[Fiasco] The abortion that didn't take

[DanielZKlein]

I played Fiasco tonight with three friends who have varying levels of experience with rpgs. I myself have a fair bit of experience with story games (and a long and troubled history of AD&D 2nd). Then there was Susan, who played various things with me in the past, amongst which were PTA and In a Wicked Age. Laura had only played I think two or three story gaming one-shots with me at various cons (and one or two more traditional rpgs), and Maria finally had never touched anything that even looked like an rpg before. I had chosen to play with these people both because they're awesome (thanks for the great game) but also with an eye to their varying levels of experience. I wanted to see how this would work.

Pretty well, it turns out. We had a few problems that I want to go into in a bit (and I'm really interested in feedback there), but let me just give a rough overview of how play proceeded.

I explained the rules, Maria suggested the Wild West playset, everyone liked it, and we were off.

There was some initial confusion in making the relationship network, where people always tended to want to come up with the fully qualified relationship right away, and it was also a bit different to explain how a detail needed to affect both partners in a relationship. Our one need drifted in play where one half of the relationship excluded herself from it, as you'll see, so I'm not sure I explained that well enough.

Our relationships were:

Maria (Biff) -> Susan (Evelynn): Church Volunteers; An Abortionist's Bag of Tools

Susan (Evelynn) -> Laura (Tom): Faith Healer / Patient; Gaudy Mansion: The Little Hopes Home For Children For a Brighter Future (Orphanage)

Laura (Tom) -> Daniel (Sady): Reformed Criminals; Need: to get out of this town before anyone finds out what you did

Daniel (Sady) -> Maria (Biff): Former Lovers; Vulcanized Rubber Womb Veil

Laura was playing Sady's sister, Tom (Thomasina, you see). They were working this gig where Sady would seduce a wealthy man, and while she slept with him, Tom would steal his stuff. Until one night Sady met Biff (Maria's character), who she fell for. We decided that something must have happened to turn them from lovers to former lovers. Eventually Tom and Sady got caught, but given a second chance, because they were just a bunch of innocent girls.

Susan played Evelynn, the well-respected older lady running the orphanage, who performed abortions and faith-healing on the side. She claimed that all her powers came from "The Lady Eve", of whom she had a big ass painting in her chapel, and which Susan insisted "WASN'T" Evelynn, but no one believed her. Self-worship ftw!

Biff was this somewhat slow Cowboy who had a hopeless crush on Sady still. He was also Evelynn's grandson and lived with her.

Here's the first bit where our interpretation of the relationship we selected veered off. Maria and Susan had "Community: Church Volunteers". Now Evelynn did run her own sort of little cult there, and Biff definitely helped, but I'm not sure that was true to the spirit of the relationship.

Evelynn performed some faith healing services for Tom, who was certain she was hideous, disfigured, would never have a man etc. Mostly it was her crippled leg that forced her to walk with a limp. Evelynn performed very doubtful healing session on her atop the chapel's altar.

The abortionist's tools were attached to the Biff-Evelynn relationship, so one of the first scenes we had was Biff walking in on an abortion. That was good fun.

We also had two solid flashbacks that set up the relationship between Sady and Biff; Biff walking in on her holding the Womb Veil (that she forgot to put in before sleeping with him) and their original meet cute.

Things were going pretty well when we hit the end of Act 1. If anything, the problem was that the heat hadn't been turned up enough.

Now, our first serious problem had started to develop. The relationship between Sady and Tom was ill-defined; Sady was busy with Biff most of the time, and Tom was mostly struggling with Evelynn. The sisters had grown apart for no good narrative reason. At one point, Evelynn convinced Tom that her crippled leg was because of her sister's bad vibes and curses. Tom took the bait and decided that Sady had to leave town.

The motivation for us to leave town it had transpired was a past charm-n-steal job gone bad, where the customer noticed Tom sneaking into the room and beat the living shit out of her, until I grabbed a straight razor and slit his throat. We burried the body in a shallow grave out in the desert, and so far no one had made the connection, but someone soon would.

Or so I thought. I had a real hard time pushing that need on Tom; I brought the Sheriff in a few times, I connected her directly to the corpse (in that she had one of two identical rings the customer had been wearing; we had only been able to pry one off his fingers, and when the corpse was discovered, the Sheriff made the connection), but no matter what I did, the over-ruling motivation for everything Tom did was her crippled leg.

