We played our first session of Clinton's new game The Face of Angels yesterday. It rocked. It felt much more like playing a complete game than like playing a playtest - and I do not say that lightly. Of course, I do have quite a list of remarks, so I don't think the playtest was, as a playtest, useless. The rest of this post will have the following structure: first, I introduce the players; then, the characters; then, the events; then, our reflections.

Players

There were four of us, with Remko being the World. I don't know everybody's background very well, so my fellow players are invited to join in and correct me.

Remko van der Pluijm has been roleplaying for several years. He used to play World of Darkness and D&D, but in the last eight months or something has become infatuated with narrativistic indie-RPGs. I have played Dogs in the Vineyard, Polaris, The Mountain Witch, Sorcerer and Acts of Evil (playtest) with him, for a total of maybe ten sessions.

Paul Bakker has, I think, only played a few sessions of D&D and even a bit of Rolemaster(?). He has also played a four sessions game of My Life with Master with me, and one session of InSpectres.

Wilco Smits is a friend of Remko's, so I suppose that his background is roughly similar - but this is pure guesswork. (In fact, I'm not even sure about your surname Wilco! Make sure to speak up if it's wrong.)

I myself played some AD&D several years back, did some freeform after that, but played a lot of indie-games in the past 1.5 years. All the indie-games named above, and also Trollbabe, Universalis, Breaking the Ice and some others.

It is important to notice that all the players had been exposed to narrativistic techniques, and at least two of us (Remko and me) were well aware of the need to drive for conflicts. This may have been a factor that structured our play, which was structured like this: One of the players or, rarely, the World suggests a cool new conflict. Some free narration leads up to the situation. And then - the cards! Repeat as necessary. It would be good idea to make such a structure very clear to people who approach this game with different expectations of what an RPG looks like.

We graduated from secondary school in 1999, 2000 and 2001, so we chose 2000 as the starting year of the game. (And I put on some Greenday and The Offspring to get into the mood.)

Characters

Paul played Natan Gliservitsj, a Queen (of spades). He was into a somewhat extreme leftwing scene of squatters, animal liberators and so forth. (It says "militant environmental hippies" on his sheet.) His talent as a queen was to organise such militant groups of radicals. Relationships were Kenny O'Frannon, an Irish vegan guru who lived in his house (friend), Jenny McPhearson, a classmate whose father had a meat farm (foe) and Margaret Gliservitsj-Hadden, his rich grandmother who leads a pro-weapons lobby (nemesis).

Wilco played James Farran, a Jack (of hearts). His talent is poetry. He is a rather quiet boy who wants to become a great poet, creating deep emotions in people's hearts. His contacts were Janice Hoops, his English teacher (I think we said 'Dutch teacher', but this is illogical since we set the game in Seattle) who disliked his poetry and always tried to give him low marks (nemesis), Jenny McPhearson, the shy girl with whom he is secretly in love (friend) and Kenny O'Frannon, a militant vegan who has led protests against James' father's chicken farm (foe).

I played Archibald Wheatstalk, an Ace (of clubs) who is shunned by other people because of his unpredictable outbursts of extreme anger. This has left him very isolated. His relationships were Jenny McPhearson, the shy girl who is his only friend (friend), Bill Parker, the bully who is always provoking Archibald to get him into trouble (foe) and John Wheatstalk, his father, who believes that Archibald should be sent to a military academy to learn to curb his temper (nemesis).

Events

Normal type are events in the SIS. Italics are actions on the level of the players.

Prologue: The birth

The three of us, Jenny and some 'alto' friends of Natan were standing outside the school because the music they were playing inside was too commercial (Natan), stupid (James) and popular (Archibald). Outside, Natan's friends had put up their own music installation and were listening to punk rock. I immediately stated that I wanted a conflict with Wilco. My stakes were that Jenny would like my company more than his and would walk away with me. His conflicts were that she would like him more than me. We grabbed the cards, and Archibald made fun about how writing more poetry was useless, since there already was enough of it. James tried to make Archibald look like an uncultured boor, but it turned out that Archibald had read an enjoyed a lot of poetry, and things were going his way - until James provoked him and he became a bit angry at James. Jenny didn't like that at all, said something along the lines of "Men!" and started walking away with James - leaving Archibald bereft of his only friend. I mainly lost the conflict because the World helped Wilco when things became critical. Paul helped me a bit, but not enough.

Then Paul called for a conflict between him and the World, where his stakes were that Natan would make Jenny cry. The World's stakes were that Jenny would embarrass him before the eyes of his friends. I very gleefully helped Paul; Wilco chimed in on the side of the World, but without much effect. We also had a lot of fun thinking up things for Paul's character to say. "You are as fat as your father's pigs," Natan said to Jenny. James tried to defend her, but after some more insults Jenny walked away crying and Natan felt really good about himself.

