[Bliss Stage] Save Our Pilots!

[ptikachu]

Yesterday, I got together with my friends Doug, Han Kit and Vin Tsen to playtest Bliss Stage for the first time. Doug, Vin Tsen and I were really eager to get this thing going, since Doug and I are the perfect target audience in terms of the game's genre, while although Vin Tsen isn't much of an anime viewer it sounded cool to him too. Han Kit watches a fair bit of anime too, and was game for Bliss Stage despite being our youngest and least experienced roleplayer.

So we got together at Doug's place and set up the game, with me as GM. We'd all read the rules (although as it turned out Vin Tsen was working from an earlier playtest version than the rest of us) and Doug and I had few problems figuring things out, so we helped the others with it.

Working out the basics of the group, I contributed the lion's share of details on the starting situation since the other players were drawing blanks.

SITUATION
The resistance group was named the Lion's Head Academy, and is based out of Sunway Lagoon, a sprawling theme park/mall/convention centre/hotel/artificial lagoon located near where Han Kit lives. It would be organised just like a high school class, complete with teachers, class monitors, and field trips. The convention centre would make a good place for classrooms for the pilots and anchors, while the water park in the below-sea-level lagoon would be the perfect site for the obligatory swimsuit episode. We figured the resistance managed to get generators working to power the complex, and that there was some reverse-engineered alien technology to keep the base hidden from the aliens' sensors. The command centre, with the pilot cradles, is located in the head of the lion statue, hence the name.

Images of the theme park, hotel and surrounding complex:
http://malaysia.cobussen.info/images/KL/sunwaylagoon.jpg
http://www.interunion.ru/Catalog/Malasya/Kuala%20Lumpur/704_Sunway%20Lagoon%20resort/704_Sunway%20Lagoon%20resort_11z.jpg
http://www.monash.edu.my/images/KL%20pics/Pic7.jpg
http://www.kl-hotels.com/sunway/images/sunwayard.jpg

We thought it was quite cool for our characters to be based out of such a well-known local theme park. There was even a "Thundercats" vibe from using the Lion statue in the game.

CASTING CALL
All of the players already had pilot archetypes in mind, but generating the Anchors and supporting cast of NPCs helped to flesh everyone out.

For my part I created two Authority Figures: Mrs. Kumara (35, female, Indian, straight), a stern Sleep Research Scientist who leads the resistance and teaches Science and Math in the classrooms, and her second-in-command Ramza (25, male, Malay, bisexual), a handsome heart-throb who leads scavenging missions, teaches Phys Ed and sleeps with his pick of the students.

Doug's character, Kitsune no Akane (15, female, Japanese, lesbian), was developed from the Desperately In Love Pilot. Doug put Kitsune's big 5/3 relationship into his anchor Nana (15, female, eurasian, lesbian), who was based on the Comforting Anchor type.

He also asked: "Can I take an animal as a Relationship?"
We figured "why not?" as long as one of the other players portrayed the pet as an NPC.

So Doug put the 2/5 relationship into Red the Fox, a 3/1 relationship to Kitsune's little sister Midori (11, female, Japanese) which got upgraded to 4/1 because of blood relation, and a 2/2 relationship into Angeline (17, female, Chinese, straight), a former anchor pregnant with the child of a recently slain pilot, Jensen. We never got around to using Angeline's unborn child as a Relationship, though...

At first Vin Tsen volunteered to take all of Doug's NPCs, one after another, but once we realised that he was taking too many of them on we transfered the fox to Han Kit.

Vin Tsen's pilot was a Promiscuous Pilot, Deuwan Nates (16, male, eurasian, queer), and he assigned a 4/2 relationship to his anchor Ken (16, male, Chinese, queer) who was based on the Fun Anchor type, a 4/2 to Coach Ramza, a 4/1 to another boyfriend called Scott (15, male, eurasian, queer), a 2/2 to an ex-boyfriend named Sandy (15, male, eurasian, queer).

Han Kit decided on a Eager Young Soldier, Andrew Setiawan (14, male, Indonesian Chinese, straight), and his 4/3 relationship was the anchor Kiri (14, female, Indian, straight) based on the Kind Anchor, and we soon worked out as a side plot that Kiri was secretly Mrs. Kumara's daughter. Han Kit decided to forego creating NPCs of his own or taking suggested NPCs from the other players - instead he decided to invest all his other major relationships into existing NPCs. He put 3/2 into Angeline, 3/1 into Midori, and 1/5 into Mrs. Kumara, automatically making him the Teacher's Pet. This ended up going really well with Kiri secretly being Kumara's daughter.

