I just had my second playtest of The Face of Angels, my newest game, and it was good. Before I even talk about it too much, a quick side-note on playtesting your own game:

Man, this is a satisfying part of the process. You have all these pieces, and you don't know if they'll work and they totally change in play. It's a subtle thing - you realize you've just played the game differently than written and it's better than written and you're so excited. There's nothing that makes me happier than this last stretch.

Anyway.

So, the game is about high school students who will gain strange power and have to resolve their own issues and find out where inhumans fit in humanity over their lifetime. Which is weird, I know. It's "Flowers for Algernon," filtered through stuff like Powder and The Breakfast Club. It's a very structured game, with five acts, and we played through the first two last night.

My playtesters were Eric and Lisa, playing respectively:

- Alex Keene, a tall, lanky hopeful-guitarist, with dyed-black long hair and a bad attitude. In game terms, he's an Ace - a freak or weirdo.

- Jenny, a blonde, pretty science nerd. She looks like a cheerleader, and is kind of an outcast from both the popular kids (because she's a nerd) and the nerds (because she's s cheerleader.) In game terms, she's a Jack - a specialist, in this case, about science.

In character creation, you have to write down three people that your character's connected to. While none intersected at first, we soon had connections shared between characters, which is good.

Act 0: The Prologue
The prologue's got issues right now. Mechanically, everything works, but I do a thing stolen from Dogs in the Vineyard - there's an initiation scene. Each character has a moment of high school graduation night before they get their power. The current method is to look at their relationships, involve at least one of them in a conflict, and pick on the character, basically. It works, but it seems a little crude still.

They were great scenes, though. The scenes are always set on graduation night, which in this case meant a party at the lake. Alex was confronted by his foe, Jake Melton, the football quarterback that used to date his little sister. They had a verbal sparring match that ended with Jake throwing Alex's guitar into the lake. Meanwhile, Jenny had a bitch-match with Susie, the head cheerleader who is now dating Jake. Susie split a whole beer on Jenny's dress, who ended up crying and running into the lake to wash up.

And in the lake, bright faces made of light came up, scaring Alex and Jenny, and they go under. When they come back up...

- Alex's now a Ace of Spades, having the power of a weird voice - he commands and people find it very hard to resist. He's like "Preacher" from the comics. (There was a similar character in the first playtest, and that's interesting to me.)

- Jenny's a Jack of Clubs - her power is controlling water.

With that, Act 0 is done.

The bridge
Here's another weird part of play I'm not that certain about - there's a scoring system in play that determines who gets to speak when during the bridge between acts. This is important, as the bridge can move the game anywhere. However, in play, it's usually really friendly. I don't know - it's a mechanism with potential for extreme abuse, and yet in play, it's almost under-abusive.

The bridge, though, led us to the end of summer, right before college started. That weekend, a gun show and a hurricane were coming to town.

Act 1: The Discovery
Ok, so armed with powers and a set-up, we played for real. And once I learned to stop holding back, it was like a tight movie.

Alex's not playing a hero at all, we find out. His first move: he walks behind Jake at the gun show and tells him to shoot himself. That's not even a conflict - Jake shoots himself. He tries to shoot himself in the heart, hits his spine, and is paralyzed for life. Holy crap.

After this, Susie's rushing to the hospital to see him as they got engaged over the summer. And the hurricane's coming and rain is pouring down and she hydroplanes right in front of Jenny, of course, and Jenny saves her life with her crazy water control.

We've already set up two stories here - a very personal one and a big, crazy, man-against-nature one.

At this point in the game, only I as GM can allow the PCs' enemies to die, so I'm not going to let Jake die. We do get a really good scene of Alex's sister yelling at him, and then him going to the hospital once he finds out Jake's not dead. Jenny's already there, and is dealing with Susie being crazy at this point.

There was a scene here I didn't get. Lisa wants Jenny to leave, and take Susie with her. Susie doesn't want to leave. I'm not sure why Jenny didn't just leave her. Instead, we had a conflict. It wasn't a big deal, though.

What was a big deal was the continuing storm. When Alex came and told Jake to "die" in his freaky voice, lightning struck the hospital and the roof broke, letting water pour in. Jenny went to stop the rain and it ended up back-firing on her, making it flood the rooftop and push the medical helicopter off the roof, exploding below and sending flaming petrol over the waters.

