[Forge Midwest] Escape From Tentacle City

[Willow]

Let's get this ball rolling!

Friday I got to 'run' this for Ron, Jae, Jerry, and Abram.  I really wanted Ron in this game since he was one of my beta testers, and wanted to see if he played the game more or less the way I played the game.

I think I have a pretty good procedure for teaching Escape from Tentacle City down, since you don't really need to know most of the mechanics until they actually happen in play.  I'll want to make sure the structure of my text follows this, and highlight some of the niche situations in the FAQ/advice section at the end of the text.

Anyway, play was excellent, as always.  Our survivor groups included a Mexican Street Gang (Jerry), an Islamic Terrorist Cell (Ron), 3rd Graders (Abram), High School Dropouts (Jae), and Midgets (Me).  Note that those names are the people who framed the group, and everyone else made characters for- so I was the only person not to have a Midget character, for example.

Highlights Include:

Midgets:  Just the whole cast of characters really.  The activist, the Mexican wrestler, the porn star, and the cojoined twin midgets were a pile of absurdity unto themselves.  Ron's Mexican Wrestler had an epic death scene.

High School Dropouts:  Jerry's Jehova's Witness character was complaining about the staff of the pizza parlor/laundromat being high on marijuana.  Simultaneously, Ron's washed-up Jock said "Say no to drugs," as my 18 year old mother of 3 (who had them with her at all times) said "let's get some pot."  Also the disturbing sex scene between Ron's jock and my young mother, interrupted by tentacles and death, afterwhich Ron's jock gained some measure of redemption by caring for the abandoned kids.

3rd Graders: Oh man was my 3rd grader gross.  "Pimped out Parasites," indeed.  Also, they played a good foil for the Islamic Terrorists.

Street Gang:  This was the most successful and tightly linked group, and had some interesting links and interactions.  We didn't have much to go but up, storming city hall and Looting the city Mayor.

Islamic Terrorist Cell:  Ron's idea, and probably the most interesting survivor group.  Contained an arabic taxi driver, a black nationalist, a white convert with a pimped-out Koran, and my Pakistani accountant who was much more interested in Ponzi schemes than in Jihad.  Pathetic terrorists with no real drive or plans (other than "get semtex" and "get coffee") the group was quickly pared down to Jae's convert and my accountant, who wound up in the same space as the 3rd graders, thoroughly confused them, protected them, and my accountant ended up being a voice of reason and moral center for the final survivor group, of all things.

Anyway, the game was long.  Really long.  Probably the longest game I've played, which drained pretty much everyone at the table.  There's a couple reasons for this, which boil down to luck and some player decisions.

Some questions for those who were at the game:

Did you have a good time?
Were you aware that you could have accelerated the game using Throw Downs to kill the other survivors?
Did the rules make sense?  Did you have an easy time figuring out what was going on, without me having to explain/mediate everything?
For Ron specifically: was there anything in my play style that vastly differed from your impressions from playing the game or reading the text?

[Willow]

"Ron's Mexican Wrestler had an epic death scene."

By which I mean his porn star had an epic death scene.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Willow,

Here are the biggest divergences in the way we played, keeping in mind that overall, nearly everything is the same. And also keeping in mind that this game is so damned fun it hurts even trying to convey it in a forum post.

1. In our game, the tentacles were present in every scene sooner or later. Early in the game, the player-characters tended not to see them, but NPCs went missing, or the tentacles were described as behind them, or there'd be a terrible smell somewhere, and so on. This gave each author something to work with, and contributed to a certain "the fight is on!" feel when the Threat level reached the next plateau.

Hey, almost tangentially, a little idea just occurred to me. I know it's a fiddly limited-use rule, but possibly ... if the player-characters choose to chill or loot, perhaps the Global Threat could go up by or even 3 instead of 1.

2. In the game I "ran," we really played up NPCs who marginalized the player-characters based on their respective groups. This was huge. It was the major story-driver, it gave every single character a spark, it provided a bank of interesting NPCs for different players to use as "mini-GMs" on their turn to do so, and it kept the thematic heart of the game right up front at all times. It was so important, and revealed as such by its relative absence in our game, that I think it should be a serious recommendation in the text for the first turns of play around the table.

