[Misspent Youth] F**king motherf**ker's on our f**cking tail

[Graham W]

We played Misspent Youth last week.

Character and world creation was a blast. We were fighting against...oh...I don't know...a corporation of some sort. The advice about choosing things that genuinely make you angry was excellent. For example, one of our Authority's systems of control was "quasi-intellectual arguments to justify itself", something that really bugs me.

So creating the Authority went well. Character creation generally went well, although one player ended with a ragbag of convictions and felt unable to make a coherent character from them. The friendship questions were good. That initial phase left me excited to play.

The first scene started well, with lots of free roleplay. Having just watched The Wire, I was keen to practice my rhythmic swearing, as you can see from the subject of this post.

Struggles, though, were much less satisfying. When I rolled a number and placed a token, my narration seemed pointless, because the Authority would always have an answer to it. For example, we narrated a bounty hunter being buried under rubble, but knew she'd get out of it, because Steve had a narration turn next. One player complained that the scene ended randomly, when you rolled a number on which someone had placed a token.

During scenes, then, I wanted to delay struggles as long as possible, because they stopped the fun. Honestly, Rob, I don't think this current system is doing you any favours. We also found that, after a while, we stopped saying "Who's going to stand up?". It didn't seem important.

The scene structuring was rather odd, too. Having won one scene, it was strange to go immediately to a "We're Fucked" scene. I mean, OK, we could have cut forward in time, but it seemed to make winning the previous struggle rather pointless. We discussed a few alternative ideas for scene structuring: perhaps a flowchart, which gives a choice of scenes to follow; or perhaps something more like Zombie Cinema, where you inevitably progress through the zombie advance, but scenes aren't set in stone.

Overall, then: world creation great; character creation great; struggles not so great; scene structure not so great. I'd personally like to see a more flexible scene structure system and a new system for struggles.

So there you go. Apologies for the negative bits and I hope that's of some use.

Graham

[Robert Bohl]

No need for apologies, Graham. As I mentioned to Steve, your experiences are kind of outside of my experience of the game, and the experience I've seen other people have (both in AP reports and recordings of games I wasn't a part of, sometimes games with people who never played with me).

Anyway, to address some of your concerns more directly, was The Authority always directly countering what you said? Firstly, part of Authority narration is supposed to be first taking the blow from your success, and this is explicitly in the text. So if you say, "We knock the plinth out and bury the bounty hunter under the rubble, crushing him to death," Steve is obligated to describe him becoming strawberry jam and having The Authority act horrified or demoralized or whatever. Further, Steve's raise does not then have to be directly about what you did. He can then say something like, "And then the flying robot sphere thingies come out of the sky and start firing on you."

I also know that most of your struggles ended in a couple of rolls, but in my experience that varies very highly. I have frequently had struggles that went to the very last, with every place on the struggle map being taken up.

As far as the scene structure, I think that this is a system mastery thing. The more you get used to it, the more you see what you need to do both as YOs and as The Authority to leave room for the story needs, and play into them.

Thanks again for playing, and for posting.

[Graham W]

Anyway, to address some of your concerns more directly, was The Authority always directly countering what you said?

No, not always. There were two things going on: firstly, sometimes narrating seemed pointless, because the Authority would counter it directly; secondly, sometimes narrating seemed pointless, because even though the Authority didn't counter it directly, there would be some comeback. One way or another, you knew what you narrated wouldn't stick.

I also know that most of your struggles ended in a couple of rolls

Oh, that's not right. Did Steve tell you that? Most of them went on for about four rolls, I think. They didn't feel drastically short, to me, but there was a feeling that the ending was too sudden.

Graham

[Judd]

Graham,

Could you give an example of how the Authority countered narration and made it feel pointless?

I'm not following how that worked.

[Graham W]

Judd, for example, this bounty hunter. We're trying to lure her into a shopping mall basement. During the Struggle, we've established that she's coming down the lift shaft, right into our trap. Someone narrates that explosives go off* and she's buried in rubble. It's a perfectly natural ending and very satisfying.

The problem is, the rules insist we keep narrating. It's the Authority's turn and, quite naturally, Steve narrates that she climbs out of the rubble*. It cancels that nice ending we had before.

Now, sure, we could have fudged the narration. Perhaps different Authority agents could have come after us, for example. But the rules seemed to be working against us, rather than for us: we needed to fit our narration around the dice rolls, rather than it pushing forward our narration. It was pretty unsatisfying.

Rob, is the answer to our feedback, essentially, "Most groups don't have that problem?".

Graham

* I'm hazy on the details. It was two weeks ago.

[Judd]

Graham, I am still not clear how the dice were interacting with this scene exactly.

I mean, if you didn't win the craps game, you could not have achieved your intent, so the perfect ending was prematurely narrated.  It would be like rolling a 2 in a D&D game and declaring that you had cut the dragon's head off and being upset because your nice narration didn't pan out.

But I think I am not getting why you had to keep narrating, mayhaps.

[Robert Bohl]

I'm agreeing with Judd, here. Was losing the bounty hunter on your or The Authority's hope or objective? If so, then that narration is in error since it steps on the outcome of that. The book says explicitly not to arrive at that point.

If it wasn't the hope or the objective, why was it the end of the conflict?

(Disclaimer: I am not being aggro or defensive, here, just asking direct questions. Sorry if I come off otherwise.)

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Graham, mostly my feedback is that it's an outlier, in my experience. I think the problem with my vague response to your valuable feedback is that I couldn't identify specific points to feed back on. (I use "identify" in the sense of "find.") Can you give me the specifics you'd like me to respond to? "I think you should do this and here's why" or "Why does this happen the way it does?"

--

Hopefully that main and identifiable disappointment will be rectified by its being a hope or objective. If not, I'd be happy to worm deeper into the question.