Lights... camera... revolution! (This is the title of an album by Suicidal Tendencies. Which I've never listened to, actually.) The lights were first. Strange lights, faces out of nowhere, a confusing dream-like sequence... and we all emerged with super powers!

Natan: Spades; "Revolution". (Inciting masses and the like.)
James: Hearts; "Desire". (Like reading and changing people's desires.)
Archibald: Clubs; "Fire". (Well. Burning, melting, you know the works.)

Bridge

Remko got to go first, and told us how it was two years later. There had been a string of kidnappings, all targeted against people who graduated from our school in the year we graduated there. He also told that James had become the (very young) host of popular poetry program on national TV, and Natan was making quite a political stir in the Seattle area with his ecological proposals. Then I chimed in and told how my character had been sent to the marines by his father, and was now a special op doing missions within the US. He had just been sent with three of my colleagues to kidnap a politically dangerous individual, Natan Gliservitsj, as he was preparing for the live show of James' program where he would appear. I think that Paul and Wilco mainly added a few details to the background that Remko and I had put up. (But maybe my memory is failing me?) Someone said that Jenny was James' girlfriend, though it was an unstable relationship.

Act One: The discovery

Once again I was quick to request the first conflict. I wanted a conflict with Paul. My stakes were that I would kidnap him. His stakes were that the organisation I worked for was exposed to the media trying to kidnap him. I remember that I had some high diamonds, so I described some cool military guns I had brought along - something I'd been very unlikely to do otherwise. This is a clear example of how the cards system forces you to be creative and makes sure that your character cannot fall into a single pattern of action. Well done! We set the tricks to best of five, but unfortunately the World helped Paul and I lost the conflict.

So masked man entered the TV building and tried to kidnap Natan, but there were too many of his followers around and the alarm bells went ringing.

In the last trick, which Paul started I knew I couldn't win anymore - so I chose to narrate my own defeat with my last card. I gave him his stakes, but without putting me at too much of a disadvantage. We wondered whether this was all right. Who gets to narrate the final realisation of the stakes? We couldn't find anything in the book, so we decided that the player with the highest card in the last trick has final authority - even if it is not the winning card.

Archibald escaped unidentified, vanishing into the corridors of the big building, but two of his men ran the wrong way and suddenly entered the stage of James' show where the camera's were already running. Soon, news of an attempt to kidnap Natan Gliservitsj was on all the channels.

The next conflict was between Wilco and the World. As the show began and Natan started to talk about how farmers mistreated animals, James' father - a chicken farmer - stood up from the audience and began shouting. Wilco's stakes: not to be embarrassed on TV. The world's stakes: to have Wilco not stop his own father, and thus embarrass himself.

James tried to talk some sense into his father, how got pretty angry and climbed on the stage where he started hitting Natan. Natan, however, hit him even harder, with James desperately trying to stop them fighting. The security guards that came to help James halted when they heard explosions coming from another part of the building, and decided to investigate the explosions first. More explosions made half of the set fall down on top of the combatants - but...

Paul was helping Wilco against the World, even though it was kind of hard to see how hitting his father would save James any embarrassment. The explosions were me helping the world; my character may not have been present, but he was at least in the vicinity and could influence the scene indirectly. Right? We thought it was right. However, Wilco won the scene, so...

... luckily, the show wasn't really live, and in fact they weren't even taping at the moment. The TV-watchers never saw the embarrassing incident.

I then told Remko that I'd like to have the marines set me up as Natan's FBI bodyguard, assigned to him because of the attempted kidnapping. "We don't have to make a conflict out of it," I said. "Sure. They organise everything very quickly, and you're now clad in a black suit, have the right identity papers and can walk up to Natan." So we had a bit of free narration.

Natan accepted Archibald as his body guard, because he was more of a professional than his cronies. Then there were more explosions in the building, and Archibald got Natan, Jenny and James to move out of the building. There, Natan started to talk to all the reporters and onlookers, who were trying to find out what was happening. He spoke of the attempted kidnapping; he spoke of cruelty to animals and to people; he told people to revolt against the oppressors. Televisions everywhere suddenly turned on, automatically, all showing Natan preaching the revolution. In the end he told the people to go to the football stadium, where he would give his next speech.

