(Criminal Element) On the Bullet Train

[MPOSullivan]

Alright, so I've had the chance to run some hardcore Criminal Element sessions recently.  It's good to get back under the hood of that thing.  Criminal Element, for those not in the know, is a Heist and Caper movie RPG.  You can check it out over here at my website.  I know it's not fully baked yet, but I can start to smell the fine aroma of completeness and it is nice.  I am still hitting some issues with the game play though, so let's get right to it. 

The game generally runs between one and four sessions, depending on the group and the desired style of play.  I ran this particular playtest with my Tuesday night group, a great set of players and friends.  The TNG normally runs about three hours or a little more, so this particular heist ran for three sessions, though it should have ran for two as I'll discuss later. 

The first session covered what the game calls the Setup, as well as a bit of story stuff as well.  This stuff went down well.  The players weren't as well-steeped in the genre as I am but there was a basic understanding and an interest, so I got them all on board thanks to a game night devoted to watching the movie Heat and we hit the ground running. 

As part of the Setup I said that I really wanted the players to make actual criminal characters and that I wanted the game to be set in a modern urban environment.  The more I think about it, I want this to be the book standard.  If the players like the game and want to run it in feudal Japan or on the moon then that's very cool, but I think that the game will be at it's strongest if I concentrate on presenting it in it's purest form. 

I also said that I'd like it if the Score, as it's called in this game, was going to be something that a criminal organization had in their possession and the PCs were going to be trying to lift it from them.  I didn't bother to decide what it was that they had or anything like that, just that the Mob or whomever had it.

With that in place we hit the ground running.  A quick discussion of style lead to the game being modern day, set in France, and the tone being somewhat serious.  I'm thinking the best corrallation is probably the short-lived tv series Smith or the movie Ronin.  Dark, edgy, slick, a little violent, but not a blood opera like Reservoir Dogs.

The next step was to talk about the kinds of characters that the players wanted to play, and everyone was fired up.  With a week to think about the kinds of characters you generally see in heist movies, the players had come up with some very loose archetypes they were interested in playing.  After a couple of minutes of talking we had the makings of a strong Crew.  Camden decided that he wanted to play a wheelman, one with a penchant for the dangerous.  Dan had Infernal Affairs on the brain and made a Face that was also an undercover cop that had been under for too long.  Kevin was in the mood to bruise his knuckles and came up with a former Russian soldier gone free market.  Finally, Zoe was thinking about Veronica Mars (and who can blame her) and decided to take a cue from Mac and play a too-smart-for-her-own-good tech head.

With the basics of the characters fleshed out, we went in for the more probing bits and discussed the PCs desires, or their Motives and Vices as the game likes to call them.  Camden's driver was motivated by excitement and adrenaline, and along with that the most dangerous of women.  Dan's character had to weigh his own desire to repay a very personal debt with his own ideals.  Kevin's bruiser has a need to be the best but constantly gets tripped up by his own loyalty to others.  Tech-head Zoe is all about taking on the impossible challenges, even if that means making things more complicated and difficult for herself.

We talked for a couple of minutes about what the Score actually was, but when Zoe said that it could be a list of informants that the Mob had gotten their hands on we didn't need to work any further.  On top of that everyone had been talking about setting the heist on a moving train and I wasn't going to argue with that bit of cool.

Next we talked about the kinds of problems the PCs were going to come up against on the heist.  The game calls these problems the Heat, and boy did we get some hot ones.  As it goes, players have to come up with one instance of Heat for themselves, and then another for the player sitting to their left.  Camden started the ball rolling by saying that his character was going to need to outrace the train as part of the heist.  By the time we were done players had introduced bodyguards, EMP pulse safeguards, interpol agents, and other bits of trouble for themselves.

After taking a couple of minutes to put some numbers on character sheets we were ready to go.  I started the session off in media res, as many heist flicks go.  A simple little scene in which someone with their head in a burlap sack had a gun put at their temple with a voice-over saying "It's almost inevitable.  This is how things always end."  Then I jumped back to the beginning and ran through the little-s setup.  Got the crew together, got them into a meeting with their broker, put the job in front of them.  We wrapped the session with the crew talking about the job and Camden, when confronted with the prospect of having to somehow get from his moving car onto a moving train, said "We're going to need a place to park my car."

