[Black Cadillacs] - Barbed Wired & Bayonets

[Darcy Burgess]

Hi,

I've got some new material to share.  This first post will essentially be an appendix to the AP report from Session One.  If you recall, I mentioned that due to rules-teaching, our group didn't actually get to the "making Stories" portion of the endgame; instead, both GW and LO agreed to craft their stories as homework.  The playtest group recently received GW's stories via email.  I was beside myself with excitement; sitting in my inbox was the real beating heart of Black Cadillacs; Stories are each player's opportunity to editorialize on the group's choices.

So, what did GW choose to do with his own private soapbox?  I think that the best answer is to lay out a little context, and then to post his story.  In fact, GW won two Stories during endgame, and chose to effectively tie the two together.

Both of GW's Stories focus on Gerhardt Steigler, SC's Trooper.  The fictional events that GW based his stories on were:

During Scene Two, the goal for the conflict was along the lines of "Does our command structure finally come through for us?"  As previously mentioned, the Troopers lost that conflict, so the answer was clearly "no".  However, what I failed to do was mention some of the finer details of that scene.  The Troopers were part of the second wave of the assault on the British lines.  By the time we were into the structure of Moments and Gos, the first wave had been cut to ribbons.  As our little platoon drove forward, we were bogged down in no-man's-land at a bottleneck in the wire.  On one of SC's Gos, his declaration was along the lines of "the god-damned artillery get something right for a change and they blast this fucking wire for us".  This would have really helped the troopers out a lot if it had succeeded.  Unfortunately, SC's dice weren't up to the challenge, and GW beat him handily.  GW elected to spend the resulting currency, which left SC the narration duties.  SC wrapped the Go by having the artillery barrage come down a little too close to the troopers, temporarily stunning Steigler; the befuddled trooper would then go on to wander aimlessly towards the Brits, and get tangled up in the wire.  Wow.

During Scene Three, which was the retreat, I had the British gas us.  If my memory is good, this declaration was made during the rising action of the scene.  The goal for the conflict was to "get every able-bodied man back to the trench".  Since gas was now a factor in the fiction, it wasn't a surprise that gas masks featured prominently in the resolution of the conflict.  My exact memory of the Steigler-Gas Mask related details are very fuzzy.  However, what I do remember is the following:

• Someone's gas mask was broken, faulty or missing.  The someone was either Steigler or an unnamed supporting character.
• There was an attempt at looting a gas mask from a fallen comrade
• Steigler rememberd "the secret of the urine-soaked rag" as an alternative to proper equipment.  This was a (mechanical) memory, conjuring up the character of Farber, Steigler's mentor in the army.
• The urine-soaked rag failed.  Badly.

Now, here's the story that GW wrote:

News from the Front
As relayed in local papers

Despite the success of other units in breaking the British line, our local boys floundered at the wire. Poor leadership led to a breakup of the second wave which retreated with heavy losses. Shortcomings in leadership could not stop some of our boys such as Pvte. Steigler who attempted to force his way though the intact wire despite the obstacles in his path and heavy British shelling.

Unfortunately, the retreat of the second wave blocked the advance of the third wave just as the line was hit by a British gas attack. Again, Pvte. Steigler rose to the challenge by offering his gas mask to another man whose kit had been damaged in the charge. Pvte. Steigler is being considered for the Heroes' Cross. A reward richly deserved by this credit to our hometown! Pvte. Steigler encourages young heroes not to wait to be drafted but to enlist right now as the war will soon be over as the British run away from First Quartermaster-General Ludendorff's master strategy to win the war for the Fatherland!

I hope that it's clear why I'm excited about this development.  By means of this story, GW has clearly commented on the fiction we created.  That's really, really rewarding.  More to come in the next post!

Cheers,
Darcy

[Darcy Burgess]

Hi again,

In addition to my previous post, I also wanted to summarize a discussion that Callan and I have been having privately.  We'd taken our discussion off-thread to clear up some misunderstandings.  We're now ready to bring the meat of that off-forum discussion into the light of day.

If I'm summarizing them correctly, Callan had raised the following concerns:

• The heavy emphasis on "Stories", which are nearly an appendix to play, raises the question "Well, what's fun about the rest of play- y'know, the normal RPG stuff?"
• If people want that meaty conversation (Stories), then delaying that conversation is a touchy issue; meaty conversation is what they came for, you'd better deliver, damn it!.

So, given that Stories are where I really want the game to shine, why all this emphasis (in terms of proportion of play-time) on non-Story stuff?  The short answer is that the Stories have to be about something, and that something is the collaborative Fiction; especially important is the notion of commenting on the choices made collectively by the players via the medium of Stories.  That's why I think of them as personal soapboxes.

