[FLFS] First Playtest -- HMS Dauntless

[Josh Roby]

We had three players: myself, my wife Laura, and my brother Ben.  Six if you count our three cats, one of which had her own character sheet.

We played a four hour First Session, broken down like so:
5:00 - 6:15 Player Expectations and Character Creation (sans Elaboration)
6:15-6:45 Engineering the Situation (the players took ten minutes for Elaboration concurrently, then made an NPC each)
6:45 - 8:00 Dinner Break.
8:00 - 9:00 Explanation of Rules
9:00 - 10:00 Roleplay.
10:00 - 10:30 Feedback

Player Expectations
We decided for our "One Shot" we wanted to set it in one place and have some quick two-fisted action, leaving open the possibility of humor.  Being that we were playing a one-shot and it was our first time, we decided to play Vanilla, with one GM (me) and two player-characters.  To facilitate two-fisted action, we went with Cinematic characters of 125 points.

I found the discussions at this phase to be very easy, non-confrontational, even simple, but very much noticed their profound impact on the rest of the game.  I'm not sure if the rest of play would have been as smooth as it was without this discussion, but I feel this sort of greased the wheels and got us all on the same page.  There was nothing that we really disagreed on, but having Laura say, "Two-Fisted Action" really gave us a sense of what we were about to play.

Character Creation
Ben and Laura quickly decided to play an escort pilot and his copilot/engineer, and there weren't any issues with one PC being in command and the other "taking orders."  Thematic Batteries took a bit of time; Ben had already been thinking of what he wanted prior to play; Laura needed a little time to make hers (which isn't a bad thing).  Overall, I think more time was spent on choosing the three thematic batteries as spending their 125 points, which went quick.  There was a little confusion on how many filled-in boxes represented a full rank, but I think this was entirely the fault of my spoken explanation.

The setting creation was pretty rapid and enjoyable, creating both a flagship and their escort as well as the flagship's captain (yes, this eeriely paralleled the example characters).  We had trouble coming up with three thematic batteries for each ship, and left one "open for later development."  I wasn't so sure about this, but Laura rather liked having options open for later (and as you can swap thematic batteries between sessions, this is functionally the same thing, so no biggie, I suppose).

This phase took only about forty-five minutes, and produced not just the two PCs but also two ships and the NPC Captain.  They all work together pretty well, both in terms of the game (complementary competencies) and in story (the captain is a pragmatist that approves of two-fisted action that isn't by the book).  Things fit together rather naturally.

Engineering the Situation
I rushed myself through this one, and I feel like it shows.  Two conflicts are pretty well tied together, but the third is not; notably, I wasn't able to double up many of the cogs.  I think I may retrofit a new third conflict into the situation (as the original third has not even been touched on yet in roleplay).  Alternately, I may just jigger a better connection for the conflicts I have.

However, the delegation of making those cogs worked out very well, as I had both Ben and Laura make one of the NPCs I needed.  Laura made a third crewman for their escort (who she decided was the marine landing party leader, and thus the escort had a landing party of mooks) and Ben made a pirate pilot.  This worked out pretty smoothly.

Dinner Break
We had Waikiki Meatballs.  Tasty!

Roleplay
The PCs and their rival escort ship were dispatched to a mining colony that had gone silent.  The rival ships raced out of the gate, with the rival NPC dodging through the mirror sails (using his Risk Taker thematic battery) while the PCs smashed into one (charging the Hot Shot Pilot Battery).  This is pretty much how Thematic Batteries are supposed to work at the beginning of the game, so that was good.

The PCs then proceeded to the mining colony where they one-upped their rivals by doing some engineering-fu and scanning the number and size of the pirate ships around the asteroid.  All of said engineering-fu was made up on the spot, including creating axioms of physics on the fly, and it all came from Laura and Ben without my prompting.  Additionally, in her success narration Laura blithely stated how many ships were out there, and also narrated something to the effect of "and some mid-sized thing that I can't quite identify yet."  I'm not sure if that's normal or just my wife gladly leaving doors open for later, but it was magnificent.  Laura greatly enjoyed this part, and spoke later about the freedoms of being able to control the story the way she liked.

Speaking of which, the Narration/Direction rules worked very well, even though Ben had trouble 'keeping up' on who had narration.  After the game, we pretty much concluded that he was overthinking things and tried to make everything cut-and-dried when they are more fluid guidelines of who talks when.  However, the primary purpose of the Narration/Direction rules, which was to break the "Call and Response" kind of gaming where the GM says what happens and the players just say what they want to do, worked admirably, and we had very very little of this happening.

