Driftwood Indie Game Night: Little Fears

[Jake Norwood]

In the spirit of the Actual Play thread that got moved to site discussion, I would like to present our session of Actual Play from last night.

We play tRoS allmost exclusively out here, but the forge has gotten me rapidly interested in other peoples games for the first time in a long time, and I'm spending money at my FLGS again (they're very happy). My goal is to erratically play some other game--mostly games I've heard about on the Forge, but not only--in addition to TROS ('cause no one wanted to stop that one). That means that we have a rather erratic group for these and we're shooting for 2-3 session games.

Tonight we play TROS, but last night, we played Little Fears.

I loved the game. We printed character sheets from the new supplement out on regular lined school paper (the players loved it) and did the whole "group character creation" thing, which took about an hour. It was a lot of fun, as we relived memories. I also instituted a little rule--anyone at the group could propose your character's real name (including you) but it took a majority vote to get it in. That left us with realistic, albeit not-so-cool (but also not generic) names. And it double everyone's motivation for a nickname. We did the trailer-park thing, with one smart kid from suburbia that hung out with the others, and an NPC kid (named "Chet...") to help drop tidbits of info (and later to be taken by the badguys).

I decided to run the Car-compactor scenario from the "Spooky Stories" section of the core rulebook. I don't normally like "modules," but I find them very useful when dealing with a new genre.

The game was a blast. We got to relive the more mischevious side of our childhoods, sing "Ellie and Billy sittin' in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G..." and even told scary stories (including Old man Taylor's) with a flashlight under our faces in the dark.

A few of our players aren't real comfortable with some of the potential issues of abuse and the like that LF can raise, so we went with a more Monster-squad/goonies thing, which is delighting everyone. This is also my first time running a Horror game per se, but I'm finding that the tension is building, and that folks are getting scared.

I can't wait until we get to play this again. I'll be reporting on other games in the future, I suppose.

Finally, what could I do with a post like this to make it a better discussion-starter?

Jake

[Jason L Blair]

Jake,

Great to hear!

As far as discussion starters, I know I would like to hear about any problems you saw with the mechanics or the presentation of the material. Were there any?

Looking forward to hearing more,

[Tim C Koppang]

Jason said:
"As far as discussion starters, I know I would like to hear about any problems you saw with the mechanics or the presentation of the material. Were there any?"

In one of my sessions the GM decided to add a drama mechanic just for the hell of it to see how it worked out.  And because he tends to like drama mechanics.  But I must say I didn't like it at all.  For me, one of the most powerful aspects of LF is the feeling of helplessness.  When you add a "Fate Chips" sort of mechanic to the mix, you dilute (if not tototally erase) that mood.  This of course isn't a problem with the rules per se, but more of a warning to people considering a similar tweak.