Ok, so the Fiction is necessary.  But is it fun?  Let's ignore 'fun' in the usual RPG sense; Black Cadillacs has all of the social aspects of any RPG, and that is fun, but it's really just 'baseline' fun, isn't it?  Black Cadillacs provides extra fun is in the following ways:

• The hunt for cards during conflict resolution is nifty.  There's a nice tension between winning a go (on one side) versus improving your own hand/denying wicked cards to the Foe.
• Winning a Go grants the winner a choice, to spend the currency generated by the win, or to narrate the results.  This choice is consistently engaging; it's very important to spend those points, because they directly impact the next Trooper's die pool; however, the allure of narrating tugs awfully hard, too.
• There's a second neat feature underlying the spend/narrate choice.  The spending always happens before the narration (keep in mind that it's always spent on the three strains: Hubris, Valour and Horror), and the fun part is that it acts as a constraint on the narration; yes, this means that even if you're 'only spending', you still get to keep your finger in the pot.  Do you want something nasty to happen as a result of the go?  Dump all those points into Horror!
• Stories are supposed to be about moments in the Fiction that moved you (the player) in some way.  It doesn't have to be deep, world-sweeping stuff.  It just needs to be a moment that made you say 'whoa' or 'no way' or even 'cool'.  Keeping an eye out for those moments and cataloguing them is really fun, especially when coupled with the anticipation of making a Story about them.

That last point brings me to a really excellent concern that Callan raised.  Anticipation is a significant factor in the Fiction/Story dynamic.  Callan was specifically worried about players being 'strung along' and not achieveing that fulfillment or payoff that Stories provide.  I haven't experience that in play, so I'm not terribly concerned.  However, the concept of anticipation has really stuck with me; I need to find more ways for the pre-endgame play to heighten and intensify the anticipation of the endgame.  I don't even know where to begin doing that.

With that in mind, I'd like to go forward in the thread with the question 'How does this heighten anticipation?' always in the background.  Sometimes the answer will be 'no at all, and that's ok', but I'm eager to find the moments that ratchet that anticipation up.

Cheers,
Darcy

[Darcy Burgess]

Session Two

Social
LO and I were the first to arrive, and I had a big ol' tirade (the good kind) about how awesome my HoundCon game of Lacuna had been.  I was pretty animated, because the game had been fun.  We caught up a bit, and waited for SC and GW.  We got started a bit late, as GW was held up in traffic because of an Ottawa Senators game.

Here's the thing: we'd all had long days, and were all in various states of tired-ness.  This is important, because it's about the only thing that's holding my hand; I'm ready to can this playtest and tear the whole game back down to first principles.  But I think that our fatigue played a significant role in what happend next.  Because of that uncertainty, I want to try at least one more session before letting the axe fall.


Mission Parameters

• Trapped
• The only people we can talk to are the Brits
• No Food
• Early Dusk
• We've got a machinegun
• Our COs have written us off

Scene One
GW opens his frame with a little research; he shows us some diagrams of trenches, how the 'fighting' trenches were arrayed in parallel 'layers', with each layer connected to the one behind it by perpendicular trenches (to allow travel to and from the front).  He goes on to explain that earlier in the day, we'd been part of an assault, and our platoon had done quite well, penetrating a trench or two into British land;  we found ourselves in what's called a 'support trench'.  Unfortunately for us, none of our fellows fared as well.  In the chaos of the assault, we missed the sounding of the retreat.  It's getting dark and we're cut off (as per the Mission Parameters).

I was uneasy from the moment that 'trapped' was introduced.  That parameter is a huge limiting factor on the fiction -- but the purpose of the playtest is to see what breaks, right?  I could also see a couple of interesting ways to leverage it, so I wasn't terrified.

During the rising action, we discover the follwoing: an NPC in our platoon, Johann, had been shot in the assault; he's not dead, but he's in rough shape; the machinegun is a captured British jobbie; the support trench we've overrun is some sort of communications hub, as indicated by a righing telephone (!); one of the British 'corpses' is actually very much alive, and reaching for the phone; the Brit is quasi-delusional, he thinks that we're just lazy and unhelpful (rather than German!).

We bandy around a conflict proposal, and settle on "Do we avoid discovery?"

The conflict resolution was fun, if a little choppy -- we had some hard times coming up with declarations.  However, we saw some neat Gos.  The two most memorable ones were:

• Ripping the handset off of the phone, then waving it up in the air as if to say "stop calling, our phone is broken", only to have the handset shot by a our own sniper(s)!
• Pvte Schillo propping up corpses in a Bosch-esque tableau to attempt to fool passing Brits into thinking that all was normal.  Schillo also swapped helmets with a corpse so that he could add to the ruse.

The nifty part was that we actually won the conflict!  Great, we've fooled the Brits.

That's where things sort of fell apart...now what?  As a group, we were really stumped.  Since we'd successfully hidden ourselves, the pressure is off.  It felt wrong to solve this anti-dramatic situation by proposing a new conflict that would invalidate what we'd just accomplished.


Scene Two
There was a great deal of meta-game discussion at this point.  GW felt like his scene-frame was overly-constrained, both by the Mission Parameters, and by the outcome of scene one.  He didn't know what to throw our way.  I mentioned that he needed to bust out of the box, and suggested fast-forwarding to the next night, and dumping some new grief on us.  He turned his nose up at that (I think it's because he didn't buy the idea that the British would not notice our presence for an entire day).  The obvious solution was a involving whoever was sent to fix the phone, but for it to be legal, that would have to be at dusk too.