[MPOSullivan]

With session one behind us, we were ready to get into the heist itself.  Sadly, this is when things went off the rails a bit. 

Since the Score was being transported on a bullet train I decided to open the session with the crew at the bullet train's station in Paris.  I thought it would be a five minute scene of the crew looking at some of the security at the station and getting a good look at the train itself before they pulled of the job the next day.  This was, as you could possibly predict, completely wrong.

It might have been that the players were simply a bit punchy.  One of the players had gotten little sleep and was a bit off the chain.  In any case, the five minute scene ate up at least an hour of play time.  The players just sort of wandered around the train station, sort of interacting with things but not really. 

Thinking back on it now I should have probably followed my own advice in the book and introduced some Bangs.  Maybe have the cops roll into the train station looking for something.  Maybe have some enforcers from the mob outfit walk in and start casing the joint for the next day's bit of business.  During the after session chat that we always have I took full responsibility for the lack of pacing that night and, in retrospect, can easily see what I should have done. 

After a lot of flailing around trying to pick up the pace I finally just jumped to the next scene, one where two of the crew members were trying to get their hands on some heavy equipment.  That scene and the following went by well enough and by the end of the session we had gotten everyone on to the train.  I decided that I would wrap the session just before the heist itself takes off, so I had the players wander through the train for a minute and such.  I ended the session with one of the players, Dan's undercover Interpol agent, sitting in the dining car and waiting for someone.  A woman walked past him, recognized him, and looked down at the character and said his name, something that no one outside of Interpol would know.

Next session we picked up with that same character.  The player decided that he wanted to use his character's "False Identity" trait to play off that he wasn't the person that the woman thought he was.  I wasn't sure about it, it seemed silly that a woman that obviously recognized him would suddenly forget who he was or whatever.  I had also wanted to use this NPC to introduce more of the undercover cop stuff for the PC.  In any case, I had thoughts of the indie game mantra "say yes or roll the dice" pop in to my mind, so I set opposition and we drew cards.  The player won the draw and the woman failed to recognize him and walked off.

I was able to recover from this by introducing a different character that also knew who Dan's character really was and gave the appropriate cipher code-phrase to identify himself as the PCs handler.  It let me introduce more of that fun Interpol stuff, but I was hoping to run on a bare minimum number of NPCs.  Having to introduce an extra one just seemed extraneous. 

From there on the game went into the heist proper, which pretty much just sang.  Things moved at a breakneck pace, combats were had, Meltdowns were activated, characters were shot.  The end of the session had the players gasping for air.  I've gotta tell you, that's a nice feeling.

All in all though, this is the stuff that I took away from that particular series.

Pacing:  Should there be some sort of explicit statement from the Director that says "this is what this scene is about"?  The game requires a fast pace to work well, so I find myself wondering if the Director should set out exactly what the goal is in each scene explicitly to the players rather than just having an idea of a scene goal like I talk about in the director's notes part of the PDF. 

Glass NPCs:  Man did my NPCs die quick!  Without a Drama Point like mechanic to protect important characters from harm, they just get torn apart during combat.  My thinking on this is to simply give important NPCs a bunch more wound points to help out with that.  My other thought was to let the Director burn players' metldown points as a sort of "backdoor" drama point mechanic, but that's not a solution that I'm too comfortable with.  I think that it takes the focus away from what's important with meltdown points in the first place, the Vices and loss of control.

Going for cover:  Is fun and easy, but without it a character is really dead.  I'm thinking about ripping the active dodge rules out of Sorcerer to help out with this.  A character can just take the two cards on his dodge but still get his full action like normal, or he can use his action to make a dodge draw using an appropriate trait.  Going for cover would add a +1 draw bonus to all defensive actions, active or passive.

Body armour:  I'm also thinking that this needs to be a little more solidly-handled mechanically.  As it stands right now, the only time a bullet-proof vest is helpful is if you use the DS "Kevlar", which you can only use once per scene.  I'm thinking that I want to have armour work like an Advantage Draw, giving characters an additional card on their draw for defending themselves.  This lets those passive Dodge draws not suck so much as well as gives bonuses to characters that put some forethought into getting a kevlar vest.

