[theInfected2] Spiders of Phoenix

[Eric Provost]

A few months back I hammered out a little zombie movie game I called Shamble and Moan.  By the time I got done with it I was calling it the Infected, but it never turned out to be a game I actually wanted to play.  At the beginning of the month I was daydreaming at work about what I'd like the game to look like in play.  By the end of the day I had a sequel to my monster movie game.

In the Infected 2 you play someone who's trying to accomplish something very important in their lives.  Something that's personally important.  Something like painting your one great masterpiece or finally asking the love of your life out on a date.  Naturally, the problem is that the living dead have shown up on your doorstep and are totally fucking up your plans.  There's a copy of the PDF of the game on my website.  Or, if you don't want to click through that link at the bottom of the page to find the game, here's a direct link.

Last night Lisa and I got together with Andy K and Mark Causey to give this second version it's first playtest.  Lisa and Andy had playtested the first version with me, but Mark hadn't seen anything about it yet.  It took me about half an hour to sit down and explain the rules to them.  I figure that's not too bad, really, since that was the first time I explained the rules to anyone.  I showed the versions of the Motivation cards I'd created using the 'artist notes' to them and they really grooved on the visual description that they were going to use to create their character's goal. 

After the rules explanation we jumped right into character creation.  Almost immediately I realized I'd made a mistake.  We hadn't discussed a setting or what the monsters would be like in any detail.  I'm confident that this omission led directly to the players feeling a bit fumbly with trying to author their characters.  There just wasn't any direction for them to go in.  Fortunately, it worked out alright. 

Setup
Lisa created the character "Stacie", a highschool art student outcast to play.  We discovered through play that she was the spoiled and demented daughter of a Senator.  While we didn't know it yet, Lisa had drawn the motivation card of "Misunderstood Maestro", and was grooving on the idea that she was going to push the limits of the game by starting out a little crazy and monstrous herself.

Mark created the youngest character in the group, a 9 year old boy named "Timmy".  Timmy was having issues with his dad, which we discovered later was because his mom had been committed to a nearby asylum.  Mark had the card "Mouse and Raven" to work his goal with.

Andy created "John" an office worker.  A bit of a computer guy, if I remember correctly.  He'd drawn the card "A man in chains" and seemed to be constantly working towards freeing his character from the chains of his career.

Once we realized that we hadn't talked about the setting or monsters at all we collectively came up with the idea that we'd play in a modern-day Phoenix Arizona during a catastrophic drought and heatwave.  The monsters then would be creatures that were after water.  Namely the water and fluids in the human body.  Early on, someone mentioned something about "spider-like" which ended up shaping how the monsters transformed in the final act.

Act 1
At the moment when we were ready to actually kick our characters into play we were all just sitting and staring at each other.  None of us, myself included, had any idea where to start the story out.  I'd totally neglected to figure out who should frame what scene and how.  When I was writing it seemed like a non-issue.  Well, it definitely was an issue.  After considering for a moment, I suggested that the players should start things out, not the GM.  After all, only they knew what their goals were and only they could really frame up a proper conflict around them.

The result was that we had a couple bland scenes and conflicts about kids trying to get to school and exert their Independence over their elders and one about John and his slacker partner Charles (an important NPC authored by Andy) trying to put on a proper presentation.  There were some interesting bits set up in this act.  Like discovering that John's usual partner in these presentations was in the hospital from dehydration.  Problem is, I was so distracted by trying to see if the mechanisms were working properly that I neglected to build off of these interesting events.

The first scene where we got to see the PCs being monstrous to get hold of their infected dice was also the first one where Timmy and John came together.  Andy had framed a scene where he was desperately trying to get out of Phoenix and there was a traffic jam.  I added that the traffic jam was because a stretch Lincoln had collided with an ambulance, sending the ambulance down into a deep concrete ravine.  If you've ever lived in Huston, or any other city prone to flash floods, you know the things I'm talking about.  Or if you've never lived in one of those places, think Terminator 2's big-rig chase scene.  Anyway, after I'd described the situation, Mark chimes in that Timmy and his dad are there too, also trying to get out of town.  Mark narrates that, just as they're passing the old man he's going to suddenly lash out, grabbing dad's steering wheel to try to run the plague carrier over.  With a series of failed rolls and re-rolls, eventually we find dad crashing the family sedan into a second rescue ambulance, tilting the whole thing over the edge and down the ravine.  Dad manages to push Timmy from the car before it's dragged down and crushed beneath the ambulance.  Dad's dead, but it's not the last time we see him.

