[Best Friends] At Dragonmeet

[Graham W]

Best Friends went down a storm at Dragonmeet: five strangers randomly signed up and gelled quickly. Here's some notes on how it went (mainly for the reference of anyone else planning to run it at conventions).

My blurb for the game was very general: the title was The Mystery Of Black Rock Ridge, the set-up had the girls on holiday in the mountains, and there were teasers like "Is that howling you can hear in the distance?". The idea was that the players could decide the genre: schlock horror, Cthulhu, boarding school comedy, whatever.

Being a con, the players arrived gradually and, as they arrived, I asked them to think about a genre. They first suggested Scooby Doo. After a bit of chat, I said "Do you want it as cheesy as Scooby Doo?", and they decided not: by the time everyone had arrived, they'd decided on a Buffy-like feel, but British.

Character creation went down well. I suggested they choose Nonsense that impacted on each other and suggested some external adversity (see [Best Friends] Larceny, hatred, and supportive actualization and [Best Friends] Thor is no damn good)

At first, I framed a scene with them arriving at a log cabin. That scene never got going: it was all about unpacking. After a few minutes, I suggested we abandon it and fast-forward to the middle of the night. This time, I started them off with a fire and the cabin filling with smoke. The scene, um, caught light immediately: lots of struggling to get out the window and rescuing clothes and pets.

They got out of the cabin and I threw in some random "mystery" elements: a mysterious symbol carved on the door and a black van driving away. I'd no preconceptions of what these meant, of course. We faded the scene out there and I framed them one, outside a big mansion (they'd traced the van there somehow). Lots of crashing vans through gates to get in.

And that's how the game continued. My biggest contribution to the game was scene framing. The scenes all started with some external adversity: so I framed scenes with a burning cabin, with a mansion to break into, with the girls captured in a dungeon and with a final fight against the villain and his minions.

It seemed important to fade the scenes out soon after the adversity had been overcome: after they'd escaped the cabin, broken into the mansion, escaped the dungeon. At this point, the players would still be initiating conflicts, but they'd all be working in different directions, and they seemed grateful each time I said "Shall we end it there?".

I kept reminding them, in setting stakes, to keep focussed on each other, not externals. So sure you can hotwire the van, that's no problem: but what does that do to your Friends? (The player decided that he wanted to hotwire the van, start it up and spray one of his Friends with mud). Even in the final scenes, I needed to remind them of this: sure you can take down the main villain, but how does that affect the other girls? (It became a competition to see who could take him down first).

Oh, and on Gregor's advice, we started with two friendchips per player (see    
Re: [Best Friends] New to gaming... Bring It On! ). This seemed to work well. One guy ran out and one hit the maximum limit.

The game went well: one of the players shot off to the Collective Endeavour stall to buy the game afterwards. It was a light, comedy feel, with no real intensity, and that worked well for the group.

[Emily Care]

Sounds like a good game, Graham. And the emphasis you put on asking them to figure out how the stakes affect the other pcs is good advice I'll take into it the next time I play.

best,
Em

[Paul King]

I played in that game, got to 5 chips more than once (and sprayed with mud).  The plot was rather confused, and didn't make a lot of sense but that just emphasised the idea that the game was really about conflicts between the Friends.

I enjoyed it enough to buy the book (& CD), start planning a Gloranthan scenario (hopefully to be run at Recombination) and wonder about an Amber variation (set prior to the books).

[Graham W]

Thanks, Paul, glad you enjoyed it. Could I get some more feedback from you? (Don't feel you have to be nice, by the way).

You mention the lack of plot. How much did it bother you? One of my faults, when running this game, might be that I encourage people to play it for comedy, and the narrative suffers.

How was the cooperative genre-deciding and character creation? Is that something you're used to? Did it sit well with you?

Since you're thinking about running it at Recombination: what would you do differently from the way I did it?

There you go, loads of questions. Any feedback you've got would be useful.

Graham

[Paul King]

The games not exactly fresh in my mind, but I'll try to answer your questions.

The genre deciding went predictably, I thought.  "Buffy" level is a good middle ground between outright horror and silliness.  I'm not sure that it was worth the time spent on it for a Con game.  The cooperative aspect of character generation isn't new to me - but the way the other players generate your character stats is.  It's not something  that I think I would appreciate in a long-term campaign, but it's OK in occasional one-offs.

The plot problem was a minor annoyance.  I suppose it was a likely consquence of allowing Conflicts to have a major effect on the narrative.  So there's a tension there between playing it as a typical RPG or a more story-oriented games (perhaps exaggerated by the fact that there is no separation between conflict resolution and narrative control). 

The main difference for the game I'm planning is that I have fairly strong ideas about what's going on behind the scenes, and I've got ideas pf what the scenes will be.  However I would emphasise that that's because I came up with an idea I wanted to run.  It isn't a reaction to your game (other than the fact that it made me want to run a Best Friends game in the first placer).