[Unistat] [DexCon] Out in the black

[Andrew Morris]

Unistat – the little RPG that could. I was a little nervous about running Unistat. If you're not familiar with the history, I created it in seven hours as a short intro to RPGs that could be used at a moment's notice to give non-gamers an easy way to dip their toes in the hobby without jumping in at the deep end with a system- or setting-heavy game. You can easily explain all the rules (all three of them) in less than five minutes. After about 15 minutes of play, you should be able to GM it from memory. The thing that made me nervous was that I hadn't playtested it at all. The mechanics are simple enough that I was fairly confident it would play out as expected, though, and that turned out to be the case.

I had five players, I believe. We started with the basic concept that we would be gaming in the Firefly 'verse. The players quickly decided not to play the main characters in the series, and came up with the idea of a smuggler ship during the Unification War. They worked for both sides and had a legitimate cover as a transport ship. Unlike Mal, the captain of this ship didn't own it, he ran it for a corporate concern. The smuggling was something they did to get a little extra on the side.

In this session, the players really ran me ragged as the GM, doing things that were clear conflicts I had to resist. By the point where we were ready to wrap the game and narrate a climax, I had very few dice. The characters had interacted with each other and the various NPCs that we all created on the fly and they had invented backstory, secrets, and personal issues and resolved them in game. I was impressed – everyone knew the source material well, and I could easily see a story like this fitting into the series as a flashback to the history of one of the main character's relatives or mentor.

Just like in Firefly, it all started off with a simple job. Pick up some medical supplies on New Hopewell and deliver them for the client. While there, they would buy some drugs from their criminal contact. Of course, things go bad quickly. A day out from the planet, they get a message that the legitimate deal's off, and no word about the under-the-table deal. They've got to refuel anyway, and they can't afford not to pick up some cargo, so they head on to the planet.

When they arrive, they find a rebel blockade, and they make a run for the surface instead of trying to fast talk their way past the warship. Through expert piloting, they make it past the blockade and set down in a concealed location.

Investigating the manufacturing plant, they discover their shipment, waiting to be loaded up. Not ones to pass up a free meal, they start loading the cargo, along with everything else the ship can hold. One particularly heavy box is dropped, and it breaks open to reveal what appear to be rebel weapons, which get collected along with the medical supplies.

Just as they finish loading, a rebel patrol spots them and opens fire. They make a run for it in the cargo hauler, while keeping the rebs under cover with return fire. The pilot comes in hot to pull them out, scoops them up, and takes off, deliberately incinerating the rebel soldiers.

They head for the nearby fueling station, so they can get out of Dodge. Upon nearing the station, they find it crawling with Alliance forces. They pass themselves off as legitimate, and come in for inspection. Alliance soldiers escort them to the commandant, who is about to start grilling them on their arrival and how they got past the blockade, when one of the characters reveals she's an Alliance agent and pulls rank on the commandant, who quickly falls into line.

They fuel up, and there's a brief firefight when rebs scouting the fuel station enter the ship. The crew finishes them off quickly and heads off planet. The pilot, who hates the rebs and Alliance both, sets a bomb in the depot before leaving. As they take off, the bomb destroys the facility.

When they hit space, the rebel cruiser calls for them to halt and be detained, but the warship's obviously taken some serious damage. There's a gaping hole right through a cargo area and out to the other side. The Alliance agent taunts the captain of the rebel warship, who she betrayed while undercover. She hopes to enrage him enough that he'll want to take them alive instead of blasting them out of space. The pilot heads right for the hole and flies through the ship, while the crew tosses explosives out the airlock midway through. The explosives go off and the warship is broken in half. But the pilot takes damage to the nav system and they land on one half of the ruined vessel in order to enter and scrounge parts to repair their cargo ship.

During the scrounging, the rebel captain and some soldiers spot them and open fire. There's a cool tense scene in the hallway where the rebel captain's ex-lover (now a member of the smuggler crew) make a run for him, while the other smugglers keep him pinned down with gunfire. The smuggler captain shoots out the control panel to shut the bulkhead door. Just as the door is sliding closed, the agent tosses a grenade through, which hits the rebel captain right in the chest before exploding.