There was an interesting recurring NPC just cast as "That old man" who was our plague-carrier.  Constantly showing up in the first act as my solo monster, spreading the disease of the undead and he shambled from scene to scene.  Possibly the best scene he was in was when Timmy was connecting with his social worker, Mary, and trying to figure out where his mother had been taken.  Mind you, this was the first scene where we got to meet Mary and to discover that Timmy's mother had been taken from him.  I introduced the Old Man causing trouble in the lobby of the social services building to bring in an infected die to counter Mark's conflict to find his mother.  Eventually a couple of social workers ended up tussling with the old man, but his undead strength was too much for them, and the trio went crashing into the office where Timmy and Mary were working, destroying the computer they were using to track down his mom.

By the end of Act 1, we hadn't really pulled any of the PCs together.  I think the issue is that I hadn't figured out what the GM was supposed to be doing for scene framing in those early scenes.

I'll be back in a minute with more.

[Eric Provost]

Act 2
We opened up the second act with Mark trying to tie his character's story in with someone else's.  Namely Andy's.  He narrated Timmy and Mary at Mary's apartment, trying to track down Timmy's mom.  Mark suggested that John might live in the same complex and that Mary would go to him for computer help.  So John brings over Charles from work (because they were about to have a couple beers) and Charles invites over a girlfriend, which pisses off Mary. 

I introduced Charles's girlfriend as the GM to bring in a monster and we had a great little classic B-rate horror movie scene where you get to see the girlfriend and Charles in Mary's bathroom going at it.  The classic part being that Charles doesn't notice that Mary looks a little dehydrated nor does he notice her growing thick spider-hairs on her back while they're fooling around.  All of which, while fun & interesting, was way off of our stated conflict of tracking down Timmy's mom.  It was another great scene that never ended up properly connected to anything.

Lisa had a couple scenes with Stacie trying to continually rebel against her dad and dad's security guard, Earl (as played by Michael Clark Duncan).  First she escaped her dad's private residence/compound when a group of hippies came up complaining that ol' dad was watering his lawn during a water shortage, then she hooked up with another depraved youth by the name of Joe to watch a family burn alive in their own home because the fire department hadn't enough water to fight the fire.  Later on I made my first attempt to tie her to the other stories by having Timmy's dad return as a half-spider monster, calling to her and asking if she'd seen Timmy.

We finally got to see all three PCs hook up at the end of Act 2 at a truckstop on the way to the mountains, where everyone was heading for their own purposes.  Mark went for the genre-supported scene where his character goes off on his own for no good reason (to use the bathroom), and it just didn't turn out very well.  The system really encourages bringing along as many NPCs as you can to be successful, so it kinda ended up a bit flat.  Granted, Timmy was attacked by the spider-monster "Betty" from the truckstop, but the whole doing things by myself-vibe didn't end up working out at all. 

The first scene where we got to see all the PCs in the same conflict together was the very last conflict for Act 2.  The group of PC and NPC survivors were gathered in the truckstop parking lot when they were set upon by an entire highschool football team turned monster.  The whole thing got just a little bit silly for a few moments, as we collectively narrated how two football-spiders had been fighting behind the schoolbus, one eventually popping the head off of the other, sending it flying towards the PCs.  Which the rest of the team instinctively remembered they were supposed to chase (as if it were their football) and causing a panic amongst the living.  Mark managed to bring the whole scene back to the horror level for us by narrating how Timmy embraced the monster within him, physically transforming into a spider-monster, and attacking the football team to protect everyone else.  The horror flavor came back as Timmy collapsed, crying, seeing what he'd done and become.