Which was fine to us as a group since there was a lot of horribly-awesome play in all the guilt games (you are deformed because your sister hates you? Jui-cy!), but all of a sudden our common need to get out of this town before they found out what we did had become my need, and Evelynn was all for it (she did not approve of me bewitching her grandson), and basically everything conspired to enable me to leave town. My attempts to explain why Sady couldn't just up and leave became more and more artificial. I was basically in a position to achieve my need well before the Tilt.

The next problem was that we weren't really getting anyone into all that much trouble. Evelynn went pretty much unpunished for her faith-healing and her aborting, Biff hadn't really done anything wrong, Sady was given money by Evelynn so she could leave, so she was doing fine too, and no one seemed to take the threat of the murder coming back to bite Sady and Tom in the ass too seriously.

The tilt, then. We chose four tilts (the text doesn't make it very clear how many you choose, but I assumed you just use all remaining dice, which was 8 at this point). We came up with four tilts, but this was probably the biggest problem we had: we had NO idea what to do with them. At all. Mechanically: do we attach them to a relationship each? Do we grab them in play and attach them to a relationship? To a character? Does only one relationship get to use a given tilt or are they free for all? (we ended up just leaving them in the middle of the table and taking inspiration from them, weakly, every now and then) and narratively: none of them really seemed to work too well for our situation. We kinda somewhat saw one applying here or there, but none of them really jumped out at us.

The Tilt turned out to be very very tame. Nothing really changed that much in the story. I used "Someone watches, waiting for their moment" to mean that the saloon owner's had his eyes on me for the longest time, and when I fell behind on rent payments, he forced himself on me. ("You're paying in kind then") That did end in a good scene where I whispered into Biff's ear that he had to shoot him to protect me, but it also felt a little artificial, like I was bending the story to fit the tilt in.

We had one very nice flashback where we found out how Evelynn got her start in this whole abortin' business. She did not approve of the woman her son had married and gotten pregnant, insisting that she wasn't worth his seed. (Susan does crazy lady so well). So she convinced the woman to have a secret abortion... which "didn't take". When she did give birth, it was to a somewhat odd looking boy (Biff, who wasn't the sharpest tool in the west), and she died in childbirth (collateral damage being the tilt we used for this). Evelynn's son walked out on her then and never spoke to her again. We established that she set up the orphanage as penance (and that she perfected her abortions, obviously). Again, very nice scene, but it did nothing to push Evelynn toward Fiasco in now time.

We eventually finished the somewhat weaker Act II. There was a great scene where Tom, still crippled, was now working for Evelynn as a maid and desperately tried to make eyes at the new village doctor, who rejected her in the crudest way possible. ("Have a look at my leg, doctor!" "My services don't come free." "I am still a young woman! I'm sure we could work something out! Just take me into one of these rooms and... examine me!" "I think not." "Please! Just a little touch!") (Kudos Laura. That was a brilliant line.)

We rolled for aftermath.

Most of us got pretty low rolls. We were between 1 (me) and 4 (Biff). We started out with Biff, who finally eloped with Sady, only to live in the most abusive of relationships. She agreed to run away with him impressed by his manliness when he shot the saloon owner; but he quickly relapsed into his slow, unmanly ways. The epilogue saw an argument end with Sady beating Biff with his own belt and Biff just whimpering into the bed linen.

Evelynn ended up in a mental asylum, where the voices of a hundred children she aborted haunted her forever. (Quick side note: Susan always kills children. Every game we play. Don't Rest Your Head. Hell For Leather. In A Wicked Age. Doesn't matter the system or the setting--if there's children, Susan will kill them.) (It's like I can't be trusted around Indians. Different story though)

Tom did fairly well (white 3), so we saw her running the orphanage--badly--and botching abortions left and right. Clearly she hated this life, but she had no other options.

Sady finally rolled white 1. So I cut back to the first epilogue of Sady belt-whipping Biff. Sady leaves their room with his belt in hand, drains a bottle of whiskey out on the street, and is mocked by a group of women: "How's the wife, then?" *giggle*

"I'll tell you how she is." She takes Biff's revolver out of his belt, puts it in her mouth. Click. Bang. Credits.


