[InTERRORgation] More of a Drill than a Game.

[jburneko]

Hello Everyone,

So, at the upcoming SoCal Con, I've decided to run Annie Rush's game InTERRORgation.  I don't like running games for the very first time at a con so I got my Thursday night group to give this a go last night.

Now, the idea behind InTERRORgation is to play out a narrative as both an after the fact interogation and a series of flashback scenes.  Setup involves distributing knowledge so that at the start of play no one including the GM has the complete setup.  The GM comes to the table with a brief paragraph concerning situation.  Mine was that the head reseracher into AI and Virtual Reality at a high profile tech company had been murdered.  Then the GM leaves the room while the PCs create their character concepts.  Finally, each player writes down a secret about their character which the GM reads and randomly redistributes.  The idea is that the each player knows their secret and the secret of another character but doesn't know whom the secret belongs to.

So the players I had were the CEO of the company, the AI created by the research and the murdered researcher's assistant.  Their secrets were that CEO was stonewalling the military's involvement in the project in order to shift focus to the private sector.  The AI's secret was that he was created from the mind of an eight year old boy who was killed in the process.  And the research assistant's secret was that back in grad school he had also worked under the murdered scientist and they had falsified their research.

Now all this does generate a lot of potential energy that translates into the game very well.  It's probably one of the reasons the game worked out as well as it did despite the utter failure of 2/3rds of the system as written to materialize in play.  Here's how the game went.

InTERRORgation ofters three structures of play but I'll only discuss the one we chose to use.  The structure is Questions, Flashback, Answers.  Basically, the GM in his interogator persona comes up with one question to ask each character and reveals them.  But before the characters answer the group enters a flashback (or series of flashback) scenes which must address the questions posed by the GM.  Then when the flashbacks are over each character answers the question put to him.  So you see, the whole thing is an exercise in comparing "what really happened" as established in the flashbacks versus what the players choose to have their characters tell the interrogator about it after the fact.

Now, when entering a flashback sequence after the questions have been asked each player rolls their Memory score and each player gets to frame a scene in decending order of victories.  And here in lies the problem.  This is the ONLY part of the mechanics we ended up using despite there being two more parts.  Now before we get into my criticisms let me say that I found this to be a completely worthwhile exercise.  As I say in the title of this thread I felt this activity exemplified the idea of the Drill as Ron proposed it in the Endeavor forum.

For me as a GM I felt it drilled the idea of bangs and speaking to player characters.  It was very easy for me to throw situations into play by asking questions like, "Why do you think you were the target of the break in two months ago?" when no such break in had been previously established in play.  I found that questions that poked at the player's secrets were more effective than ones that didn't.  For the players this clearly drilled scene framing skills as well as dealing with out of order storytelling.

One of the things that surprised me was how easy it was to end scenes.  At first I was worried because the game gives clear authority as to how to START scenes but gives no such instruction on when a scene ends.  However, given the prelude questions I found that it was realitvely easy to identify when a scene had served its purpose and it was time to move on.  None of the unending in-character babble that I fear so much emerged.

Now for the bad part.

As I mentioned above, the setup rules, the questions, flashback, answers structure and the memory roll scene framing rules were the ONLY parts of the system we ended up using.  I also think this worked out very nicely as a worthwhile drill activity.  However, there are two more parts of the system which I'll break down here.

The victories you get on the Memory roll at the top of a Flashback sequence are supposed to turn into a resource called "Sugestions."  Now a sugestion is a proactive action you give to another player's character.  It's supposed to be like, "Didn't you attack Doctor Lasher after he said that?"  And then the targeted player has the option of simply agreeing, "Yes, I did attack Doctor Lasher after he said that." or contesting the statement at which point players roll opposed Memory and if the player who made the suggestion wins then the targeted player must comply with the suggestion.  Note: That the person who framed the current scene, called The Leader, can make the initial suggestion for free but must spend a sugestion point upon being contested.  A non-Leader player can spend a suggestion point to make a suggestion and then must spend a second sugestion point if it's contested.

The problem here is that if you have players that are quite amiable and used to listening and grooving on each other's input, this mechanic simply never comes up, even when it probably should.  Here's one particular sequence that stuck out to me.

So to review, Meghann is playing Ms. March the CEO of Life Tech.  Michael is playing Mathew the research assitant.  Matt is playing Linus the AI.

Michael is the current scene Leader and has framed Ms. March and Mathew into Ms. March's office together.  The two players act out the scene together and Michael has Mathew exit.  At this point Meghann has Ms. March say, "Linus?" with a clear intonation that suggests that Linus has somehow been listening in on the conversation.  Matt of course jumps in with a response for Linus clearly acknowledging the idea that, yes, he was listening in.

Now, see, strictly according to the rules this should have been a suggestion.  Michael was the Leader and Linus listening in wasn't part of his setup.  Meghann should have said to Matt, "Wasn't Linus listening the whole time?" and because she wasn't the Leader and despite Matt's clear acceptance, that should have cost her a Suggestion point which she may or may not have had as an outcome of the initial memory roll.

But all that was handled by social cues alone.  It had been previously established that Linus uses the company's intercom system to listen in on important conversation.  No one at the table expressed surprise or frustration at the notion that Linus's eveasdroping had been implicitly inserted into the scene.

And so went MOST things that by the rules should have been Suggestions and costing people points and what not.  But all that was so natural and under the hood that one or more of us would have been having to strain our attention to even notice.

Finally, I find it significant that the GM neither has suggestions (anything he brings into the scene is law) nor is subject to sugestions (i.e. players can't make NPCs do things).

The second mechanic we didn't use was the player's second stat called Shock.  Memory can be thought of as the "meta-game" stat while Shock is the "in game" stat.  Whenever a character does something risky during a flashback sequence you're supposed to roll Shock.  However, it is very clear from the text that Shock ONLY applies to physical situations.  There are no social conflict resolution rules in InTERRORgation.

(I lied, we did use Shock once but at that point it was almost like a joke.  "What to roll Shock?"  "Sure, why not.")

The main reason Shock ends up being avoided is that it is extremely easy to simply frame scenes around danger even if it is brought in by the GM.  At one point my question to Michael's character Mathew was, "Why do you think you were the target of the break in?"  Michael won the Memory roll and framed the scene AFTER the attack narrating himself waking up from unconciousness surrounded by security.

So, does anyone else have experience with this game?  Does my experience match yours?

Jesse