[psi run] cold and rainy in San Francisco

[lumpley]

Meg, Emily, Julia and I played Psi Run last night. I GMed.

Meg's character, Charlotte:

What's in the box that's handcuffed to my wrist?
Who is Donovan?
Where are my shoes? [answered in play: I don't wear any - my feet are lethal]
Why am I afraid of cats?

Emily's character, Lorraine:

Why can I light things on fire by looking at them?
Why won't this dog leave me alone?
Why don't I recognize what I look like? [answered in play: because I was burned horrifically and rebuilt surgically]
Why can I sometimes predice what will happen 10 seconds down the road?

Julia's character, Meredith:

Why can I breathe underwater? [answered in play: because I'm not human]
Why is my skin turning blue?
Why can I communicate with water animals?
Why do I have a picture of a giant octopus in my pocket?
Who is Sean?

They're in like a double-long SUV and it goes over into the water. It's 2:00 in the morning during the cold rainy season in San Francisco, they've gone into one of those enormous concrete culverts some miles in from the bay. Over the course of the game they blow up a black helicopter, steal a coke dealer's boat, chase off another helicopter, fall in with some marine researchers in a refitted fishing trawler, and that's where we left them. They got shot, they had seisures, they gave other people seisures by their mere proximity, and they killed a harbor seal by talking to it with their mind. We played for two and a half hours (which is a full session for us).

Play was very good, as good as you could possibly expect with no prep. (If you like no-prep play, you know how good I mean.) It started a bit loose, like "I'm not sure what I should say but how about ... this?" and built steadily. I'm excited to have a break between sessions, not to make plans, but to let the game sink in. The second session will be rock solid.

Okay, Chris! Rules talk time.

1. When we started I was like, "I'll GM. One person will play a character -" Julia: pick me! pick me! "- that's Julia. Meg and Emily, you get to choose, play a character or co-GM with me?" They both chose to play characters. I'm going to keep introducing the game this way until somebody takes me up on it. After the game, we talked a little about how co-GMing it would have worked, and we all agreed that it would've worked good.

2. I changed a category's dice on you:
Reveal
6: Character has a memory, player narrates
4-5: Character has a memory, another player narrates
1-3: Character has no memory

All three of the players strongly prefered the "another player narrates" result. If they had a 5 and a 6, for instance, and Goal and Reveal to put them in, they'd put the 6 in Goal and the 5 in Reveal. All three of our revealed answers last night, another player narrated. The player would read out her character's questions and when someone was inspired to answer one of them, she'd interrupt and do so.

3. We played with Chase its own category, separate from Goal. I'm not sure why you'd combine them; I wouldn't.

The Chase mechanism rocks hard. We didn't have the "they're on us, they're still on us, they're still on us!" problem you had - we found that on a good roll the runners pulled ahead, and on a bad roll the shadowy agency caught up, and on a mixed roll you had to tear your hair.

I was fully prepared to recapture the runners, by the way. I don't figure that "you're drugged in a helicopter on your way back to the glass rooms, what do you do?" is different from "you're on the fishing trawler and the engine won't start, what do you do?" in any way that matters. Just because they're recaptured doesn't mean they're not still running.

Also - when the characters split up, it was easy to maintain parallel chase tracks for them. They reconnected pretty soon, but I would have been comfortable separating them. The key, I think, would be that when the chasers make progress, they make progress along every track. I can say more about that if it doesn't make sense from just this paragraph.

4. That reminds me: having three runners wasn't any kind of a problem vs. having only one or two. Everybody was interested in everybody's story, and the characters immediately fixed on one another as allies and maybe friends. They never considered going their separate ways.

(It would have been fine if they had - it wouldn't've separated them mechanically. It'd still be another player narrating your character's memories and another player's dice letting the chasers gain on you.)

5. For dice, we rolled an extra die and dropped the lowest. Being hurt meant you lost that spare die. I forgot all about the "you get bonus dice for inserting yourself into others' memories" rule. Being hurt again never happened, but if it had we'd roll an extra die and drop the highest.

6. Oh! We want a way to add questions to a character sheet. We want to add questions to our own character sheets and we want to add questions to each others' too.

I think it might make sense to just say "write at least a few questions. Over the course of the first session or two, add questions until you've got 6. Your fellow players can suggest questions too."

I have opinions about endgame but we'll wait and see how we actually do it.

Take home: Chris, this game is solid. You have the opportunity to fiddle with some details, but the game is solid up and down.

