For those not familiar with the subject:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=17632.0
http://www.1km1kt.net/rpg/Apocalypse_Girl.php

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At last we have played this promising game and have much to tell. There were three players, just as proposed in the rules, and we were mostly following written rules,though not once we had to add something on the fly or add something uncovered in the original text.

Overall reaction was quite favourable. After having finished the 3-hour game we felt like playing again, each of us. The fun seemed to consist of narrativist roleplay : boardgame as 5:4 or such. Several characters were established, and as the game was progressing, it reflected their relations. I am going to describe this further.

Concerning the rules.

I

Main thing we had to change after all (which troubled us during the first half-game yesterday, and starting from the scratch today we applied it after all) was lack of instant use of free dice. In the rules it is stated, that one can throw dice during his turn. This proved to be super-restricting. Without the smallest arguments we introduced a set of rules for using free dice outside of one's turns:

1. One can use free dice instantaneously, in response to another's dice (and thus possibly preventing their results) or just by itself.

2. One cannot throw dice for stacking a pile outside of his own turn, be it a pile upon his own Engines, or those controlled by other players.

3. Therefore, one can only use instant dice to cancel other's stacked dice (via the x-1 sides rule), or one's just thrown dice before they came to effect.

4. If a player (the owner of the turn) throws several dice, instant dice may be rolled in responce to that amount of them, that was originally used. Eg.: A rolled 3 dice against B's Core's Meaning, and B countered them with any number of his own dice, but only that, and not the separate counters against each of dice. This means, rolling a group of dice is deemed here as one action, and not several split actions.

5. One can cancel stacked dice by instant rolls. Eg.: a player may save free dice, and just before his turn use those Free dice to finally cancel dice stacked on one of his engines. If A has several dice by B stacked on one of his Engines, he can save the cancelling procedure (the x-1 sides cancel on d6, with x - the result number) up until the end of his last opponent's turn, so that he could have free dice for some emergency countering while other players play their turns.

II
The gun, it's use and effects of it's use were not defined enough. There we had an argument, but at last settled with the following.
1. Gun's Power rises every full round at the beginning of the first player's turn.

2. During one's turn that player's use of gun takes priority. Eg.: its A's turn; B wants to use 3 of the Gun's 5 dice, but A was into using those himself. The A prevails, for its his turn.. A doesn't have to state his intentions concerning the Gun until he wished so (but he can't just take the gun's dice and keep it: if wants B to keep his hands off all four of Gun's dice, he has to use them all himself, though at any point of his turn).

3. Gun recoils just as it is stated in the original text. Why I comment that at all is that it wasn't really clear from the start if the original mechanic will work fine. It seemed to do just well. But...

4. But Guns recoil doesn't take effect immediately after the guns use. We finally agreed that recoil should be the thing happening just after the end of the turn, in which the Gun was used. Thus, if either A, or b, or C use the Gun during A's turn, it explodes just after A says "I'm over".
Point 4 is not for nothing here. Guns recoil has great impact upon, mostly, Cores (for they have high Attributes), and thus on turns 3-4 its nothing to wreck everything, throw in some dice and end the game without any work at all. Math is simple: each of, say, 3 Gun dice used to cover enemy Core's Meaning (in order to capture it), would also have blaster 3 more loyalties (and that's the stat responsible for easiness oa capture). Now every Core produces 5 dice even from the start, and at turn 3 each player has 2 or 3 Engines, some of them even probably upgraded to power 2 or 3. Thus, anyone needs to wait until one player spends his dice, kill the other (which would have been that easy, as described) and win, having more dice (remember, that one of the players lost his dice - that was the moment, and the other - anyone! -  was wrecked). If I wasn't clear enough, ask and I'll go into further details on this.
Now the, is one's turn ends BEFORE the Gun ricochets, game doesn't end: you can't capture Engines or Cores during other player's turns. Only if player with his Core damaged and Conflict dice-littered hesitates enough for the full round to pass, would the game end. It should take more tactics, than brute force and chance, to win.

5. Gun's dice-pool recharges at every player's turn start ("upkeep" as we called it). That's just normal and fair.

More following...

More concerning game mechanics.

III

Easiness of Engine creation and capture was once thought to be too much. Well, it proved to be OK. If one wants to keep his Engine, he has to strengthen it's Loyalty, and that was just what we used to do. Also keepeng 2 or 3 free dice for means of countering became customary.
Engine destruction, though never occured during our play, was always being taken into account and considered as means of possible tactics. Well, sedice it or shoot it in the head was also a choice. They all died of the war, which Dragon's beloved character struck upon the world, but that paparazzi was always walking on the edge even before the big 4-die recoil conflict, you know.

Whats still an issue, is what happens to the Engine, if it's Loyalty if decreased to 0. Power 0 kills it, OK, but does Loyalty 0, too? We thought of the Engine lose its Loyalty and become a small weapon-like free engine, just that it deosn't grow each turn and does no recoil. Anyone can use dice generated by it every turn, but that smal loyalty-less Engine can neither be captured, nor upgraded - just deastroyed, possibly by overlapping it's strength or even it's mere 0-dice Loyalty. That wasn't thought well, for situation didn't arise yet in actual gameplay. But rising Power without rising Loyalty is considered a tactic, and then its somewhat vulnerable to, most of all, Gun damage (players would probably capture it then painfully decrease it's Loyalty through its upgraded strength).

See some table examples next.

And thats how it all turned out.

The game finished after 5 rounds (4 full, and 1|3 of the 5th).

