Indie Gaming Monday - InSpectres

[Zak Arntson]

Well, I had Clinton and my two brothers over for Monday Night Indie Gaming. We started with Munchkin (slow starting game, but wound up pretty awesome by the end. I won, though, so I could be biased). We then jumped right into InSpectres.

Quick synopsis: The PCs were an ex-cop, ex-carpenter, and ex-NSA weirdo. They all quit their jobs to start a small franchise, consisting of 10 dice and on the second-floor of a crappy building downtown. They were approached by a kid doing a high-school/college assignment for the "media interview." Soon after, the kid's mother calls them up in order to hire them for a job (the mother mentions some odd sounds that she's too embarrassed to call the fire department about, so she holds the phone up to the ceiling -- loud dragging chains, footsteps and unearthly moaning is the result).

The party shows up, the kid wants extra credit so he asks if he can accompany the party to the attic. He is allowed, after his mom signs a ton of waivers and a contract. But he's too scared, so the three go up into the attic alone. One's got a light (with extension cord leading down out of the attic, another has a maglite, and the last just has a pistol. It's very, very dark. They hear the groaning and investigate.

ex-NSA guy finds some footprints in the dust and creeps forward (rolling badly) and bumping his head into something. In the light of his maglite is a leprous toe (unexpected leprous toe sighting in the dark = 2 cool dice). To make a long story short, they incapacitated the creepy ghoul with a glancing bullet to the head and a power drill in the skull. The ex-NSA guy discovers a photograph, dated 2 or 3 years ago, with the dead man hugging his wife and kid (who are downstairs). A really lucky roll, and it turns out the guy had a metal plate in his skull, which deflected the drill bit and left him unconscious but alive!

The cops show up, and through some lucky rolls (augmented by the Bank, I think) they produce the truth. The wife locked her husband in the attic, telling her son it was a ghost. When she found out about the InSpectres, she thought this would be the perfect way to get the InSpectres to kill him and take the fall. She was arrested, the son reunited, and the man recovered in the hospital. (part of the proof was the contract & waiver, which was signed proof that the woman hired these guys to investigate a ghost)

End: ex-NSA guy carefully talking to the hospitalized dad about payment, and the man looks up from the hospital bed. "I've just got one question. They removed a drill from my skull, but I don't own any power tools."

---

So, we had tons of fun. It started a little slow, but the two brothers (who haven't roleplayed in forever) took to it real quick and improvisation and author control abounded.

Pros: InSpectres is an amazing system. Calling for lots of Skill and Stress checks works best. Encouraging the Players to announce their own Skill rolls also helps. There were times when I'd call for a Stress roll, and I would let the Players choose which Skill to drop. Giving the Players this much freedom went a long way.

Also, we didn't have a hint of true paranormal activity. It was kind of neat to realize that this was just a mystery/thriller with comedic trappings (like Clinton's character jury-rigging a pair of cattleprods just before going up in the attic, and the slapstick bump into dad's kneecaps).

Cons: I set the job at franchise dice equal to their franchise, at 10. By the end of the adventure, they had nearly accumulated twice that amount (17 dice). I think that, in addition to difficulty, it should be made clear that a job's franchise dice also affects session time. With constant Skill & Stress rolls (stress rolls were mostly 1 or 2 dice, only once did we do 3 dice), the entire game lasted for 1.5 to 2 hours. It probably varies from group to group, but in the future the jobs I give will be x1.5 to x2 their current franchise dice.

Let me close by saying this game is awesome, and I recommend it to everyone. I've played and GMd it once, now, and it is now tied with Dying Earth for favorite game sessions ever.

[Ron Edwards]

Hey,

Stylistic differences in InSpectres always surprise me. Consider the last time I ran the game: the climaxes included (1) a woman being smeared with crushed Cheese Puffs and getting eaten by mutant rats, (2) a guy fighting mutant rats in a wrecked and abandoned restaurant and tossing them one-by-one into the meat slicer-dicer, and (3) another woman uncovering a lazy security procedure and being nearly shot by a hysterical security guard. All my InSpectres games are like this - plenty of grue, shocking weirdness, moments of pure farcical misunderstandings, crazy and slightly silly (yet murderous) fight scenes.

Clearly Zak, Jared, and I run the game differently, although I presume that all three of us rely heavily on in-game inspiration and cues from the players for the "secret behind it all." I wonder if it's possible to tease apart how we react to players' cues, and what riffs we introduce, to see how our games tend to end up so differently?

Best,
Ron

edited to fix stupid spelling error

[joshua neff]

It seems to me that the best RPGs will do this--give you the tools (the "instruments", if you will--heh heh) to make a beautiful racket, but the noise each group makes will be wildly different.

For a game that seems like it started as a one-joke kind of thing that Jared just tossed off one day, InSpectres is a profoundly brilliant game. I'm glad he's really worked to fine-tune it & make it a commercial product.