-Vincent

[Meguey]

I *LOVED* this game. The character generation really contributes to discovering my character in play. I liked being able to bring in details, like my name and apperance and clothes, as they emerged instead of trying to nail them all down in the begining. I watched all three of us players immerse into our characters effortlessly. I havn't spoken in first person in a game that much in *ages*, and it's been maybe years since I've said "Out of character, XYZ?". I can't wait to play it again. We're all really invested, right now, in each other's stories. I really like the Chase mechanic, because it keep sthe pressure on, and allows us to gauge how 'hot' it is. We could decide to suck up a wound or not get a reveal if we needed a breather, or get a reveal or achieve a goal, but know the next thing was Them right on top of us, which was just he right amount of fore knowledge.

[chris_moore]

Thank you so much for giving psi run a shot.  I'll have questions in a few minutes because I'm still in a bit of shock.

Chris

[chris_moore]

Wow!  Okay!  Here are some questions:

We played with Chase its own category, separate from Goal. I'm not sure why you'd combine them; I wouldn't.

I originally had a separate Chase category.  What did yours look like?

Also - when the characters split up, it was easy to maintain parallel chase tracks for them. They reconnected pretty soon, but I would have been comfortable separating them. The key, I think, would be that when the chasers make progress, they make progress along every track. I can say more about that if it doesn't make sense from just this paragraph.

Having the Chasers make progress along every track was exactly my intention.  Yes!  Now, how did you determine who was rolling when all the Runners were in the same scene?  Were there multiple rolls in a scene? Examples would be wonderful.

I have opinions about endgame but we'll wait and see how we actually do it.

Any forethought on this part is welcome.  I really want the endgame to be as surprising as the rest of the game.

Thanks again, Chris

[chris_moore]

I'd also love to hear from the other two players; even just general impressions.

Chris

[lumpley]

We used your original chase:
5-6 pursuers make no progress
3-4 pursuers make 1 scene's progress
1-2 pursuers make 2 scenes' progress

Multiple rolls per scene, with every player rolling for her own character's actions. Like, here's an example, abbreviated from actual play of course. Our heroines have just spotted a boat they want.

"We steal it!" Julia says.
"Roll," I say.
Julia rolls and assigns. Her character's hurt but they succeed and no chase progress, also no memory.
"So I start up the boat," she says -
"And this guy comes up from below. He shoots you."
"SHOOTS me?" Julia says.
I point at her safety die.
"I kick him overboard," Meg says.
"Roll for it," I say. She does. "Hey how about that. He shoots you too."
"SHOOTS me?" Meg says.
"You -" (Julia) "- he shot right ... here ... he shot a piece of your ear off."
"My EAR?" Julia says.
"That was some close shit," Meg says.
"You -" (Meg) "- he shot in the foot. Through and through."
"No way," Meg said. "It's only a for-the-rest-of-the-session hurt. If he shot me through the foot it'd last as long as the game."
"Fair. Throught the meat of the calf?"

Like that.

Since as GM I don't have any prep or NPCs or die rolling or anything to do, I took it as my job to pace the scenes: balance their progress from location to location with the amount of rolling they did. Especially, it feels natural to turn the low die in one roll into a next roll, for the same player or some other player - so natural that, as Meg did in my example, the players will often do it for themselves.

One more thing!

Chris, if you have any thought of going to GenCon this year, sign up with Paul and Matt. If you aren't going to GenCon, make an ashcan for GenCon anyway. You can talk to Paul and Matt about absentee representation, and if that doesn't work out you can send a few copies with me and I'll make sure they get around.

-Vincent

[Caesar_X]

Color me curious, Chris.  Do you have play test rules available anywhere to look at?

[Parthenia]

I totally enjoyed playing. I asked for 10 more minutes of play because I didn't want to stop.

I would much rather have other players determine the answers to my questions. I think there's a tendency to have preconceived ideas of what the answers are. If you have less of a chance of giving your own answers, you're less likely to have a preconceived answer. Besides, if you're playing a character with amnesia, the answers to your questions wouldn't necessarily pop into your head by themselves. Something would trigger the answer.

So for example, my question, "Why can I breathe under water?" Since I asked mostly water related questions (only because I was talking about octopus tattoos earlier in the day), it was hard not to have a vague idea of the answers. The answer (given by Vincent), "You were born under the water and you lived under the water....You're not human" was very different from even my vague idea.  I liked someone else knowing my answers. I let go of my vague ideas, and my character feels more like an amnesiac. Having someone else give the answer felt more like a revelation than if I had fleshed out the vague idea.

