[Reality Cops] Slowly Taking Shape

[Blankshield]

Last Friday the much-delayed and rescheduled playtest of Reality Cops got off the ground.

I, Fox, James T. and Davyd sat down to look at the rough bones and see where the shape of the game was, and to try and get some of what's hiding in my brain down to paper so this can get moving again.

Good news: It worked!  I'm back in the saddle on this one, and writing again.

Bad news: It's got a long way to go.

We took a while to get rolling because I was hoping I could defeat my headache with sheer volume of painkiller; alas, it was not to be, which meant I was a little slow and foggy, which definitely impacted the energy at the table.

The text we were working from was not significantly changed from the Ronnies entry hosted at 1KM1KT, except there was a couple pages of change notes and "this needs work" and "do this instead"s.

Most significant to this was actual character and setting creation, which worked quite well.  With three players, we had the ideal setup: 1 rookie, 1 regular, 1 veteran.  The character sheets I'l post later.  For now, I'll just sum up with James T. playing the veteran Coldswell, archetype as "Hannnibal Lecter", Davyd took a regular, Anderson, archetype of tired gumshoe and Fox playing Mark Chase, a rookie with the archetype of third generation cop.  Some discussion around how Chase's granddad must have been one of the very first, given the time scale.  Interestingly, I note now that he's also the only character with a first name.

The significant change here, which is the first pass at addressing Ron's "Where is this in the game?" is to Connections/Inflicted Pain, and getting the scaling/flow here right is going to take some time.  Connection dice now come in two flavours: Open and Closed.  Open connections are just floating dice, like unassigned relationships in DitV.  Closed dice have a face and a name.  When you need/want to move dice from connections to Inflicted Pain, you cut or flashback to the scene where we see that happening.  At the end of the scene, everyone at the table has the option of moving dice from the named connection(s) into IP.  Right now it's capped at 1/player, but I'm pretty sure that's too slow.

So, I covered off the background and rough shape of the game, we get the characters created, intentionally cherry-picking numbers to get some different values for testing, and move to world/setting creation, which is new since the Ronnies version.  If you're following along in the pdf, the real world is created just like a phase, with the following caveats: no Opens, and two of the five Tags are prefilled with the First and Second Thompson Subversions.  The Genre and other three Tags were bounced around in a free-and-clear phase, and worked really well.  We ended up with a harsh, harsh future noir sort of world, with tags "Hope is empty" and "Everybody Knows (Leonard Cohen)" and "We are the tools of fate".  Doing this as an open discussion really helped us get on the same page, and those three tags are really just shorthand for the discussion we had.  It needs good guidelines and tons of example text, but that's "just" writing.

There we took a brief break and I ran through the prep as outlined in Chapter 4; this also went pretty smoothly, and generated a very human villain - although again here, good guidelines and tons of example text are wanted.  The villian's goal is to cure his son with Down's Syndrome, and his motive is that he's a loving father and a perfectionist.  This flowed easily into creating a phase: High fantasy genre, with three tags: Magic Works, No Gods and Perfect Health.  This left the phase with one Open, which actually became more relevant than I thought it would.  I was flying by the seat of my pants here, and for those trying to figure out how I decided on "4" for tags+open: I picked, at random.

Here is where the headache really started to bring things grinding down.  My mad improv skillz were less than leet.  I used the framework in the rules, which worked reasonably, except that I rushed through things.  The problem discovery was stock cop fiction: Captain calls two cops, tells them about a problem and says "And take the rookie".  There was a little bit of interaction between Anderson and Chase, but that was about it, and as folks noted in the afterchat, this really made the characters feel 2D, and made playing in the phases harder, because we didn't give these characters enough context before dropping them against a new background.

Scene cut to transition then again to being in phase.  Scene as described was them on a hill overlooking a castle and medieval city, with a tourney on in the foreground.  Something I didn't plan for, but worked well was that they ran hard up against one of the Tags when Davyd narrated Anderson lighting a cigarette.  I thought for a second and said "actually, you pat around and check for a bit and can't find a smoke on you." A little back and forth with Anderson and Coldswell with the latter chiding Anderson for breaking genre, and suggesting a pipe.  Anderson rolled his eyes and looked harder for a smoke - ie: took it to dice.   I decided to oppose him, because the Tag he was running against, Perfect Health was pretty key to the villain.  The numbers with one cop running opposed to the villain were pretty predictable, and eventually Anderson, after rolling his eyes and being willing to go with a pipe, had to conceed even that and chewed on a piece of grass.  We didn't really get far enough in the game to push down this road, but it was pretty clear to everyone that this was unusual, and a big fat clue.

The children are running amok, so I'll come back to this later and finish up.  Comments and/or questions welcome!

thanks,

James

[Ron Edwards]

My question is, did this principle show up: Pain here = Power there. Which was, as I remember, your first note to yourself about the game.

Best, Ron

[Spooky Fanboy]

Bad news: It's got a long way to go.


Most significant to this was actual character and setting creation, which worked quite well.  With three players, we had the ideal setup: 1 rookie, 1 regular, 1 veteran.  The character sheets I'l post later.  For now, I'll just sum up with James T. playing the veteran Coldswell, archetype as "Hannnibal Lecter", Davyd took a regular, Anderson, archetype of tired gumshoe and Fox playing Mark Chase, a rookie with the archetype of third generation cop.  Some discussion around how Chase's granddad must have been one of the very first, given the time scale.  Interestingly, I note now that he's also the only character with a first name.

