OK, I got the boys to give it a spin tonight.

Not ideal conditions, I had only kinda scanned the rules and kept flipping back and forth through them during the game.  Absolutely non-ideal in terms of my rules knowledge.  Learning it as I went.

We only got through a scene or two for each occultist.  This particular group totally hated having their people separate; they would have much preferred lots of up front interaction.

It took me a while to get focus in terms of framing scenes with clear goals and direction.

I wasn't clear on, for example, if you frame a scene and it's supposed to be a Rival scene, well.... what if you have some interactions with nobodies in the process.  Do you use the nobody rules or is that forbidden because it's supposed to be a Rival scene?  I wasn't clear.

We had a lot of failure amongst the group.  Only one really unambiguous success scene (against a Rival).  Players found this discouraging.

They adapted well to the "you have lots of mad phat crazy powers of flesh, voice, imagination, memory" stuff.  That worked out nice.

This particular group doesn't get off on sheer badass evil that much.  I think they were thinking of their characters as more human than AoE occultists are supposed to be.  I think they wanted them to be the heroes.

(At this point I am corrected by one player who says, no, his character was a complete madwoman.)

At the end when we kind of debriefed they mentioned that they weren't really interested in the relentless nastiness of the game.  I broke ranks and explained to them the bait and switch involved in the game, and they nodded and said that made more sense to them.  But their first impression of it was just "glory in horribleness" which wasn't a path they were that interested in walking, even with the bait of badassness.  They did it for me but I don't think the game could have sold itself to them on the "cool badassness" concept alone.

Nobody ever Fetishized.

The game ended after a scene or two for each mostly because we started late and people were just getting tired.  Also there's that lack of grabby evil thing.

People did get into their characters in the sense that a Rival took a character down and they wanted to FUCKING TAKE HIM BACK DOWN.  Good old tit for tat.  So that part of the bait was taken.  But I'm not sure that's enough.

One of the players did want to borrow the rules and check 'em out so he might have some more feedback for you.

I dunno, I'd like to be more encouraging about the game but I'm not sure I know a lot of people who the bait and switch can really catch.  Hard to say from the super short game though.  I'm speculating from a really small data set.

Hey Ed,

Thanks for playing :)

Can you describe a scene or two in some detail? Did your scenes consist of a series of rolls before you cut to a different player? Or just one roll and cut to a different player? Did the players work the formulas, requesting scenes that could increase their low numbers by leveraging their strong numbers?

Paul

Let's see, first scene --  scene is "with a nobody" (my choice), the place is "a bank vault" and the transgression is "torture."  I make the point that the transgression is something that has happened, not (necessarily) something the adept has done.  Player describes how a couple of would-be bank robbers high on some nasty drug got locked in the vault along with the bank president, and tortured her to death before the vault was finally opened and they were caught.  His adept, Gordy (there is a creepy history behind the name), is on a quest to find a fleck of blood from that event.

The nobody in question is a drifter and street person who he's going to press into service to help him rob the bank (by creating a distraction).

I looked straight at the "status change" things and tried a roll for making him an underling.  (Probably not appropriate at all.)  Failure.

Then I realized we could keep going using "resolution against underlings" and he decided to try to make him help out anyway, underling or no underling. Failure there.

So he decided to beat the crap out of him.  There he succeeded and got some Power.

They weren't really playing the rules system because I was busy flipping through it trying to figure out what to do next. :)

You know, the more I think about this the more I realize, sadly, how useless it was as playtest feedback becuase of my lack of preparation/familiarization with the setting.  I suspect if I had been ready to suggest moves based on leveraging stats in one way or another, that might have caught the players' eyes more.

As it was, it ended up being more like the old "you players needn't worry your pretty little heads about the details of these rules," thing, which is totally inappropriate for this kind of game.

I wish I had another chance to run a playtest game of this, but I'm quite sure I won't be able to sell this group on it again.