Streets of the City

The Game

I’ve been gaming with this group for about a year now. I’ve known one player for a little longer; we gamed together in a sadly dysfunctional D&D campaign. The other players had gamed together for about a year before we came into it.

This time around we've decided to run a low dice, no formal system, mean streets cyberpunk campaign. This post outlines our group, our framework for play, and ends with some questions about how to make freeform play work for you.

The Group

Duane is a print designer who is very enthusiastic and interested in experimenting but is also attached to traditional role-playing systems like Earthdawn and WFRP. He drove the WFRP campaign idea.

Nathan is an artist who cut his teeth on White Wolf games and has a distaste for fantasy gaming. His gaming style tends towards cinematic open ended play. He ran the Abberrant game.

Landon is older than Duane or Nathan – closer to my age. He has a lot of experience with games like Cyberpunk and D&D 2e. His style tends towards ‘building ‘a character over time and tense limited resource situations. The game I’m describing is largely his baby.

I’ve played for a long time, and cut my gaming teeth on D&D 2e. However, my preferences tend towards hard science fiction and Cyberpunk. I’ve also tried to sell the group on any number of indie games, succeeding with Universalis.

We previously played Aberrant for about 6 months, very free ranging but with a touch of Illusionism I think. We did lots of fun things involving Space Nazis and time travel and the like.

After that we moved on to an ill-fated short story campaign arc Warhammer FRP game with a new GM for each story arc. That game derailed on an ugly note when I tried to sneak in some Narrativist techniques that tugged on some overly personal plot hooks. The player left the group. Squick. However, to be fair, the main problem was that it strongly spotlighted some interpersonal problems focusing on one of the players.

After this we cooled down on RPGing for a while with some German board games and several one session Universalis games, which were very well received. Over beers one night, Landon, Nathan and I decided to discuss a new framework for a role-playing game. We started out using Universalis as a mechanism to discuss rules and setting for our proposed game.

Our Framework

I already posted the agreed framework in the previous thread, but this is what we’ve come up with:

• GMing is on a per session basis. At the end of every session, dice are rolled, with a 50% chance of GMing duties remaining in the same hands for the next session. Otherwise, they are randomly assigned. No allowances are to be made for position in an ongoing story. The next guy takes the reins and that's it.
• Strong scene framing rights for the GM. The specific example used during our negotiation was of an absentee player's character's life used as the stakes for a session. The goal of play is to save your buddy's life, he's been shot in the leg real bad and you don't have the money to take him to a doctor. You've got two hours to raise the cash or get it done by other means - or else he bleeds to death.
• The characters must remain poor and hungry. If they become wealthy, they must lose that wealth.
• Characters are entirely mortal. They are in no way protected by a PC halo.
• Hands off other GM's NPCs, unless the players drive the conflict. If the PCs go to the street ripper seeking help and end up shooting him, that's OK, but you can't use him as a primary antagonist.
• No blocking other GM's contributions. If one GM suggests that MegaCorp, Inc. is using street urchins as incubators for their new biomodifications, only to rip the body parts out later, then when you are GM you cannot reveal that MegaCorp's involvement is a red herring, and the real villian is OtherCorp GMbh. You could use MegaCorp or the urchins as a plot element in your story.
• Setting is intentionally left vague and is meant to be unveiled through play. As a start, there is a city at the base of a corporate arcology.
• Supernatural elements must be kept covert: nothing that be shown on the evening news can be introduced into play.
• System is limited to opposed dice rolls and general description level skills. Beyond that it is subject to GM fiat. In our example play, the GM hid his rolls from us.

Actual Play

During the negotiation regarding advancement, we came to a point where Landon claimed that formal advancement was unnecessary. I disagreed, and he proceeded to start a short example of play, simply by saying “OK, you’re a techie, and you’re a fixer, you’re in a bar, and you see several gang members walking towards you.”

I don’t want to delve into a blow-by-blow, but system-wise Landon simply asked us to describe our actions, carefully outlining the risks of failure, and then rolling a single ten-sided die, with ones exploding downwards (roll again and subtract) and tens exploding upwards (roll again and add). Formal target numbers were not declared, and so the success of your action was uncertain until Landon declared it. Failures tended to be demeaning (falling in a pool of puke and the like), but largely based on bad luck rather than personal weakness. Successes were satisfying and invariably led to any results you were trying to achieve.

Through that encounter we met a local gang leader, who offered us a ‘job’. That’s where we stopped play and agreed that this would be a good model for a campaign.

All in all we were pretty excited. Theory-wise I had all sorts of notions running through my head (which all turned out to be more or less irrelevant, but more on that later).

For the first formal session Duane played with us, having agreed to play in this manner and having had the terms of the Universalis negotiation shown to him. He had previously played with Landon in this style and so he agreed without much discussion.

Landon introduced Duane’s character by saying that he had been hired to kill the gang leader who had just hired us, who he saw coming up the stairs from the bar (to arrange a meeting). Duane kicked him and he flew down the stairs, breaking his neck. A dispute over payment ensued, and his character retreated down the stairs to escape vengeful gang member – you might say there was a set of tracks that led that way.

Landon later told us that the game was supposed to center on the job we were going to do, but that he hadn’t actually expected Lenny the Gang Boss to fall quite so hard. So as it turned out the entire session became an extended bar brawl, where we confronted chains of gang bangers and dispatched them in various ways.

Our combat actions tended to center on positioning to get an extra roll or two in before the hammer fell, while getting ready to strike a telling blow if there was an opportunity.

Landon definitely succeeded in applying constant tension on us, as we fought and twisted to get out of a dangerous situation. And aside from the tracks down the stairs that I mentioned the entire scenario felt very open ended. We could do whatever we wanted, but there would be consequences. At the same time we felt very much at risk as characters.

We ended the session in hiding from the wrath of the gang after having patched up Duane’s character’s knife wound. In the process my character had quite surprised me by turning out to be quite the little cornered rat under pressure. I hadn’t meant him to turn out that way at all.

Wrapping Up

We rolled the dice, and I was the GM for the next session. If there’s interest I’ll post the results of that session, but in short it went well. The players surprised me totally but I ran with it, and we kept the gritty feel going. There was PC death, escalating tension and gritty drama. The whole game was a chase scene from start to finish, beginning with the introduction of untrustworthy PCs and moving through unfriendly door knocks, escaping from an apartment building totally surrounded by enemies, and running through the streets - culminating in a rip roaring vehicle chase.

Still it was far from thematic or even driven in any particular direction other than grit. What it resembles is a crime drama or Grand Theft Auto.

Is it going to keep being cool? Or are we headed for the precipice? Heck, I don’t expect you to answer that, but what are your experiences with freeform play? Where are the pitfalls we need to avoid, how do we keep it fair GMing and keep the tone right?