots of games where the players imagine a fictional story inspired by the "cues" of what's happening in the game mechanics -- imagining your Panzers or Star Destroyers or Knights Templar sweeping forward is a huge part of the fun of traditional wargames -- but the fiction does not in turn influence mechanics. As Vincent Baker said on his blog anyway, in response to the suggestion that maybe Kasparov imagines a medieval knight riding forward every time he moves his knight, "Kasparov might be thinking about a kingdom or his laundry, I'm pretty sure he's not saying it all out loud and trying to get his opponent to buy into it." (It's well worth reading that discussion, by the way: it's at http://www.lumpley.com/archive/156.html.) But in a roleplaying game, the fictional material you imagine actually changes the choices you make when you play, because your attachment to one element of the story -- a character most obviously, but also possibly something you want to have happen, like a big space battle or a quiet love scene -- makes you value one element over another even though they are mechanically identical.

[Sydney Freedberg]

As I mentioned earlier:

I finally witnessed Actual Play of my own game! I didn't actually play it, on purpose, because I had three more-or-less willing volunteers and wanted to see what they'd do without me, although after making them all read the short fictional introduction and the description of the three roles, I did explain the rest of rules myself and prompted them on mechanics and narration throughout the game.


Rules & modifications
We used the rules straight as written, with two big exceptions:
1) The Gun was toned down, slightly: Instead of reducing any Power or Loyalty score greater than or equal to the roll of a Gun Die, it only reduced scores exactly equal to the Gun's roll. It was still terribly overpowered. (See analysis at end).
2) I kept the original "each player rolls one die, then the next player rolls one, then the next, repeat" rule -- which both B.J.'s and Unco Lober's groups discarded in favor of rolling multiple dice a turn -- and then had to house-rule that any newly created Engine had immunity from attack for one round of play, because otherwise such a Power 1, Loyalty 1 Engine could be immediately taken or eliminated by the next player without any way to defend it! This was just one of the many exciting dimensions of brokenness created by the "one die a turn" rule. (Again, see below).



Roles & Players

The Girl...
Played by Martha, my wife - a highly creative non-geek with almost no gaming experience: She writes poetry, does worldbuilding projects with me, loves Harry Potter, Narnia, Tolkein, et al., could take or leave Star Wars, and doesn't even play Scrabble, Monopoly, or cards, let alone wargames and RPGs, and tends to get nervous about "doing it wrong." (She played an hour of Inspectres with at a D.C. Forge meetup a while back and was fascinated but baffled). I rather dragooned her into playing because I absolutely wanted to get a non-gamer perspective.
Martha chose as her Core, "You've got the wrong girl," deftly double-edged on both the in-game and real-people levels.

The Dragon...
Played by Chris, one of my best friends from college - a sci-fi fan/gamer type, creative and a good writer (better than me) but with a pretty standard background of computer games, boardgames, card games, and traditional RPGs like D&D and GURPS, but no Indies. He was taking care of his four-month-old baby, a big distraction, but even so analyzed the rules in real time as I explained them and started explaining the broken bits before his first turn.
Chris's Core for his Fallen Angel was basically John Milton on a motorcyle: "Head like a hole / black as your soul / I'd rather die / than give you control" (a Nine Inch Nails lyric).

The World...
Played by Karel, Chris's younger brother, also a gamer, albeit a bit less intense; I haven't known him as long.
Karel's core was, "I like beer" -- one which ended up driving most of the narrative of the game!


Course of Play
(with apologies to the participants for anything I misremember)

The difference in experience and personality showed up almost immediately: Martha created lovingly detailed characters with some fairly serious issues in their backstory but wasn't quite sure what to do with them, the guys created much sketchier, more comedic characters but threw them into action immediately.

Chris, as the Dragon ("Head like a hole..."), appropriately enough pursued the most aggressive and ruthless strategy, quickly figuring out the advantages the current (broken) rules give the "crawler" strategy of building more, smaller, expendable Engines rather than building up fewer, stronger ones. (Because of the one-die-a-turn rule, the "sweet spot" in the system was for a 2/2 Engine, rather than a 1/1; I'll explain why later). Chris created two Engines:
- First, "The Nihilist," a propagandist-prophet type who acted mainly through his writings. Maxed out (before the Gun started going off) at Power 2, Loyalty 2.
- Then, "Urban Anonymity," the state of people being crowded together yet always alone, never reaching out to one another as the world came apart around them (Chris narrated this abstract Engine's actions more vividly than his character-Engine, interestingly). Maxed out at Power 2, Loyalty 2.
As soon as Chris had his pair of 2/2 Engines, he launched himself on the attack, initially focusing on the World (Karel) but later taking swipes at the Girl (Martha) as well.