This also would mean that the mechanical weight of such a thing, an item that gives a +1 draw bonus to appropriate actions, would have to be carried out across the board.  Certain weapons, tools, what have you could give you the bonus if those items are good enough.  For any of these items to come in to play though a character would either have to make a successful requisition draw or spend the right number of DP.

And the biggest issue is Stakes.  I've been playing in a whole lot of Shadow of Yesterday lately.  It's a fun game, well written, with great rules.  It also has very explicit narrativist stake-setting.  I found that this approach to running the game sort of infected the way I ran parts of Criminal Element and it definitely did not help play.  CE isn't a narrativist game.  The use of the mechanic doesn't give a player story power.  It runs more along the lines of an Over the Edge or Unknown Armies.  While I think that setting explicit Stakes is important to any kind of good play... hell, it's integral, I find myself wondering how to implement the concepts here without drifting towards a narrativism that doesn't really work for the game. 

Using an example from the gameplay above, the player tried to have his character go unrecognized by an NPC.  I think what went off the rails here was not the setting of Stakes, but instead how they were set.  I think I was too frozen up by my unwillingness to curtail player freedom and I let it go to an extreme.  If there was something more along the lines of stakes negotiation maybe it would have worked better.  Perhaps if I had done the following:

Me: "Alright, so picking up with the end of last session... The Greek is staring down at you with a puzzled expression on her face.  She mutters your real name under her breath."

Player:  "I want to use my False Identity trait.  I want to tell her that she's mistaken, that I'm not who she thinks I am, and for her to move on."

Me: "Well, sorry man, but she does recognize you and there's no undoing that.  Maybe on a successful draw you can use False Identity to not draw attention to yourself while you talk to the Greek."

All in all, a great couple of sessions but, more importantly, a great couple of play tests.  What do you guys think?

[Mikael]

Looks like fun to anyone who's into these kinds of movies. Regarding the Greek recognizing the player: Was she part of the pretermined Heat, or something extra? If the former, would it not be ok to just say no, you cannot roll this away, it's the heat you wanted? If you need to roll, roll about something more interesting, like whether their relationship ended badly or with her still yearning for his company.

Reading that over, looks like I am supporting your solution to your Stakes problem, but with a different justification than "no, it already happened, because I SAID SO".

[MPOSullivan]

Hey Mikael,

Thanks for the interest in the game.  I like to think it's a fun one to play, and hopefully more people will think the same way. 

As for the stuff with the Greek, she was not a part of Dan's Heat.  His Heat mainly involved tracking down the device that they were trying to lift on the train.  I threw in the Greek because I thought it would be a great Bang against his Motive and Vice, that being his debt to another person and his ideals.  The problems that I was having with that particular scene is in some basic IIEE stuff and the nature of the trait that the character was using. 

As for the IIEE bit, I had described in-game that the Greek had recognized Dan's character.  It wasn't something that was resolved mechanically, I had simply wanted her to be Dan's mysterious Interpol handler, Gabriel.  When he came back with his desire to make it seem like he was someone else it just felt like retconning to me.  Keep in mind, there is an actual mechanic for retconning in the game, but it requires more than just the draw of cards.  He had also not stated anywhere in the unfolding of the game, the SIS if I'm remembering the terms properly, that he was in any way disguised.  As a matter of fact, as an undercover cop it was completely outside of the scope or need of the character to wear prosthetics and such. 

As to the bit about Traits, I loosely remembered that Dan's "False Identity" trait was defined by him as being able to create a false identity, from the appropriate paperwork and ID to a different persona he could "wear".  Think of the scenes in Reservoir Dogs when Mr. Orange is creating his crook undercover identity and that's pretty much it.  The use of "False Identity" in this instance just didn't feel right. 

