[TROUBLEshooters] - Playing with Time

[Joe Murphy (Broin)]

Hola. I took a little break from The Forge for the last month or so, thanks to the thrills, spills and melodrama of my last game exploding.

TROUBLEshooters is a slightly satirical game dealing with the exploits of the (Tactical) Robotic Orthodox-Universal Belief Limitation Eliminators. The PCs are ultraviolent robot troubleshooters sent on various missions into alien-infested space on behalf of a colossal religious hierarchy. It's very much based on UK comics like The ABC Warriors and so on.

It hangs on Donjon, with a lot of contested narration and so on, and some things rejiggered to better suit robots and planet-scale violence.

Originally, I thought it'd be fun to have the each session play through the Briefing, Mission and Debriefing of a particular mission. Briefing would sort of correspond to Donjon's 'town' stage, with characters establishing their resources and requisitions. Debriefing would include a 'shady list' system for establishing just how potentially treasonous the characters got during the game, along with 'character advancement' (lame characters are melted down) and so on.

I realised that the pacing in Debriefing could really suck, though (following planet-smashing violence with 10 minutes of red-tape would not be fun), so instead, I thought it might be interesting to tell the whole mission through flashback. A little like the Confessionals in Inspectres, the session would open with the group's superior ticking off their injuries, excess ammo expenditures and lists of laws broken, with the players making vague apologies in return.

Five minutes of back-and-forth accusations and apologies would generate the scenes the group would then play through, in flashback: 'So you nuked the village?' 'Yeah, but we saved the kids.' 'Yes, but you nuked their parents.' 'But the parents were aliens, honest guv.' The players and GM would then know they'd eventually have a village-nuking scene to play through.

How does this sound so far? And are there any other games I should look at that 'play with time' like this, and tell the story backwards?

Joe.

[joe_llama]

Hey Joe,

There are two games I know of that follow a similar line of thought. One of them is The Adventures of Baron Munchausen from Hogshead Publishing, the other is Bedlam. There may be more.

With respect,

Joe Llama

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Joe,

H'm! I like it, so far. I'm thinking that standards for "how much" can be told in the debriefing will have to be set quite clearly, because the goal, as in InSpectres, is to make the subsequent play fun and creative, rather than simply playing out "what we already know."

So for instance, the last time I played InSpectres, one player called for a Confessional just as another player's character was unknowingly about to confront a bunch of mutant rats. The first player took great pleasure in describing her character's relaxed, nonchalant, cig-smoking demeanor in the Confessional, and said, "Of course, I'd packed Cheese Puffs in her lunch bag."

The fun came from the second player entering into the scene, knowing (unlike her character) that mutant rats were certainly about to get her, and now knowing that she was armed with the mighty power of Cheese Puffs.

The association of Cheese Puffs and rats is actually a tad more straightforward than other, equally successful instances of InSpectres play. Quite a few Confessionals have been played as curve balls, as in "Geez, how can that be made into a key factor in the scene." And in fact, as it turned out, the player in that scene did not use the Cheese Puffs in any way that the rest of us were anticipating and provided a particularly spectactular payoff to the setup.

The question for Joe now becomes, can that same kind of cooperative, challenging, semi-improvisational logic be applied at the level of a whole scenario? How much information should the GM provide to start? For instance, should he or she dictate whether the mission or whatever succeeded or failed? What is the scope for input during the Debriefing? If the GM does not provide the information about success or failure, can a player?

It's an interesting question, and I'm interested to see what others think.

Best,
Ron

[Ron Edwards]

Hey, I went thread-hunting.

Ferry's thread about Your thoughts on fatalistic roleplaying? also offers some views on the topic.

Best,
Ron

[Joe Murphy (Broin)]

Mr Llama,

Cheers. Bedlam is down, so I'll mail the author and see what's what.

Ron,

Bloody hell, where do all these threads come from? I was *sure* I'd read everything on The Forge up until about Jan 02. Oy! Thanks. Great stuff.

I had three things in mind when I thought about running the Debriefing at the beginning.

First of all, pace. 10 minutes of bouncy, in-character chatter is a good way to start a game session, like the Interview stage in InSpectres. 10 minutes of conversation doesn't work so well at the conclusion of a long evening.

Secondly, I was inspired by sessions of Over the Edge and Al-Amarja's infamous customs bureacracy. For those not familiar with OtE, one recommended scene to run at the beginning of a campaign is to have the PCs vetted by insane/twisted/mundane/terrifying customs officials. Players know their characters will eventually get onto the island, so playing through the interview is quite a giggle. Red tape is perversely enjoyable in game sessions. In real life, not so much.

And finally, I thought that the arguments could involve a sort of bidding process. The GMC superior would explain note that one character lost a gun; a negative. A PC would respond by explaining how the gun was out of ammo at the time, having mown down a small squad of aliens; a positive.

Generally speaking, I wanted both 'sides' to avoid discussing success or failure. Instead, as I'm basing all this on Donjon, I wanted the debriefing to set up small goals for each of the characters: 'Right, you know you lose a leg at some point. Go wander into a hail of gunfire, and narrate your leg exploding.'

I haven't yet had concrete opinions about whether characters can hint at other character's mistakes, or the extent to which the GM can suggest misfortunes. It's a helluva question.

Joe.