Karel, as the World ("I like beer"), was more cautious, initially building up a single Engine, beer-brewing entrepreneur "Dr. Claus von Hopps," who invested in advertising and benefits for his workers and maxed out at Power 3, Loyalty 3 -- before the Dragon struck.
Chris moved in to take "von Hopps," with his evil influences encouraging the industrialist to raid his company's pension plan and water down the beer with lead-contaminated water. Karel daringly split his dice between defending his Engine and counter-attacking "Urban Anonymity." Chris had more dice and better luck, with Karel's defensive dice failing to either Capture or Cancel Chris's attacking dice, so -- and remember they were each rolling one die a turn in alternation, creating a tit-for-tat conflict where the next step was pretty easy to predict -- both the 2/2 "Urban Anonymity" and the stronger 3/3 "von Hopps" ended up one die away from certain loss, with Chris debating whether to keep attacking or defend: He figured losing his 2/2 and taking Karel's 3/3 was a good trade and plunged ahead. Von Hopps became a minion of evil; "Urban Anonymity" inverted its Meaning to become "the Boozy Cameraderie of Strangers," that blurry, benign feeling towards your fellow-man produced by a few brews.
Karel now shifted strategy to retaliate, creating a "Drunken Posse" (maxed out at Power 1, Loyalty 2) out for revenge on the man who'd poisoned their beer and reaching for the Gun turn after turn, narrating the bleary mob blazing away randomly and unraveling the structure of society as Engine after Engine took hits. Chris cheerfully reached for the Gun too, narrating von Hopps's descent into madness and his opening fire on the Girl's friends as they went about one of their missions of mercy, missing them physically but shaking their Loyalty in the Girl's missions -- the first time the Girl's Engines had actually come into active play.

Meanwhile, Martha ("you've got the wrong girl") had been playing a defensive, slow-growth strategy, creating character-Engines and lovingly building them up:
- First, "J. Lo" (sadly, I forget the full name because Martha's cards went missing), the Girl's best friend and "jealous sidekick": The Girl's Core insecurity (her sense of being the "wrong girl") led to long heart-to-hearts that assauged the jealousy and brought the two together, building J. Lo up to Power 2, Loyalty 3 (as I recall).
- Second, "Lola Lo," J. Lo's troubled sister, an ex-stripper with a history of drug problems who was moving slowly out of the dark into the light of the Girl's influence, again maxing out as Power 2, Loyalty 3.
Interestingly, Martha never named or described the Girl herself, who acted initially only through conversations with her friends and then through prophetic dreams.

When the Gun began going off, Martha's lovingly built-up Engines began crumbling, leading Chris to make opportunistic attacks on her Core. Martha responded by throwing her characters into action, with the Girl instructing the sisters to take jobs at the beer factory and undermine it from within. Meanwhile, Chris recaptured a much-weakened "Urban Anonymity" from Karel, as the boozy comraderie of the mob disintegrated back into lonely coldness. A series of nasty Gun rolls and Chris's slow-but-steady attacks on the Girl put her Core in danger more swiftly than even I realized, let alone Martha with her lack of gaming experience, and suddenly the Dragon crushed the Girl's spirit. Chris had far more dice than Karel (many of them unspent Charge dice) and thus the Dragon won the game, plunging humankind into eternal, raging loneliness.

Total elapsed time, from my starting to explain the rules to the end of the world, was only two hours -- which was just as well given that (a) we were all very tired, (b) I'd see lots of brokenness to fix, and (c) we had run out of six-sided dice!


Lessons Learned

1. The Gun is still overpowered. How I'm going to fix the blasted thing I still don't know, but I'm tempted to drop the whole "Gun as an Engine" model and go for something along the lines of Escalation from Dogs in the Vineyard.

2. We ran out of dice, for crying out loud! My collection isn't huge, granted, but I've always warned other people (e.g. Tony Lower-Basch early in the design of Capes) that dice pools only work as long as their growth is limited, and I've been bit by my own ignored advice. B.J., Unco, did you guys start to find the number of dice unmanageable? I think I need to shift the system from "accumulate X number of dice to prevail" to "accumulate dice totalling X amount," because doing a little addition is easier than handling hordes of little cubes.