Keep in mind, these are all issues that lay pretty much with me.  I hadn't asked more probing questions at the moment concerning the trait because I was kind of taken aback.  As for the IIEE stuff, I'm not sure exactly how I can approach that and make it work.  I honestly felt like I was within my role as Director/GM by narrating a character into the SIS that recognized Dan's character and was a part of his past.  Maybe if I had simply been more upfront about it and narrated her as being his handler right out of the gate there wouldn't have been such a problem. 

Obviously, I couldn't discuss these things at the table using this language.  Not only is this sort of technobabble (and I use that term affectionately) not understood by everyone at my table, but it would have ground the session to a halt.  I was much more willing to just let the draw go down and move on with the game than step back for a half an hour and talk about why I don't think the player's stakes jibe properly.   

What's the opinion here?  Also, I'm a bit rusty on my Forge-speak.  Am I using the proper terminology?

[Mikael]

I am not the person to clarify terminology for you, but at least I think I understood what you mean by the terms you use. You said you do not want a narrativist game, but did not reallly state what your goal was with the game. An experience akin to watching a heist movie, or a gamey challenge for the players, a game where the players choose their own challenges (Heat)? Seems to me a conflict around this goal might have been the cause behind your stakes confusion, which then is really not a stakes issue at all. You wanted to introduce this handler character as a cool scene and a cool thing for the player to roleplay his character around, but he perceived it simply as a threat, a challenge to be overcome. Which, from my outside point of view, is a conflict of perception your game should not let happen. Now the actual conflict was broken, either way: if you would have been open about your intentions, there would have been no conflict, and if the challenge was really about what the player thought it was about, you should not have been free to bring the essentially same handler character in later, no matter how much cool it generated.

I want to emphasize that I do not see this as an issue of "wrong play" on your part in the specific situation, but rather a possible design issue you might want to think about.

[MPOSullivan]

Hey Mikael,

I'm not sure I understand what you're getting towards with your statement.  Let me clarify things a little here.  Criminal Element is a Simulationist game, as I understand that to mean.  The function of system is to emulate and enforce a style of play that maps with the themes, storytelling techniques, and style of the heist and caper movie.  It is through the application of parts such as the Setup, Drama Points, the Aftermath, Meltdowns, etc., that the game tells stories based on the source material.  Gameplay should result in a cool, crazy, probably bloody story of characters trying to steal something and going seven shades of crazy. 

I think that my problem is with the concept of stakes as it applies to this game.  I like the idea of stakes at their core, a simple statement of what a player (including the GM if the game has one) wants to happen as an outcome of the use of the mechanic.  The problem here is conflicts in the source material are often dealt with on a close scale, getting down into the blood and guts of the issues at hand.  It makes no sense for a game like CE to resolve big events like an entire combat or a sweeping change in a character through one application of the mechanic. 

I was reading through the Sorcerer wiki the other night in preparation for a game that I'll be running in about two weeks time and I saw a link to a post that articulated my concerns with stakes much better than I could. 

It happens that I think "Stakes," as currently discussed in a lot of blogs and forums, isn't really as big a deal as a lot of people are making out. In fact, in many cases, I think they are mixing up several distinct things:

1. Resolution of an at-hand conflict of interest in the current situation
2. Mechanical effects of a given outcome of the resolution system (score changes, etc)
3. Larger-scale implications for relationships among other characters, outcomes of other events
4. Consequences for the next significant real-person choices (new scenes, turn changes, etc)

Now, there are a lot of games out there in which a more generalized combination of all of them is fundamental to play. My Life with Master is probably the core system which has influenced many of them, including The Mountain Witch, Primetime Adventures, The Shab al-Hiri Roach, With Great Power ..., and others. If you roll to gain Love in My Life with Master, you know (a) that the minion will or will not successfully appeal to his or her Connection character; (b) that the minion does gain a point of Love, but will or will not gain a point of Self-Loathing as well; (c) that the Master or a hostile minion may well turn his or her nefarious attention to the Connection character; and (d) that the scene is effectively over, because this game typically sees one roll per scene.

However, I think people are confounding combining all of them with conflict resolution by definition, which is, as I see it, a bad case of synecdoche at the Techniques level.

