Indie Netgaming Monday: Orx

[greyorm]

We played Orx this past Monday, Labor Day, via the usual IRC channel.
This was the first time any of us had played it, myself included.

For anyone who has designed their own game and not yet playtested it, I recommend you do so, now! This game was a complete eye-opener to me, questions and situations arose in the first few moments of play which I had never even thought of during design.

Additionally, it brought to light areas of the game which I thought were explicitly clear but were obviously not, as well as areas that absolutely needed to be fleshed out or added (I can imagine easily doubling the page count).

In fact, we backtracked a couple times and redid portions of the scene we ran because I realized something was just not right with the way things were being done.  I'll come back to that in a moment.

There were four of us, Travis Casey, Nathan Banks, Bob McNamee and myself.  Character creation was simple, Nathan created a character for the game in under five minutes, and I'd be surprised if it took a complete newcomer any longer than that.

That said, we only managed to get through one scene, though we played for more than three hours.  I think we spent more time discussing rules, how the game should run and filling in holes than we did playing.  Everyone was really great, however, and I appreciate the enthusiasm they had despite the lack of *ahem* actual play.

Also, Bob created an absolutely rocking character sheet out of the blue, which you should expect to see either at the website, or in the PDF version (when that comes out).

So, with everything I learned from this session, expect to see some major improvements and much needed additions and clarifications to Orx.

As to the mechanics, they worked!  And there were a few moments of gamist joy in there, just as I'd intended, like when I pulled out a Fate die out and ruined Travis' victory over their intended prey...course, in the next roll, I managed to utterly fail using the same trick, spending the last of my Fate dice in the process.

I think we got down pretty well what a "Scene" was, and how to end it, everyone seemed to grasp the concept pretty quickly.  Unfortunately, I lost sight of what a "Conflict" entailed, and fell into my D&D "rounds" and "action per" mode (which was a mistake, gentlemen, even though we played that way all night...sorry about that!).

Honestly, the way Conflicts should have happened was: Declare Conflict, Declare Involved Parties, Declare Complications, Borrow Fate, Roll, Borrow Fate, Resolve.  And eventually it would have reached the Conflict with the wizard and his gold and the scene would have been resolved.

This means not everyone would have been involved in each Conflict, and seperate Conflicts could have been occuring at once.  I'll have some detailed examples written up to share shortly that should hopefully clarify!

Also, I realized that the gamemaster doesn't recieve injuries to dice, they are either successful or not (meaning the Orcs win), the die ceases to exist after rolling, since the Conflict is resolved and the problem was either too much for the orcs or they overcame it.

One of the other big things I got out of the evening was something I only realized afterwards: ties.  We had a few tie rolls during the evening, but for whatever reason, I'd never even thought of it occuring, and had nothing in the rules to indicate what occurred in such a situation.
I'm happy to say I do now!

That, in a nutshell, was the evening.

Again, I had a great time, I hope everyone else did, too, and if you have any comments about the evening or things you want to share, pipe on in!

[efindel]

My own thoughts on the game...

In the first attempt at the scene, we were definitely in "rounds-think" mode... the discussion about initiative was the biggest example of that, I'd say.

However, I think that in the second trip through, we did a lot better.  We still were at the "single-action" level, but I think that's due to the nature of the scene we were engaged in -- we were just there to rob the guy, not trying to do anything complicated, so single actions were just what fit the scene, IMHO.  

Putting it in terms of the Conflict for each roll:

roll 1 Conflict:  Can we get this traveller to stop so we can rob him?
We won that conflict handily, with Nathan's orc pulling down his horse and starting to munch on it.

roll 2 Conflict:  Can we intimidate this guy into handing over his money?
We lost that one, big time.  He turned out to be a wizard who wasn't at all intimidated by orcs; two of us got serious injuries (ones that wouldn't be gone the next scene), the other got off with a light hit.

roll 3.  At this point, we had two Conflicts:  My orc was trying to get the money still, the other two were just trying to get out of there.  We resolved them all as one; we probably should have broken them up into two.

roll 4.  The only Conflict left at this point was for me to get out of there; however, since we'd been doing an "all vs. mage" thing the whole time, we had everyone roll.

So, I think we did fairly well, especially considering that we didn't really discuss the idea of doing it by Conflict.  Next time we'll do better.  :-)

A couple of things I think really need to be hit well in the rules, and which I'm planning on working on in my attempt at editing/rewriting them:

- A good writeup of how the GM's end is supposed to work.  Orx's rules for GMs are quite unusual, and it took me a couple of readings to wrap my head around them.  Raven, re-reading the rules the next day made me think about whether or not GM dice were supposed to take injuries.  My own thought was that "major" NPCs should, other things shouldn't -- a sort of Mook rule.  Up to you, though, since it's your game.