We thought it was notable that none of the pilots took major relationships with one another. Also, the division of roles worked out like this:

Kai (me): Mrs. Kumara, Coach Ramza
Doug: Kitsune, Ken, Scott
Han Kit: Andrew, Nana, Sandy, Red the Fox
Vin Tsen: Deuwan,  Kiri, Midori, Angeline

Normally each player should play one pilot, one anchor and two supporting characters. Since Han Kit and Vin Tsen both chose to put major relationships into Authority figures, and Han Kit didn't create any NPCs of his own, there was a shortage of supporting characters for Doug to play. Nobody felt like creating more NPCs, either. We decided that Doug would take up the slack with any additional NPC who showed up in Han Kit or Vin Tsen's future scenes, although we didn't get around to creating him/her during this session.

Chargen took about an hour and a half and I wanted to get the show on the road with a nice mission sequence. We agreed on having Han Kit's character Andrew be the "POV character" for the audience who joins the team on the first episode. So we abstracted the Briefing Scene and decided that Doug and Vin Tsen's pilots would go on the first mission, while Han Kit anchored them with Nana.

As a bit of backstory I suggested that this was their first mission working together. Furthermore, Deuwan and Kitsune were the second and third pilots produced by the resistance; their fellow pilot Jensen, who was the first and best pilot, had died of trauma during a recent mission, and this shadow hung over the other pilots.

I looked at Vin Tsen and Doug's characters, and thought that a mission with a difficulty of 2 or 3 might be "too easy" so I set the number of Mission Goals at 5. This turned out to be a very interesting mistake.

FIRST MISSION: VETERANS OF THE PSYCHIC WARS
So we opened the story with Andrew scavenging for food and supplies in some ruined apartment blocks near the old National Stadium in Bukit Jalil, when a scavenging party from Lion's Head led by Coach Ramza rans into him. Before they could get to him, a towering crablike alien drone walked in on the scene and attacked, slicing apartment towers in two just to get to Andrew.

Back at the Lion's Head, Mrs. Kumara sent her two surviving pilots to destroy the alien command-entity controlling the drone in dream space, so that Ramza could rescue this new survivor. The mission was on!

Han Kit kind of blanked out at first when it came to Anchoring. We had to explain that he was narrating the dream environment - we had to explain a couple of times before he got it. Once he did it went fine. Kitsune formed a fox-shaped chassis with her Anchor, Angeline and Red relationships (total: 9 dice), while Deuwan created a Rayearth-style robot using his Ken, Scott and Ramza relationships (total: 12 dice). We all forgot that Deuwan also had a default 1/2 relationship with Nana.

When the players started rolling I saw the problem: since one die must be assigned to Mission and Nightmare for each pilot, with the lowest being read, having more pilots doesn't necessarily make a mission easier, especially if the weaker character, or bad decisions on the part of a player, drags the others down. Doug noticed that Nana allowed re-rolls on Nightmare so he actually assigned two or more dice from his own pool to Nightmare, while Vin Tsen almost assigned mixed results to Threatened categories several times.

Things almost immediately went into full-on Nightmare and the pilots started gaining Trauma and Terror. They managed to strategise their dice spending to achieve three mission goals early on, at the cost of taking some Stress on their robot components, as well as suffering '-' results in Nightmare several times. This caused a death spiral effect, because the more Trauma they had the more I Threatened and Endangered their relationships, and the more dice they had to spend just to keep their relationships from being over-stressed. Also, Vin Tsen rolled a lot of dice, but he also had some lousy results, and ended up taking a lot of Bliss every turn.

We played this entirely by the book, except that instead of assigning dice one by one the players were all eager to assign them as fast as possible. We did allow the pilots' players to strategise and re-allocated dice after some second thoughts, and Doug had to pitch in a couple of times to give dice on behalf of Vin Tsen, to achieve goals. But it was a futile battle. Both pilots accumulated lots of Bliss and Trauma in a shorter time than any of use would have expected, and we started getting worried that they wouldn't be able to pull out before exceeding 6 Trauma. Both pilots had relationships forced (Midori for Kitsune and the default relationship with Mrs. Kumara for Deuwan). Doug had to sacrifice his Angeline relationship which was completely destroyed, while Deuwan's relationship with Kumara was also ruined. I really hit them as hard as I could with Trauma, threatening and endangering relationships to the fullest extend possible. I did not fudge anything or try to take it easy on them at all.