Order was: Dragon, Girl (that happened, and I lost {:{)=- ), World.
On his forst turn the Dragon spawned the Engines, one of which was a character. We didn't think of a rule for instant dice, so he didn't keep any and thus used some of his free to upgrade something in his new Engines. Then the Girl spawned an Engine and upgraded it to be 2/2, which took, obviousely, 4 free dice + 1 to spawn the Engine itself. World spawned and Engine, and also stacked something ot Girl's Core's Meaning.
Then there was some powering their Engines up on the second round. Girl cancelled some of the World's dice on her Core's Meaning (but not the 6, whch can't be cancelled, as it turned out: indeed, you need to roll a 7 on d6 to cancel a 6 :) ). Some dice capture also took place. Girl tried out placing some dice upon World's Meaning. World cancelled some of the Girl's dice, captured some also, and then captured the Dragon's best Engine - his character one. The event gave both the World and the Dragon some Chrages - as per the original text. Then, on his nearest turn the Dragon captured his Engine back and upgraded it (him, actually, us being roleplayers) to be 3/3 power/loyalty. Well, it never kept one from being captured by the Girl (oh the narrations) on her next turn (Girl and Dragon both got their Charges). Keeping her (well, his - my) charge, the Girl battled some of the Worlds dice stacked upon her Core's Meaning, and kept three of them (2 core and 1 Charge) for defence. World wasn't able to capture the character, though he tried. But then Dragon did it with his fresh powers, both him and the Girl getting charges again. Now the, the Girl had troubles with bringing the strong Engine back, for Dragon battled it ferociousely. World was into piling some dice on Girl's Core's Meaning (having really much 6es there, which can' be cancelled, only captured if I rolled a 6 for the matter myself). Well. Too bad for everyone the world didn't try to recapture or otherwise demoralise the 3/3 character..
Now, on the beginning of turn 5, Dragon captured (for some still unknow reason - not even narration) World's character (by that time World had two Engines, second of which was a character), and then he decided to end it all. He tried and shot 5 of the Gun's dice at Girl's Meaning, piling them there. Then he threw in his for then free Core's dice, four more from the Charge, two more from another Chrage, and two more from the second Engine the Dragon controlled. Well, weakened by World's attacks, the Girls succumbed after all, her Core (being a character itself, sole Core-character in the game) captured. The game ended. Now then, even though Dragon accumulated quite a much Charge dices (last one was very lucky - dice were even, so he got all 4 of them), it wasn't known that he could end the game, untill the Girl started to roll ones for her counters. That tremendous massive attack, using up all of free charges, and the power of upgraded Engines, could have been in vain if only the Girl managed to counter mere two of the dice. It is harder to win in AG that in may seem.
Now then, neither World nor Dragon had any dice left. Well! Who won? We diceded that Dragon wins, for he had definitely more engines at the end of the game (remember that he captured one at his fifth turn, that being 3 against World's 1).

The narration, briefly, following.

What I said in second post was somewhat around 50% of the game. Believe it or not.
Ofcourse, all three of us are roleplayers. The game was not tested on non-roleplayers yet. But I think, that  the main point of the game is telling _how_ things happen, not what dice are being rolled. You're so cool rolling your Core dice against my character, then tell me how it's Meaning influences him at all. Well, the last can always be done. But it makes people think different. It makes your game easier if you establish a logical, realistic structure. Well,proved, if one delves into dice relations too deep, it won't be that easy for him to explain how his engine influences the other, or even the other Core, or counters some Charge-dice.And that makes the game! That is 50 or even 60% of the gameplay, being the equal tactical difficulty,  a thing to be seriously considered for the purposes of winning. Not mentioning the aesthetic pleasure (hope its okay to say "aesthetic pleasure" in English...) the game itself gives if played correctly.

I can't stress enough how were tactical decisions influenced by he meaning of game elements outside the dice-card mechanics.

The Dragon created his Engine, and that Engine became, as we afterwards saw, the kind of a main character in the story. Well, he was just into making nothing of the world. Then there were World's designs against this. There was bad weather and cold, and then that reporter, who also said the world was nothing, but meant something different. "Anomalies are nonexistant," was his idea. Everything is just as it is, and its nothing to be considered of valued. Things just happen. And soon the Dragon's character, that dark personality, stopped making difference between his nihilistic ideas and that one of the reporter's. Then there steps a Girl. Wasn't that the time when the nihilist thought of philosophy and religion? Whatever: she wasn't a godling she seemed, she caught cold and that paparazzi spoke of her, simplifying and vulgarizing everything to the Dragon's chosen tool. That didn't change his attitude. What did was the memory of his old thoughts, however strange this may sound... indeed, his past thought, though forgotten, now trampled upon him. He felt the Dragon once again, and that made him become what he was. He made steps, which would later do more harm that could be ever anticipated.
The Girls sees peoples destinies. She knew what would follow. She tried to stop that. She used the wrong methods, and then it was late.
Well, the world worked as it does often. Until the war broke out. And then the simple reporter was called by his friend, the chosen of the Dragon. And the journalist thought at last, that outstanding exists. He forsook his idea (and his Idea forsook him).
Next was the girl. Gods many things have happened. She forsook her ideas for the one's of her heroe's; she saw fate and succumbed to it. She tried to tell him, but that was no longer her, for the Girl ceased to exist, she gave in.

Well, what happened afterwards? Many dreadful things. Reporter was... shot. If not for his relations to the - well, the one who gave Dragon his victory died himself. A hero of flames and hate was devoured by both. On the ruins of the war-crashed world the girl alone remained, wounded and broken, and a faithful tool of the Dragon.

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That's would conclude it. All the, well, "story" narrated above was fully generated as an only mean to roll the dice :). Well, that was the first game, and also an enjoyable one. Hope this report was helpful, and happy to help more. We are going to play some more games this week, again. Indeed, a good roleplaying session is one that makes gamers ask when 's the next one.

P.S. Forgive my English. I tried to be as clear as I could. Forgive the "story" as well. It was fun playing, but probably not so fun reading, but I just had to illustrate this for example purposes. No, really.

Dude, I don't have any comments at the moment other than that you have nothing to apologize for. That was an awesome write up.