Trapped in a flooding hospital with flaming water surrounding it, our protagonists decide to jet once a security guard realizes Jenny has something weird about her. They don't save anyone - oh, no. They leave.

There's a mechanic in the game where you can't end an act without using up the draw deck of cards (it's obviously a card-based game.) We knew we needed about two more conflicts to do that.

The first: Alex goes to his house to get his guitar before he leaves town forever and his dad wants to not let him leave. I mean, it's a terrible storm out. Anyone who tries to drive in it will die. (If they can't control water.) The stakes of this were cool, because Alex was leaving no matter what. The stakes were over his father's blessing, and he didn't get it - he had to command his dad to move with his power-voice.

The second conflict: they're driving out of town across a bridge that is being submerged in water. Can they make it? The stakes again were weird - basically, if I won, they were rescued. By the government of the ex-Soviet state of Georgia. I won, of course.

So, we'll begin Act 2 next time with Jenny as a super-scientist revitalizing the interior of Georgia with huge irrigation and damming projects. Alex is the head of the spy network for Georgia's biggest enemy (unnamed), but also a spy for Georgia, which makes him a Philip K. Dick character, I think.

What we did right
The card mechanics for this game work really well. I should release a preview later for those interested in playtesting.

The scene framing picked up after a while and was good. We quit holding back and starting throwing helicopters and having Georgian spies assault bridges in the midst of a hurricane.

The two stories were awesomely connected while having different feels.

That second bridge was awesome when it started with "5 years later..."

What we did wrong
Did you know I forget the rules to my own games all the time? I do, and did. I have to remember to use relationships.

We either destroyed or ignored our relationships. It's no problem - I'll just have to figure out how to bring them into the next act, which will be weird, but fun.

Sounds excellent. I think it's interesting that the players made some very anti-hero choices. That definitely makes a statement about the game.

Are the Acts structured to have such long spans of time between them, or were you expecting a young-adult story when you designed the game?

Also, don't worry about forgetting your own rules. I do that all the time.

Hey Clinton,

This sounds awesome.  Would you mind describing a scene blow by blow with the mechanics?  

best,
Emily

Allo!  Eric here, Alex's player.

First, I LOVE the bridges.  It's kinda like incorporating that old storytelling game where you all sit in a circle and have X amount of time to tell some story before the next player has to add onto your story.  When Lisa began the second bridge with "Five years later..." my brain immediately fired into "Where is my bad-attitidue mind-controlling character going to end up after five years with a desperate foreign government?"  My answer was immediate; I'd be working my way up to controlling that government.  Rock.  So, now, because of the nifty-ass bridge, I have the opportunity and the obligation to connect the dots between the gangly outsider teen and the super-spy that he's become.  I can't wait to do that.

I think that the card system is pretty cool, but there need to be more... apparent rules on the table about how & when to play.  I kept dropping my first card for a conflict before all the proper decision making for the conflict had come to pass.  I was just like; "No way dude!  Deal with this!"  And suddenly we were all in a bind 'cuz I'd thrown down before we were prepared for a throw down.  Maybe if there was a system where the initiatior of the conflict were to play their first card face-down, just to declare that they're ready for a proper conflict.  Then we could all pause the action for a moment to discuss the particulars of the conflict before more cards come out and the first card is revealed.

Also, I totally won that conflict with Alex's dad, dude!  Remember?  I won with two trump cards.  You just didn't live up to the narration that we expected from you.  But it was no biggie and I could tell that your brain was really humming with trying to keep up with not just the story, but the changes to the system too.

There were another few issues I had where it seemed at times that you, as GM, didn't know what to do next.  If that was you being nervous about running it, all good.  If it was your game not presenting the GM with a way to keep things flowing, then that's a problem.  Granted, Lisa and I didn't jump in super-fast all the time with meaty conflicts, but I think we both presented characters that were chock-full of conflict potential.  Meaty-meaty characters to chew on.  I'm looking forward to reading the full text of the game to see what you've got in there so far.

Also...

My favorite moment of the game was at the lake when Jake walks up to Alex and asks him to play some Guns n' Roses.  I don't know why it struck me so funny to have the big jock that Alex (fan o' Depeche Mode, freak, loner) hates and have him genuinely request a little GnR, but it did.  I thought I was gonna pass out.