The PCs then went into the colony and met a stranded member of parliament and took him on board.  When asked how he'd got there, I was able to attach his answer to Laura's prior narration about that mysterious mid-sized thing she couldn't identify.  I then fell into some old illusionist GMing habits and railroaded the PCs a bit; as they were leaving a big pirate battleship loomed above them.  The PCs identified its classification and saw it was damaged, but the other players were very reactive, turtled up a bit, and overall I really took more control of the narrative than I was comfortable with at this point.  I think this may have been started by me assigning a secret (written down) target number and dispensing information to the player who rolled, but it may have just been the situation foisted on them.  Time was growing short so we broke for Feedback.

Feedback
We had fun!  That's a good start.  After we untangled Ben's overthinking of narration/direction, both players said that they liked the freedom they were given in what they could narrate.  Thematic Batteries worked out easily, and the players interpreted how they were expressed in ways I wouldn't have thought of (I jury-rig this because I'm Curious if it will work).  Laura really enjoyed drawing a character Portrait to gain an in-game advantage, and said she'd wanted to bust out her crayons (which is a shame she didn't).

However, the Spoils Scrips system fell on its face.  I incorporated my first pass into the opening narration, but that was the only pass of the night.  There were a number of opportunities for the players to pass -- such as Laura's character strapping down the member of parliament in preparation for Ben's character's Hot Shot Pilot shennanigans -- but this narration was not accompanied with the passing of the Spoils Scrip.  I was strongly reminded of playing 7th Sea and forgetting to hand out Drama Dice for cool stuff.  However, both Ben and Laura said that they were actively thinking about how to work a pass into their narration, but were not very clear on what counted and when it was allowed.  I think in our next session I'll be a little more pushy with suggesting passes, and will take a harder look at the text.  Hopefully, this was more a familiarity issue than a broken mechanic; we'll have to see.

We decided to get together on Wednesday evening to continue our "One Shot" and complete the Situation.

[Josh Roby]

Oh yeah, actual questions --

1) What's your call on the railroady/turtling situation?  Does a GM keeping a target number secret squash player initiative?  Is that a power-grab sort of move that can shove players back into a habitual reactive role?  Or perhaps the GM introducing the looming battleship, pitting PCs against overwhelming odds (also typical gamer-grist, perhaps inciting typical gamer behavior)?

2) Things being passed around the table in the middle of play.  Fan Mail works like this, yes?  Is there any way to smooth this out, or is making it so streamlined and unnoticeable make it drop out of player consciousness and then it doesn't ever get used?  Any good strategies for getting players to think in these turns, rather than waiting for the GM to hand out the ol' XP reward at the end of the night?

Also, random clarification: when I say "Cog" in the above post, I mean "Character, Set, or Prop."  Bits and pieces.

[Brand_Robins]

Josh,

I'm still slogging my way through the playtest document, so my replies aren't fully coherent yet. However, you know that this has never stopped me from voicing an opinion, so here we go....

The script thing, as well as the narration/direction rules issues you desribe seem very much like a Laura and Ben thing to me. I know I've only met Ben the once, so I'm guessing a little on him, but these seem like things that fit the social backgrounding of the game. Larua is always crazy inventive when given leave and permision to be, and so it isn't surprising that she rocked. Ben, otoh, is younger and (from what I remember) a little in awe of you guys -- so it also makes sense that he'd be a little hesitant and want to be sure he was on solid footing before moving forward. His background is also mostly Sim based, yes?

Same deal with the Scripting. When we played 7th Sea the one thing Laura always cursed herself about was forgetting Drama Dice. I do the same damn thing, and have sometimes played a whole session of PTA without giving Fan Mail. If you aren't used to passing things around and pushing the game that way, it does take some time to get used to.

Not that I don't think both of these things can't be helped by the text, mind you. If you let people know specifically how and where and why their push comes (Pass the script or you'll never advance!) then it can help get the pin in the ass that makes them jump.

For the specific questions:

1) I personally HATE THE FUCK OUT OF SECRET TARGET NUMBERS. Dear God, I hate them so much. Not knowing what is going on around the other side makes me feel at a disadvantage. I can't make good tactical decisions, I can't make as many story decisions as I want either. If I don't know if I'm being brave or just a bully then I can't decide to charge screaming for glory and kick them as hard as I can. This is especially a pain in any game where I'm supposed to have some degree of narative or story control, as it marks off an area in game (in my eyes, at least) that is like "Well, you can do some things in the game, but this over here belongs to GOD."