My narration got more and more nightmarish until the two pilots had to relive watching Jensen die of trauma on his last mission, and the alien boss entity started taking on the face of Jensen as well.

Finally they got a decent Nightmare roll and Nana was able to pull the pilots out. We were all horrified at how brutal the first mission had been (although the 5 difficulty might have contributed).

Kitsune gained 4 Trauma and 5 Terror as well as 10 Bliss over 5 or 6 rounds, took 8 points of Stress on relationships that didn't cave in, and had one 2/2 relationship completely demolished. OK, the Terror went away the moment the mission ended, but she was still 2 Trauma away from death.

Deuwan had it worse, gaining 5 Trauma including 1 point from his Terror overflowing past his Trauma limit, and a whopping 26 Bliss which put him right into Bliss Stage, as well as losing 2 Trust from damaged relationships, having 1 Stress left on another relationship, and having his default 1/2 relationship with his commanding officer destroyed.

We all pictured Andrew arriving at Lion's Head Academy just in time to see the other two pilots being carried off to the infirmary in stretchers, their bodies convulsing.

Comments from the players had everyone complaining that mission combat was too brutal and too dangerous. I suggested that this would fit in perfectly with explaining why Mrs. Kumara was suddenly putting the new kid Andrew into the pilot program, since he was fresh meat and not all used up like the other two veteran pilots.

Doug: "What do you mean, veteran pilots?"
Vin Tsen: "Dude, after one mission, we are veterans."

Too true.

Interludes:
Since Deuwan had the most Bliss, he had a Trust Building scene with Ken, which rebuilt the 4/1 back to a 4/2.

Kitsune spent some quiet time in the animal pen of the base with the fox, relieving the 5 Stress on the relationship.

And Andrew, interestingly, had an encounter with Angeline, played by Vin Tsen as a hysterically weeping pregnant girl drunk on the resistance's alcohol supplies, depressed because she couldn't recognise her friend Kitsune anymore. That one was Trust or Intimacy Building, I forget which.

Deuwan also spent downtime with Coach Ramza trying to find out what the commander had in mind, and the Coach leaked some information about how Kumara was trying to track down the monstrous alien commander that got away, now code-named "Leviathan." This resulted in an increase of Trust for that relationship.

Kitsune had a Stress Relief scene with Nana, in which she walked in on a debriefing between Mrs. Kumara and Nana, and defended Nana from being blamed for the failure of the mission, ranting and yelling at her commander with a whole "you don't understand what it's like out there" thing that drew applause.

At this stage I think we realised that the Interludes were really quite good for blowing off all the stress that the players had accumulated from the horrors of the recent mission.

There was also a volleyball game scene where Andrew got to know his fellow pilots, which sort of got sidetracked into his developing a strong friendship with Midori, which increased Trust between the two.

Then Kitsune had a scene with Midori, who was becoming our favourite annoying supporting character.

Finally we finished the allotment of interludes with Mrs. Kumara arranging for a dinner date between Andrew and Kiri to get the new hotshot pilot to know his anchor better. Behind-the-scenes, I portrayed the the commander as quite enthusiastic about getting her daughter to romance her new favourite cadet. Han Kit was a bit awkward about roleplaying the romance scene with Vin Tsen, but in the end he had Andrew telling Kiri about the horrors he had seen during his time as a lone survivor, which we all agreed was a good Trauma Relief scene.

During the interludes nobody tried for any Betrayals or Humanization. We just went for the basic allotment, and that was it.

At the end of all this, the two "veterans" were still heavily Traumatized and one more mission might still finish them off.

The alarm blared and the pilots and anchors were summoned to the Lion's Head Control Room for a new briefing. Mrs. Kumara coldly announced that the alien entity known as "Leviathan" had been spotted again. She would need volunteers for a strike mission against it...

And since time was running short I ended it there, on the cliffhanger. We can't wait to play again next Sunday. Although, my players would like to see combat difficulty toned down.

That's my report, Ben. Thanks for creating this game for us to mess around with. Hopefully my players' comments will follow as well.

[ptikachu]

Forgot to add: We decided that our Hopes for the story would be 1) Do we raise a second generation successfully? and 2) Do we defeat the aliens?

[OneWingedAngel]

>.<

You know... you don't have to describe my defeciencies in role-playing, you know. =P Just kidding.

Anyway, I feel that the part with the dice is a little skewed towards failure. Not only does the lowest dice roll count, but 2 out of 3 of the results on the success table are failures. Due to the fact that the 'lowest roll counts' system as well, the more people we have on a mission, the easier it is to screw up simply because the condition for failure is multiplied but the chances of success is only increased slightly.

