The First Reaper Beauties Playtest Report. Now in English.

[Elliott]

As requested on Story-Games on the following thread: http://www.story-games.com/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=4302&page=1#Item_0, an actual play thread for Reaper Beauties. 

I posted a rather incoherent one before... Could a mod please delete my old one?

During my first playtest, I was playing with my good friends Becca, Alex and Jen. They had been supporting my efforts in this game from day one, and were happy to playtest.

After some excellent fried chicken, we went into character creation. In Reaper Beauties, your characters are all Reaper Beauties - a kind of magical girl with the power to see malevolent beings that control innocents and eat their willpower - Chi, if you will. Hungry Ghosts do this by clutching the Hearts of these innocent victims with one of their one thousand clawed arms and squeezing the feelings from it.

Reaper Beauty characters are differentiated from each other by Passions - one sentence descriptions of relationships with people that inspire that Reaper Beauties' love, hatred or fear for a compelling reason. Each player's character begins play with 4 Passions.

The most interesting character in play turned out to be Becca's. Becca was dead-set on playing a criminal. She eventually settled on playing Juun, a spoiled brat whose Korean mother was tangled up in the Korean branch of the Japanese mob, or the Korean Yakuza.

Becca chose as Juun's Passions (words to the effect of):

   1. I love my Japanese father, who is strong and provides for me.

   2. I love my always kind and caring Korean mother.

   3. I hate my grandfather, as he abandoned Father when he married a Korean woman.

   4. I fear the dangerous mobsters on my mother's side of the family, who I do not know and have heard stories about.


The rules require you to spotlight one passion on your character sheet every time you set a scene. We had a little difficulty setting scenes in a way that involved the other players. Because of this, I rewrote the rules for future games such that one Passion on your sheet had to deal with the Reaper Beauty played by the person sitting on your right.

Becca set the first scene, with a little prompting, in a high-end udon shop. She was taking all of the Reaper Beauties and their mentor, Kan-chan - an incarnation of Kwan-Yin, the goddess and bodhisattva Compassion Herself - out to dinner, courtesy of her father's credit card (Spotlight on the Passion: I love my Japanese father, who is strong and provides for me).

Soon Jen's character, a Daoist "magical boy," overheard an argument between his mother and his also mother, regarding her birthparents finally tracking him down, and we hit the ground running.

The conflict rules, which require you to spend the Chi you need to retain free will in order to get what you want, worked like a charm. Everyone was spending Chi like crazy: Alex spent a Chi to pump Jen's character's mother for information; Jen spent three of her six to find a polite (and eventually, impolite) way to turn down Jen's character's birthmother's request to have her stay over for the night, "so we can get to know each other."

And then there was the first conflict Juun, Becca's character, participated in.

Juun's grandfather came over to apologize for being a jerk to her father, for Juun's sake. This was at the same time that Juun's mother was going to have a package delivered to her - from a Korean man with approximately seven fingers and a tattoo that showed through long sleeved clothing, that couldn't be mistaken for anyone but a mobster.

Becca said, "I ask ojiisan if he would like to have a pleasant conversation far away from my house so he doesn't discover my mom's a Yakuza!" In response, I set the Ghost's counter-desire ('Desire' is what I use for 'stakes' in my rules document): That the man delivering the package show up right about, say, now.

Well, Becca argued back and forth with me, slapping down Chi tokens, as we played out Juun's argument with her mother, who just had to say some choice words to Juun's grandfather.

And then Becca spent her last Chi Token without even thinking about it.

I gave it back to Becca. "Consider your position," I said. "If you spend this, then Juun will become a victim of the Hungry Ghost and lose her free will."

Becca considered for a moment, and said, "You know, I want to beat the Ghost." She then gave me the Chi Token. "But Juun doesn't care about that right now. Juun escalates by walking out of the house, arm in arm with grandfather."

I held up the token, stood up, and declared: "Juun's Heart is now in the clutches of a Hungry Ghost. Becca, give me your character sheet and tell me what Juun's going to keep doing as an NPC."

Jen shouted, "Okay, time out! Strategy session!"

We decided that Reaper Beauties was not Jen, Alex and Becca's game. It was, however, a very good game, according to group consensus, and they wished me the best of luck with it.

[Mark Woodhouse]

We decided that Reaper Beauties was not Jen, Alex and Becca's game. It was, however, a very good game, according to group consensus, and they wished me the best of luck with it.

Glad to hear that it's coming together for you! Can you elaborate at all on this? What things that happened in play informed both parts of this response?

[Elliott]

In this game, they needed to spend Chi to get what their characters wanted and needed at least one Chi to retain control over their characters.  Coupled that with the fact that to win, you need to sacrifice what your characters want, possibly multiple times, to ensure that the Hungry Ghost gets what it wants - and spends all of it's Chi doing it.  If the GM runs out of Chi, the Ghost is banished ('Reaped') and the game ends in victory for the players.

They thought that this made the game an extremely effective vehicle for Buddhist parables.  They just didn't want to play through Buddhist parables.