So we had a GREAT time. There was a lot of laughter. We all learnt about Womb Veils and Maria told us about post-coital contraception in Victorian times ("squat and sneeze"). Basically we had a great evening and looking back, we did make a very enjoyable story, but I felt like I was bumping up against the system every now and then. So I have questions!

1) The dice you roll to make your network in the beginning. Why not simply let people pick stuff freely? Is this a jeepform-esque "Restrictions Foster Creativity"? We played it by the book because I believe in always doing a new system straight up as written the first time you play, but I'd be tempted to just let people pick whatever next time we play. A couple of cool things suggested themselves where we didn't have the appropriate dice.

2) How do you make bad things happen? SIlly as this sounds, the game kind of seems to rely on everyone's internal badness clock. There's nothing in the system really that makes things take a turn for the worse by itself; I kept hoping that the tilt would do that, but it didn't. In the end we had to do a lot of sudden changes to make the epilogues make sense. Evelynn for instance was right as rain all throughout the game, never a hint of a bad conscience, and the only explanation for why she should go crazy that we got was that last flashback where we saw Biff's birth.

Is this a case where the people around the table need to make sure negative outcomes are really driven home? We often had negative outcomes that didn't do much more than "okay, so I don't get what I wanted right now. Oh well."

3) The tilt. Someone explain it to me, because it didn't happen, and if anything it made the second half worse, as we all scrambled to incorporate these ill-fitting concepts into our stories. I'm sure we were Doing It Wrong [tm], so someone explain to me how it should work!


Ergh. That was longer than I wanted it to be. Sorry guys, I can't not be wordy. Hope someone made it through all this

(And again, we had a GREAT time. These problems became evident only when thinking about the game afterwards.)

[Jason Morningstar]

Hi Daniel,

I'm glad you guys had fun with Fiasco. Thanks for writing your session up, and I hope you'll give it another try!

Your question about the Tilt is answered on page 41, and is demonstrated in the replay on page 117. The players whose dice have the highest black and white totals respectively choose Tilt elements, so you have a total of two. These are fair game for anybody to incorporate and serve as signposts for what to expect in Act Two. They don't need to pop up at any particular time, and occasionally one or the other doesn't show up at all.

You're on the right track about the Setup - by limiting choice players end up with situations they may not have selected if all 144 elements were available to them, which leads to surprise and creative uncertainty, which is fun. It also greatly speeds the Setup. Everything in the playset is fair game for incorporation - the things attached to Relationships just happen to be really important to those people. Mine it for cool stuff, for sure.

Choosing "To Get Out" as a Need can be tricky. There's no reason to artificially make your character stay, since you have an entire arsenal of creative tools (flashbacks, smash cuts, etc) to continue the narrative in their absence. But if everybody is listening and on top of things, they should be working hard to make that Need problematic. If what you need is to get out, everybody at the table should be working hard to make you stay. So more than most, it relied on the creative contributions of others to really kick hard.

It's good practice to work toward establishing strong relationships with every character built during the Setup. Often when I am not sure what sort of scene I should frame, I'll look to see which characters haven't interacted much and build a scene around that potential interaction. This works whether I'm framing a scene for myself or another player.

As far as making things go wrong, that's totally a tonal issue that you and your friends need to work out. The game is structured freeform, and the only inputs for genre emulation occur during the Tilt and Setup (there's also some fairly esoteric stuff going on with the dice and genre emulation). Outcomes are deliberately vague, and you guys can decide what "positive" and "negative" mean in the context of your play. It sounds like you were settling for mellow outcomes, which is fine if that's what you want, but there's nothing wrong with making a negative outcome truly horrendous if you are resolving it. If you felt like you guys weren't playing hard enough, play harder next time! You definitely had a killer situation in that game.

--Jason

[DanielZKlein]

Hey Jason! Thanks for the answer! I think here's the bit of text that confused me:

The player with the highest white total and the player with the highest
black total each get to choose Tilt Elements.
(p.41)

Additionally:

Use the results of the roll to pick Elements from the Tilt list, as during
the Setup.
(also p.41)

So "...each get to choose Tilt Elements" being plural and "use the results of the roll [...] as during the Setup" seemed to suggest to me that we needed to use up all the numbers (as during Setup). Additionally, we had 8 dice and four relationships; it seemed to make sense to come up with four tilts, so we'd have one for each relationship. The last bit was an obviously wrong conclusion.

I should have thought to check the Replay, of course! I really enjoyed that, by the way. Not sure why I didn't think to check there.

