[Ensemble] 9th Hell: The Family at 316 John Street

[Lxndr]

The first playtest of Ensemble happened on the indie-netgaming IRC channel Monday night.

Characters and other record sheets available here:  http://www.twistedconfessions.com/confessional/index.php?n=Ensemble.HomePage

We had five players - Ivan, Dave, Chris, Brendon, and me, Alexander.  After some discussion wherein we couldn't decide what sort of story we wanted to do, I proposed a parodical take on 7th Heaven called '9th Hell', which everyone seemed to enjoy.  The basic idea is, "A story of a respected Satanist pastor and her family in suburban life."  It was decided all the protagonists would be members of that family.

* I created Allison Crowley, the mother and the respected satanist pastor, who works as a realtor during the week
* Chris created Anton Crowley, my character's husband, a death metal rock star looking for his next big break
* Ivan created Nightshade Crowley, who goes by 'Jake' - he's the rebel son, deep into the whole 'Christian' thing.  He blares his Christian Rock, and is dating the daughter of the local pastor
* Dave created Lucifer Crowley, the sort of squamish 'good son' - he gets good grades, he goes to black mass, he has delusions of grandeur
* Brendon created Ezekiel Crowley, Allison's weak brother who constantly 'backslides' into Christianity.

In Ensemble, every protagonist has two foils.  Foils included the principal and vice principal of the school, both good satanists; a christian pastor, the brother of the vice principal, and his daughter; a somewhat persistent guardian angel, a rival realtor; a rock agent; the son of the principal, Ezekiel's son and his wife.  So we had quite a selection of characters when the game started, without a single antagonist being created.

I am rather happy that the hardest part of the whole game was coming up with the concept, not dealing with the rules that have been written.  Unfortunately for us, Chris had to leave for a family emergency, leaving us with only four players for the first session.  If he's unable to come back, his character will transmogrify into an antagonist, which will be very interesting.

Our first rolls came up with Chris being the Situation, and Brendon and me in the spotlight, playing Ezekiel and Allison.  Dave bought into the scene as Lucifer, and we decided that Allison and Lucifer were at Ezekiel's house, having an "intervention" because he hadn't been going to Black Mass.  Of course, then Chris had to go, so we rerolled, and the second time, Brendon, me and Dave were all in the spotlight, with Ivan as Situation.  We, of course, called it fate, and continued on with the intervention.

So we opened our game at 1135 John Street, Ezekiel's house (less than a block away from the Crowley family residence at 316 John Street).  Allison and Lucifer had just let themselves in, and so when Ezekiel came home from a hard day's work, he found them waiting for him.  They immediately started a double-fisted barrage, metaphorically speaking, saying that Jake's girlfriend had let slip that she'd seen him at "that Church" for a few weeks. We had a few wonderful lines like (paraphrased):

Lucifer:  "If your wife wanted you to jump off a bridge, would you?"
Ezekiel:  "Is that a problem?  I recall your mother encouraging me to do that half our childhood!"
Allison:  "Hush Lucifer!  Still, the boy has a point.  I swear, you'd follow that woman through the Pearly Gates themselves if you had the chance."

Everyone loved it when I decided that tonight was not just any Black Mass, but Walpurgisnacht, so of course the whole family had to be there.  Nightshade was even bringing Mary!  Finally, we rolled.

Things were close.  Between Lucifer and myself, we rolled 6 successes.  Poor Ezekiel only rolled two.  Lucky for him, Ivan also rolled two successes, and decided to cast his lot in with Ezekiel.  That encouraged Brendan to spent some beats on rolling Traits - 3 of them, which unfortunately only got him one success.  Poor Ezekiel wound up in the back of Allison's soccer-mom SUV, tied to the chair, as they drove off to the Black Mass.

The only other scene we had, Ivan was the Spotlight, and Brendan the Situation.  Dave again got into the action, playing Mary, Ivan's girlfriend and one of his foils.  (We had two Marys, and although their characters were in no way related, we agreed that if this were a TV show, they'd be played by mother and daughter, or some other relations).  They were standing outside the Black Mass, and Jake, of course, did not want to go.  On the other hand, Mary very much did - she was interested and experimental and all, like many teenagers, and wanted to stick it to her dad.

