[The Naked City] Prototype using index cards for scene generation

[Caesar_X]

I returned from my honeymoon eager to get moving with The Naked City: a Game of Film Noir.  I've been working on this game off and on for almost a year, and I was looking for a spark to get it going.  And I found that spark in a thread on Story Games that Jason Morningstar started about using index cards to generate scenes (http://www.story-games.com/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=3637&page=1).

This weekend I ran a playtest with Brian, Mark and Robert. I had prototyped something very similar to Jason's idea using my random character generator, which uses regular playing cards and lists of 52 adjectives, jobs, first and last names, and locations.  The motivations and situations were generated at the table by the different players with some collaboration from the rest of the group.   There are no complete rules yet, so I purposefully kept things very open to give the playtesters a lot of room to interpret/discuss/suggest rules and the implementation of them.  My biggest question was: can these index cards really be used to create a serious of interesting scenes?  While there are many other questions to be answered and rules to be written, I think the answer to the big question is: "Yes".  I'll talk about the content of the game and then go into concerns/problems as well as possible solutions in the next post.

Structure:
-This is not a roleplaying game, but rather a storytelling game where players (Actors) take different characters in each scene to play, and work collaboratively to move the story forward.  The GM (Director) is there to add structure, keep track of the plot turns and be the rules interpreter.

Year: 1950
City: Crescent City; a fictional city on the West Coast
Plot: Prison escape is in the headlines
Theme: Everyone in this town is trying to escape from something

Character Cards: note that while the Motivation is tied to the character (it's the one thing they want but can never have), the Location and Situation are tied simply to the card, not the character.  These character cards are placed in different combinations to define the elements of each individual scene.

Name: Mildred Young
Job: Clever Fugitive
Motivation: Secret mobster husband
Location: Theatre
Situation: An accidental unmasking!

Name: Frank Young
Job: Scheming Pilot
Motivation: Wants to go legit
Location: Greasy Spoon
Situation: A stolen wallet!

Name: Clyde Taylor
Job: Misguiding Lawyer
Motivation: Save one innocent man
Location: Downtown rooftop
Situation: Blackmail!

Name: Andrew Messner
Job: Insane Casino Dealer
Motivation: Wants true love
Location: Grimy Refinery
Situation: Pistol Whipping!

Prologue: As the opening credits roll, sirens are wailing and spotlights light the frame.  A silhouetted man jumps from rooftop to rooftop with cops below firing at him.  Fade to a spinning newspaper headline that screams: "Escaped murderer on the loose!" and a radio announcer tells the story, "Last night, convicted murderer Wallace Henry escaped from the Crescent City Penitentiary.  Police are out in force and are setting up roadblocks around the city to capture this killer..."

Act I:

Scene 1:
Characters: Frank and Clyde
Motivation: Save one innocent man
Location: Greasy Spoon
Situation: Pistol Whipping!

The same evening as the breakout, Clyde tracked down Frank as a key witness to save an innocent man.  But Frank refused to testify because he didn't want to be uncovered as an illegal smuggler.  Clyde threatens to revoke Frank's pilot license if he won't testify, and Frank pistol whips him!

Conflict: Frank tries to intimidate Clyde.  Clyde wants to get back at Frank.

Resolution: Frank wins the conflict and Clyde is filled with shame because he's not man enough to face up to Frank.

Fade-Out: Frank leaves Clyde bruised and bloody in a puddle outside the greasy spoon.

Scene 2:
Characters: Clyde and Mildred
Motivation: Secret mobster husband
Location: Downtown rooftop
Situation: A stolen wallet!

Clyde stole Mildred's mobster husband's wallet and found a romantic picture of Mildred and the mobster inside.  Clyde thought that Mildred was in love with him, and confronts her later that same evening with the picture on the rooftop of the theatre where she works.  Mildred was playing Clyde for a sucker.

Conflict: Clyde accuses Mildred of cheating on him with the mobster; he wants the truth.  Mildred wants the wallet back.

Resolution: Mildred wins the conflict and tells Clyde about how she played him and how he'd better hand over the wallet unless he wants to end up "like the rest of them".

Fade-Out: Mildred takes the wallet and leaves Clyde alone on the rooftop.  Dejected, he walks over to the edge to look down and contemplates stepping over the edge before chickening out.

Scene 3:
Characters: Frank and Clyde
Motivation: Frank wants to go legit
Location: Theatre
Situation: A stolen wallet!

The next day, Frank shows up at the theatre and starts intimidating Clyde about a key that was in the wallet.  Frank needs this because he wants to make one more smuggling run and fly Mildred and the mobster out of town before he can go legit.  And he needs the key before he can make the run.

Conflict: Frank wants the key.  Clyde still wants Frank's testimony.

Resolution: Frank wins the conflict.  Clyde had overplayed his hand and kept the key before he returned the wallet to Mildred, who had in turn given it to Frank.  Frank takes things even more physical this time and takes the key from Clyde. 

Fade-Out: Clyde is not killed, but he is a broken man and is no longer in the story.

Act II:

Scene 4:
Characters: Mildred and Andrew
Motivation: Secret mobster husband
Location: Greasy Spoon
Situation: Accidental unmasking!

That day, Mildred is having coffee at the greasy spoon after work when Andrew walks in.  He has eyes for Mildred but works for her estranged mobster husband, who has sent Andrew to get her out of the way.

Conflict: Andrew wants to kill Mildred.  Mildred wants to "win" Andrew over and turn him into her sap.

Resolution: Andrew wins the conflict and follows Mildred into the Ladies Room only to strange her to death.