- The rules for Fate Dice and Fate Points.  We ended up with a pretty good understanding of them, but it took a bit to get there, and it's not too clear on a first read-through right now.

The good stuff:
- Inflicting complications on each other was fun, and, IMHO, it really helps bring out "orcish spirit" in the players.

- We got a lot of things cleared up and some helpful conventions established for next time.  I think the next session should go much more smoothly.

- Most importantly, we all had a lot of fun!

The bad stuff:
- If there's one thing in the game I don't like right now, it's the Crippling Loss rule.  With the highest attribute for a starting character being d10, 1's are just way too common to inflict a session-long loss over, I think.  Especially when the game encourages people to use Descriptors to get a second die, and to borrow Fate Dice for more dice... someone rolling d10,d10,d20 has more than a 1 in 5 chance of suffering a crippling loss -- almost a 1 in 4.  Even in our short game, we had four crippling losses come up!  IMHO, that's just too many.
--Travis

[Bob McNamee]

Now that we understand the rules better, I'll be interested in seeing what happens in a whole session.

I like the Loss rule myself. I think it acts as a deterent to asking for lots of Fate dice, and in general keeps to lower dice levels. THe reduction of stats thing could be a problem over time... Except for
two things.
1)We are playing Orcs afterall... they should get to be cannon-fodder after a while (we'll have to see how fast they drop in extended play)
2)Don't forget that you can spend Fate Points to increase your stat levels. In the long run this may be where they get spent the most...recovering losses. (When you can spend could be a problem for the GM, if you can never get an orc down to zero faster than they can spend the Fate points they gained from using Fate dice in the scene.

I'm looking forward to our next game of Orx

Bob McNamee

[greyorm]

whether or not GM dice were supposed to take injuries. My own thought was that "major" NPCs should, other things shouldn't -- a sort of Mook rule. Up to you, though, since it's your game.

Oddly enough, I was thinking of the same thing, though along a slightly different line --  I added a bit to the rules called "extended contests" (not up yet) but thanks to your mention of this, it occurs to me I could easily expand that to the gamemaster deciding each Conflict is an attack against a major NPC, instead of the whole battle. This would allow the whole, "Big Boss Battle" deal you get at the end of movies, and things like the swordfight between Wesley and Montanya in "The Princess Bride."

In regards to Crippling Losses, I really like the rules as they stand...they're there to balance out Fate dice and Descriptors, to keep players from going ape-shit with bonus dice (without CLs, there's no downside to rolling your stat, a descriptor and every Fate die from the pool every time you roll).

Plus it's just so orcish. It shows how the gods themselves are against the orcish people, how anytime they get a bit of a leg up, they get the smackdown put on them...and the further they get ahead, the worse it usually is for them...how they can't win for winning.

However, some changes I thought of that might work equally as well:
Juggle the effects of Crippling Losses and Zeroing a little bit.  That is, Zeroing causes game-long stat loss while CLs cause two-scene stat loss.

Or ditch the whole current method and instead remove a Descriptor for the session whenever a Crippling Loss is suffered. Course, I'd have to figure out what to do after you run out of Descriptors...penalty rolls (ie: for a particular task or stat, you *have to roll two dice and take the worst).

OTOH, Bob's right about cannon-fodder...your orc isn't supposed to last very long. The more CLs you suffer, the more you'll depend on those Fate dice to turn the tides, and then the more CLs you'll suffer...of course, you can use Fate to heal your score.

And that's an interesting problem, I hadn't thought of it...hrm, wait, while you can spend Fate any time you want, you can only borrow Fate once per scene, remember? (yeah, I forgot, too)

So borrowing ad infinitum during a scene just to keep boosting your levels and thus avoiding death even at impossible levels of Fate can't occur...eventually, and quickly, it would catch up to you.

Not to mention, if you borrow multiple Fate dice at once, just to get the points, your chances to roll a "1" increase, so you might borrow a die to fix a CL'd stat, only to CL another stat with the borrowed die and completely negate the action (except for increasing your total Fate).

[efindel]

On crippling losses again... I agree that the orcs are supposed to be "cannon fodder" rather than heroes, but the losses just seemed to be coming *too* fast when we played.  As Bob says, though, we'll really need to play it more to see if that impression is correct.  The math inclines me to believe that it is, but we'll see.


--Travis