This was a conflict between Paul and the World, but Wilco helped Paul by telling that meanwhile James' father was still trying to get at Natan while James tried to stop him. Paul's stakes were that people would be impressed by the injustice he spoke of; the World wanted the people to believe that all the explosions and stuff were created by left wing terrorists. In the end, in the fifth and last trick, Paul was winning. I then played a card to help the World and revealed Natan's secret: he was the criminal who had burned down the farm of James' father, killing two people. (The in-game event was that Archibald gave a briefcase with incriminating documents to a reporter.) So Paul could choose between saying the secret was true, in which case my card was a trump and the World would win the conflict; or saying that it was not true, in which case I could choose cards from his hand. He looked at me and said: "Dude, I have no cards left." And I was like: "Uhm... well... but it's cool if it's true, right?" "Yes, that's much cooler. So it's true." Thus the World won the conflict.

Everyone then drove to the stadium. Kenny O'Frannon drove the old bus, with Natan sitting next to him. Behind them were Jenny and Natan, and in the back Archibald. Who suddenly drew his gun, and told Kenny to turn left.

Conflict! My stakes were that I would kidnap Natan. Paul's stakes were something along the line of having me and the military exposed to the media as a repressing group. I used my character's Powers heavily in this scene, setting the cars of Natan's followers on fire and melting the bulletproof screen that protected Natan. I won.

The lot then drove to a farm that was actually a secret military base. There, all of them were to be imprisoned. It turned out that the army had been collecting all the graduates from our year, and Archibald had been framed into doing a job part of the objective of which was to imprison himself. Archibald got rather angry, and before they could put him in a cell with - of all people - his old foe Bill he started hitting the guards. James and Natan joined in, and after Archibald set fire to the general and several of his men (killing them), all the prisoners were free.

Interesting part of the conflict: Natan wanted to escape, but Paul wanted to help the World. So while James was diving for a gun dropped by one of the soldiers, Paul narrated Natan doing the same but clumsily knocking it out of reach of both of them.

However, Natan took this opportunity to have the other ex-prisoners lock up the soldier Archibald. This too was a conflict. Natan used his powers. We were using powers all the time, really. Hardly a trump-card has been played without being made into a trump. He set Bill to guard hm. (Gnh!) However, James and Jenny weren't too happy with that, and they tried to free Archibald after Natan had gone.

A big conflict ensued, halfway through which Natan cam back. Part of the fun was where I narrated how Archibald was slowly strangling Bill through the little window in his cell door, whispering, vary calmly, things like "You will die today, Billy." But the greatest fun, mechanical wise, was somewhere else. Halfway through the conflict, Wilco decided to reveal Natan's secret - something with Natan having blackmailed his teachers. Natan replied with an offhand: "That's not true.", and Wilco got to take some cards from Paul. "Hey, that's my super trump!", he said. "Hey, and you have mine!", Paul said. So Wilco took his supertrump and gave Paul his back in return - which he needed not have done. Just for fun. And it was fun:

Natan then used the most of his Powers, speaking over the intercom in such a commanding voice that all the soldiers on the farm became followers of his revolution. Archibald and James were overwhelmed and imprisoned.

Here we ended Act 1. We had just gone through the pile of cards, though the exiting conditions had been fulfilled almost from the start. Paul chose to rewrite his Power (as a transformation), because "Revolution" was a bit vague. He changed it to "Voice of Command".

Bridge

I got to go first, which was cool. I narrated that it was now six months later, and that Natan had control of all of Seattle - a city besieged by the US army as the US was contemplating whether to attack or deal with the problem in another way. (Stakes in the second chapter can involve the fate of cities, after all. And did.) Archibald had been kept imprisoned in the deepest dungeons of the farm, were he had been drugged continually while scientists experimented on his brain. Natan wanted to find the secret of Archibald's powers, so he could implant them into his followers. Wilco told how he and the other prisoners had been released after being imprisoned for two months - except for the few that had become crippled during the scientific tests performed on them. Those were mercifully killed by the new government, at Natan's orders. Paul told us a bit about the new autocratic government he had established, and his headquarters. Remko ended by telling us that James had become the leader of the resistance against the environmental dictatorship. (Remko later remarked how beautiful it was that James became the revolutionary at the moment that Natan changed his Power from "Revolution" to "Voice of command".) I also took Kenny O'Frannon as a new foe for my character.

Act 2: The Ascension

It's typical: I once again requested the first conflict. I wanted to escape from the farm, which was dubbed "Animal Farm" later. Remko told me that I was guarded by... uhm... Bill. Grh!

At seeing Bill, the fire of rage cleaned Archibald's mind from the drug-induced stupor. He then started to act as if he were in pain, hoping that Bill would open the chains that held him and bring him to the medical ward. Bill, however, just started laughing and hitting him - although he did unlock some of the chains so he could hit Archibald harder.

It seemed as if I were going to lose, but then Wilco did a brilliant trick. He narrated how he revealed my secret to someone else - the camera swung to another scene, as it were - the secret being that Archibald was the unidentified person who had killed Bill's sister in a car accident. I said it was true, and we justified Wilco's card being a trump that could help me by having me narrate thus:

"Bill," Archibald whispers. "You sister? That we me." And he grins stupidly.