A nice scene played out here that convinced me that Extras should be a bit easier to bring into the action, which I achieved.  Again there was no NPC played by the Situation, but we didn't need one, and eventually we got to the roll to decide - would they go to the Black Mass after all?  Mary wanted to go, but Jake didn't.  The rolls originally wound up with Jake losing (since Brendan ganged up with Dave against him), so Ivan invoked some traits and got a tie, which Dave didn't manage to break.

The tie broke on Ivan's side, and he also had narration rights, so the scene ended, sadly, with Jake and Mary going out to a dinner and a movie instead.  Allison, watching from the window, brushes away a single tear before her face contorts with anger.

Everyone enjoyed the game, except Chris who didn't get to play, and it sounds like we'll all be getting together Monday for another round.  So far, the game is running like a rather smoothly-oiled machine, and for that, I am happy.  A few minor tweaks have been made to streamline the process, and it sounds like I might need to pimp the Investment part of the game a bit more, but otherwise, I'm very happy.

[dindenver]

Hi!
  The game play was smooth, but I feel like at least half of that was due to a clever and fun idea for a campaign. In fact, the lack of setting slowed us down for at least 15-20 mins while we had to invent the setting whole cloth.
  In fact, there were points, where we were having witty banter and then we had to stop in order to roll for a conflict.
  Also, Coins are the creative currency of the game and the only way to get them efficiently is to invest in someone elses Triggers. But this was never really epmhasized well.
  The game claims that it is easy to run if players enter or leave the session arbitrarily, but we still had the same, exact struggle to come up with scenes that were in-continuity and that didn't involve Chris after he had to leave unexpectedly.
  These sound like harsh criticisms, but they aren't. I think its just a writing issue and that soon the text will match the awesome time we had Monday night!

[iLikeSpoons]

Hey everyone,

I'm Ivan, this is my first post (at Alex's insistence)

After talking about starting an Ensemble playtest for a couple of months, Alex finally managed to get more than three people interested and available in the same timeslot!

After meeting up last Monday, we did have a bit of a problem with ideas about the setting/direction. Finally, Alex decided to pitch in his idea - the 9th Hell story. This immediately gave me ideas on playing Nightshade-call-me-Jake Crowley.

Character creation was really fast once everyone found a concept to their liking. Every player basically has to create 3 characters (one for him/herself and one for the players left and right of him), 8 traits and one trigger.

After Chris dropped out, it was actually pretty easy to re-start the game - as easy as everyone rolling 3 dice. As the set-up was identical to the scene Chris was about to frame, I went along with it. The intervention scene ended with Ezekiel (Brendan's character tied up and in a van).

We then continued on to the next scene where my protagonist was in the spotlight. The "No sex before marriage" trigger I created proved to be very interesting for everyone involved and Dave and me had a lot of fun playing Jake and his girlfriend Mary. Sadly, we had to end it there.
The first session went really, really well - everyone had a lot of fun and both scenes involved cheering from everyone not involved (even from the situation - the kinda-gm role). The only point nobody but Dave and Alex got was triggers and investment into them, but, after explaining it a bit better to us (both in the new playtest document and personally, over irc), the rest of us realized that investing into triggers is the only way to get more coins. And, more coins == more and longer-lasting triggers.

After the second game (described below), we realized that the triggers make powerful tools for players to use and directly tell everyone at the table "Ok, now THIS is a cool thing. Let's get more conflicts about that!"
Unfortunately, none of us got to create new characters in the first session. This was all rectified in the second installment of the game:

Session two almost didn't happen on Monday, as I had stomach problems and Brendan didn't appear until 20ish minutes after the scheduled start of the game. But, with Brendan getting there and my stomach getting kinda better, we decided to start.

Dave got the best rolls in that scene, thus becoming the Situation, while me and Alex got the Spotlight roles. Brendan decided to buy his way into the scene and Dave framed the three protagonists (Allison, Ezekiel and Jake) in a car, passing besides a church revival tent. We (Alex, Brendan and me) almost instantly decided that the conflict was going to be whether or not we stop there, but the scene took a strange turn when Alex decided that Allison will crash the car rather than attend the church revival. We rolled and, despite using Jake's "Overweight" trait, Alex still won, with the narration going to me. The scene ended with the car going into the crowd and falling over, the pastor taking out the unharmed bodies of the Crowley family and yelling out "It's a miracle!"