-Eric

Emily wrote:
Hey Clinton,

This sounds awesome.  Would you mind describing a scene blow by blow with the mechanics? 

best,
Emily

Eric wrote:
I think that the card system is pretty cool, but there need to be more... apparent rules on the table about how & when to play.  I kept dropping my first card for a conflict before all the proper decision making for the conflict had come to pass.  I was just like; "No way dude!  Deal with this!"  And suddenly we were all in a bind 'cuz I'd thrown down before we were prepared for a throw down.  Maybe if there was a system where the initiatior of the conflict were to play their first card face-down, just to declare that they're ready for a proper conflict.  Then we could all pause the action for a moment to discuss the particulars of the conflict before more cards come out and the first card is revealed.

There were another few issues I had where it seemed at times that you, as GM, didn't know what to do next.  If that was you being nervous about running it, all good.  If it was your game not presenting the GM with a way to keep things flowing, then that's a problem.  Granted, Lisa and I didn't jump in super-fast all the time with meaty conflicts, but I think we both presented characters that were chock-full of conflict potential.  Meaty-meaty characters to chew on.  I'm looking forward to reading the full text of the game to see what you've got in there so far.

inthisstyle wrote:
Sounds excellent. I think it's interesting that the players made some very anti-hero choices. That definitely makes a statement about the game.

Are the Acts structured to have such long spans of time between them, or were you expecting a young-adult story when you designed the game?

This all sounds pretty sweet. Clinton, have you seen any of the material that Chris Lehrich and Jeremiah Genest posted in various places about Age of Paranoia / Shadows in the Fog? Chris was working on a Jack the Ripper game using tarot cards for resolution and Jeremiah borrowed it for a LeCarre style espionage game (in which Chris and I and a number of our Boston group played) but added in a system using trick-taking card games that sounds like it worked similar to yours.

A rough outline of the trick-taking rules is here: http://www.innocence.com/games/age-of-paranoia/index.php/Main/MissionPlay
but it doesn't really explain the "play a card, interpret it" rhythm that we worked out during actual play. It all got a little baroque as group designed house rule systems tend to do, but it was a lot of fun, and the tricks-and-hands were really powerful for generating a lot of story fast. Recaps of a dozen or so "missions" (ie, hands) are here:
http://www.innocence.com/games/age-of-paranoia/index.php/Main/Missions
If you click through on the mission titles, there are card by card breakdowns of every hand and what each contributed to the story. You might find it interesting for comparison sake or simply as further evidence of the power of this sort of mechanic.

Does this look at all similar to The Face of Angels? If not, my apologies for threadjacking. The game sounds cool regardless.

Rob

Clinton wrote: Awesome idea. Most games I've played with "conflict setup" mechanics have this exact same problem, and it's because people naturally get excited. Let's do this. It's going to be part of the rules.

The continuing tales of Alex and Jenny

We had our second session of the playtest last night, eating up one-and-a-half Acts - Act 2: The Ascension, and Act 3: The Passion.

Act 2 started with a bang. If you recall from the first post, the players had bridged into it with a jump 5 years in the future, to the summer of 1997.

Jenny Jordan, Lisa's character, had a job was a special assistant to the Georgian Ministry of the Interior, which meant she was trapped there, basically, but doing neat work. She was responsible for the construction of the world's highest-output hydroelectric dam.

Alex Keene, Eric's character, was secretly head of the Georgian resistance movement, and also a spy for Georgia on the Georgia resistance movement.

We started with the last day of work on the dam. Neither PC's been home or had any personal contact with anyone back home. A helicopter lands at the build site, and someone from Jenny's past steps out: John, her lab partner from high school, who is now the president of NuPower, an international alternative-energy corporation who has built many of the specialized components for this dam. He'd found out that she was in Georgia through the people who bought parts from his company, and came to find her.

Alex is planning to blow the dam tomorrow at the grand opening, ruining the current government for wasting so much money on such a project, and putting the resistance in charge.

Jenny's a bit weirded out by John's presence, as she hoped to remain secret, but they have dinner. The big revelation at dinner is a Henry Kissinger look-a-like talking with Alex's second-in-command, Baia. They're exchanging info for money.

Also, somewhere around here, I introduced the Dead Man, a secretive American agent, incredibly thin with greying skin and hair. (Lisa and Eric - anyone remember his first scene?)

Anyway, the next day, everyone - including the president of Georgia and many foreign diplomats - is there for the opening of the dam. Alex blows it with secret charges in the foundation. This was cool - Jenny tries to save it with her water-control powers, but Alex gets on the radio to the workers inside and gives them the super-voice to open it wide. Before any of this, though, Baia, Alex's flunkie, passes off the location of Alex to the Dead Man.