The Sorcerer resolution rules are only concerned with #1 and #2. This is a big deal. You don't have to announce or account for or otherwise deal with anything about #3-4 prior to the roll. So, it's perfectly OK to announce "I cow him with my fierce gaze," or even, "I convince him to stop exploiting the factory workers," as a Sorcerer action, but there's no need to

Furthermore, and this is important for the kinds of actions I just mentioned, there is no final/guaranteed outcome for a given stated Sorcerer action. In the factory-workers example, the targeted character may lose ... and yet continue to exploit the workers, just operating with an inflicted penalty based on the dice-defeat he just suffered. That is just the same as announcing "I kill him!" in a fight scene, but hey, the dice, even on a successful roll, don't kill the guy, so he doesn't die.

See the difference? In a game like Dogs in the Vineyard, if my stated goal is to kill a guy, and we're rolling, and the other player/GM gives ... then he's dead. Because I'd stated that as the goal. Same goes for My Life with Master, with slightly different dice - if I'm going to use Violence to kill some poor Townsfolk schlub, and I succeed in my roll, he's dead - because I'd stated that as the goal. These games use "Stakes" in the broadest, #1-4 sense.

That doesn't happen in Sorcerer. The statement prior to the roll doesn't have that kind of "weight" (which I associate with #3, above).

So yes, do use "stakes thinking" if you want to, but focus on #1-2 as what the resolution system actually does, with #3-4 being the province of post-dice, post-conflict, post-scene decisions. And in fact, I suggest not using the "stakes" terminology, for now - instead, I strongly recommend this phrasing instead:

When fictional characters encounter a conflict of interest, the players/GM must roll dice
When fictional characters are not encountering a conflict of interest, then the players/GM must not roll dice

The mechanical issue that I feel I need to clarify in the game is the scope of resolution when you use the game mechanic.  I've specifically avoided using a "Bringing Down the Pain" style mechanic because it resolves too much and takes some of the grittyness out of the game.  I think that something like Ron does with Sorcerer, or perhaps what Fred and the guys did in Spirit of the Century is a bit more correct in terms of my desires for the outcome of conflict resolution in my game. 

Also, while re-reading the Sorcerer main book for game prep I read the part in I read the part in chapter four that discusses characters attempting to do actions that are well beyond their means.  In that section Ron talks about telling a player when something is just impossible and the right way of discussing such a thing with the player.  It doesn't fall into the "Say yes or roll" mentality and it works perfectly for Sorcerer, as well as my game I think. 

Going back to the original issue, I feel that things would have been clarified up front if the player had been more aware of these matters when playing the game.  As it stood in the game the player's action felt like a Jedi Mind Trick, him waving his hand and saying "You don't know who I am", though the NPC did and that information was already narrated into the SIS.  When the above ideas are taken into consideration, it is perfectly sensible for the GM/Director to say that the player's intended outcome is beyond the scope of a single draw of the cards as well as not really possible.  Then the player and GM can work toward coming up with an action that does better fit the nature of the mechanics and the problems at hand. 

Or, at least, I think that works.  I think I might be just on the brink of over analyzing things. 

[Mikael]

Thanks for the clarification. It seems to me that we are talking about two different things here.

You are and have from the beginning been talking about what are the proper stakes to set in a conflict, and I do largely concur with your analysis of the issue.

My argument, or focus, has evolved to the question of whether there should be a conflict at all, and whether the case you described was such where there would not have been a conflict of interest if the player had known your intentions. Now that he did not know them, you had essentially what seemed like a needless conflict, which may have partly influenced the "ugly" stakes your player had - but that's mostly beside the point (my point). So, trying to restate my point: is there something you could do with your design to make it difficult for the player to perceive a challenge when being offered coolness? Something like a system where you can make an offer of a cool complication (the handler) and if the player (knowingly) accepts the complication, you both gain resources.

Sorry for not addressing your stakes question directly. Just let me know if the above thoughts seem in any way relevant for your game.

[MPOSullivan]

Yeah, we do seem to be on two different tracks, but the conversation is very helpful indeed.  It's sharpened my focus on the game a bit, so that's always a nice thing.  I also agree that I should have been much more transparent when it came to telling the player what I was doing in the scene.  Problems would have been solved if I had simply said, "Alright, here's the Greek, otherwise known as your handler, codename "Gabriel".  She comes over and sits at the table.  What do you do?" 