Now, this scene was kinda problematic - Dave, as situation, wanted a different kind of conflict, but either he failed to communicate it to us clearly, or we were too caught up and excited about the car crash. The other point that was raised here was about the rules for creation of extras during narration and use of existing characters, which Alex promptly changed/made better. Here we finally realized how triggers work and poured coins into them.

After Block (dice) re-distribution, I got the Situation role, while Dave got to be the spotlight. Since nobody wanted to play an already-existing character, I got the chance to try out the character-creation rules. After deciding that this scene will involve the World Domination trigger that Dave's character is invested in, I created our first Antagonist - Jenny, the preppy next-door-neighbour. Apparently, it was Lucifer's birthday, but nobody showed to his party. Jenny also held a party next door and the scene began with her furiously teasing him. Well, due to a lack of communication between me and Dave and since we had different ideas for the scene, it took us a while to find out where it was going to go. After humiliating Lucy in front of all her friends, for their entertainment, Dave, dressed in his cool ninja outfit "infiltrated" her party and, winning the conflict, got all people there to go to his party. Unfortunately for him, I got the narration rights (I think that is 3 times in 4 scenes, so far) and, while I didn't want to try and ruin his success, I did want to get Lucy even more humiliated. We ended with Jenny loosing (even with her "Winner" trait) and Lucy kind-of-winning - apparently, all the partygoers went to join Lucifer's political party.

We played one final scene that night where Alex tried to test out where we can and can't go, as a group. Again, I got the Situation role, while everyone else was a protagonist. After deciding that this would be a cool time to talk about what happened between the first and the second scene of our first session, I framed a flashback to the car that night. And, um, without going into details, I will only say it was good, but pushing on my (and other people's) squick-limits.

After that, we got another player who created his character and then called it a night.

Final thoughts - the only thing that sounds kinda problematic to me right now is the scene continuity. While it hasn't been that bad, strange rolls could lead to very, very unconnected scenes that would be problematic to tie together. Everything else worked very well and the game had us laughing and cheering on other players almost all the time. While we were all kinda worried about three different units of currency at the beginning (Beats, Blocks and Coins), after just one scene the difference and use of each becomes really clear.

--
Ivan

[dindenver]

Hi!
  Yes, the fact that a scene ends on a conflict seemed to de-rail the church revival scene for me. I was planning on playing an extra, but never got to play at all, because they never got out of the car.
  Maybe there needs to be a way to veto a conflict? Because you are almost guaranteed not to have the same spotlight and situation after a conflict and its possible that by then, the story hasn't started.
  Or possibly an Establishing shot rule, where each player has to do some narration before a conflict can be called? I don't know, it seems like the ability to call a conflict at any point can be used to short circuit good scenes.
  For instance, I pitched the scene as a reverse intervention, the Christians confronting the Satanist mom about her beliefs. I even put one of the Christians behind the wheel and the Satanist in the back seat, but the scene became about how the car would stop. And when Alex said scene over, pay your blocks, I thought, 'but wait, that wasn't the scene I framed at all!'
  Night two was fun, but not as funny. Seemed like we concentrated more on the Satanism and less on the sitcom. Also, I think that Alex deciding that the High Priestess of the Church of Satan should be called Satan's Whore (while not necesarily inaccurate, was not all that funny), may have put us on an un-funny path (though that is no fault of Ensemble itself and can be easily fixed I think).
  I still feel like Beats are superfluous. There is this bizarre confluence of events that has to happen to spend them, you need:
1) To need one or two more successes in a Conflict
2) Have a Trait that can be used in the scene
3) Have a spare Beat
  And even then, its all for nothing if you don't roll odd. It seems like its a lot more efficient and important to influence players to join your side of the Conflict, than it is to try and use a Trait.
  Finally, Alex slipped in a continuity rule (I don't know if its in the playtest rules or not) that each scene is supposed to take place chronologically after the preceding. But my guess is it is going to be awkward to implement. Since the cast of characters has to change every scene. In fact, in order to comply, Ivan had to do a flashback scene in order to wrap up one of our long orphaned story lines...
  Don't get me wrong, the game was fun and I plan on being there next week. But I feel like it could be better. Keep up the good work Alex and thanks for a fun game!