At these words, Bill becomes mad with rage, hits Archibald everywhere but loses his caution - and is suddenly grabbed by Archibald's free arm and his neck snaps. Bill is dead. This was not part of the stakes, but the World agreed with it so we thought we could do it.

A bit later, Natan hears that something has gone wrong on Animal Farm, so he gets in his car and sets of to set things right. Will he get there in time to stop Archibald from escaping? Not if James gets his way, because when he sees Natan's car stopping in front of a traffic light, he immediately starts changing the desires of a truck driver nearby into driving his truck over the asshole dictator. By commanding the driver to stop, Natan makes sure there is no car crash. But now!

Wilco still had his super-trump, remember? He played it. His transformation was that from now on, people who look into his eyes see their greatest desire.

Amidst many special effects, he makes all the people around him desire to punish their leader for his many sins. A big, bloodthirsty crowd starts running towards Natan, and only the machinegun fire of his guards, killing dozens, keeps him safe. James escapes, and Natan is not in time to stop Archibald from escaping from Animal Farm.

At this point, we found out that Wilco was holding my super-trump. Well. I still had his secret, so we planned a conflict between the two of us with the explicit inter-player goal of having him give me my super-trump.

Archibald quickly finds his way to the leader of the resistance, James. (When he looks into James' eyes, he briefly gets a vision of Natan dying in a really painful way.) There, they have a small conflict about the leadership of the movement. "I am a skilled marine, you are a poet. I should lead." "You are a good fighter, but I know the hearts of men. I am the man for this position." "You know the hearts of men? You didn't even write your own poetry! You just found it on a cellar!" "What are you talking about? This is nonsense." "Oh, uh... sorry. You're right, you are the right man to lead the resistance." But hey, I had my super-trump!

Next, Natan finds out who did the things with the crowd - the special effects gave James pretty much away - and moves towards the house with soldiers and even a few tanks. First, Archibald manages to escape in James' car before a single shot is lost, and drives away from the city. Then the attack starts, but James manages to make the soldiers want to betray each other, and in the terrible confusion he too escapes, leaving the city followed by Natan and his man (and his hostage, Jenny, who had hid herself in James' cellar).

Here we exhausted the pile of cards for the first time. But hey, I still had a super-trump, and I asked the other players not to end the act. So I looked at the World, and then described:

Archibald makes his way to a secret military base that he know because he had to stop a terrorist attack on it once.

At which point I said: "I want a conflict. My stakes are that I nuke Seattle off the map. And we don't have to bother about your stakes or the number of tricks, because I'm going to play my super-trump right away."

Archibald sends fiery death of immense proportions throughout the entire complex. In the process his skins turns the black of burnt flesh, but everybody on the base is dead. He then makes his way to the control center, presses a few buttons - and mere minutes later, a mushroom cloud marks the place where Seattle once was. (Implicitely, all the relationships and such were too far away to die.)

Man, I nuked Seattle - and nobody could stop me.

End of Act 2.

Reflections

Clinton, anything I don't touch upon: ask me. Here are some things we wrote down or which strike me now.

• First, I have to say it was tremendous fun. We all felt that we had been playing, rather than playtesting, a game. It is great. Also, I never had so easy a time to remember everything that happened during the session. Never. That's good too.

• Of course, a final version of the game should contain a lot more flavour text than the present version does. It was your actual play report that gave us an idea of what kind of story we could play; the rules themselves don't currently do much to convey this.

• It strikes me that knowing popular culture is not as important in the game as the game text claims it to be. Both our game and your playtest quickly moved from 'college kids' to something else entirely - for a large part already in the first bridge. I don't think Dazed and confused is a relevant reference at all.

• We noticed that the World was pretty weak. Having no trumps is not balanced by having one extra card. This makes the position of the World perhaps a tad too passive, as he cannot often influence the story. Perhaps it would be good to give him a bit more power - maybe seven cards would do the trick, maybe something else.

• Related to the previous point: we think the game will be boring if the players stick together. Only by having conflicts against each other do you get real resistance, and real fun. I think you should actively encourage antagonism between the players in the text.

• We did not understand who got to narrate how the stakes of a conflict are fulfilled. Ofttimes, you win a conflict and thus your stakes, but it still open in what manner you get your stakes. Our solution worked pretty well: the person who played the highest card in the final trick has final authority. (Though others may narrate.)

• The exiting conditions are very easy to get to; at least in our game, they were generally fulfilled ten minutes after we started an act, or even before we started the act. I'm not sure this is a problem, but it is something you might want to be aware of.