3. Small Engines are overwhelmingly a better return on investment than larger ones. In this game, because the "one die a turn" rule made 1/1 Engines fatally fragile (see #4 below), the "sweet spot" was at 2/2 instead, but the superiority of the "Crawler" strategy is clear across the board. The basic mathematical problem, as Chris pointed out on turn two or so, is that (a) the number of dice needed to strengthen an Engine increases geometrically, but (b) the number of dice that an Engine gives you, and the number of dice required to take it, only increase arithematically, which means it needs to be much easier to build up Engines or (less attractive to me) much easier to take them. I'm fairly confident that I can combine the solution to the "too many dice!" problem above (#2) and this problem with some careful math.

4. "Each player rolls one die a turn" is not painfully slow, as I'd feared, but, somewhat to my surprise, it is badly broken. Because each player can roll one and only one die, the outcome is pretty predictable; Capturing and Cancelling are sufficiently unlikely to hamstring defensive rolls, as Karel found out; and your accumulated dice (the Conflict Pile) take effect immediately when you get to the required total, seizing the target Engine before the defending player has a turn and a chance to respond.
The most immediate problem was that, as Chris pointed out, if a player creates a new (1/1) Engine, that one die is all they can do on that turn, so the Engine remains 1/1 and the next player can take or destroy it automatically with their one die. I immediately introduced a rule that a newly created Engine was immune from attack until a complete round of play has passed (i.e. everyone spends all their dice and Engines refresh), which led to an equal and opposite form of stereotyped play in which you had to use your first or second die of the turn to create an Engine and then hastily build it up to 2/2 before its immunity expired.
But this problem of predictability also showed up in the big conflict between Karel and Chris, when Chris realized that his one die could either take Karel's Engine automatically at the price of sacrificing his own, or try a low-odds defense, and the mutual-kill was the tactically obvious choice. (Likewise, if Martha had not literally never played a strategy game before, and if I were not the worst tactician in gaming history, one of us would've noticed Chris creeping up on taking her Gun-weakened Core, at which point any kind of defense might have extended the game an hour).
In a more complex game, this kind of mechanical predictability could produce "if I do this, then he does that, but I could do this" strategizing like that in chess. In apocalypse girl as written, the result is tic-tac-toe: fun once, boring twice, and thus broken. I need to find a way to systematize Unco's and B.J.'s house rules on both attacking and defending players rolling multiple dice on the same turn.

5. The current mechanics make a decent scaffolding for narrative, given creative players (and almost anyone interested in this kind of game will be pretty creative), but not enough. True, players having their first experience of director power unrestrained by a central GM always find it easy to do slapstick or absurdist narration (look at half the Capes threads out there), but the system needs to do a better job of guiding players towards the apocalyptic conflict. Part of that is better examples and guidance for narration -- I intend to copy With Great Power..., the state-of-the-art (that I've seen) on explicit guidance for how to narrate different elements of a fairly abstract system -- but part of that, the harder part, is tighter mechanics: My goal for the next draft is some kind of "connections" mechanic that lets Engines only affect (attack, help defend, build up) Engines they are specifically linked to in both mechanics and narration, creating a kind of "relationship map" in the course of play, with the mechanical incentive for adding to the story this way being that the more Engines you link to a given target, the more dice you can roll to attack or defend it at once -- trying to solve problem #4 above at the same time.



My thanks to all the playtesters so far. Any additional suggestions, from anyone who's played or just pondered the game, are tremendously welcome.

[Sydney Freedberg]

P.S. And a big thank-you to Clinton R. Nixon for fixing the typo in the thread title.

[Unco Lober]

B.J., Unco, did you guys start to find the number of dice unmanageable?

As for me, I (and my group) never used the literal dice piles as is. We rolled dice and then noted results on the Engine-cards in pencil.
For convenience we developed a kind of an engine card format:
- each card was seperated into three parts: one for Meaning, one for Power, one for Loyalty;
- each part was then seperated again into three - one for each player (including self);
- then, if someone "places" a die on a card, he rolls it and notes the result in pencil, on corresponding feild (e.g., when I played the Dragon, if I "placed" a die on someone's Core's Meaning, I rolled and marked the result in the "Dragon" column of "Meaning" part);
- whenever needed, numbers were easily erased (because were done in pencil).

None of us are wargamers, and piled together our d6's would total around a dozen, or just a bit more, so we never tried to use real dice piles at all.
Number of dice "active" were totally kept in memory (not the charges). Don't think that would be possible with single die turns, though (but dice not yet rolled may be noted with any kind of tokens, so probably that won't be the problem).

[Ramidel]

Ditto to Unco. We kept a play sheet for dice rolled on each aspect (though we never used Meanings as such. The group found it superfluous, really).

[Sydney Freedberg]

The method your two groups used sounds a lot more manageable than my draft, frankly. But replacing stacks of dice with paperwork still seems too complicated, to me; clearly I need to just make it simpler. Thanks.