The crew start fighting with each other over what just happened to the captain of the rebel warship. A shot is fired that fries some circuits, and the airlock is ejected as a life vessel, with the smuggler crew trapped inside.

Instead of resolving things at the climax, they chose to instead leave it as a "to be continued," which I found surprising, but satisfying. The last scene is the pilot (the captain's ex-lover) and the agent (who killed him) wrapping their hands around each others neck while the rest of the crew look around with a "we are screwed" look on their faces.

[Bill_White]

Andrew --

That's a cool summary of what happened in the game's fiction.  Can you comment on how the Unistat rules constrained or enabled action at the table (i.e., at the level of player rather than character)?

-- Bill

[Andrew Morris]

Sure.

The players really grasped the idea of swapping dice in a conflict. Early on, they'd fight my complications only with lots of low dice, so they usually lost, but got to narrate it and add new elements to the scene. Occasionally they'd win, but they clearly weren't counting on it. About midway through, they looked at their dice pools and mine, and started narrating stuff that they knew would lead to a conflict, in order to either steal my dice or highlight their character's coolness. That's when the action really started jumping. Conflicts were won and lost by the players and GM alike. Everything played out like it should have, and as we neared 30 minutes to the end of the time slot, they just started pounding me with big dice backed up by small ones, so they got to win and narrate.

The thing about Unistat is that it's structured so that the players are pretty much at the mercy of the GM at the start of the game. And it's his job to make their lives miserable with his huge stack of dice. Predictably, this tosses lots of dice at the players, giving them the resources to have more control (though not complete) around the middle of the game, and to essentially take the story out of the GM's hands by the end.

When they saw how transparent the system was, and how the GM's power was clearly limited, the players did a lot of cool, cinematic stuff that just wouldn't work if the game handled the nitty-gritty details rather than the broad scope of "who wins, and who gets to say how?" As stated, they all knew the source material and were free to focus on fitting their actions and narrations into that, rather than worrying about how to do it by the rules.

[Bill_White]

Nice.

[Rob Donoghue]

Were you using Unistat for that Angel game I watched?  If so, I have to say that the base model is really very intuitive - the shape of it became clear after watchign only a few rolls.  I wasn't looking at the dice outcomes themselves, so I couldn't tell you exactly how you determined which die roll won, but the ebb and flow of the dice and the coolness of the trading, was readily apparent.

-Rob D.

[Andrew Morris]

Yes, I was, Rob. I'm sure if you'd gotten a bit closer so you could see the dice results, you'd have figured out the whole system in no time at all -- it's very concise.

That ebb and flow of dice is in fact the point of the game. Narrative power shifts back and forth in the small scale, but in the large scale (over the course of a game) narrative power is positively bleeding from the GM and getting sucked up by the players. This gives you the sort of cinematic swing you get in most fiction, where the heroes are put upon in the beggining, then struggle against the odds for a while, and finally achieve victory. That's what I intended, and I'm glad it worked out that way.

The "trading" you saw was actually TonlyLB's idea. He kinda just stuck a new mechanic in the game without asking. Of course, since it's Tony, it rocked, and I'm keeping it. It wasn't really trading, but instead was like PTA fanmail. Interestingly, "you should have a fanmail mechanic" was one of the comments of a player in the Firefly session, and I'd been thinking about a good way to insert it. Then Tony did his thing. He also had a suggestion about a way to make it better, and I'll be putting some thought into it, because it would change some fundamental elements of the game. In the meantime, the ad hoc system he came up with works just fine.

[Bill_White]

Andrew -- The "Download Unistat" link in your sig seems to be busted.  Did you take it down for revision? -- Bill

[Andrew Morris]

Yes, I should have it up by the end of the week. The download was ver. 0.3, which wasn't even the ruleset used at the convention. I took it off because it's not...well...nearly as good as the current version, which I'll write up as soon as a have a chance.

[TonyLB]

The "trading" you saw was actually TonlyLB's idea.

Uh ... I'd bet good money that Rob was talking about how the winner and loser of a conflict swap dice, rather than the fan-mail shuffling we had going back and forth.  But that's just my opinion.

[Andrew Morris]

Huh...I'd bet you're right. My mistake.