Act 3
We did some heavy-handed scene framing to open up Act 3.  Timmy was a spider-monster and locked up in a padded cell in the Asylum.  I got the vibe that we were missing something that was needed to tie things together well, but Lisa opened right up by declaring that she had a scene and we went with it. 

Stacie had gone down to Timmy's cell and started talking to him about how she'd seen his dad as a monster.  She kept it up, teasing and taunting him, hoping that the stress would cause him to transform completely into a spider.  Andy took on the role of two of the NPCs (Lisa's Earl and recently authored Tom, a militant conspiracy theorist type) who saw what Stacie was up to by way of the in-house security cameras and went running down to calm down Timmy and try to take Stacie out of there.  The eventual result being Stacie's complete failure and Timmy reverting back to human just a bit, shedding two of the spider legs that he'd grown to fight the football team.

Eventually the Asylum became home to a few dozen other survivors that were never named.  We had a scene or two where hordes of spider-monsters came swarming over the walls of the compound, bringing all the characters together in a bloody fight.  We watched Stacie try her best to place herself up as the spider queen, trying to take control of the monsters herself and Timmy resigning himself that he wouldn't find his mother after all.  Which I thought was a shame.  I think maybe Mark found himself at a dead-end, having expected to find his character's mom here at the asylum eventually, but then having other players' narrations kinda hint that there was no one there besides them.  I think we very well could have, and maybe should have chased on after Timmy's mom, but I think the fault was that the PCs weren't properly wrapped together in plot, even as late as half way through the 3rd Act. 

Eventually we saw a somewhat confusing ending where John was the only survivor and the only one to achieve his goal.  Which was um...  Yeah.  I can't remember.  Freeing himself from being a corporate lackey?  See, one of the awesome things about the game is that the players get to change and morph their goals for their character during play.  But, maybe just because it was a slippery playtest, come the end of the game, I was kind of confused about what everyone's goals were.  I remember that Stacie's was to become the Spider Queen, ruling the world with her masses of monsters.  And I think Timmy's was to kill off the other survivors in the compound, for having cheated him out of his proper family.  Which... I totally fucked up and had the spiders kill off pretty much every survivor in the first round of the ensuing conflict, robbing Mark of that goal.  My bad.

Afterward
It was pretty late when we got done, but we had a great chance to sit around and discuss what did and didn't work with the game.  I was really pleased that almost every crunchy bit worked just like I'd imagined it would.  I expect to work out a better system for dealing with player vs. player ties and to probably skinny down the number of steps in the process of improving an important NPCs stats.

The bits that really need work are all the soft-bits.  The who narrates what and when bits.  I absolutely need to give the GM some direct instructions for how to tie things together to form a more cohesive story.  Which makes it fortunate for me that I really just learned how to do that well this year at GenCon, playing The Mountain Witch.

I also need to work out just who gets narration rights in a conflict.  After seeing the whole process in front of me, I'm thinking that the narration that comes after the dice are rolled really must go to the losers of the conflict.  After all, they're the ones who are going to be deciding if they want to reroll or not.  Which totally makes sense because that's the way it works in Trollbabe, which is where I borrowed the re-roll system from.

We also agreed that there should be a nice tight little system for getting things set up for the story, preparing the monsters.  Something that we imagine will resemble authoring the master in My Life with Master.  While the monsters always have to be humans that died from a communicable infection, there's still lots of room to author.  Like, do the monsters physically change over the course of the story?  What are they're physical characteristics?  etc.

I don't have anything in particular I need to ask you, or any advice I think I need right now, but I'm really excited about this playtest and I wanted to share it with you.  This game is leaps and bounds better than anything I've designed before, and I'm feeling pretty certain that if I can hammer out the fine details enough to produce regular awesome gaming I'll make this my first hardcopy-published design.  I'll be working out a new playtest document over the next couple of weeks.  Something a little easier to read and digest.  So, if you read what I've got so far and you have anything you'd like to ask or add, I'd love to hear from you. 