[Paul Czege]

Hey Zak,

What about the confessionals...how did they play out for you?

Paul

[Zak Arntson]

We had two beginning players, which helped us forget about confessionals. We were also thinking about a weird agent, but eschewed it to keep things simpler.

So, in short, we forgot. But we talked about confessionals after the game, so next time I will encourage it. I'll even pause at dramatic times and ask if any wants to place a confessional.

During my InSpectres GMing, timing is pretty important. I make a lot of suggestions and pauses to let people chime in. Clinton, especially, would make suggestions even when the rules would force me to narrate. I'd still narrate, but I'd take all and any input before doing so. Which I enjoy, because the goal of InSpectres is to tell a good story. And I'm not the sole author.

[Jared A. Sorensen]

Zak Attak...glad to hear the game went well.

My comments:

My rule o' thumb is that the # of Franchise Dice needed to finish a job should be twice the number currently invested in the company. This seems to work well.

Stress Rolls and Skill Rolls MAKE the game. It's kind of a reaction to gamer anecdotes like, "It was an amazing role-playing session...we only rolled the dice, like, once!" Huh? I figure if you're going to use a Fortune system, then dammit USE the system!

On a low Skill roll, the GM gets to say what happens...but you can always let the players add wrinkles to your narration (or just let them take over). It's funny, but players tend to hose themselves without too much prompting (witness Paul Czege narrating his character being stabbed through the eye by an animated kachina doll!).

Re: letting the players decide what skills are reduced by stress penalties. Exactly. Part of the fun is to figure out just how the stress' effects manifest (in this last weekend's game, the player was drenched in blood from a "screaming showerhead" and decided that her Academics (she couldn't think straight)  and her Contact (she was covered in blood) would be penalized.

Great resolution to the story, btw. Very cool.

When I run my games, I usually either start with a situation (a guy turns on his shower and it screams and oozes blood) or a clear fact (a giant mollusk rises from the muck of a lake and eats a boater). Of course, the players are free to bend, fold and mutilate my idea to their heart's content...sometimes I riff off of their ideas and embellish the plot, taking their input and stirring it into my main idea. Other times,  I'll just follow their lead and have them take control of what happens. This first is good because I can keep things moving along by returning to my own "plot." The second is good because the "plot" becomes anything the players become interested in.

[Zak Arntson]

On a low Skill roll, the GM gets to say what happens...but you can always let the players add wrinkles to your narration (or just let them take over). It's funny, but players tend to hose themselves without too much prompting (witness Paul Czege narrating his character being stabbed through the eye by an animated kachina doll!).

That's how it happened, and it worked so well. If someone had an idea for a failure I'd listen, and incorporate it in if I liked it. I think Players have a tendency to hose themselves worse than a GM (well, unless the GM is running the Caverns of Tsojcanth or something), and having that hose in the open and from a Player leads to fun all around. Rather than disgruntled folks complaining about how unfairly the game went.

Part of the fun is to figure out just how the stress' effects manifest

YES!! One of the PCs flipped out and started screaming about the Goblin King coming to get him ... it was pretty funny when he triumphed with the drill bit in the head.

And about those introductions -- good call. We went smoothly from Media Interview to actual job, though I can't start every game with a Media Interview. Last night I flung caution over my shoulder and just improved the entire thing. My original plan: Media Interview, then some ghost in a bookstore. It changed to thumping, groaning, rattling sound in an attic. I added leprous toes, and um, a 50's mom and a teenager. That was nearly the extent of my contribution (other than metaphorical bass player).

[Jared A. Sorensen]

Coo. And re: Interviews...I explained to Jesse in the MMT forum here that the "Starting Interviews" are only for that first session. To kind of bulk up the character relationships before the "real" game begins. After that, there should be more familiarity and the players can actuall use the events of the last mission for "No shit, so there I was..." stories.

[Joe Murphy (Broin)]

Zak,

This might sound somewhat elementary, but I'm impressed:

So you started off with a vague idea in mind like 'there's noises in this lady's loft' and the players (by hook or by crook) came up with the rather clever 'actually, the lady wants to bump off her husband'?

I've been trying to comvince a gamer pal that InSpectres sessions do not necessarily have to devolve into silly, overdone, sprawling chaos. I'll point him at this thread.

Joe.

[Zak Arntson]

So you started off with a vague idea in mind like 'there's noises in this lady's loft' and the players (by hook or by crook) came up with the rather clever 'actually, the lady wants to bump off her husband'?

Yup. It's up to the guidance of the GM and the wants of the Players, really. I gave no guidance as to what was going on. Heck, I even called the old man a corpse-pale ghoul, but leaving it open for interpretation by the players. They headed in a normal (as opposed to paranormal) direction on their own.