Mike

Unco, that's marvellous, thanks. Do send me a personal message with you & your friends' real name in full so I can put you in the credits for the next revision as the first-ever playtesters!

I'm travelling for the Thanksgiving holiday and have almost no Internet access, so I'm going to print this out, ponder it, and post in a few days. The only immediate thoughts that come to mind are:

1) Very good point about what happens when Engines go to Loyalty = 0. The current draft says, "uh, they can't go below Loyalty = 1, sorry," which is frankly lame. I think your idea that such Loyalty = 0 Engines become "detached" from any one player and move out into the middle of the table for anyone to use, like the Gun, is a very good one.

2) , how were you reading the "only roll dice on your turn" rule? What I meant that to say was "on your turn, you get to roll one and only one die from any of your Engines or Charges," so play goes around the table with each person rolling one die at a time. If you were misreading that rule letting each person roll as many dice as they wanted on one turn without anyone else getting to respond, that would be a problem, definitely. On the other hand, you could've been reading the rule right and just thinking that one die a turn is too bloody slow, which it probably is.

Sydney,

Oh, seems we played the game somewhat different than it was originally stated in the rules concerning the amount of dice to be rolled. But why split turns that much? And how does one use his, say, 5 Core dice if he can use only one?

So, thats either:
Roll dice in turns untill everyone spends their dice, then reset dicepools and "upgrade" the Gun;
Or:
Use all the dice, except for some saved for emergency countering ("cancelling") during each player's seperate turn (with a full circle of turns being a Gun-strengthening, etc. "round").

I have just talked to fellow players (with whom we played AG yesterday), and both said that they'd absolutely prefer second variant. Possibly you were right when you said that it would slow the game.
Btw, it seems that both ways of rolling dice are still quite close to each other in terms of gameplay; differences seem to be minor at this point. Still, possibly, the full-turn way is IMO nicer.

But yet again, single-dice-turns arise some nteresting opportunities for cross-narration. Hm...

A couple of small proposals after the second game (today).

1. Its only fair to disallowdice countering on the first full round. That is because the first player will always have no one to oppose his, well, doings, because everyone else are yet without dice. In his turn, after upgrading his first engine himself, he'll mess with other's upgrading procedure. It would have been fair, if not for the tactical advantage: the first player can always have his first engine upgraded, but successive ones - if only they get lucky in countering. Whether player 1 wins countering upgrades or not, he loses nothing except for the free dice which he would have lost at the start of his turn anyways.

2. Today, seeing the terrifying power of the Gun, and remembering that once we were into allowing to using of the Gun at other player's turns, we got terrified. Use of Gun should be absolutely limited to one's own turn (otherways the losing player can blow things up too many times in a row - his own turn of massacre on round, say, 5, is always of great consequences itself).
Eg.:
If player A blew things up at his turn and even still thought that it wasn't enough, he should wait the full round until he has another opportunity. Other players may, of course, shoot the Gun if they wished, which they probably won't.

3. It is advisable to players to not create too many engines. Around 5 is just more then enough! Better upgrade some, or capture the other players' engines, than create the 6th one: this may possibly stall play. (We, by the way, used to create 2-3 engines each and then go capture opponents' engines so that they couldn't benefit from them on their turns.)

4. Odd/even dice Charge creation mechanic is just great; but dice capture mechanic probably seems to be too obscure to control, leave alone enjoy. Though, other than dice-capture there is no way of getting rid of 6s (whether that's good or bad).

I've had a chance to sit down with the printout of your playtest reports, circling key points and scrawling comments in the margins like a mad copyeditor. I never imagined I would have such rich data to work with just a few days after writing the game! I can't thank you enough.

1. It works! It works!

Which is what I raced around the room saying after I read your reports carefully. [self-congratulation] That these rules are sufficiently clear, and the mechanics sufficiently robust, that people who've never met me (who aren't even native English speakers!) can understand the game and have this kind of fun with it, is tremendously gratifying. [/self-congratulation] Especially this:

Unco wrote:
World cancelled some of the Girl's dice, captured some also, and then captured the Dragon's best Engine - his character one.....then he [the Dragon] decided to end it all. He tried and shot 5 of the Gun's dice at Girl's Meaning, piling them there. Then he threw in his for then free Core's dice, four more from the Charge, two more from another Chrage, and two more from the second Engine the Dragon controlled. Well, weakened by World's attacks, the Girls succumbed after all, her Core (being a character itself, sole Core-character in the game) captured. The game ended....On the ruins of the war-crashed world the girl alone remained, wounded and broken, and a faithful tool of the Dragon.

Unco wrote:
the main point of the game is telling _how_ things happen, not what dice are being rolled. You're so cool rolling your Core dice against my character, then tell me how it's Meaning influences him at all....I can't stress enough how were tactical decisions influenced by he meaning of game elements outside the dice-card mechanics.

Unco wrote:
So, thats either:
[1] Roll dice in turns untill everyone spends their dice, then reset dicepools and "upgrade" the Gun;
Or:
[2] Use all the dice, except for some saved for emergency countering ("cancelling") during each player's seperate turn (with a full circle of turns being a Gun-strengthening, etc. "round").

Unco wrote:
Whether an Engine can use it's dice upon itself or not. Well. Probably this is it (and maybe not): none except the Cores can throw it's dice upon itself for any purpose.

Unco wrote:
If one wants to keep his Engine, he has to strengthen it's Loyalty, and that was just what we used to do.

Unco wrote: what happens to the Engine, if it's Loyalty if decreased to 0. Power 0 kills it, OK, but does Loyalty 0, too? We thought of the Engine lose its Loyalty and become a small weapon-like free engine, just that it deosn't grow each turn and does no recoil. Anyone can use dice generated by it every turn, but that smal loyalty-less Engine can neither be captured, nor upgraded - just deastroyed, possibly by overlapping it's strength or even it's mere 0-dice Loyalty.

