[Inspectres] Get in the box.

[sirogit]

I got to run Inspectres last night and hopefully again sometime soon with a new player.

The characters were "snooty filmmaker taking a day job", "big man in highschool... 3 years later living in his imom's basemant." and "computer geek college student."

Normally the interview part makes me feel a little worried it'll stall, but I felt pretty good about the bits I introduced in these, espicially the kids being throw around by a playground haunting.

The game was like an hour and a half long, and I felt like it was fucking on fire for every segment except while I was explaining the rules. I chose to give one big infodump after the interviews on "These are skills rolls, here's how you can get bonuses, here's stress rolls, they can give you cool dice which are used for this, these are franchise dice..." and I noticed that the heat was missing after I was done.

More and more I'm getting into games that are "traditional GM/player set up, but with the the GM providing as -narrow- input as possible" which I felt Inspectres fit pretty well. The four things I did during play was giving NPC's funny voices, coming up with causes of stress, "asking what do we do know?" and calling scene transitions.

Speaking of which, I think I had a really good number of low stressfull situations, but no really high stressfull sitautions, leading to a fairly good amount of Cool possessed by PC's. I believe my stressors were:

The lights go out in the office(1 die)
A ghost shows up, as a client(2 dice)
A bum asks someone for change on the way to the park(1 die)
Dwarves talk about eating someone's blood(3 dice)
A dwarf bleeds profusely on one of the investigators(2 dice)
A bimbo that one of the inspectres hit on in the park shows up to tour the office(1die)
After it's found out that the dwarves work for a competeting organization, the Werehouse, and were trying to capture their ghost client, they threaten litigation(2 dice)
The bimbo is hired on the board of directors after she drops some cash(2 dice)

One thing that hit me about the game was that players really cared about stress rolls, but not so much about skill rolls. I think that's because the stress rolls carried a feeling of "Ack! It's making my character suck!" permanence feeling wheras most people didn't care if they were individually successfull/got to narrarate on most given skill rolls, plus no one used any franchise dice making them less meaningfull. This seemed kind of a shame because there's all these groovy mechanics effecting Skill rolls and not many effecting Stress.

Next game: Investigation during a vacation in the netherlands. I found it very good-bearing that a player asserted that prositituition was legal there at the end of the game.

[Nathan P.]

Awesome.

Really, if you feel that they're not getting Stressed enough, feel free to invent Stress ("and now bird shit is falling out of the sky onto your newly washed van...1 Stress). Tying it into the situation at hand is never a bad idea ("the Dwarves slashed your tires. 3 Stress'). Also, sometimes I make Stress "stack" when I think its appropriate ("still irritated from when the bum hit you up for cash, you really aren't in the mood to deal with pitiful homeless children offering to wash the birdshit off your car. 4 Stress")

Once skill levels get low enough from too much Stress, and you narrate all kinds of complications into their failed rolls, watch 'em reach for those bank dice. Just watch.

Did anyone do a confessional? I usually have to urge confessional use the first couple times, until the players remember its an option.

Yay InSpectres!

[sirogit]

Can't believe I forgot to mention. There were I believe two confessions which went pretty smoothly. One was about "Jimmy" the highschool big shot trying to score with the park bimbo, and stated that he had a harebrained scheme to get their secretary out of the office at the time, which cut to a scene of said for harebrained scheme interposed, the other one establishing that the dwarves in the park worked for a competeting organization, the werehouse, which led to them being introduced in the office scene to threaten litigious actions.

[Jared A. Sorensen]

Werehouse.

Fantastic.