[carry] Endgame tweaks

[Nathan P.]

Here's how I'm going to start running the Endgame for carry.

1. Everyone chooses a target and hands their Burden die to the person. The GM keeps track of who gives what to who.

2. Everybody rolls the die or dice that they just received, and adds their number of unresolved Burden Entries. GM writes down their totals. It's important that theres a discrete order; if there's a tie, the person with the most Burden Entries counts as higher; if these are tied, highest sized Burden Die received (d8 is bigger than d6, etc); if still a tie, roll-off with d12s. The GM sorts the players into a list from lowest to highest number.

3. The player with the lowest number narrates the Denouement of everyone who gave him dice. If nobody gave him dice, he narrates his own Denouement.

4. The next player in order narrates the Denouement of everyone who gave him dice, &tc. He must place the character or characters that he's narrating about in a WORSE fictional position relative to the first narration, depending on the context of the scene and the story that has developed to this point.

5. The next player in order goes, with the same caveat - he has to place those he's narrating about in a worse fictional place than the last narration.

6. Once all Denouements have been made, go in reverse order with each person giving the Epilogue for their character. This is a more informal narration, and everyone should feel free to toss in their ideas and suggestions for a characters Epilogue, but that characters player has final say. There are no fictional restrictions on these narrations.

Thoughts? I'll post once I run it this way and I have a chance to see how it goes....

[Yokiboy]

Has anyone tried this variant yet?

I will hopefully play Carry in a few months. I now own the necessary d12s, but one of the players is working in Ireland this fall, but once he gets back Carry is high on the list of games to play next.

[Nathan P.]

Heya,

I ran it this way at last Dex Con. It seemed to work pretty well for my taste, and I got feedback both ways about it after the game - that is, I was told that it worked really well by one player, and that it seemed too artificial and "dick-waving" by another. So the jury's still out, I need to see how it plays over multiple games.

In our game of 6 players, everyone targeted two of them. So it worked out smoothly in a procedural manner, which is one goal for the system.

Now that I'm thinking back to that game, I may have messed up this process. My memories of who talked about what aren't matching up. Hrm.

Anyhow, if you have any specific questions about this system, let me know!

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Nathan,

I remember that we used a variant rules-set for ending the game, as described in my thread [Carry] Helicopters and Accuser role-switching. Here's the relevant text from that thread:

we had three options to try.

1. The text rules, in which the Burden dice are rolled and the outcomes assign who gets to narrate Denouement vs. Epilogue.

2. The revised rule-idea as emailed to me by Nathan, in which the dice are not rolled and people just pick which to narrate within each pair.

3. The revised revision as discussed with Nathan phone the day before, in which the Burden dice are rolled and the results affect the Grunts in the denouement narrations, but who narrates which is left up to each pair.

We used the third version, as Nathan and I had agreed during the phone call, and unfortunately it featured exactly the same hitchiness that he had experienced and was trying to avoid. Hence, group discusssion! Here's what we came up with.

i) Keep the target-picking and the rolls, just as in the text.

ii) The low-rolling individual in each pair must narrate the Denouement, and must put his Grunt "worse" than the other Grunt in that narration, in terms of the already-stated conflict going on in it.

iii) The high-rolling individual in each pair gets to narrate the Epilogue for the Grunts and has no constraint on content.

We are all agreed that this technique is clear, so no hitchiness or awkward decision-making, and it assures a content/SIS role for the final Burden dice-rolls, hence making all their various increases and decreases during play relevant.

I really like the way that your new method makes ours look clunky and hitchy! You've taken away the most tricky part: the business about the "pairs." I really think it looks good.

Best, Ron

[Nathan P.]

Yah, pairs were a big hangup. Making the list helps like woah.

Also important: making it clear that whoever goes first is establishing the baseline for "bad stuff" for everyone in the denouement narrations.