Unco wrote: Engine destruction, though never occured during our play, was always being taken into account and considered as means of possible tactics. Well, sedice it or shoot it in the head was also a choice.

Unco wrote:
Its only fair to disallowdice countering on the first full round. That is because the first player will always have no one to oppose his, well, doings, because everyone else are yet without dice.....[And the] dice capture mechanic probably seems to be too obscure to control, leave alone enjoy. Though, other than dice-capture there is no way of getting rid of 6s (whether that's good or bad).

Unco wrote: After having finished the 3-hour game....

Unco wrote: Now then, neither World nor Dragon had any dice left. Well! Who won? We diceded that Dragon wins, for he had definitely more engines at the end of the game (remember that he captured one at his fifth turn, that being 3 against World's 1).

Believe it or not, but we were around as happy with the fact that AG works as You were! Now, though, its already a past thing - game works and thats a solid fact.
One question remains open at the moment: whether it works for non-roleplayers. We shal zee :) as I have plans for that, not so swift as the roleplayer group was organized, but still. Interesting to see how they'll react to that kind of (in a sence, intellectual :) ) gameplay.

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"3. The Gun's Ricochets - too strong!"
and
"9. Fast play!"
are strongly related.

We enjoyed the rules for the Gun (every dice recoiling separately), even though we thought otherwise for the start (before we used the Gun in actual play). But. The first game ended in 3 hours, the second one in 2. That seems to be a rule for now: up to the point where gun gets strength 5 or so, there is always a small player who wants to blast everything else by sheer brute power. He doesn't necesary win, though: current Gun is a chance to win in expence of further endangering self.
It was nice with the Gun. We really liked it. It was whats called "cool" in its essence. But it makes games go really fast.

One possible way of making games less swift is limiting Gun's progression. And just now an idea struck me: why not let those who want it to use some of their powers to stop Guns progression or to temporarily disable it? Just as character-engines, there could be gun-controller-engines (possibly, one for a side if they wish to bother at all): each side decides whether they wish the Gun to grow, or to diminish, or to halt.

"Power and Loyalty - redundant?"
Not really! In the second game we already practiced both strengthening all engines attributes and, for example, upgrading Power and keeping some dice to protect the engine from attacks by dice-countering. In different situations different choices prevailed (though defining that would need more games). SOmetimes we upgraded Loyalty so that enemies would rather try and capture other player's Engines, than throwing more dice on your ones and leving themselves defenceless.

Loyalty=0 Engines.
We thought of those Engines as being impossible to control or change, only use or destroy. Possibly just overlapping it's power should be enough for destroying it. I imagine loyalty=0 Engines as ones that have _lost_ their Loyalty attribute at all. Those lost sheep.

"Destroying an Engine - too hard? Or just right?"
In short, it seems OK as it is, as I believe.

"Dice capture & cancellation"
We did:
if dice are _piled_, and another players _rival-piles_ his dice on same Engine, if player B rolls a a number, and player A has just those numbers in his pile, those go to him.
The problem is, as we thought, thats "kinda unnatural or whatever". Dunno, we somehow, not even disliked it, but tended to think of it kind of less. It just "felt" somewhat wrong or unnatural.
That probably was just us - and I mean that, it may probably be just us. At least I have absolutely no explanation of that currently.

"8a) Everyone's Engines should start with a full Ready Pile of dice before the game begins, so why can no one counter or capture the dice of the first player? Perhaps the rule as I wrote it was unclear? Or am I just missing something?"

Now, we played it this way: dice piles are refueled (or fueled for the first time at all) when current player's turn starts. And those started in a sequence: the first one, the second, then the last; round over; first one's pile refueled and his second turn starts - and so on. Player's free dice are lost before his new turn is started: when player C says "i'm over", player A's dice kept for wicked are lost for naught.
So, when the first player starts his turn, he's the only one having dice on the table yet. He can do whatever he wishes. If he keeps his dice, his strategy is enforces on other players: their upgrades may get thwarted, though they had no chance of twarthing player A's upgrades at all.

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I have some thoughts on Engine capture, and some overall thoughts that I deem to be of meaning, but sorry - its already late here. I'll continue tomorrow. Please comment on the current post for now, if You would like to do so.

Unco wrote: One question remains open at the moment: whether it works for non-roleplayers. We shal zee :)

Unco wrote: "3. The Gun's Ricochets - too strong!" and
"9. Fast play!" are strongly related. ....where gun gets strength 5 or so, there is always a small player who wants to blast everything else by sheer brute power. He doesn't necesary win, though...One possible way of making games less swift is limiting Gun's progression. And just now an idea struck me: why not let those who want it to use some of their powers to stop Guns progression or to temporarily disable it?

Unco wrote: SOmetimes we upgraded Loyalty so that enemies would rather try and capture other player's Engines, than throwing more dice on your ones and leving themselves defenceless.

"So increasing an Engine's Loyalty is rather like an insect making itself poisonous and bad-tasting"

Sure thing a better protected Engine is less prone to becoming a capture target. Also creating a group of Loyalty-overpowered crawlers (with Power 1, because that would cost too much to upgrade power if Loyalty is high, and vice versa, as is known) is a tactic: they give you 1 die a turn, and they are solid with that.