• A rules question: When a queen is in a conflict, and plays card A; and he is helped by another player, who gives him a better card B, so that the final result is B + x; is the x in this formula 3, because the underlying card was played by the queen, or 1, because the queen isn't really helping someone else?

• The transformation are a bit underwhelming, we thought. I'm not sure if they are supposed to be relatively subtle, in which case it is cool; but if they are supposed to carry a lot of punch, they are too weak. They don't really allow you to punish your character - and that's what you want, right?

• I don't remember a situation in which we used a potential trump without using our powers and thus playing it as a trump. Is this a problem?

• The card system rules. I love the way you have to think out of the box in order to justify putting down those, say, diamonds. I also love how you know you're gonna kick ass in your next conflict, because you have great cards, and intentionally make the stakes very high.

• We only got super-trumps by trading them using secrets. If we hadn't done that, there wouldn't have been a super-trump played at all during this first half of the game. Are they supposed to be that rare? They are so cool... If you want to raise the chances of getting one, you could take the 2's to 6's out of the deck and put in the exit conditions that you have to go through the deck twice instead of once.

• People constantly help others in order to dump their bad cards. Sometimes this is very cool. Sometimes, it is far-fetched and takes too much time. It would be good to have the former and not have the latter. Wilco expressed the desire to have some other way of dumping bad cards, but the rest of us weren't sure about that.

• It would be cool to put in the rules that you can use a secret even if your character is nowhere near the scene in question. Simply allow the other player to reveal the secret himself, and thus let you help him with a card that becomes a trump. We sort of did this in Archibald's fight with Bill.

• I, personally, think secrets should not be disclosed at the start of the game.

• Sometimes, we let our narrative sensibilities override the stakes set down in the rules. "You can only affect small groups"... hm... but having all the televisions in the city (or perhaps the nation) jump on is cool, and it's not like it disrupts the story arc.

Dude, holy fuck, you nuked Seattle. I laughed until I cried when I read this post.

Question: was anyone pissed about this? Was anyone rankled by the fact you got to slap down that super-trump?

You're right about the frequency of super-trumps. We've had the same problem in our game in that they don't come up enough. My plan: if you want to, you can help someone with their super-trump, and it counts. We'll see if it works out.

A rules question: When a queen is in a conflict, and plays card A; and he is helped by another player, who gives him a better card B, so that the final result is B + x; is the x in this formula 3, because the underlying card was played by the queen, or 1, because the queen isn't really helping someone else?

Clinton wrote:
Dude, holy fuck, you nuked Seattle. I laughed until I cried when I read this post.

Question: was anyone pissed about this? Was anyone rankled by the fact you got to slap down that super-trump?

You're right about the frequency of super-trumps. We've had the same problem in our game in that they don't come up enough. My plan: if you want to, you can help someone with their super-trump, and it counts. We'll see if it works out.

Are you guys going to finish the game and play it through?

Victor wrote:

Clinton wrote:
You're right about the frequency of super-trumps. We've had the same problem in our game in that they don't come up enough. My plan: if you want to, you can help someone with their super-trump, and it counts. We'll see if it works out.

Cool idea. Do you want us to try that rule in our second session?

Victor, I don't have a good sense of how much real-world time these sessions took.  Could you give us an idea?

Cheers,
Roger

Roger wrote:
Victor, I don't have a good sense of how much real-world time these sessions took.  Could you give us an idea?

Well, I guess Victor has pretty much told it all. I've playtested the game again with Wilco and a number of other players (who have played just D&D, WoD, a few tries of me with MLwM and a few poorly designed modifications on D&D), which was my original group.

It didn't come close to anything like this and this was clearly because all except me and Wilco weren't experienced with playing indie RPG's. It didn't bring up really good and juicy information about your game though, so I won't post about it unless you would like me to.

By the way Vic, I've also played Breaking the Ice with you ;).

Remko wrote:
It didn't come close to anything like this and this was clearly because all except me and Wilco weren't experienced with playing indie RPG's. It didn't bring up really good and juicy information about your game though, so I won't post about it unless you would like me to.

Well, the thing I mentioned on <a href="Http://www.mandragon.be">Mandragon was that the lack of narration control for the World (especially after the Prologue), because, even when the characters have a lot of enemies (which means I could draw more cards), only a few suit cards are neccesary.

There isn't a real drawback against playing a trumpsuit card without using it that way (or at least no mechanical drawback), which means all those cards are impossible for me to win. And one draws statistically at least one trumpsuit card.

Playing the world means having significantly less power to change elements of the story.

(I'll talk about my other session another time, Victor).

Remko wrote:
Well, the thing I mentioned on <a href="Http://www.mandragon.be">Mandragon was that the lack of narration control for the World (especially after the Prologue), because, even when the characters have a lot of enemies (which means I could draw more cards), only a few suit cards are neccesary.

