(octaNe) question for players

[lin swimmer]

Fuck, man. I was sitting around with some friends tonight, re-watching From Dusk til Dawn, and I couldn't stop thinking to myself, "I wanna play this." I wanna play a game where the characters are every stupid goddamn grind-house stereotype known to man. I want the grizzled middle-aged white dude with the tattoos and Camels fresh out of prison, I want the black dude with a fucking Cigar and a .38, I want the Japanese guy with sunglasses and a missing fifth digit, all in a hotel room with a suitcase full of coke, a dead cop body (barely) hidden under the bed, in Chinatown... and then zombies.

I need to play some Octane.

So I'm reading the rules right now, with an eye towards asking anybody at Nerd NYC/GGG if they'd be interested in such a thing. I have very little experience with the "shifting narrative authority" type games. I've played one session of Inspectres (Which I felt got a little too silly for my tastes. More Futurama than Bill Murray, you know?) and one session of Dust Devils (Which I felt was a little more Leone than Eastwood than I was probably anticipating. A group thing both, not a game thing, and I'm not saying all bad either).

Now the real purpose of this thread is that I've been getting the impression that there are potentially, for people that have played it, a few areas of rules that perhaps I should be thinking about culling. I think it may have been Ron who said that the initiative system was somewhat unnecessary (pardon me if I'm unjustly quoting anybody). On the latest Sons of  Kryos podcast I believe I heard Jared say he'd dump Might & Magic, part and parcel, given the opportunity.

So that's my question for those that have an opinion. Is Octane perfect as it is, or is there a way to turn a 2X4 with nails in it into a switchblade?

Thanks

[Luke]

Hi Ryan,

OctaNe runs purdy smoothly. We didn't play with Might and Magic when we played because it just didn't fit our genre. And I didn't even know there was an initiative system! We also made up our own templates on the fly.

The two stumbling blocks that I had was how skills were used (color, color, and more color!) and I didn't put in nearly enough hazard. Hazard is your friend. Dump hazard on the players. In buckets. I was giving out Hazard 7 and 8 conflicts/villains at the end of the game, but by that time it was too late. The players had so many brownie points they were breezing past.

The only hack I deliberately undertook was to make conflicts extended based on their Hazard. Each outright victory reduced the current hazard by one.  Players had to reduce Hazard to zero to move on. If they all happened to fail on a roll, I won the conflict and got to freaking narrate something for once!

-L

[lin swimmer]

I hear you on the Hazard thing. That was one of my big errors in running Inspectres. I totally wimped on the stress tests, and it definitely suffered for it.

Yeah. Initiative? I think that one fell out of the sky into my brain. Ignore.