My group of five played one game of Apocalypse Girl, with two Worlds and two Dragons, and one very confused Girl. Here are the players and results, in player order:

"Amanda, the Girl." Played by Geneva. Built up one engine of her own (Fluffy the Cat) and snatched a few other engines through "a little sniping," defending them through diplomacy and a few winks and smiles. Core enslaved by Lucifer during Ascension of Darkness.
"Liberty, the World." Played by Kara. The idea of human liberty as opposed to either divine or diabolical right. Tended to carefully nurture and defend a few personal engines (Green Party, the high school itself, and a couple of overly-nice and fuzzy people), provided a lot of defensive support to Prosperity and Amanda. Survived until the Ascension of Darkness.
"Satan, the Dragon." Played by Ryan. The Prince of Lies, manipulator of man's darkest nature. Relied upon a momentum strategy, snatching engines and not defending or building them much, but instead building Core loyalty and snatching more engines in a perpetual motion machine. Survived until the Ascension of Darkness, but displaced by Lucifer in the final outcome.
"Prosperity, the World." Played by Michael. America's consumer culture with no place for God (quite a place for the Devil but that's by the by). Relied heavily on low-power high-loyalty "crawlers," including a lot of CIA agents and politicos. Survived until the Ascension of Darkness.
"Lucifer, the Dragon." Played by yours truly. The Fallen Angel, cast out for Pride. Relied on a degenerate strategy of building a huge number of minor engines (drug addicts, terrorist cells and lecherous schoolkids), -really- hurting Satan when he tried to snipe them ("Vengeance shall be swift, certain, and entirely out of proportion to the crime") and a grandstanding finale. Won the game.

Rules used:
Multi-dice on your turn. (We considered allowing multidice turns -with- "any number of turns till we all pass," but decided it was too complicated.)
Gun may -not- be used to create engines (after Lucifer does it the first time).
If Core is captured, all engines ruled by the Core are also captured (never came up).
At Armageddon (or lack thereof), compare the two surviving sides' strength as a whole, then compare the winners' players if two remain.

The Narrative:
The plots were a struggle in America between the established government and a wave of activists, terrorists and foo, and the girl's personal life in an undefined American high school that somehow seemed to always attract media attention or otherwise change the fate of the nation and the. The actual national conflicts were rather dry but made a good backdrop, the high-school antics lightened the tone, and the mixes tended to provide the heroism and drama (and occasional nihilism). Geneva gets the star for narrative goodness with this memorable scene, however:

A political debate had ensued and a member of Congress was about to switch sides, thanks to the American Nazi Party candidate under Satan's control, when Fluffy the Cat got ahold of the mike, tangled in some wires right in front of the camera, and broadcast a feline plea for help to the world (completely spoiling the yelling match in the process). "Meow?!?"

(Okay, so we stretched realism a bit. Geneva's funny enough to get away with it. Besides, we needed to get out of the angst mode.)

The Gameplay, most of the game (using character names since that's our habit):
The brawling early on was mostly between Amanda, Satan and Prosperity with some rocking-the-boat by Liberty and core-attacks from me. There were no gunshots after I used the gun to make an engine (and -that- wasn't- done again), mainly because nobody wanted to damage their precious core loyalty. Generally speaking, Amanda and Satan did most of the stealing while Prosperity did a mix of theft and sniping. Liberty and I mostly built, and Kara was prime territory to -be- stolen from when she didn't leave enough for defense against concentrated Satan-fire. When Amanda and Satan tried to either reform or further corrupt my little beasts, I tended to respond with a mixture of stealing them back and damaging core loyalty, at the expense of expanding if need be. By the end of Turn 6, I had a collection of little killing machines numbering 15 or so, but nothing heavier than 1/1, with a 5/12 core (in other words, I was the weakest in total dice). The strongest non-core machine was Amanda's 6/6 death toy, Pink Puff High School, which had been taken over from Kara in 5 by Satan and now stolen by Amanda (and defended against a Satan charge). Satan had 3 Charges left, Amanda had 4, I had 7 (I never used any, yet), Kara 3, Michael 2. Then, on my turn, I lowered the "What the?" boom.

The Ascension of Darkness:

I grabbed all 6 Gun dice and held them for dramatic emphasis, looking at everyone with a cross between an evil grin and an angry snarl. Then, I commented, "I'm taking over Amanda." Each die started clattering, ricochets started to fly, everyone Looked At my horde of little engines that didn't care about the ricochets. When the dust settled, Amanda was a 1/3 Engine, with 6 marks on her. Amanda started defending, but she only got 5 of my dice removed before she ran out, and I calmly tossed down another two dice from my pile. With Amanda enslaved and everyone exhausted (while I was still pretty much fresh), I had more dice lying around than the rest of the bunch together. Everyone groaned. I finished with Fluffy's noble tear-jerking death and Amanda's collapse into despair, followed by her falling for the Lord of Evil, and we called it a day. (The way the mood was going after that final cheap-shot, though...I honestly considered having Fluffy fall victim to a random car. Decided against it.)

Conclusions:

Gun ricochets are overpowered, -waaay- overpowered. We knew that much. Also, because of gun ricochets, there's no point in building powerhouses when they're just going to die when the gun gets fired. Little one-piece toys become the ultimate bang for one's buck. We are not sure about the optimum number of players, but if Illuminati and other vampire games have taught us anything, more players mean more targets to feed from.

Narrative-wise: Mixing high-school humor and epic struggle is a very good way to keep the plot moving, as anime writers have often discovered. It's probably best to focus on character-driven scenes, but make sure to run a few Big Illuminati-Esque Political Events to provide a backdrop for the struggles before Armageddon. Above all, no meaningless, nihilistic angst, but I'm sure we knew that much. A normally grim tone is good, a dark gray background makes the light have that much more effect (as Fluffy the Cat discovered).

Wow. Five players! That doesn't just require filling in holes in the rules (e.g. who wins?); I'm pleasantly surprised the system held up at all. How long did the game take to play?

Yup, rolling multiple dice on one's turn = more fun. How did you all limit max dice rolled (if at all) and "counterattack" dice rolled by defending players?

And yeah, the Gun is way overpowered. I'll have a rewrite of the "ricochet" rules up soon -- people should badger me if I don't have it by Tuesday. (Deadlines turn out to be a great motivating device). I do like how grabbing for the Gun is such a dramatic moment, though; I need to preserve that without making it too over the top.

I'm also very interesting at the "crawler" strategy; I'll want to make sure it's still viable even with a lower-powered Gun.