Therefore, what you get is pilots going on solo missions all the time for the survival of themselves and their team mates. If the GM steps in and says that at least 2 pilots must go, then what will happen is PCs dying in just one game due to no particular fault of the players themselves.

This might be good for a one shot RPG, but with the amount of secondary characters created and character development in such a short time [one game], I certainly feel that this system should not feel like one.

Also, from the character templates, I was led to believe that it would take years to accumulate bliss [Seasoned Pilot]. However, from that one mission we had, Nates [Vin Tsen's character] collected nearly 30 points of bliss or run the risk of dying outright. Maybe it's the disadvantage of his character template, but I am writing in favour of having long term characters.

The secondary character generation, development and control system is brilliant, IMO. I have nothing but praise for that. However, like I said, since we do put quite a lot into character generation and development, we don't like to see them have one mission lifespans.

[Mark Woodhouse]

Question: In the Mission scenes, were you bringing in all your relationship dice at the beginning? That can really hurt you, in my experience. Ideally, you want to be rolling no more than about 2x the number of dice you need to meet all categories at the beginning of a mission. Later on, as things get out of control, you might need to grab more dice just to get out alive, but if you're trying to defend a whole bunch of relationships right from the start, that pushes you into the death spiral.

[ptikachu]

Each pilot was bringing in anchor+2 other relationships, which gave a heap of dice but also a lot of relationships to defend.

So...perhaps anchor+1 is a safer choice.

[DevP]

Han Kit: 30 points of Bliss? Wow. Isn't 108 points the limit for a character?

Was there much tactical advice in the playtest doc? It seems like this is a game where a few guidelines, at least about what to do on the first mission, might help.

[MaryBell]

Hello One and all....

Yes...I think most of my thoughts have been already put out.

I LOVE the concept of the game....but definitely feel that the difficulty may have been too much.  My girl was pretty well creamed either way I went.  I really don't see us having gotten five victories wthout further sacrifice of relationships.

One may argue we could sacrifice our relationships and make new ones.  However, I don't think that's how our characters would see it.  Since we know that we are drawing on the strengths of our loved ones, we would be more likely to protect them..esepcially the ones we care for more.  So it's not so simple as -pull out all guns and zig for great justice.

With that said, all the 'after-combat' roleplay made it all worthwhile.  I can't wait for more of it, as I've completely worked on seperate personalities for all the NPCs I play :D.  The players really got into their roles, and the GM was able to keep the game going wihtout it having a chance to go into a lull. 

Over all sir, we had a good team, we had a good coach, but we got our a$$e$ handed to us on a pigskin, sir.  But next time I'll make that touch down, yeehahh...

Okay..enough redneck stuff.  It was great fun.  I want more...even if I go brutally insane, stab myself to death with an onion ring, and spend my time haunting my fellow player's characters going "use the fork Luka...use the fork..."

Best of thoughts

Douglas.

[coffeestain]

I LOVE the concept of the game....but definitely feel that the difficulty may have been too much.  My girl was pretty well creamed either way I went.  I really don't see us having gotten five victories wthout further sacrifice of relationships.

One may argue we could sacrifice our relationships and make new ones.  However, I don't think that's how our characters would see it.  Since we know that we are drawing on the strengths of our loved ones, we would be more likely to protect them..esepcially the ones we care for more.  So it's not so simple as -pull out all guns and zig for great justice.

I can't speak for Ben, but that sounds like it's working just right then.

Regards,
Daniel

[Andy Kitkowski]

I can't speak for Ben, but that sounds like it's working just right then.

Yeah, remember the source material is heavily based on Evangelion: Shinji "masturbate on the chest of your comatose co-pilot" Ikari and the like.

However, that brings up an interesting point: I wonder if Ben will write an "exception style" mode, where the difficulties are easier, to play a less dark-dark-dark game...

[ptikachu]

Han Kit: 30 points of Bliss? Wow. Isn't 108 points the limit for a character?

Was there much tactical advice in the playtest doc? It seems like this is a game where a few guidelines, at least about what to do on the first mission, might help.

108 is the limit, and Vin Tsen's character had gone from 65 to 91 in one mission. Plus he's at Trauma 5. That's really teetering on the brink, that is.

Going into a mission with high Trauma is practically suicide.

The system is transparent enough that you can see most of this coming, except for the multi-pilot mission rules which make things a lot more difficult than conventional wisdom would tell you.

