This past sabbath day we kicked off a planned multi-session playtest of Acts of Evil. And what can I say...I like it. We only had time for two scenes with each player, and they weren't all great, but there was enough greatness that I'm very geeked about our next and forthcoming sessions. Yeah, I was excited about the first session. But as a designer. The mechanics had been refined in reponse to playtesting and comments in this forum, and I was anxious to start the engine and see it perform, and tune it if necessary. Now though...I'm excited as a gamer. I'm excited to see what the system will teach me about drama, and story, and creativity. The mechanics just suit me. The things they require me to do as a GM are things I like doing. And they don't require me to do things I hate.¹ I'm much less anxious about tuning the mechanics, and now excited about tuning my creativity. And then baking what I learn into GM and player advice text.

A few highlights:

Scott Knipe's character is Borchardt, in 1783:

"Others refer to him as a libertine, but he really doesn't care about labels. He's a hedonist and a blasphemer, and enjoys nothing more than pushing envelopes and breaking taboos. He's independently wealthy.  He owns and operates a brothel, not because he needs money, but because he's an avid voyeur of the darker side of humanity."

For his first turn, Scott told me to frame a scene with a Nobody. I looked to what I'd prepped according to the rules and found the word "slave." I framed to Borchardt having dinner in a restaurant with a man named Claude de Ban, who had run up a substantial tab at the brothel. I played Claude as nervous, and apologetic for delays in paying his debt. I had Claude beckon his slave boy Michele over for his purse, and produce coins amounting to only a small fraction of the debt as a payment. And it went from there. Scott had Borchardt step behind the seated Claude to rub his shoulders and invite him to relax. "If you really want him to relax, it's a die roll," I said. And so Scott rolled Resolution Against Nobodies, with Voice as the key Aspect, and it was a success. So Claude relaxed. Then he had Borchardt bend over Claude to suck the man's eye from it's socket. Again, Resolution Against Nobodies. I remembered to add a die to what I was rolling, because it was the second Resolution Against Nobodies in the scene, but we forgot to adjust Scott's pool for Flesh, rather than Voice being the key Aspect. The roll was a success. Claude screamed, and arched his back way up. But Borchardt held him. And invited the boy Michele to pour wine into Claude's open eye socket. This was a attempt to make the boy an Underling. The roll failed. The boy shrieked and threw the wine bottle crazily at Borchardt before fleeing the restaurant.

What I learned:

First, damn it was powerful. What a great first scene. It absolutely captured everyone's attention. But I did start to doubt my prep scheme. The only thing I'd used from what I'd prepped was the single word "slave."  And although clearly I know how to frame these kinds of scenes, with NPCs in weak positions relative to player characters, in retrospect I'm not sure it wouldn't have been more appropriate for a scene with a Victim. And that leaves me wondering about the kinds of things I should be framing when it's a scene with a Nobody.

Danielle's character is Clive Black, a pirate in 1650.

For her first turn she told me to frame a scene with a Teacher. This took me a bit by surprise. With no Rivals, Underlings, or Victims to start, players are limited to just scenes with Teachers and Nobodies. And strategically it doesn't make much sense to interact with Teachers until you have some Power to spend. But I looked to one of my prep notes and framed a scene below decks of a slave ship while a storm raged above, with Clive in irons and an occultist slave planning to sacrifice him as part of a ritual to bring doom upon all the shipboard whites. Her roll was a Resolution Against Teachers, with Flesh as the key Aspect, to very cleverly change her coloring to match that of the Teacher and invalidate herself as usable for the ritual. But the die roll was a failure. I didn't negate the change, though. The Teacher acknowledged her cleverness, but told her that the cosmetic change didn't affect her inherent whiteness, and then proceeded with the ritual.

What I learned:

In retrospect, handling the Teacher as a murderous enemy was a mistake. Damn if I didn't give Matt all kinds of advice when he was running The Questing Beast about having antagonists engage with the PCs, and problematize their decisionmaking, rather than just flatly attacking them, and then I do the same thing here. Clearly Acts of Evil needs textual guidance for framing all the various scene types. And for scenes with Teachers, I'm thinking the framer should look to the occultist's Power and Capacity scores. If the occultist has no Power or un-used Capacity, the Teacher should engage them, and have need of them. Only if the occultist has Power or un-used Capacity should overt hostility be an option. And not always even then.