I'll review all these notes. more carefully and come up with more questions. Thanks for such detailed notes! It's a huge help.

Even with a weakened gun, pumping out a huge flow of 1/1 engines, particularly for the last player in order, is an ultimate strategy in terms of bang for your die...

1. One die gets you another die next turn. 100% return-on-investment.
2. If someone steals it, you lose...all of one die, as opposed to 4 dice if a 4-point Power beast is stolen. You also might get a Charge out of it.
3. Building up loyalty means you are not directly cranking dice into dice supremacy. (A spread of defensive dice may be better.)
4. End of your turn, if the final player, you get all those dice off your cute little killing machines. (Which you may have stolen from other players who used this strategy without defense...)
5. Weakened/less dangerous Gun=more incentive to use the little toy of doom. (Something of a balance towards the first player, if -he- uses a crawler fleet...)

How about instead of the gun killing off all larger than X, how about it kills off only those with the same power as the number rolled? So the lowly one-engine has as much chance to die as any other. Except for one with 7 power or higher, which becomes immune to the gun. This gives incentive to build bigger engines to try to get to 7. Which is balanced by the counter-incentive against this that was mentioned - they become more tempting targets to try to take over, or reduce.

Here's a more complicated way to go. The player drawing the gun selects one of his engines to risk as the "shooter." Then roll a die and count engines to the left including one's own, and then moving on to the player to the left (all engines would have to be kept in a line from left to right). The engine indicated is then also at risk. Keep rolling a die and counting engines in the circle until you get back to the original player, or past him, that being the last roll and last engine indicated. Early in the game, this might be the original player, so it might incentivize waiting at first.

The gun dice are rolled. For each targeted engine, starting with the first to the left of the shooter, the owning player may roll up to as many dice from the engine that he has available, at most as many as the gun dice (he may gamble and roll less than the gun dice if he likes, perhaps if the gun dice rolled low). Or perhaps as many of the dice available as they wish to roll (though we don't want to overincentivize the large ones). If he rolls higher than the gun dice, the target is unaffected, else it is killed. Or, alternately, use the cancellation method, and each uncancelled gun die means a drop in power. Or somesuch.

What's cool about something like this is that you can then have table position as a strategy. You might put your most powerful shooter on the left as your "point" so that you can select it to be the shooter. Or a sacrificial small one. On the left so that several rolled ones on the targeting die won't end up shooting your own stuff. Further you can have an expenditure of dice to move engines around in your structure. There can be rules about having to enter something into your structure next to the thing that either spent from to create the engine, or spent from to convert the thing - ala Illuminati. You could even have an expensive "shielding" option where you could maneuver an engine behind another such that only the front one was in the targetting circle (when the shield engine is killed, move the background one forward). All sorts of options this opens up.

Two notes, generally, on the design. First, haven't played it, obviously, but to me, it sounds like the one die per round thing would be most fun. I'm a fan of incrementalism, and it means that the strategy is more intense, IMO. I could be wrong about that, though.

Second...anything you can do to add dimensions that move it further from parlor narration, the better. You already have extremely strong links to the setting and character elements mechanically, and you do have a fixed set of resolution options into which all types of actions can be divided. So it's pretty good from that POV. But if you could put in just a tad more cross-dimension of some sort, I think that might be cool.

BTW, I probably missed this but, how do you keep track of whose dice are whose? Color? Position? If not, then one of those things might be useful to add another dimension. How do you keep track of what the dice are for on a card? I mean, how do you know if loyalty is being attacked vs power being attacked? I imagined dividing the card up into four squares, with the remainder on the side a place for the name and the meaning. The quarters would have the scores diagonal from each other, and the dice in the other two diagonal boxes. Then you'd go against the score next to the dice to adjust the score above or below it. Or some such convention.

Mike

B.J., I've finally had a chance to really grill through your report. I think the Gun issue has been thoroughly discussed -- though hardly solved, so I'll concentrate on some other cool points you made:

Ramidel wrote: If Core is captured, all engines ruled by the Core are also captured (never came up).

With Amanda enslaved and everyone exhausted (while I was still pretty much fresh), I had more dice lying around than the rest of the bunch together.

Mixing high-school humor and epic struggle is a very good way to keep the plot moving, as anime writers have often discovered. It's probably best to focus on character-driven scenes, but make sure to run a few Big Illuminati-Esque Political Events to provide a backdrop for the struggles before Armageddon

By the end of Turn 6, I had a collection of little killing machines numbering 15 or so, but nothing heavier than 1/1...Even with a weakened gun, pumping out a huge flow of 1/1 engines, particularly for the last player in order, is an ultimate strategy in terms of bang for your die.

Hmm. Question: Was this because you were earning so many Charge dice from all this destruction and enslavement? Or did your "crawler" strategy just give you more Engine dice than anyone else?

It was the latter, but not quiiite in the way you were thinking. More engine dice=less need to use the few charges I grabbed. I never actually -used- a Charge in the whole game. There's a huge momentum effect when you build up Engine dice.

Ha! That seems about right, given this is "Buffy without superpowers." I also like how this seems to reflect Ben Lehman's idea of "escalating inward": you start with the mega-conflicts, but the little personal things are what really matter in the end.

Yes. Also, this creates something of a bonus in terms of plot interaction...people will actually do sub-optimal things because they're attached to engines (or because they're the Dragon and someone -else- is attached to engines...). Fluffy the Cat was a prime example. Geneva lavished love, affection and dice on the little guy, and most everyone pretty much kept their hands off the cat...with the exception of Ryan, of course. Was this kind of character attachment, at the expense of saving or destroying the world, intentional?

Ramidel wrote: Was this kind of character attachment, at the expense of saving or destroying the world, intentional?