Clinton wrote:

Remko wrote:
Well, the thing I mentioned on <a href="Http://www.mandragon.be">Mandragon was that the lack of narration control for the World (especially after the Prologue), because, even when the characters have a lot of enemies (which means I could draw more cards), only a few suit cards are neccesary.

This is interesting. The original rules was 5 cards + 1 per character player, but that seemed overwhelming against the two players I had. I beat them down often.

Perhaps 4 + 1 per character player would work better. In your game, that would have given you 7, which might have worked out better. Still - if people aren't helping each other, it just makes the World much more powerful, and I want to encourage fighting as much as helping. Hm. Perhaps just moving to 7 all around would be enough.

Remko wrote:
Hmm, strange. Perhaps my cards weren't just right. But my opponents had a lot of trumpsuit cards, which meant an overwelming power. I guess that the well-placed secrets created that situation: Often, the players gained (next to their supertrump) at least one or two extra trump cards. That really meant the uselessness for me as a World.

Clinton wrote:
That makes sense, though. The randomness of it can result in very different acts. In Act 1 of my current game, one player didn't pull a single trump card the entire act. That's when I shifted the World back to 6, but I think 7 was a better sweet spot.

Next to the reflections posted by Victor, one thing that worries me is the fact that only two Secrets remain in play, both property of Paul. In my opinion Secrets were the coolest elements of gameplay, arguably tied on that spot with Supertrumps. I would surely enjoy more Secrets (either created at the initial Secret creation phase or 'discovered' in the 2nd to 3rd bridge [or any bridge for that matter]) as I think it would largely contribute to story development.

The second session

We played the second and final session of this game some 10 days ago, using the two changes to the rules mentioned above (the World gets seven cards, players can help others with that player's supertrump). First, my assessment of these changes.

Assessment of rules changes

Giving the World seven cards is good. It makes him more of a presence in the game.

Allowing all players to play the supertrump to help someone else may be overdoing things a bit. We, and I guess we will be typical in this respect, had the unspoken convention that you'd always do this. The result of this is that every character gets his supertrump in every act, and that is just too much in my opinion. Maybe a good compromise between the original and the new rules is that only the World can help someone out with their supertrump - that about doubles the chance that you'll get to play your supertrump in an Act, without making it a certainty.

Assorted remarks

I also have a problem with supertrumps in Act 4. I had mine in my hand, and I knew that therefore I could get anything at all - and that just seemed to be too much power. I could have killed any of my fellow player's characters, and nobody would have been able to stop me. Doing so would have sucked though. Now, this may just be me, but I like driving play as hard as the rules will allow, pushing against the boundaries of my narrative power; but here, my power was too big and too unrestrained, because I could simply put one of the other players out of the game without them being able to do anything to stop that. That made me uncomfortable and more cautious than I would otherwise have been; in fact, I think I didn't push the stakes as I should have, in Act 4, and somewhat hurt the game with that. So in my opinion, there should be some mechanism that ensures that you can't use your supertrump to decide the final fate of the story alone.

It doesn't say so in the rules, I think, but we played a 'bridge' act at the end as an epilogue. This worked very well, and I recommend adding it to the rules.

So what happened?

I'll be much more concise than last time. Archibald fled the US after his destruction of Seattle, and was given asylum by Saddam Hussein who could use such a powerful agent in his exploits against the US. Natan continued his political career, trying to become president of the US as his grandmother, a powerful weapons lobbyist, was trying to oppose him. James, most of his Resistance destroyed in the destruction of Seattle, also tried to bring Natan down.

The third act started out by Natan having a TV-debate, where he was verbally beating the crap out of his grandmother as suddenly (I used a trump) there was a special news flash which showed the US embassy in Baghdad exploding in flames and Saddam Hussein declaring war on the US. Natan used this to his own advantage, and became ever more popular in the polls.

The rest of the third act basically consisted of Archibald, James and Jenny trying to meet up with Natan's grandmother in order to plan an assassination of Natan. We never met there, unfortunately, as several black cars with machine-gun wielding guys almost killed us, later assisted by a helicopter and - alas - Natan himself. The act ended with Archibald killing his coward driver, taking the seat himself and pressing down the gas as far as he could while steering the car right at Natan...

In the bridge, it was told how we missed Natan, but managed to escape to an old atomic bunker deep underground. Even as the Arab armies were invading the US, Natan tried to have us killed by a regiment of US soldiers - they failed, and Natan understood he had to go down himself.

In act four, he first killed Jenny, then found Archibald. Archibald reminded Natan of their common childhood, and asked, in tears: "What have we become? We should destroy ourselves, before we destroy the world." As an illustration of the evil of their powers, he showed a live cam shot of Boston, then, with a single gesture, set the entire city aflame. This was a supertrump, and I changed his Power from spades / 'fire' to hearts / 'memory'.