For instance, in the Forge Midwest game, both the drop-outs and the midgets became vastly more sympathetic and interesting to me after they clashed with one another in the alley. The midgets in particular bored the pants off me in their first couple of scenes because all they did was bitch at each other. For it to come together, they needed someone to pick on them because they're midgets.

Also, you and I had different personal experiences regarding the Mexican group. I think it tanked. They ran around a lot and did showy stuff, but none of it had any fire for me. "Let's go to town hall!", "Let's kidnap the mayor!" et cetera, felt more like kicking a can down a street than playing characters who had some kind of personality and drive. My sexy-bitch character was boring to play because I felt like I was waving my arms in the air and making noises at the table instead of enjoying an SIS, and that's a bummer - a back-seat blow job scene should be more fun than that! Anyway, this isn't to disagree with you or to criticize your experience, but rather to say that the broader range of fun might have kicked off stronger if we'd seen them get sneered at for being Mexican early on.

About Throwdowns, I confess I don't really like to think of them as a game speeder-upper, although granted they do have that effect and it's a good one, as such. I enjoy seeing the groups trying to work together, and then Throwdowns evolving out of failed attempts to do so - a lot like my character Clyde punching his geeky fellow drop-out (and as it turned out, killing him based on the group vote) after they all got their asses kicked by the midgets. Since the Mexican group didn't have any inter-personal tension aside from posturing, and since they didn't encounter any meaningful adversity (I don't mean failing, I mean thematically grabby adversity), I didn't pose a Throwdown, and doing so simply to whittle the group down a bit wasn't a fun option as I saw it.

Best, Ron

[Larry L.]

Willow,

That is possibly the most entertaining clarification ever written.

The game sounds like a blast!

[Callan S.]

Hi Willow,

I read through the rules you sent awhile back (sorry to take so long to get back to you). The listed procedure in it is really solid, with only about one gap in procedure (in relation to when to determine if an item applies, the gap being who decides this). Most new and old RPG's seem to have procedure gaps applenty, and how they resolve tends to do more to decide the outcome of play than any of the remaining mechanics do. It's really nice to know what a game of EFTS actually is, at a procedural level. If someone suggested a game of it to me, I'd think "Ah yeah, I know what their talking about!". Thumbs up!

If you didn't have to worry about whether anyone else had a good time, what things did you expect the game to give and what did it give? Hope it's not a crazy question. I myself worry about whether other people would have a good time and sometimes that can get in the way.

[Willow]

"If you didn't have to worry about whether anyone else had a good time, what things did you expect the game to give and what did it give?"

I have no idea how to parse that sentence.

When I play Escape From Tentacle City, I don't worry if other players are having a good time.  But they do.  When I play or run other games (like, say, Awesome Adventures), a large part of my attention is focused on whether the other players are having fun.

[Callan S.]

Uh, you asked whether the players had a good time, in your original post? Maybe I thought there was more emphasis on it than there was at the time.

[jerry]

Did you have a good time?
Were you aware that you could have accelerated the game using Throw Downs to kill the other survivors?
Did the rules make sense?  Did you have an easy time figuring out what was going on, without me having to explain/mediate everything?

I had a great time.

I was not aware that throw downs were for accelerating the game until one happened that killed someone (I believe the first/only? was Ron's Jock sucker-punching my Jehovah's Witness) AND the rules on endgame were explained (I think Jae reached "safety" for her one surviving character first; at that point I realized we were looking forward to when each group had one survivor). The game went pretty quickly even without many throw-downs.

I agree with Ron that when the midgets and the street gang met they become more "fun" after they met. I think the same thing happened when the Muslim terrorists and the third-graders met after the third-graders had stolen all of the terrorists' plastic explosives. I'm not sure the terrorists became more interesting after that, but the third-graders did.

The rules made sense as they were explained; I would almost certainly play it differently a second time now that I know all of them; I had an LOTR moment at the end because I thought the survivors getting together in a central location *was* the endgame, instead of only starting it. And I'd probably think about which of my characters I most want to escape to the end now that I know how that works.

Jerry