Fade-Out: Andrew is sitting in the bathroom stall with his foot blocking the door, quietly holding Mildred's dead body and stroking her hair while he smokes a cigarette.

At this point, we needed to end the session.  We had spent about 2 1/2 hours on character card creation and running four scenes.  But a good portion of that was debating various points of the rules.  With a real set of rules, I think a group of three Actors and a Director could get through three 3-scene Acts in 3-5 hours.  More info in the next post.

[Caesar_X]

Notes from the scenes:
1. The fourth scene didn't really have anything to do with "An accidental unmasking!", but it was so creepy and cool that no one seemed to mind!
2. After Clyde lost two scenes in a row, the group was almost gunning for Clyde to lose again.  They knew he was a loser and were all following his descent down into despair.  I had thought that Clyde was going to lose his life at the end of Scene 3, but they unanimously wanted him to still be around to pop back up later for one last desperate act.
3. The game started out slow as there weren't clearly defined rules (by my own admission) and there was a lot of discussion about how cards should be laid down and how scenes should be structured.  But by the third scene, the game seemed to be firing on all cylinders and players were really making the narrative happen, even though we were basically playing with a bare minimum of rules and a lot of scene constraints.
4. For simplicity, I was limiting all conflicts to two characters, and the conflicts were resolved simply by cutting cards from the deck.  High card won the scene, and the winning Actor got to narrate the end of the scene and add a new element to another one of the character cards.  When I develop an actual mechanic for resolving conflicts, I want it to include shades of gray similar to what is in The Mountain Witch to allow situations where one side gets what they want but at the expense of having to sacrifice something as well.
5. Leaving one card from the previous scene is an important step and helps to link scenes together.

What worked:
1. The random elements.  The players enjoyed drawing a few cards and getting some interesting combinations of character names, jobs and locations.  I am considering doing the same for the motivations and situations.  Brian insisted that the players be able to draw two cards to choose from for the Location since they get a choice for the other elements, which I thought was a cool idea.
2. Cooperative narrative.  I stated up front that this was not a roleplaying game, and all of the players really got into the spirit of telling a cool story and not getting hung up on what character they were playing that scene.

What didn't work:
1. The problems that we did have were mainly related to the placing and moving of the character cards.  Figuring out the proper positioning of them was key, because the Actors needed to know what characters were going to be in the scene and what other elements were going to be key.  There was a lot of back-and-forth about this, because I wanted to make sure that all of the players were making interesting decisions and that the last to move a card wasn't trumping the others.
2. I had worked some relationship map elements into this by adding new characters to my R-map everytime they were introduced into a scene and randomly generating two-way relationships between them.  This failed because I didn't keep the R-map in front of the players and they couldn't reference it, and because several times I let the players start to define the scene before I remembered to define the relationship between the characters, which led to some confusion.  But even given those, we all felt like the R-map wasn't adding much to the game experience.
3. It was a bit confusing to have the players place the initial cards because they weren't sure how they would fit together.  I'm still considering having the Director place the first three cards in Scene 1 to get things moving.
4. We started with four cards for three players, and after each scene we added a new element to another card.  But it didn't feel like enough content for the players.  I would start with 5-6 cards next time for 3 players and not worry so much about adding new cards.  Perhaps just one new full card at the start of Act II and Act III.
5. There was a lot of resistance to having all four elements on the same card.  The players felt like it added too much constraint and perhaps too much repetition.  I think some of this was due to the confusion around how and when cards are put together to create a scene.  But there needs to be more thought put into this mechanic. 

Suggestions:
1. To make the cards work more smoothly, we came up with a few possible ideas afterwards that I want to look into more: one was to swap a few elements on the card so the Motivation was no longer directly across from the character Name/Job.  Another idea was to remove the Motivation from the right side of the card and add it under the character Job.  But we would need another important game element to put on the right side of the card.
2. Mark had the idea of a "Stake Meter" that defines how peaceful or violent the next scene is going to be.  After a peaceful scene, the meter goes up, and after a violent scene the meter goes back down.  Which lets the story tension build up and release throughout the game.
3. If scenes are only about two characters (which I am still debating), this should be made an explicit part of the rules.
4. Let players "buy" relationships with game currency.
5. If "tragedy" and "violence" are part of the Film Noir game feel, make sure that these are a part of the card generation and scene creation as well.
6. Players asked about Flashbacks and whether they would happen in the final game.
7. When a character's Hope (which I didn't use in this playtest) was all used up and they are removed from the game, their Name/Job and Motivation should be circled on the card to show that those portions of the card are unusable while the Location and Situation can still be used.  Clyde was pivotal in the first three scenes, so the players felt like he should come back at some point in the game.  Perhaps someone could pay game currency to bring Clyde back, but with a new (and more desperate) Motivation. 

Overall I felt like this was taking the game back-to-basics and it was jettisoning a lot of what I had developed over the past year, but that is not a bad thing.  I watched the narrative develop without any stats or a lot of rules, and it makes me realize two things.  That I still have a long way to go to get a finished product.  But more importantly, that I have less to add than perhaps I thought I did.

Chris B.

[Osmo Rantala]

Seems like really cool a game. Planning on publishing it sometime in the future?

[Caesar_X]

Thanks, Osmo.  I do have some interest in publishing it, but it still needs a lot of work and testing to be complete.  And I am hoping to wrap a book about Film Noir around it.  Not really a sourcebook, but rather a book on the subject that happens to have a game in it.

Chris B.

[GreatWolf]

And I am hoping to wrap a book about Film Noir around it.  Not really a sourcebook, but rather a book on the subject that happens to have a game in it.

That would be several kinds of cool.  I'll be keeping an eye on this project!