Natan was unimpressed, and he persuaded James that together they could bring paradie on earth. In the meantime, Iraqi soldiers were entering the complex, hoping to capture the three superheroes with special weapons that could disable their powers. I started a conflict with the stakes "The soldiers will come too late", leaving ambiguous what that meant, and we narrated how Archibald tried to show the others the memories of their common childhood and remind them of what they once were.

He failed, and lost his powers in the process. He wanted to die then, but the other two took him away and escaped the complex. Then, using both their supertrumps, they managed to take over the entire world and brought Heaven on earth.

Literally, it turned out. I used my episode to strongly imply that our coming had been the Apocalypse and the political utopia of Natan and James was the Kingdom Come. The Face of Angels, indeed! But I also told how everybody was happy except my character, who tried to incite revolt in the meek populace, without effect. In the end, he died and swallowed up by Hell.

The other characters did not fare better. Wilco told how James found out that the people he interacted with always lost their happiness and became restive, until he restored it for them. In the end, he saw that his place was not here, that he could not live in his own paradise, and he killed himself. Paul narrated how Natan, also disenchanted by the reality of Heaven, spent eternity trying to persuade people that they should think for themselves - but to no avail.

In the end, then, we had brought Heaven of Earth - but in the process, we ourselves had been excluded from bliss.

A problem

As I write this down, I think: cool. And it was cool, but not, in my opinion, nearly as cool as the first session. Most of the thematic goodness in this second session came from the epilogues, and that was just us jumping onto a cool idea without any help from the system. Act three in particular was mostly 'going through the motions', and act four, although it had its moments, felt a little flat too.

I'm not sure the other players agree with me here, but I'll ask them to chime in.

And I think I know the reason for this problem.

See, you make a character that has certain problems - at the very least, he has an enemy or nemesis, which gives some tension to his situation. Then, you give him superpowers, and suddenly two questions arise: How is he going to cope with these powers? And how are they going to influence the problems created during character creation? These two questions are enough to kick the story off, get it up to steam and keep it moving for, oh, two acts.

But the situations change, often radically, foes and nemeses easily get out of sight (who cared about Kenny O'Frannon anymore in the third act? Archibald killed him to hurt Natan, and I forgot to mention that in the above) and there is nothing that keeps the story going. Escalating stakes and the exiting conditions are simply not enough.

So, in the second act Archibald was all about taking revenge on Natan. I even nuked Seattle to do that! Nothing could top that - blowing up a city or a world is not a more powerful statement of the same premise, it is merely a further exaggeration of it. But I didn't have anything else to drive Archibald, so I kept pushing the revenge theme... and it didn't really work. In act four I substituted a 'we must stop ourselves' theme for the revenge theme, but it was dramatically unmotivated and, what is worse, not provoked by the system in any way. It was just me trying to stave off boredom by changing the drive of my character, not the system helping me to keep the story going.

What I'm saying, then, is that the system as it stands kicks the story off nicely enough, but doesn't give you the mechanics you need to keep it running. Escalating the stakes doesn't really do anything in that regard, since 'the fate of a nation' or 'the fate of the world' is - storywise - just 'the fate of a city' writ in large letters. We can't identify with such entities anymore, they're all just big. And the exit conditions don't do much either - I think we had already fulfilled those of act 3 when we started the act, and even if we hadn't, they don't actually guarantee steam to keep the dramatic engine running.

So I think the system needs something more, something extra, something that will keep the tale progressing. Perhaps something like the 'issue' of PTA, and making it part of the exit conditions of each act that for every character there must have been a conflict where at least one of the sides had as stakes that this issue were to be changed into something else. That's just the first thing that came to my mind, though, not something I actually thought through.

Victor,

One thing I noticed here - did people take new relationships during the game? I didn't see any. I think connections with new people might have helped drive the later acts.

On killing characters: both sides have to agree to the stakes before a conflict starts. If they don't, there's no conflict.

Clinton wrote:
One thing I noticed here - did people take new relationships during the game? I didn't see any. I think connections with new people might have helped drive the later acts.

On killing characters: both sides have to agree to the stakes before a conflict starts. If they don't, there's no conflict.

Victor wrote:

On killing characters: both sides have to agree to the stakes before a conflict starts. If they don't, there's no conflict.

What - really? I can say "My stakes are that your character dies" and then you go "No way, think up something else"? If that is so, we completely missed it. That gives effective veto power to all the players, at least as far as they are the ones who get to set the stakes!

How does that work, by the way? Can I start a conflict with the World where my stakes include things happening to someone else's character? Such phrases as "there are no restrictions on the stakes" do suggest that this is the case.