[Lxndr]

Ivan managed to summarize the gameplay of the second session, so yay.

The second session started with a rules change that was pretty quickly decided to be bad - I'd increased the # of startings blocks, giving the extras to the Situation, and that turned out to be a bad idea, so we retconned that before the first scene had even finished.

Dave and Ivan have hit on one thing - the triggers do need more 'selling', especially in the rules themselves.  I believe the play examples I plan on adding will do the majority of that work, by showing the usefulness of Triggers in play...

In my opinion, Dave approached the Situation role with too much on his plate.  It's the Situation's job to set up interesting scenes (which he did), and to call for conflicts - when they come up.  The Situation should not be strongly invested in any particular conflict idea - and it seems that's what Dave did.  When Allison reached out to crash the car.  That was, in my opinion, a good scene, while Dave seems to feel that it could have been a good scene, and was 'short-circuited' by my actions.  Heck, when I announced what I was doing, Ivan went "YES!"

I don't feel what I did (trying to crash the car) was at all out of bounds - like in any roleplaying game, scenes evolve organically.  Even in a game where the GM has significantly more 'power' over the scenes than Ensemble gives, you can set up scenes where the PCs don't act in the way you expect.  That, in my opinion, is part of the fun of any roleplaying game.  The Situation doesn't own the scene - the Spotlights do.

That said, while I wanted scene changes to happen frequently, I have to agree that perhaps they are changing a bit too much for comfort.  On the other hand, Prime Time Adventures, one of Ensemble's inspirations, has the "one conflict one scene" rule, and it works exceptionally well there.

I've already been pondering a possible solution to this potential problem though, and I think I'll try it out next session.  Instead of all participants in a conflict getting a block from the Situation, only the Spotlight(s) involved would. This would slow down the scene shifts while still keeping them relatively quick.

On the other hand, I'm considering that maybe I'm making 'playing your own protagonist in a scene' too cheap.  People should be playing non-protagonists more often than we currently have happening in this game, and part of that might be because you have to give up no more blocks to play a protagonist than you do anyone else.  So, that change is also going into the document.

As for beats and Traits, I've changed them slightly too, making them more powerful.  Here's the appropriate section:

A small bit of additional narration is required, showing how each Trait is being used in play. But in return, they may roll 1d4 for that Trait, and regardless of success or failure, they may dictate one small element that must be in the resolution of the conflict.

Thus, Traits will now split up the narration at the end, and allow more people to contribute to it than just the success/failure of the conflict.  We'll see how all this works out in the next playtest.

As for continuity, all I said was scene should 'follow from' the previous.  Nothing about chronologically.  It's not in the rules, more of a general 'how this should go.'  That said, I think you're overstating the case by saying that Ivan had to do a flashback scene.  Really, nothing required us to go back to the Black Mass (and it was the Black Mass that brought out all the squicky Satan stuff) - there were several suggestions.  In addition, I feel you're overstating the case - it wasn't a long-orphaned storyline, it was something that happened that was sure to be brought up again in later scenes.  Maybe I'm just seeing it differently than you.

Remember, if this were a tabletop game, instead of an IRC game, we'd still be in the FIRST SESSION.  Ample time for those things to come up in play again.  I'm really hoping to do some FTF testing of this as well.

[dindenver]

Hi!
  OK, I may have used strong language. I apologize. Really, I don't mean to step on your toes or even want to push you around. It was never my intention to overstate my case, I was just trying to let you know what I saw.
  And I didn't have a specific conflict in mind, I was just shocked when the Tent Revival Scene didn't ever make it to the tent. And disappointed that I didn't get to play. And if I knew it was the Situation's job to call for the conflict, I would have just said, the car crashes, we'll have another conflict later, lol
  And I wasn't trying to say that your char crashing the car should have been forbidden, but that calling a conflict so soon (as opposed to just narrating something) was depriving me of a chance to play a character. And was jarring when I realised that. I didn't even have an idea of which Extra I would be playing, just that I wanted to play an Extra and maybe help the christians try and convert you.
  I dunno, it was just a suggestion, I wasn't trying to say my way is right and you are wrong and evil, but I was trying to say that having anyone call a conflict at any time might cause us to miss out on some cool narration, that's all.