Mongrel in actual play

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Last night, Dan Root, Matt Wilson, and I were (I think) the first people in the world to play Mongrel. Here's my extensive notes on play.

The Adventure
The adventure's not that important to be honest - it got shunted by something I'll mentioned later. For now: the PCs (bounty hunters) got a contract to snatch two ex-cons and suspected murderers that escaped while on their way to Prison Vessel Statia. The bounty was supposed to be exclusive, but they would get interrupted in the middle by the injection of another bounty hunter, a hot leopard-woman named Fiera, that wanted to get the bounty for herself.

All PCs Kick Ass
So, the adventure got shunted for one reason: PCs whip down pain like you'd never believe. (There was a second reason - I forgot that I could turn Dark Resolve into Action Points. Forgive me - it was my first time.) While chasing the two criminals, the PCs ended up in a marketplace. One criminal prepared a nasty Burn, and we got into an Action Point bidding war over who would go first. The PC won as the criminal got down to 1, and hit the criminal for 5 Effect. With only 4 damage left that he could take, the criminal went down. (The other criminal was already at zero AP and got wiped up fast.)

This was twenty minutes into the adventure. Still, it went for a good 90 minutes, which was fun.

Two things to note from this:
a) If not defended, most attacks will hit.
b) Whether or not they are defended against, most attacks will do 4-8 Effect off the bat if successful. That's crazy nasty, but I think in the spirit of the game.

Weapons, Armor, and the Great Beyond
Because of this high amount of Effect being thrown around, I made one simple rule for Mongrel: while armor might lower damage Effect, weapons cannot raise it more than 1. Surprisingly, this wasn't hard to do. Here's the weapons used during the game.

Electro-shock baton: Does only one Effect of damage no matter what, but removes Effect - 1 Action Points from the target. Action Point loss can be nullified by spending a Dark Resolve.

Tranq needler: Does only one Effect of damage no matter what, but prevents Actio n Point refreshment for the next hour. This can also be nullified by spending a Dark Resolve.

Wicked sharp knife: Does normal Melee damage, but damage can be shunted to Beauty by the wielder. ("You want that I should cut up that pretty face?" This is the scariest weapon I made, in my opinion.)

Depleted uranium bolt-thrower ("hand cannon"): Does Effect + 1 damage.

The armor used was minimal:

Ballistic vest: Reduces bullet and blunt damage by 1.

Combat gel-suit: Reduces all damage by 1. In addition, can survive falls (half damage) and survive in vacuum for 5 minutes, because of the rapid-inflatable helmet built in.

While We're At It, Powers
I used Ron's guidelines for Powers: they only augment other Expertises or qualities, not be used by themselves. Here's some of the powers we saw:

Demonic:
Child-like face: odd baby-face is disturbing and comforting at the same time. Add rating to Lie and Convince when face-to-face.

Wings: Demonic wings let the character glide short distances, and add rating to Balance.

Bestial:
Powerful legs: Powerful legs add rating to dice when leaping, jumping, kicking, mating, etc.

Claws: add rating to Rend.

Tough skin: subtract rating from most physical damage.

Borg:
Exo-skeletal armor: reduces blunt or sharp damage by Rating.

Cyber-reflexes: gain 1 + rating in Action Points when refreshing from 0.

Retractable arm spike: add rating to dice in Melee.

Voice modulator: For each point in vomod, gain one social-based ability your voice can emulate without give-aways. Add rating to those abilities. (Example: vomod 1 [soothing - adds to Convince]).

I fear that some powers will be more useful than others, which may be a problem. In this game, that didn't happen, but I'll keep watching for it.

Space combat

From page 9 of the Mongrel rules: "The world of Mongrel crackles with cybernetic energy and the roar of spacecraft engines." Where, then, are the spacecraft rules?

Here's our spacecraft rules we used last night, which we found to work very well in play.

Each spacecraft has four statistics, all cribbed from characters: Size, Speed, Hull (Physique), and Style (Beauty). Size and Speed should equal 8, and so should Hull and Style. (Advanced ships might be better.) A ship might also have weapons that do special damage, or just plain lasers.

The ship's Action Points are equal to Speed, and damage is counted with Size and Hull as normal.

Every character on each ship that has something to do can go, ranked by Beast scores, per usual. You might have one character as the pilot, and one as the gunner.

Action Points, however, are spent from the ship's Action Points, and must be agreed on by all players that have characters on the ship.

In order to do anything, roll your Expertise vs. the ship's attribute (or the opposing ship, if it defends.) Appropriate Expertises are:
Information - for normal navigation and piloting. (I figure ship piloting is processing info from radars and such as much as anything else.)
Athletics - for quick, short-range navigation, like rolling behind another ship.
Missile - for attacking.
Stalk - for tracking another ship.
Sense - for knowing when a hiding ship is approaching.