AndyK: Yes, it would be nice to have a "difficulty dial" that GMs could adjust. Arguably, having more or fewer mission goals already does this...

[ptikachu]

By the way, it looks like we might not be able to get our whole group together on Sunday. In which case we'll delay to the following weekend.

[OneWingedAngel]

Han Kit: 30 points of Bliss? Wow. Isn't 108 points the limit for a character?

Was there much tactical advice in the playtest doc? It seems like this is a game where a few guidelines, at least about what to do on the first mission, might help.

No, there was no tactical advice in the playtest doc. I was coming up with my own along the way. So, basically we did every thing that made the whole scenario more difficult for us, namely:

a) bringing in nearly all our relationships
b) going in with two pilots

The two pilots thing needs to be fixed, seriously...

[Ben Lehman]

Lots of stuff here.  Let me do some broad points first.

WOW!  This play looks awesome!  I'm totally jazzed by your characters and their relationships.  I really enjoy the fact that race got a fair shake -- that's something that I really liked about my Oakland playtest.

Secondly, I want to say that the game, as it stands, is bugged -- it's supposed to be soul-crushingly hard, but not quite as soul-crushingly hard as it is right now.  Also, there are definite length-of-game issues which I'm thinking I have a totally clever solution to.  So anyone saying "but that's how Ben meant it to be..." well, thanks for your faith in me, but no, I didn't.  That's what playtesting is for, after all.

Thirdly, I think you guys handled some of the rules wrong.  A couple of these I'm not going to mention because they are more clever and better for the game than my actual written rules, and I'm just going to slyly pretend that that's the way I meant it.  However, I'm totally surprised about what happened with the Bliss ratings -- particularly Han Kit's 30 points.  Unless you crashed your anchor relationship (which is a possibility), you should only be getting lots of Bliss or lots of Trauma, but not both.  Here's my hunch: You were counting Bliss for all dice rolled, rather than just for unassigned dice.  Is that accurate?

The two pilots thing I think I have a better way of handling -- basically you have two pilots, cut back and forth between their rolls, and they have a shared set of mission objects.  So picture three pilots on a six goal mission -- in terms of "who achieves what objectives" it could split 2/2/2, or it could split 0/1/5 or whatever.  The goal, previously, would be to shunt off your low dice into the other guys' relationships, however as it stands it seems the game on a player-to-player level is becoming more about "working together to try to live" rather than "backstabbing your buddies for fun and profit," so those rules should probably expire.

The reason that there is no tactical advice in the book is that I haven't yet figured out the tactics of the game... :-)  For instance, I would have thought it best to throw down almost all of your relationships, every time.  Apparently this isn't the case.  Interesting...

So my new plan is to start the templates with many more relationships in the 2/3, 2/2, 2/1, 1/3 range, and also give each player an initial interlude scene or some such.

The other big thing which I got from my own playtesting was this: Each mission objective should be a concrete, useful thing that is worthwhile to achieve in its own respect.  That way, you can bail out halfway through a mission and still have gotten *something* done.

Anyway, this is a bit rambly.  I'm very happy that you guys playtested, sorry for the harsh rules, and I hope that you have fun with the rest of it.  Any questions please ask.

yrs--
--Ben

[Ben Lehman]

Oh, and -- Han Kit, Doug, welcome to the Forge.

yrs--
--Ben

[ptikachu]

As far as the "30 Bliss," that was actually HK referring to Vin Tsen's 26 Bliss accumulated over about 6 rounds. Each round he had 3-5 unassigned ones and twos among his rolls. Since he was rolling 12 dice from the start (using his 4/2, 4/2, 4/1) you'd expect that many ones and twos - and he wasn't using them. And the reason he was also getting tons of Trauma was that Doug was dumping multiple bad rolls into Nightmare, sometimes two '-' results, in hope that the Anchor power would re-roll them to something better. But looking at that now, the more dice you have to roll the bigger chance of one of the re-rolls not going well. So that caused a '-' Nightmare result for 4 or 5 rounds, which is where all that Trauma came from.

Throwing down a few high-Intimacy relationships does work, or at least it should for low-Trauma characters. it's just that I had set a high number of Mission Goals and Doug was dumping too many dice into Nightmare for re-rolls, which didn't work well at all. They hit the Trauma death spiral too quickly, and didn't realise they should stop dumping extra bad dice into Nightmare.

"Race getting a fair shake" - Don't know quite what this means. We're a multiracial group so there tends to be a lot of diversity in our characters. Plus Malaysia's got a fair bit of ethnic diversity. To us it was just business as usual as far as race goes.