Alex, watching the dam blow, doesn't see the Dead Man walk up behind him, pistol in hand. We have two conflicts in quick succession here. The first was important mechanically to me.

Who is the Dead Man?
The Dead Man is Jake Melton, Alex's enemy from Act I, the star football player. When Alex told him to "die," but he didn't, power was conferred to him (and he can no longer eat or live as a man - he is half-dead.) Of course, I had no way to handle that mechanically, as the PCs are supposed to be the only ones with power.

So, there's a new rule in the game - the GM can ask for power for an NPC as stakes in a conflict. That way, the only way others in the world get super-power is through character action.

The first conflict's was a standoff between Alex, the Dead Man, and Baia. The stakes were Eric wins, Dead Man's detained by the revolution; I win, he's not and he is immune to Alex's power.

We later decided immunity doesn't work, and this has been amended to Dead Man gets a power - he cannot be controlled, trump suit Spades.

Back to the action
So, anyway, Dead Man can't be controlled and he and Jake fight and he shoots Jake with the same pistol he shot himself with, and Jake falls off the waterfall and Dead Man thinks Jake is forever dead. Nice.

To wrap up this part of the act, there's a great scene where Jenny rescues John from the falling dam. Later that evening, he tells her he can get her out of this country and she could be of great use to him at NuPower.

Act 2, part 2: Wherein it gets more awesome
Two months later, Jenny's back in her hometown, living in a palatial home and kind of secluded. After running into Alex's mom, she's going to work. Her research and work have been on a device to make fusion from water. John thinks her abilities may let her control the energy created, which thus far have proved unstable.

Alex is alive, and knows about this technology. He and Spider, a hacker friend of his in the resistance, are traveling to America to steal the tech. They sneak into NuPower and almost get the plans, but Spider accidentally starts the reactor.

Eric used the rules for Aces and pyrrhic victory here, which are cool. Basically, we both get our stakes. His were, "We get the plans." Mine were "The reactor blows with you in the room." It went off, and he protected a guard with his body, absorbing much fusion power. He is transformed, where he cannot command people without using his super-voice.

Jenny storms in and does control the power, causing the reactor to stabilize and she makes the world's first self-sustaining reactor plant in the process, and is loved throughout the world for her contribution to economic prosperity. Really, this was the stakes.

Lastly, Alex makes his way back to Georgia, hurt. He goes to the president - his friend Baia, who betrayed him and won the presidency after the dam and the old president fell - and gives him the stolen plans, allowing Georgia to claim the same power and also make terrible weapons of horror.

Act 3: The Passion

We played out the first part of this act. It was bridged as it was 2 years in the future, in 1999. The United States has begun rollouts of fusion power, as has Georgia. Georgia's is obviously unstable - they have a power plant next to a giant lake that now glows from space.

The UN has called a summit on Georgia, as the local powers have become worried about (a) free power and (b) the threat from this power. The attendees: Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, Britain, United States (a diplomat, plus Dead Man, plus John and Jenny from NuPower invited as special speakers), and Georgia (General Alex Keene).

That's a whole room of trouble. Things went nuts, and it ended up with General Alex Keene trying to incite war and then destroying an entire Russian village with the might of Georgia's weapon systems built off the same power. Before he could do worse, Jenny shut down the fusion power of the entire nation of Georgia.

Dude, wow. I love this game.

Back at home, John apologizes to Jenny for how rough that was, and later proposes marriage to her, citing how much time they've spent together and how he's grown to love her. It's awkward, but she accepts.

Six months later:

So, UN peacekeepers and inspection teams come to Georgia to comb it for anything wrong and basically neuter it. Alex has a better plan, though, after six months of occupation. He manages to get two US troops to have sex with a 13-year-old Georgian girl. (The word used by Eric was "rape" and I see statutory rape. We didn't say what was going on with the girl, but I bet she was drugged or perhaps he used the word on her.) They're on videotape - as is Dead Man, storming in and killing them.

Meanwhile, Susie, the head cheerleader from high school, and an enemy of Jenny's, has been the secretary for John this whole time. (She's also a single mom - she had Jake Melton's ("Dead Man") kid. He inpregnated her before he "died" and disappeared.) She finally warms up to Jenny because of the upcoming wedding and takes her out to lunch. After lunch, she tries to shoot Jenny for "stealing her only opportunity to make it out." She apparently has been trying to get to John for years but could not.