OTOH, I have a couple of players who actually like not knowing. In one case the player's ability to weasel out the information is what makes him happy, it becomes a social and numbers game where he uses the system to figure out the secret numbers so that he can step on up. In the others it's mostly an immersion thing -- if there is a situation where the characters wouldn't know what the level of oposition is then they don't want to know OOC either. (Of course this comes with the caveat that if they know IC they should know OOC, and be able to understand what the difference in the fiction means in terms of the system.)

So the question is, did you do it to encourage immersion? Did you do it to provide a challange where the challange was to figure out how tough it was so that they could then later figure out how they wanted to deal with it? Or was it just a default back to "you shouldn't know this because I want the decision to be a character and not a player one" reflex?

2. I've already talked about this a bit. Text can help. So can telling the players point blank to do it. When I played TSOY the first time I had to tell the players to give each other bonus dice. When someone would say "Cool!" or the like I'd look at them and say, "Why aren't you giving her dice then?" Eventually they got the hang of it, and started doing it without me. I know this gets into tricky areas of GM force, but sometimes when you're doing something new you have to spur the characters in the ass.

This is especially true with those who don't have a lot of experience as a GM. (Actually, a lot of Nar games work best with groups of GMs, or at least those who would like GMing.) Mo, for example, is fairly new to GMing and when we play Breaking the Ice I always have to prompt her to give me bonus dice. She isn't used to being in a place to judge performance and push the game in that mechanical role, and so it isn't instinctive for her to do it. Whereas for you and I, long time awarders of XP, we know that you give the dog a cookie when it does well. We've got the training, people who don't GM don't.

[Nathan P.]

Quick reply/thought, and I may be totally off-base as I haven't the foggiest how it's actually implemented in the game, but...

The Spoils Script is a piece of paper with stuff written on it, yes? What about having times when it's passed, or notated on, or whatever, represented by passing around tokens (a la Fan Mail), and then there's a distinct phase of play where you look at your tokens and turn them into notes on the peice of paper. Would that be applicable at all?

In my experience, as long as I'm good about handing out Fan Mail, the players pick it within a session or two. In Timestream, on the other hand, the GM is the power that physically hands out and collects Time and Strain tokens, and they are so central to character effectiveness that they can't be forgotten.

Maybe something in there is helpful...

[Josh Roby]

The Spoils Scrip works like this: it's a quarter-sheet piece of paper with everybody's Thematic Batteries (core traits) written on it.  It gets passed around the table and accumulates signatures.  Full sets of signatures (one of everybody at the table) are circled.  When you're narrating and you address/reference another player's TB, you hand them the piece of paper.  When you pass the Scrip, you score a Spoils point for every circled set of signatures on the sheet.  When you receive a Scrip, you add your signature (and circle a full set if you complete one).  Spoils points translate into character points translate into character effectiveness / authority tools.

We're going to play our second session tonight; we'll see if increased familiarity leads to more passes.  Any other tips and tricks, folks?

[Warren]

One thing isn't clear to me with this: Say that there are three players; Alice, Bob and Charlie. Alice starts off with the Scrip and passes it to Bob. Bob passes it to Charlie, who passes it back to Bob.

Therfore it reaches Bob with [B C] written on it. Does he sign it a second time for [B C B], or does he have to wait until  he can pass it to Alice to sign off (and so create the first circled set)? I think it is likely that two players could have their characters repeatedly trigger each other's Batteries and get 'ahead' of the rest of the group and end up with a Scrip like [(A B C) B C B C B C B].

Warren

[Josh Roby]

It's certainly possible.  But Bob and Charlie would be getting a measly one Spoils point per pass.  If they include Alice, the value of the Scrip increases, and everybody earns more per pass.

Futhermore, if Bob and Charlie actually go down that route and actually produce a Scrip like [(A B C) B C B C B C B C] they've both scored five points and Alice has none.  If Bob passes to Alice after this (scoring one point), Alice passing it back scores two points, herself.  Bob can repeat that again, scoring two points and when Alice passes back she gets three.  Bob's got 8, Alice has got 5, Charlie's still got 5 -- so in just two passes, Alice catches up to Charlie's score after five passes, and Bob is rewarded for including Alice.

If Bob and Alice complete the next two potential sets, that would leave Bob at 15, Alice at 14, and five extra Bob signatures on the Scrip. Alice and Charlie could decide to monopolize the Scrip for five more passes, leaving them with... really high scores.  Alice comes out in the lead.  Which is all to say, this should be self-correcting.

Another thing to consider is that each player starts with a Scrip, so there's more than one bouncing around the table.

[mutex]

I'd just like to say I'm really excited that you've gotten a first playtest.  I'm looking forward to the next session, where you'll be pushing the Scrip more.