The significant change here, which is the first pass at addressing Ron's "Where is this in the game?" is to Connections/Inflicted Pain, and getting the scaling/flow here right is going to take some time.  Connection dice now come in two flavours: Open and Closed.  Open connections are just floating dice, like unassigned relationships in DitV.  Closed dice have a face and a name.  When you need/want to move dice from connections to Inflicted Pain, you cut or flashback to the scene where we see that happening.  At the end of the scene, everyone at the table has the option of moving dice from the named connection(s) into IP.  Right now it's capped at 1/player, but I'm pretty sure that's too slow.

So, I covered off the background and rough shape of the game, we get the characters created, intentionally cherry-picking numbers to get some different values for testing, and move to world/setting creation, which is new since the Ronnies version.  If you're following along in the pdf, the real world is created just like a phase, with the following caveats: no Opens, and two of the five Tags are prefilled with the First and Second Thompson Subversions.  The Genre and other three Tags were bounced around in a free-and-clear phase, and worked really well.  We ended up with a harsh, harsh future noir sort of world, with tags "Hope is empty" and "Everybody Knows (Leonard Cohen)" and "We are the tools of fate".  Doing this as an open discussion really helped us get on the same page, and those three tags are really just shorthand for the discussion we had.  It needs good guidelines and tons of example text, but that's "just" writing.

There we took a brief break and I ran through the prep as outlined in Chapter 4; this also went pretty smoothly, and generated a very human villain - although again here, good guidelines and tons of example text are wanted.  The villain's goal is to cure his son with Down's Syndrome, and his motive is that he's a loving father and a perfectionist.  This flowed easily into creating a phase: High fantasy genre, with three tags: Magic Works, No Gods and Perfect Health.  This left the phase with one Open, which actually became more relevant than I thought it would.  I was flying by the seat of my pants here, and for those trying to figure out how I decided on "4" for tags+open: I picked, at random.

1) What, in particular, are you tripping over? Or is it just pouring water on what you've written and making it expand?

2) In the original document, I see only three archetypes: Buddy!, Hard Knocks, and Academic. According to them, all are rookies. What changes between rookie to normal, and normal to veteran?

3) So, the players determine what world (base) they're playing in? That is a significant upgrade!

4) What happens, again, to an Open Tag? Is it something the players can muck with if the Villain doesn't claim it first?

5) What are you thinking in regards for character change, as far as what can be swapped during the end of the scenario? You said 1-1 was too slow. What do you think would work?

Anyway, I was thinking about this game the other day. I'm glad to hear you're back on track!

[joepub]

Hey James,

This looks really cool.

Most significant to this was actual character and setting creation, which worked quite well.  With three players, we had the ideal setup: 1 rookie, 1 regular, 1 veteran.  The character sheets I'l post later.  For now, I'll just sum up with James T. playing the veteran Coldswell, archetype as "Hannnibal Lecter", Davyd took a regular, Anderson, archetype of tired gumshoe and Fox playing Mark Chase, a rookie with the archetype of third generation cop.  Some discussion around how Chase's granddad must have been one of the very first, given the time scale.  Interestingly, I note now that he's also the only character with a first name.

What are the stats for Rookie, Regular and Veteran? Did they feel well balanced?

Are Archetypes free-form created?

I decided to oppose him, because the Tag he was running against, Perfect Health was pretty key to the villain.  The numbers with one cop running opposed to the villain were pretty predictable, and eventually Anderson, after rolling his eyes and being willing to go with a pipe, had to conceed even that and chewed on a piece of grass.  We didn't really get far enough in the game to push down this road, but it was pretty clear to everyone that this was unusual, and a big fat clue.

So, is everything opposed by the villain's score? Does this imply that a villain creates all the Tags in a phase? It seems a bit limited that all opposition would be rolled on their dice.

Question: Do the characters test to do stuff which isn't about reality subversion? For example: if there's a giant stone wall, and they want to climb it, what happens?

How are the villain's stats generated? The PDF doesn't really say anything other than "determine the Burke dynamic".

[Blankshield]

Ron: yes.  In some designed ways, and some ways that surprised me, which was bonus cool.

Carl/Joe: excellent questions, thanks for the interest.  Forgive me if I kinda jump past specific answers and talk in general.  Poke me if I miss something you want addressed.

Regarding Rookie/Regular/Veteran, the main difference is that Pain Threshold goes up (quite a bit), stability goes down (not dramatically), and Regulars/Veterans have some Inflicted Pain dice they have to identify.  They also get a few less connection dice to start.  Archtypes are freeform generated by the players, and now are explicitly not about "who your character is" but are about how they are perceived - which as someone pointed out at Forge Midwest, gives a starting point to hang descriptions on in phase.  I'm totally stealing that and writing in the rules.

For various dice stuff; it's coming pretty clear that I do need a baseline "roll against" for when the villain isn't actively involved.  Not sure yet how this will emerge, though.  Doing stuff in phase is free narration until/except they start to break genre or go up against Tags, and that's been working pretty well, although it starts to run into "do anything" paralysis, and that needs to be sorted out.

There's a metric ton of stuff I have now to write and the next version will have a good chunk of meat on these bones.

thanks,

James