And because of the mechanics for the third Act, Lisa turns Jenny from her enemy to her friend, as I failed in this conflict. A nice end for the session.

Conclusions for session 2

The mechanics are working better and better. We had some disruption with the concept of another NPC getting powers, but that was it.

The biggest problem was with Dead Man coming into Alex's scene with the Army guys. I tried to use his trump to negate Alex's power, and it seemed wrong. We decided that all possible trumps must be declared before a conflict.

It was also rough on Alex when he tried to start World War III by blowing up that Russian village. The Fist of Georgia appears on all the screens and he's war-chanting, and BOOM, Jenny kills the power. It was cool, though, if a little sad for Alex.

Overall, this went really well. I can't wait to see the last session.

Yeah, I've got a couple fresh comments from last night's session too.

First off, I'd like to talk about the cards, your hand, and the conflict resolution system.  It rocks.  But you totally have to get used to it.  See, before you even get into a conflict you've got a hand of five cards in front of you.  And that hand pretty much tells you what kind of conflict you're going to have next.  Or at least, it tells you what kind of conflicts you have to choose from coming up next.  For instance, if you happen to have a hand full of crappy clubs then you know that your character is going to react with violence and you know you're probably going to loose.

Now, at first, I thought that totally sucked.  I'm like; Hey, I wanna kick some ass and blow some shit up, but my hand is full of hearts!  Now that I've adjusted, I'm all about; How can I use this hand to get what I want?  And now that I've adjusted I love it to death.  It's still my character, it's still my conflicts, but the system is making me think harder.  And the system is moving the story in directions I wouldn't have expected otherwise.  That's what makes it rock.  It would have been easy for me to narrate Alex using his Voice to mess with the deligations at the UN summit, or to use the voice on Baia when I was trying to talk him into going to war.  But I didn't, because I didn't have any spades in my hand!  I had the ace of clubs when I was at the UN Summit.  I wasn't going to drop that card on some piddly threat of potential violence.  Hell no.  I had the monitors turn to the destruction in the remote Russian village.  When Alex was in Baia's palace I had some big hearts in my hand.  So what did I do?  Sing the song of the Rebellion for him! 

Rock.

I would like to share with you all how much I thought the UN Summit thing rocked.  In the scene before I was still Alex the spy.  I'd done some stuff with Baia and the plans for the NuPower plans, and I totally wanted Alex to speak before the UN.  There was some momentary confusion amongst the players about who was there and why, and for a moment, I really did consider how my super-spy character was going to be there.  And it hit me all at once;  It had been my plan all along to have Baia be my presidential puppet, and now I'm his right-hand man.  Who better to be the right hand man to a fresh dictator than his general??  Oh yeah, Alex the General of the Georgian Armies was born.  So, we start up the conflict where I'm trying to incite the rest of the world (the US mostly) to attack -us-.  And I'm looking at my cards and I'm like; Yeah, I rock, I'm gonna win.  I start out with hearts and give a rousing speech about the power and indepence of Georgia, then lead into the destruction of the Russian town.  Good stuff!  Then I decide to cinch it all off with my The Wall - esque declaration of the vast superiority of the new Georgian state, complete with the monitors behind me displaying the new emblym of Georgia, an Iron Fist on a red field. 
....

Then all the fucking lights went out.

Damn that Jenny!

I will destroy her!

*lots of gloved-fist shaking*

-Eric

Now I feel somewhat prepared to run a playtest.

Eric: Your comments about how the hand tells you how the next scene will flow, do you feel that that is a pre-requisite for good play, or just an a-ha moment some players will come to and others ignore?

Clinton: In multi-session play, regarding 'bridges': Cliffhanger, Prologue for the second evening, or 'whatever feels best'?

Awesome work! Can't wait to play.

Aman wrote:
Now I feel somewhat prepared to run a playtest.

Eric: Your comments about how the hand tells you how the next scene will flow, do you feel that that is a pre-requisite for good play, or just an a-ha moment some players will come to and others ignore?

Clinton: In multi-session play, regarding 'bridges': Cliffhanger, Prologue for the second evening, or 'whatever feels best'?

Awesome work! Can't wait to play.

I feel that the realization of your hand foreshadowing your conflicts is a bonus.  I enjoyed the game more when I realized what was happening and acknowleged it as a feature instead of a flaw.

-Eric