Let your Players know that InSpectres is really a collaborative effort. If everyone has the same expectations for mood and content, it'll run itself.

[Ron Edwards]

Hey Joe,

That's how I always play InSpectres. I never have a "plot," "villain," or "story" embedded in the preparation. I just throw out tons of adjectives, anecdotes, and cool notions.

In one game, all I started with was the notion that more students were going into the campus library than, you know, came out. During the chit-chat of early play, one of the players mentioned that the library was built on the site of an old brothel (apparently some info from one of her classes). Oh ho, I said to myself, silently. That factored into the big Awful Thing that was Happening.

So the GM is busy doing assemblies, during play of InSpectres. There are off-the-cuff comments like that, which were not made with the intent of contributing. There are rolls, failed and succeeded. There are connections and suggestions made by the characters (via the players) that strike you as either bogus or brilliant.

The keys are not to stop assembling during early play, and to know when and how to make the assembled thing "walk" later in play. Neither of these are skills encouraged by traditional RPG design and prep. In fact, they are heavily discouraged by most RPG culture over the last ten or twelve years, which is probably when most of your players developed their value-systems of play.

That's why they're reluctant. No one can play like that. Play like that doesn't happen. It must be railroading; it must be GM-bullying; it must be that "storytelling" stuff; it must be a lie.

The only cure is to make sure that you, yourself, are not secretly convinced of the same things that they are. People pick up quickly on genuine enthusiasm, but if you're reluctant and iffy about it, then they pick up on that instead.

Best,
Ron

[Joe Murphy (Broin)]

Ron,

Ach, I know that's how InSpectres *should* work. =) I'm just impressed that it *does*. Cheers for the example, too. I've always enjoyed taking my plots from minor comments the players throw out. Much less work, and the players feel proud of their competence.

I played a couple of games of a superhero version of 'Once Upon a Time' last year. In a sense, it's a cooperative story-creation system. The first 'story' created involved cybernetic ninja zombies, the underground Kingdom of the Mole People, Three Mile Island, and various apocalyptic death rays. Thinking back, it was probably *less* coherent than all that.

With that game, 'Meanwhile in Manhattan', there's no system to ensure the story stays coherent. The goal is not to have a coherent story, after all. The goal is to play the cards one has.

With InSpectres, there are no rules to ensure the story stays consistent either. One player could roll well (+2 Franchise dice, thankyou) and decide the noises in the loft are a ghost. The next rolls well (another +2, cheers) and decides the ghost is actually a hologram. The next could decide the hologram was actually a creepy old man with a rubber mask. And so on.

InSpectres allows for a certain amount of 'drift', in terms of mood or tone, and the players can bounce ideas around as much or as little as they wish.  It's a self-regulating system. There are no rules (implicit or explicit) to help build a _satisfying_ story, yet Zak's story seems immensely satisfying. That impresses me.

Joe.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Joe,

I've played quite a bit of Once Upon a Time. I agree with you that it's not built, necessarily, to produce coherent stories. The story creation is a side-effect of the competition among the players to win (get to their Endings).

However, I think InSpectres is more focused on coherent story-making. It surprises me that you would permit subsequent rolls to revise previous "play-established" material at all. I don't see that concept supported in the rules; what I see is the notion that elements of setting, character, etc, are established through rolls and improvisation. Established means established - concrete.

The first roll establishes that the thing is a ghost. It's now a ghost. One doesn't change it into a hologram or whatever, no matter what the roll - the second roll (presumably a Credit Card/ Tech roll) may analyze the ghost holographically and learn (read: create) many things about it, but it's still a fuckin' ghost. It strikes me as very, very odd that you would continue to treat the in-game world as "infinite potential soup" as play progresses.

I agree with you that such play would turn InSpectres into a hash of incoherence, indeed, much more so than Once Upon a Time (bless it, it's a wonderful competitive game, but it's definitely piss-poor in terms of the ultimate story's quality, that's half the fun).

Take a look at the InSpectres rules again - I think you might see that notion of "establishing," when you aren't letting "improv improv" get in your way.

Best,
Ron

[Joe Murphy (Broin)]

You're absolutely right. I hadn't missed the piece about 'establishment', but I had't treated it nearly as seriously enough as it deserves.

I blame Sorensen.

Cheers, Ron. =)

Joe.

[Zak Arntson]

As a note on establishing facts: I would advise (both GM and Players) to begin vague, and as the GM, to remain vague while Players keep filling in the gaps. If you GM and immediately say, "There's zombies in the mansion!" everyone has to accept it as fact, and the Players are less involved with the creation of things. Alternately, you can say, "There's been complaints that the hired help in the mansion is acting, well, particularly ghoulish lately." That opens things up, and lets the whole group jam.

I also can't stress enough: Let the Players contribute even if they don't roll well. You just have stronger veto/manipulating-their-facts power.