As for your question, and man is it a good one, the reward for players is to actually push any given situation into a conflict.  The game has a very, very specific and powerful currency.  Or at least I think it's powerful.  Players earn their Drama Points/ reward mechanic by betting the DPs that they have on actions that they resolve using the conflict resolution mechanic.  For instance, if a player bets 1 DP on an action that he's drawing cards on and he wins, the player earns back his 1 DP and gets 1 more.  The return on DPs can increase due to in-game stuff, like a character interacting with his Motive or Vice.  This can see that 1 DP come back with 2, 3, or even 4 DPs on a bet. 

What this means in practice is that players will want to make every situation they get into crazier and more troublesome because it offers them the opportunity to bet on actions and earn DPs.  Players have an even greater incentive to make things harder on themselves in areas that they specialize in because it increases the DP rewards as well as makes them easier to earn.

To use an example from the last game of CE I ran, the players wanted to get some heavy weapons on-board a bullet train that was very well guarded and had a number of electronic security measures.  Rather than try and sneak the items on board using some kind of bait-and-switch or get their hands on some collapsible weapons, the players wanted to up the ante. 

One of the PCs was a computer hacker, another was a wheelman, and a third was the one with the black market contacts.  They decided to get the weapons off the black market and get them to the wheelman's souped-up Dodge Charger.  The hacker would get on-board the train as a regular rider and hack her way into the control mainframe.  Once inside, she would slow the train down at a certain specific part in its route and open one of its loading bays while the train was still traveling.  The wheelman would be waiting for this at the ramp that he makeshifted out of a bridge that traveled over the train tracks.  When the train came by, he would jump his car off of the bridge up-ramp and into the loading car of the train.  And all of that just to get some AK-47s on board a train.  This was a decision on the players behalf that was encouraged by the mechanics.  Make things harder on yourself and you get more opportunities to draw cards, bet on them, and thus get paid.

As for the resources, they are intentionally a one-way street.  The Director does not have Drama Points.  He doesn't need them.  His job is to turn up the heat on the PCs at all times.  Basically, the Director keeps hitting the PCs with bangs.  The ideal response from players, and this is for their own benefit as it earns them DPs, is to take those Bangs in stride and to place their PCs in a way that those Bags make problems for them.  This will let the player milk any issues that rise out of the Bangs for more DPs. 

Using the example of the Greek from the previous session, maybe the player could have just pulled her off to a secluded part of the train and killed her.  Fine, that's one small shot at getting DPs, and physical violence isn't even a thing that the character specializes in.  If the PC tries to manipulate the Greek though, and then tries to manipulate other people along the way, and keeps building up this grand scheme, then that's a lot of places where he gets to draw cards on actions that he's good at and really earn those DPs. 

Does that get to what your thinking of?

By the way, if you're interested in seeing how the mechanics are presented, check out the PDF at the link in my sig.  A quick read-through of that might clarify some stuff for you that I'm not addressing properly, or maybe you can see some presentation issues in there that I'm missing. 

[Mikael]

Thanks for the explanation. I know I should read your PDF, but I honestly do not have the time or the bandwidth. Sorry. But you, yes you, reading this post and interested in the genre, read through Michael's rules and comment! Looks like a well-thought-out thing that will make your life better.

Two thoughts came to mind:

You said you should have been direct with the player and just told that the Greek is the handler. I am wondering if, given the amount of player-generated content that you seem to be aiming for,  you should make that directness a hard-and-fast rule in the game. That is, if GM knows or plans something, he or she should reveal it like you are supposed to reveal the Town in Dogs, and let the players create their own twists as per the DP rules.

The other thing is something you could do to emphasize the value of the bangs: make them a limited GM resource, with only a set number of bangs available per player, and then have some way of directly telling the player that "this is a bang" (preferably without actually saying so - perhaps toss a chip or something). Just knowing that they are limited should raise their value in the players' eyes, and the available bangs could also act as a within-scene pacing mechanic, if you do not already have one.