Other Expertises might come in useful, but these are the ones that came up for us. The system worked pretty flawlessly, even when we had an NPC in vacuum trying to break into the PCs' ship's airlock. Dan rolled his Athletics as his character, Frank, was piloting and wanted to swing one wing up and then back down quick, shaking the ship and knocking the attacker off the ship, and into the other wing. She defended, and he had to roll versus her Speed instead of his ships. I didn't figure out the difference in damage between people and ships - it never came up last night. Outside of that, though, it worked.

In another space combat, the enemy's Theta Class Air-to-Surface Podship was speeding around Qek, one of the criminal moons of Beruun, pretending to approach for landing. The PC's followed in their ship, and then the enemy made a piloting roll (Information) to break away. The PC's defended, but the enemy succeeded anyway, moving around the moon's horizon to put the sun right into the eyes of whoever followed. The PC's were blinded, and the enemy doubled-back, speeding towards Beruun proper.

So, what went wrong?

Well, we have a few questions. First, the cardinal piece of Mongrel advice.

Buy index cards.

That's right. The Action Point system works great in combat - better than most round-based combat systems I've seen - but is way hard to keep track of on a notepad. With index cards, just move someone to the front when they spend an Action Point to do so, and move 'em to the back when they perform an action.

Here's our major question of the night: when does action declaration happen? There's a couple of points I can see it happening:
- Before Action Point spending for initiative.
- After Action Point spending for initiative.

An example of each:
a) "So, it's Pete's turn to go. Does anyone spend Action Points to go first? Ok, my NPC, Zak is going to. Roger, you're spending to go before Zak? Zak spends another. You're spending another? Too much for me - go ahead. What does Roger do?" The order is now Roger -> Zak -> Pete, by the way.

b) "So, it's Pete's turn. What does Pete do? He's going to attack Zak with a chain-stunner? Screw that, Zak spends a point to go and plans to Burn Pete in a nasty way. Roger's spending to beat Zak? What's he doing? Ok, he's just going to try to intimidate Zak and stop him? I can handle that. (Roger's character rolls and fails.) Ok, it's Zak's turn now, and he's Burning your ass." The order is now Zak -> Pete -> Roger.

You can see how the two end up very different, as people pre-empt concrete actions, not turns to go. I used the second option, although I state that you can't change your declared action unless pre-empted.

As for Action Point refreshment, my idea for solving the problem of how much you can refresh your Action Point pool is this:

The first time you refresh in an hour, you totally refresh. The second time, you refresh to your pool - 1; the third, to pool - 2; and this keeps going until you just refresh to 1 over and over. You have to rest for an hour before you can refresh back to normal.

Healing is not defined in the game, either. My incredibly cinematic fix was that one day of rest heals Spirit in damage. This makes Spirit a bit more important, and doesn't overload Physique.

That's just about it for notes. I might think of more later. All in all, we were happy with the game. Like I mentioned earlier, the level of success in the game is a bit jarring. I wasn't expecting it, and it threw the game a little awry. The main strength of the game is its Color, which is saturated and sexy. We had blinding suns, crazy markets, sexy bounty hunters (don't tell me a six-foot black panther-woman in a skintight combat gel-suit isn't sexy), and huge prison space-craft. My vote is that with a little work, this game is a gem.

[Matt Wilson]

Regarding the effect values in the game:

The likelihood of high effects makes tools, weapons, whatever into "props." The BFG-9000 is overkill. Your guy can "whip down pain," as Clinton says, with a dinky little pocket  knife. I like that because it becomes a style choice. You're about you, not your stuff.

Adding your Human/Beast/Demon to the successes makes for a very un-Sorcerer curve. Why, I remember when 1 success was worth a pat on the back.

Action Points are fun as hell. Bumping up an Action reminds me a bit of the feel in Dust Devils when deciding whether or not to fold. Should I let this guy go first, or am I gonna get creamed?

Clinton's spaceship rules were sweet. Hey Clinton, what's that over there? *steals rules for own game* I recommend them to anyone else who's thinking of trying this game out.

-Matt

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Clinton and everyone,

First, thanks! This was great to read.

Second, here's the deal on announcements and Action Points.

No one has to announce until it's his or her turn. However, once the action is announced, Action Points may be spent to pre-empt the action or to preserve its position for the next action.

If an action is pre-empted, then the person who got pre-empted is not stuck with the old announcement. Just start the process over exactly as described above every single time someone is "up."

Best,
Ron