Clinton wrote: One guy bets his car, and the other guy bets his watch. If the first guy thinks the watch is worth the car, ok, he might go for it. But he could always say no way. In The Face of Angels, it works similarly. You can always say, "Ok, if I win, I want you to die." But if I say, "No way," we're not going to have that conflict or scene.

Hi,

As a player at the same session (Paul/Natan) I must concur with Victor: Natan's megalomania was extremely cool to play the first session, during the second session it was still quite ok, but a second 'motive' was missing, more and more as the session progressed. As a player I was less conscious of this during the play itself, but it felt like the character became a bit flat.

With superpowers, the goals of a character will become enormous as well, and that create limits: normal people can imagine only so much over-the-top goals for their character (like conquering the world). Perhaps characters should have 'weaknesses' (world uses this color as a trump/cards of this color are worth 4 points less (a 10 of spades played by a player with a weakness in this suit counts as a 6)). Perhaps it's just me or us, but I'd like the characters, even with all these superpowers, to have difficulty dealing with some daily life problems (like Spiderman or some other bad examples).

In the end I let Natans motive shift slightly: he became honestly convinced that they could make the world a better place. As he picked up a new superpower after I played my supertrump (queen of dimes/'telepathy'), he could influence people over large distances, but also received feedback that he could not ignore (he didn't really listen/take serious the protests of others before).
In the epilogue, when 'heaven' on earth was created, and Natan and James were 'gods', he heard so many prayers of people directed to him, that he became insane: with his powers he could still not do much about these problems, and this problems that came to him in prayers made him see that the world was in fact not really a better place. This lost him his powers.
More than a bit crazy, he tried to convince people that this was not the way, but failed, and died of old age in mental agony.

What I would also have liked in our session (but opinions seemed to vary upon that) that there would slowly be a 'storyline' about how the superpowers came into the world. We gave it something of an apocalypse theme, but it would be nice if there was some mysterious force that the players and characters slowly discover more about, and a bigger plan that this force (God for example, or the aliens/angels/unicorns that gave the character the powers) has. This might bring limits for the creativity though, which should of course be avoided.

And Victor...
Oh my God! You killed Kenny! :)

Clinton wrote:
Yeah, really. It's not so weird or bizarre - only because traditional RPG design is so defensive is this considered weird.

Paul wrote:
With superpowers, the goals of a character will become enormous as well, and that create limits: normal people can imagine only so much over-the-top goals for their character (like conquering the world). Perhaps characters should have 'weaknesses' (world uses this color as a trump/cards of this color are worth 4 points less (a 10 of spades played by a player with a weakness in this suit counts as a 6)). Perhaps it's just me or us, but I'd like the characters, even with all these superpowers, to have difficulty dealing with some daily life problems (like Spiderman or some other bad examples).

...

What I would also have liked in our session (but opinions seemed to vary upon that) that there would slowly be a 'storyline' about how the superpowers came into the world.

Clinton wrote:
You nailed two things that should happen right there. As for the first, I'm honestly baffled why that didn't come up - just because you can set stakes as high as blowing up cities doesn't mean ordinary people can't still be a problem. In three out of the four arenas, you can still lose easily to the World's characters.

As for the second, I left any rules about that out on purpose so that you'd have to figure it out for yourself - but was that a good decision? I'm looking for feedback on whether there's enough to really work for you here.

Victor wrote:

Clinton wrote:
You nailed two things that should happen right there. As for the first, I'm honestly baffled why that didn't come up - just because you can set stakes as high as blowing up cities doesn't mean ordinary people can't still be a problem. In three out of the four arenas, you can still lose easily to the World's characters.

I'm not sure what you mean with that last sentence. It is true that your trumps will only help you to win one out of four tricks, but that does mean that you'll win about 1/4 + 3/8 = 5 out of 8 tricks, and since you'll dump lots of non-trumps as help cards in other people's conflicts, I think it's not so hard to boost that even higher. With those numbers, you rarely loose against an unaided World.

Clinton wrote:
You're right - I think. I'd have to sit down with the math to see.

The one rules change I've made that should help with this is that the World's hand size is now 5 + Act number. So, in the prologue, it's 5; in Act 1, it's 6; carrying on to Act 4, where it is 9. This should significantly change things.

Victor wrote:
Personally, I'm not so hot about making something like that explicit. In general, I wouldn't care where the superpowers came from. (This is purely a statement of my own preference, which carries no generality beyond that.)

Paul wrote: I think the world was stronger in the second session, having more cards, but I also think less players helped him. I think playing the world is not easy (but perhaps Remko can say more about that), and a hint or two would not be out of place: about how to create NPC's that become important for the story and, when there's a conflict between the world and a player (or two players), how to get the others to help one of the sides in the conflict