Thanks for reading,
-Eric

[Mark Causey]

This is Mark from the actual play of last night.

My (pertinent) notes are as follows:

I'd like to reiterate that I really wanted to have that cool scene with me going off alone and the horror of it all. I'm only thinking that such a spotlight hogging act should come as a challenge, with some major risk (and should only be for acting towards a goal - it's gotta be important).

I had trouble not wanting to spew out my thoughts and goals. I think it has to do with simple lack of experience with cool games where I actually care about my character's ongoing issues.

We each had little minutiae that I realize now would've really brought future scenes together, Big Lebowski style. Andy had a postcard, Lisa had her camera and pictures, and I had my swimming. Maybe the equivalent of an NPC card? The lack of character sheet was liberating and I love it to death, so I don't have any good idea for it. I'm guessing it's not necessary but some scenes might've had more oomph had they been remembered and narrated.

I have a lot of notes on zombie creation just because I could think of so many variations that filled the genre prerequisites.

I asked for a line not to be crossed at the beginning of the game. Eric, do you have lines and veils in the rules (I obviously haven't read over them yet).

I honestly thought that you shouldn't be able to make an NPC a card NPC until they were used in a dice roll but once I realized that you want to pump them up before risking them I understood. Alas, poor Dad, I should've probably left you not even written on my sheet.

I have a few notes on certain genre specific characteristics. My best bet is just to include them as notes in the final version. The rules work really well right now (besides the whole tie thing) and they're just so damn elegant.

Force the GM to lose her Infected dice by narrating your own durn zombies! Great tactic.

When is the underdog supported, rules wise? Something to think about. Also, don't get attached to NPCs. They're tools to be used. And give them to the GM if you want cuz they get immunity and that's an inspired bit of awesomeness.

I had lots of fun, Eric. Thanks for letting me play!

[knicknevin]

Hi Eric!

I like the new direction you're taking, going back to the core concept; the 'survivalist-style' of the firts version was cool but I think this will be much easier to play as a one-off game.

One thing from reading the draft and the playtest notes above, and which was an issue in the playtest I conducted of the previous version, is getting the PCs together: its nice to have the freedom to go where you want and do what you want, but its not very 'zombie-movie'. The 'group of strangers thrown together by chance' works well, but there needs to be a little more incentive to keep the PCs together, at least in the style of game I like: I'd be worried that 3 or 4 players would all decide to do different things, creating NPCs to aid them rather than relying on other PCs. Maybe PC groups need to be stronger, perhaps by rasing the number of dice PCs get to roll when they work together or even changing the die size, e.g. 2 players roll d8s, 3 players roll d10s and 4 players roll d12s.

[Mark Causey]

Im not trying to supersede Eric in any way, but here's my observation:

In Actual Play you did better if other NPCs were there because if you narrated them on your side you got their bonus. So it behooves you as a player to make your own way to the other characters.

[Eric Provost]

Mark's pretty much got the right of it.  This system is designed to inspire the players to bring their characters together on their own.  The single die for PCs and the slow-climb of NPC stats means that it's more power for you if you drag either another PC or someone else's already-used NPC in on your side of a conflict. 

I'm guessing that the primary reason why it didn't fire as well as it could have in our first playtest session was that all my players were out to see where the system would break.  I'm feeling pretty confident at this point that if the players are aware of how the system favors them dragging each other together, instead of waiting for the GM to do so, that the seperate-stories thing won't be any kind of issue at all.

In fact, I think that the advice to the GM in this system should almost encourage trying to keep the PCs apart.  However, when the GM does this, he or she should still be trying to thematically connect the PCs' stories.  So long as the entire thing comes together as one big story in the end and the players are aware that they are authorized to forcefully drag each other into conflicts, then I don't think it'll fall flat again.

In fact, I'm so confident that it'll work out well, I'm going to encourage players to consider trying to go solo as long as possible in the next session.  I don't think it'll break, or even be weak if I'm doing my job properly, so I'm willing to push it real hard.  I'll let you know how it goes. 

-Eric