I can't wait to play again!

Julia

[chris_moore]

Caesar_X:  coming soon.

Julia, Vincent, Meg:  Do you think that other players should always narrate the characters' revelations?  As in, narrating one's own character's revelation shouldn't be an option? 

Chris

[lumpley]

I like making your own memory on a 6. I think a) it's good to leave it as an option, for certain, and b) it makes more sense to me to put it at 6 than at 4 or 1.

-Vincent

[Parthenia]

Yeah, I like have the occasional option to answer your own question. If you don't want to, you can always put the 6 somewhere else.

[Meguey]

Ditto what they said. We're playing session two tomorrow night, and I'm really hoping I find out why I'm afraid of cats. I like that there's no control over what question gets answered in the Reveal; we played that it had to make logical sense that something triggered the memory, but nobody got to say what question they wanted answered (unless they were narating their own Reveal).

[chris_moore]

I can't wait to hear how session #2 goes! 

Michael (my co-designing buddy) and I were chatting, and we have these ideas for your consideration:

Vincent wrote:

Oh! We want a way to add questions to a character sheet. We want to add questions to our own character sheets and we want to add questions to each others' too.

I think it might make sense to just say "write at least a few questions. Over the course of the first session or two, add questions until you've got 6. Your fellow players can suggest questions too."

What if you could add a question as an option of the Reveal category?  You (or another player) depending on the die, could add a question instead of answering an existing one, as long as the character doesn't already have six questions.  That way, if I want more ownership of my own character, I could write all my questions at the beginning of the game.  If I want more collaboration, I could do what Vincent suggests above, understanding that people could add questions to my character's sheet.

Also, it seemed as if GM Vincent was narrating the outcome of the rolls.  Is that true?  If so, how was that?  Our original (and unstated) assumption was that player's narrate their own rolls.  Let us know what you think. 

One more thing, about the Crossroads (endgame).  As of now, it's just narrative constraint.  When one character has all (six?) questions answered, it's Crossroads time for everyone.  Story's over.  Each player chooses a Path, and narrates their character's epilogue.  The Paths, tentatively, are Home, Trapped, Turned the Tables, and Quest.  They are not defined; you decide what they mean for your character's story.

Now, Vincent said in another post:

I super like the idea of fewer questions answered = your fellow players have more say about your character's epilogue, but who knows what actual play will require.

Another idea we had was that the player with the most Answers gets first pick of the Paths, and no one else can choose that one.  The other players pick from what's left in descending order of Answers. 

Thanks again for all the feedback!
Chris

[lumpley]

My crossroads thinking this minute is, for each question you've answered, you get to cross off one of the crossroads as a possibility. (I have 7 paths here, so 6 questions is the right number.) The other players choose which epilogue you do get, from the ones you haven't eliminated.

Adding a question as a reveal option is very good. What numbers are you thinking?

I think that the idea of "person X narrates" doesn't suit the game. Everybody should talk all the time. As GM, I took it upon myself to make sure that the bad outcomes were actually bad, is all. Often I inserted more badness in, but occasionally I didn't have to.

I have more to say about GMing and narrating and "final say," but it's slippery. I haven't figured out how to say it yet.

-Vincent

[chris_moore]

My crossroads thinking this minute is, for each question you've answered, you get to cross off one of the crossroads as a possibility. (I have 7 paths here, so 6 questions is the right number.) The other players choose which epilogue you do get, from the ones you haven't eliminated.

I like this very, very much.

Adding a question as a reveal option is very good. What numbers are you thinking?

I was thinking this:

6 - player narrates a Reveal, either an Answer or a new Question (if current Questions < 6)
5-4 another player narrates, etc.
1-3 no memory

I think that the idea of "person X narrates" doesn't suit the game. Everybody should talk all the time. As GM, I took it upon myself to make sure that the bad outcomes were actually bad, is all. Often I inserted more badness in, but occasionally I didn't have to.

I have more to say about GMing and narrating and "final say," but it's slippery. I haven't figured out how to say it yet.

Ah, I see.  Everyone was suggesting roll interpretations.  Cool.  Let me know if anything rises to the top in your next session about "final say".  I'm thinking it should be with the player, for now.  Or, maybe, the final say on the low roll (if there is one) or the "badness", should rest with the GM.  Hmmm...

Excited Chris