As I mentioned earlier:

I finally witnessed Actual Play of my own game! I didn't actually play it, on purpose, because I had three more-or-less willing volunteers and wanted to see what they'd do without me, although after making them all read the short fictional introduction and the description of the three roles, I did explain the rest of rules myself and prompted them on mechanics and narration throughout the game.

Rules & modifications
We used the rules straight as written, with two big exceptions:
1) The Gun was toned down, slightly: Instead of reducing any Power or Loyalty score greater than or equal to the roll of a Gun Die, it only reduced scores exactly equal to the Gun's roll. It was still terribly overpowered. (See analysis at end).
2) I kept the original "each player rolls one die, then the next player rolls one, then the next, repeat" rule -- which both B.J.'s and Unco Lober's groups discarded in favor of rolling multiple dice a turn -- and then had to house-rule that any newly created Engine had immunity from attack for one round of play, because otherwise such a Power 1, Loyalty 1 Engine could be immediately taken or eliminated by the next player without any way to defend it! This was just one of the many exciting dimensions of brokenness created by the "one die a turn" rule. (Again, see below).

Roles & Players

The Girl...
Played by Martha, my wife - a highly creative non-geek with almost no gaming experience: She writes poetry, does worldbuilding projects with me, loves Harry Potter, Narnia, Tolkein, et al., could take or leave Star Wars, and doesn't even play Scrabble, Monopoly, or cards, let alone wargames and RPGs, and tends to get nervous about "doing it wrong." (She played an hour of Inspectres with at a D.C. Forge meetup a while back and was fascinated but baffled). I rather dragooned her into playing because I absolutely wanted to get a non-gamer perspective.
Martha chose as her Core, "You've got the wrong girl," deftly double-edged on both the in-game and real-people levels.

The Dragon...
Played by Chris, one of my best friends from college - a sci-fi fan/gamer type, creative and a good writer (better than me) but with a pretty standard background of computer games, boardgames, card games, and traditional RPGs like D&D and GURPS, but no Indies. He was taking care of his four-month-old baby, a big distraction, but even so analyzed the rules in real time as I explained them and started explaining the broken bits before his first turn.
Chris's Core for his Fallen Angel was basically John Milton on a motorcyle: "Head like a hole / black as your soul / I'd rather die / than give you control" (a Nine Inch Nails lyric).

The World...
Played by Karel, Chris's younger brother, also a gamer, albeit a bit less intense; I haven't known him as long.
Karel's core was, "I like beer" -- one which ended up driving most of the narrative of the game!

Course of Play
(with apologies to the participants for anything I misremember)

The difference in experience and personality showed up almost immediately: Martha created lovingly detailed characters with some fairly serious issues in their backstory but wasn't quite sure what to do with them, the guys created much sketchier, more comedic characters but threw them into action immediately.

Chris, as the Dragon ("Head like a hole..."), appropriately enough pursued the most aggressive and ruthless strategy, quickly figuring out the advantages the current (broken) rules give the "crawler" strategy of building more, smaller, expendable Engines rather than building up fewer, stronger ones. (Because of the one-die-a-turn rule, the "sweet spot" in the system was for a 2/2 Engine, rather than a 1/1; I'll explain why later). Chris created two Engines:
- First, "The Nihilist," a propagandist-prophet type who acted mainly through his writings. Maxed out (before the Gun started going off) at Power 2, Loyalty 2.
- Then, "Urban Anonymity," the state of people being crowded together yet always alone, never reaching out to one another as the world came apart around them (Chris narrated this abstract Engine's actions more vividly than his character-Engine, interestingly). Maxed out at Power 2, Loyalty 2.
As soon as Chris had his pair of 2/2 Engines, he launched himself on the attack, initially focusing on the World (Karel) but later taking swipes at the Girl (Martha) as well.

Karel, as the World ("I like beer"), was more cautious, initially building up a single Engine, beer-brewing entrepreneur "Dr. Claus von Hopps," who invested in advertising and benefits for his workers and maxed out at Power 3, Loyalty 3 -- before the Dragon struck.
Chris moved in to take "von Hopps," with his evil influences encouraging the industrialist to raid his company's pension plan and water down the beer with lead-contaminated water. Karel daringly split his dice between defending his Engine and counter-attacking "Urban Anonymity." Chris had more dice and better luck, with Karel's defensive dice failing to either Capture or Cancel Chris's attacking dice, so -- and remember they were each rolling one die a turn in alternation, creating a tit-for-tat conflict where the next step was pretty easy to predict -- both the 2/2 "Urban Anonymity" and the stronger 3/3 "von Hopps" ended up one die away from certain loss, with Chris debating whether to keep attacking or defend: He figured losing his 2/2 and taking Karel's 3/3 was a good trade and plunged ahead. Von Hopps became a minion of evil; "Urban Anonymity" inverted its Meaning to become "the Boozy Cameraderie of Strangers," that blurry, benign feeling towards your fellow-man produced by a few brews.
Karel now shifted strategy to retaliate, creating a "Drunken Posse" (maxed out at Power 1, Loyalty 2) out for revenge on the man who'd poisoned their beer and reaching for the Gun turn after turn, narrating the bleary mob blazing away randomly and unraveling the structure of society as Engine after Engine took hits. Chris cheerfully reached for the Gun too, narrating von Hopps's descent into madness and his opening fire on the Girl's friends as they went about one of their missions of mercy, missing them physically but shaking their Loyalty in the Girl's missions -- the first time the Girl's Engines had actually come into active play.

Meanwhile, Martha ("you've got the wrong girl") had been playing a defensive, slow-growth strategy, creating character-Engines and lovingly building them up:
- First, "J. Lo" (sadly, I forget the full name because Martha's cards went missing), the Girl's best friend and "jealous sidekick": The Girl's Core insecurity (her sense of being the "wrong girl") led to long heart-to-hearts that assauged the jealousy and brought the two together, building J. Lo up to Power 2, Loyalty 3 (as I recall).
- Second, "Lola Lo," J. Lo's troubled sister, an ex-stripper with a history of drug problems who was moving slowly out of the dark into the light of the Girl's influence, again maxing out as Power 2, Loyalty 3.
Interestingly, Martha never named or described the Girl herself, who acted initially only through conversations with her friends and then through prophetic dreams.