He finally settled on putting us in a moral quandry: we saw British reinforcements bypassing our position, heading for the front.  This was a good solution to the scene frame problem.

However, the rising action was very clunky.  Speaking for myself, I knew what I wanted next: some sort of neat rear-area guerilla tactics scene where we heroically harassed the Brits from within their own trench system, causing confusion and hampering their reinforcement agenda.  However, I felt hampered by yet another stipulation of the rules: the Troopers can not be removed from the fiction except during the Endgame.  Since I didn't know when the timer was going to go off, I didn't feel comfortable diving into what would be a high body-count scene!

I'm presenting those internal thoughts to explain why I was tentative about some of my Rising Action turns.  I'd really appreciate it if some of the rest of the crew would do the same.

The Rising action eventually established the following ideas:

• Our Unteroffizier (roughly equivalent to a Sergeant) was seriously considering surrender as a means of saving his men.
• Some of the men in the platoon had begun grumbling over what they perceived as weakness on the Unteroffizier's part.
• Johann wasn't getting any better.  In fact, he was sinking into shock.

Out of this comes the conflict "Does the platoon mutiny?"  For the sake of clarity, I'll mention that the Trooper's 'side' of this conflict is an emphatic no.

Here are some of the neat Gos that we had during resolution:

• One of the dissenters asks Wolfgang (me) to choose a side.  I botch my roll.  Wolfgang begs off -- "I'm not with you, but I won't stop you either."
• Gerhardt tries to diffuse the situation by passing out liberated British rations.  Botches his roll.  All he comes up with are smokes.

The conflict concluded with the Troopers losing.  We took the scene wrap-up fiction into some seriously messy territory.  The mutineers appear to back down, and then, when the Unteroffizier turns his attention to poor Johann, they slit his throat.  We were all shaking our heads in that "this is horrible, but it's also so right" kind of way.


Scene Three
This was the scene where the game really took a turn for the worse, at least at the meta-game level.  As players, I think that we collectively felt like we had painted ourselves into a corner.  What's strange is that as I'm writing this (about two weeks later), I find the fiction we created interesting and moving.  However, in the moment, things felt incredibly awkward and wrong; this sense of wrongness was not rooted in being squeamish, rather it was due to being overly constrained as authors.

The upshot of this was that our Rising Action was incredibly disjointed and choppy.  We were all over the map, and a lot of our unease was seated in one of two chairs: we'd bitten off more than we could chew with the mutiny and murder; we were massively constrained by everything else I've mentioned already.

We ended up discovering an aid station in the British rear (I don't know about anyone else, but my "believability-o-meter" was in the danger zone at this point -- how the fuck did we slip this far into the British zone?  seriously!).

The conflict that came out of it was interesting: Do we maintain some shred of humanity and stop the mutineers' crazy attempt to attack a hospital?

That was a close call for me -- I don't know what I would have thought of the Troopers had we failed that conflict.  Murdering hospital patients?  Man....


Endgame
Somewhere 'round here, the timer went off.  The endgame cardgame resulted in no deaths, no tickets home and no distinguishment (the last part is particularly apt!).  And then, holy fuck, did we pass judgement.

The endgame fiction went like this:
We're captured.  We're put into hard labour digging trenches for the Brits.  There's all sorts of nasty diseases that take their toll on the squad, paring it down.  Then, we're shipped back to a POW camp in Canada.  On the way our transport ship is torpedoed.  That's where we ended it!

The stories themselves were a little rushed, but interesting:
Wolfgang was characterised as an instigator in the mutiny, rather than a passive accomplice (by LO)
Gerhardt was characterised as a coward (the cigarette incident), rather than as an earnest resister (by Me)
Gerhardt was characterised as not only a mutineer, but as a British Spy (same incident) by his own player!


Overall Reflections/Questions
I feel like the constraints placed on the fiction by the Mission Generation are too tight.  I'd never felt this before, but we sure felt it tonight.  I've got one idea about fixing it, but I'd appreciate some outside opinions.

[Darcy Burgess]

Hiya,

This is all about slaying Dragons.  Dragons are the things in Black Cadillacs that stop it from doing what I want it to.

Dragon #1: Blank Canvas Syndrome
We've all felt it, whether it was as an over-taxed GM trying to prep the next CP2020 game or as a player in a GM-less create-a-thon.  Blank Canvas Syndrome is that moment where you must...be...creative...NOW!, and come up blank.

I think that this Dragon rears its head in BC via a minion; let's call that minion constraint.  Specifically, the constraints imposed on the mission by the six mission parameters.

Here's what I'm thinking of for slaying it:
Winning a conflict allows you (the winner) to change the nature of one of the mission parameters.  For example, maybe in Session Two, scene One, we could have changed the parameter "Trapped" to "Hiding...for now".

Here's my question to you:
Is your swordsmithing better than mine?  If so, please speak up.  If not, please comment on mine.

Thanks,
Darcy