Out of curiosity, how do tables usually handle the tilt index cards? When the tilt makes itself felt at one point in the story, does the person the tilt applies to just grab the card? Do you put it under a relationship like you do with a detail? Or does the tilt just stay on the table? This isn't really important to how I'd play the next game, but I'm curious.

And yes, I definitely want to play this again as soon as possible. The setup alone was totally worth it. Those moments when the details and the relationships come together and all of a sudden you understand, oh my god, the nice old lady running the orphanage is also a faith healer... performing illegal abortions on the side... that's just golden.

[Jason Morningstar]

We usually just keep the Tilt cards in the middle of the table for all of Act Two. Usually when somebody hits one of them they'll just point and everybody will nod appreciatively, an obvious callback.

[SusanAHolmgren]

(1)  That's a good point about Setup (limiting choices).  Though I really enjoyed the setup/relationship phase in say, A Taste for Murder (and indeed, was my favourite part of that game), it did take quite a long time.  Fiasco was fast, quick, and with just a few words drastically changed my original character idea for the setting (not knowing anything about the game, as soon as the setting was decided upon I immediately started jotting down ideas for characters not knowing we'd have some elements pre-defined for us and I should have just waited).  So I can't really say that having the restrictions necessarily fostered any more additional creativity than not having them, since I would have been happy either direction, but it did seem to make the process faster by narrowing the scope and keeping everyone focused.

(2)  The "How to make bad things happen" miscue.  I think this actually boils down to my error on the "To Get Out" Need (between Daniel/Sady and Laura/Tom).  I should have seen the overarching story as a whole, and instead I made decisions too quickly on an important element of the game based only on an existing relationship of my own (me/Eveylnn with Laura/Tom).  Basically, I wasn't looking outside my own character there.  It would have been fascinating to play out what would have happened had me/Evelynn insisted Daniel/Sady must stay in town.  I could have easily gone in this direction, too, and it wouldn't have been forced.  That would have created more character v character plot without the need to bring in external elements (the Sheriff).

(3)  The Tilt:  In a way, we did what the game was engineered for and used only two "Tilts" when we had four mistakenly on the table.  The system proves out there I suppose.  And I think Jason is correct as well, we could have "played harder".  I think that was more indicative of the four of us never having played together before as a group.  Not to mention one of the players had never rpg'd before ever, and another had only played a few times in a con setting.  I think you need to be confident in knowing a game, and/or knowing your fellow players, or just being confident in your rpg skills to push it.  I can see this being much different in the future if we get this particular group together again.

In summary, I'd love to play it again having learned a good bit more about the system (which I very much enjoyed).  I think the game forced me to be a better player (though I failed on the # 2 above, it was a learning experience for me).  I also think the game was approachable to all experience levels of gamers and was enjoyable to all.

...and I'd just like to point out that I didn't kill any children in A Taste for Murder.  And technically since this game took place in the US, I didn't kill any here, either.  So there.

[David Artman]

I can see the potential procedural confusion around Tilt (good site for Fiasco II revision, Jason). By my reading, there's a number of questions:

OK, so highest white and highest black "choose Tile elements... as during Setup." Say I have White 6 and Bob has Black 4.

1.a) Do I pick a category AND its element, then Bob does so for his choice? ("Full control method")
1.b) Do I pick a category; then Bob picks a category(i) OR a particular element of the category I chose(ii); the I pick one of the specializations of the two chosen categories(i) OR the other category(ii); then Bob picks the last particular element? ("Alternating  picks method")

2) Who picks first, regardless of element selection method (1 above)?

3) What if there is no "highest black" or "highest white," say if only white or black dice were ever chosen during Act I (rare, but it happens)?

I can make some guesses, but I'm curious about the RAW intent.

1 is answered by case b ("as during Setup"), which also has the interesting element of giving the second person to choose a bit more control.
2 seems like just "he highest value" with ties broken by letting the black pick first, as that character has probably had some rough scenes!
3 seems like the "highest" of the missing color would be, say, the lowest of the present color (i.e., if the white-to-black values were a continuum, then the lowest white is "closest" to the [non-existent] "highest black" and vice versa). Like so:
10B.... 5B.... 1B, 0BW, 1W... 5W... 10W

Hope that's clear enough--I haven't had to use outline numbering to keep points straight in a while (I must be tired today)!