When the Gun began going off, Martha's lovingly built-up Engines began crumbling, leading Chris to make opportunistic attacks on her Core. Martha responded by throwing her characters into action, with the Girl instructing the sisters to take jobs at the beer factory and undermine it from within. Meanwhile, Chris recaptured a much-weakened "Urban Anonymity" from Karel, as the boozy comraderie of the mob disintegrated back into lonely coldness. A series of nasty Gun rolls and Chris's slow-but-steady attacks on the Girl put her Core in danger more swiftly than even I realized, let alone Martha with her lack of gaming experience, and suddenly the Dragon crushed the Girl's spirit. Chris had far more dice than Karel (many of them unspent Charge dice) and thus the Dragon won the game, plunging humankind into eternal, raging loneliness.

Total elapsed time, from my starting to explain the rules to the end of the world, was only two hours -- which was just as well given that (a) we were all very tired, (b) I'd see lots of brokenness to fix, and (c) we had run out of six-sided dice!

Lessons Learned

1. The Gun is still overpowered. How I'm going to fix the blasted thing I still don't know, but I'm tempted to drop the whole "Gun as an Engine" model and go for something along the lines of Escalation from Dogs in the Vineyard.

2. We ran out of dice, for crying out loud! My collection isn't huge, granted, but I've always warned other people (e.g. Tony Lower-Basch early in the design of Capes) that dice pools only work as long as their growth is limited, and I've been bit by my own ignored advice. B.J., Unco, did you guys start to find the number of dice unmanageable? I think I need to shift the system from "accumulate X number of dice to prevail" to "accumulate dice totalling X amount," because doing a little addition is easier than handling hordes of little cubes.

3. Small Engines are overwhelmingly a better return on investment than larger ones. In this game, because the "one die a turn" rule made 1/1 Engines fatally fragile (see #4 below), the "sweet spot" was at 2/2 instead, but the superiority of the "Crawler" strategy is clear across the board. The basic mathematical problem, as Chris pointed out on turn two or so, is that (a) the number of dice needed to strengthen an Engine increases geometrically, but (b) the number of dice that an Engine gives you, and the number of dice required to take it, only increase arithematically, which means it needs to be much easier to build up Engines or (less attractive to me) much easier to take them. I'm fairly confident that I can combine the solution to the "too many dice!" problem above (#2) and this problem with some careful math.

4. "Each player rolls one die a turn" is not painfully slow, as I'd feared, but, somewhat to my surprise, it is badly broken. Because each player can roll one and only one die, the outcome is pretty predictable; Capturing and Cancelling are sufficiently unlikely to hamstring defensive rolls, as Karel found out; and your accumulated dice (the Conflict Pile) take effect immediately when you get to the required total, seizing the target Engine before the defending player has a turn and a chance to respond.
The most immediate problem was that, as Chris pointed out, if a player creates a new (1/1) Engine, that one die is all they can do on that turn, so the Engine remains 1/1 and the next player can take or destroy it automatically with their one die. I immediately introduced a rule that a newly created Engine was immune from attack until a complete round of play has passed (i.e. everyone spends all their dice and Engines refresh), which led to an equal and opposite form of stereotyped play in which you had to use your first or second die of the turn to create an Engine and then hastily build it up to 2/2 before its immunity expired.
But this problem of predictability also showed up in the big conflict between Karel and Chris, when Chris realized that his one die could either take Karel's Engine automatically at the price of sacrificing his own, or try a low-odds defense, and the mutual-kill was the tactically obvious choice. (Likewise, if Martha had not literally never played a strategy game before, and if I were not the worst tactician in gaming history, one of us would've noticed Chris creeping up on taking her Gun-weakened Core, at which point any kind of defense might have extended the game an hour).
In a more complex game, this kind of mechanical predictability could produce "if I do this, then he does that, but I could do this" strategizing like that in chess. In apocalypse girl as written, the result is tic-tac-toe: fun once, boring twice, and thus broken. I need to find a way to systematize Unco's and B.J.'s house rules on both attacking and defending players rolling multiple dice on the same turn.

5. The current mechanics make a decent scaffolding for narrative, given creative players (and almost anyone interested in this kind of game will be pretty creative), but not enough. True, players having their first experience of director power unrestrained by a central GM always find it easy to do slapstick or absurdist narration (look at half the Capes threads out there), but the system needs to do a better job of guiding players towards the apocalyptic conflict. Part of that is better examples and guidance for narration -- I intend to copy With Great Power..., the state-of-the-art (that I've seen) on explicit guidance for how to narrate different elements of a fairly abstract system -- but part of that, the harder part, is tighter mechanics: My goal for the next draft is some kind of "connections" mechanic that lets Engines only affect (attack, help defend, build up) Engines they are specifically linked to in both mechanics and narration, creating a kind of "relationship map" in the course of play, with the mechanical incentive for adding to the story this way being that the more Engines you link to a given target, the more dice you can roll to attack or defend it at once -- trying to solve problem #4 above at the same time.

My thanks to all the playtesters so far. Any additional suggestions, from anyone who's played or just pondered the game, are tremendously welcome.

P.S. And a big thank-you to Clinton R. Nixon for fixing the typo in the thread title.

B.J., Unco, did you guys start to find the number of dice unmanageable?

Ditto to Unco. We kept a play sheet for dice rolled on each aspect (though we never used Meanings as such. The group found it superfluous, really).

The method your two groups used sounds a lot more manageable than my draft, frankly. But replacing stacks of dice with paperwork still seems too complicated, to me; clearly I need to just make it simpler. Thanks.