Matt Gwinn's character is Gerald Conners, a Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley in 1969.

On his turn, Matt elected to frame his own scene. So I had him frame one with a Teacher. And he did it as overtly antagonistic. His Dean of Academic Affairs, Dr. Thaddeus Fry, was upbraiding him. Gerald is a Timothy Leary-esque proponent of expanded consciousness via chemical experimentation. Fry questioned Gerald's future at UC Berkeley in a threatening way, and Gerald laughed at him. It went to Resolution Against Teachers, with the objective of Gerald convincing Fry that he was the greater occultist via force of presence. The die roll was a failure and the scene ended.

What I learned:

"He comes to believe I'm a greater occultist" was certainly a genre appropriate objective, but it rather lacked dramatic teeth. Perhaps my creativity was just failing me, but I couldn't see how it was dramatically demonstrable. Is there an interesting way to dramatize belief changes? We discussed the demonstrability of the belief change, and Matt offered that Gerald had tried to convince Fry to come to a drug party. So I'm thinking now the rules text should explicitly state that you can't make an NPC believe something via the dice mechanics. Unresolved in my mind is whether you can put thoughts in their heads. Is there a meaningful distinction between putting a thought in an NPC's head, and making them believe something?

And the framing was as much a mistake as my framing of Danielle's scene. In retrospect, when the roleplaying started I should have tried to turn it around. Maybe Dr. Fry should have come on strong and critical at first, and then offered Gerald an opportunity to "make good" or something. "I don't know why I'm doing this Gerald, but...okay, convince me why I should do this." Salvaging an imperfect scene, now damn that's a skill worth learning.

So, forward to the second session, I have an idea for an alternate prep scheme that I'm excited about trying. I can't wait to see some of the game's strategic complexity now that Borchardt and Gerald are in the same time period. And I'm eager to learn more about what makes for great scene framing.

Thoughts? Scott? Matt? Danielle? Anyone?

Paul

¹ One of my publishing concerns is that players, though, might hate what's required of them. I've seen the side of playing Acts of Evil that's intense and creatively rewarding. But I'm suspicious that "you play evil" will be an even bigger barrier to player enthusiasm for the game than "you play a wretched minion" was to My Life with Master Also, there was no laughter during the game. My Life with Master when we play is characterized by lots of laughter. This was intense, and creative, but brutal and without laughter.

I know where the inspiration for the Borchhardt character came from.

Anyway, sounds good - and I think it is very useful that you playtest your own game. Could you expand on the "now that Borchardt and Gerald are in the same time period" bit? How did that happen?

By the way, I think it makes excellent strategic sense to confront Teacher if you do not have Power, as long as you are planning to roll a Status Change against them.

Hey Victor,

I know where the inspiration for the Borchhardt character came from.

Scott's original concept was a hateful Pictish king. But he switched to Borchardt when he recognized Pictish history actually installed the king idea with too much potential as a sympathetic character. Which has me thinking players' human bias for potentially sympathetic, potentially heroic, potential protagonists is going to be a very tricky hurdle for Acts of Evil. How do you engage players in carefully scrubbing latent potential protagonism from their character concepts?

Anyway, sounds good - and I think it is very useful that you playtest your own game. Could you expand on the "now that Borchardt and Gerald are in the same time period" bit? How did that happen?

Gerald had a second scene with his Teacher in which he attempted a Status Change. That roll was unsuccessful. And the failure outcome, revised since you played, for a Change a Teacher to a Rival is a forced shift in time/space. Fry was serious when he threatened Gerald's continued retention by UC Berkeley. He threw him across time and space into pre-Revolutionary Paris.

By the way, I think it makes excellent strategic sense to confront Teacher if you do not have Power, as long as you are planning to roll a Status Change against them.

With the revised formula, the odds for that roll are not in your favor. As a new occultist, with no Underlings or Power, you're rolling a pool of d8's equal to your Clarity against a pool of d6's greater than your Clarity. I recall that Matt even fetishized prior to his roll to make Fry a Rival and he still failed. And now he's in the same time and place as Borchardt, which has to be considered a less secure situation.

Paul

Victor...I want to hear your theory about Borchardt.  Where do you think I got my inspiration from?

hardcoremoose wrote:
Victor...I want to hear your theory about Borchardt.  Where do you think I got my inspiration from?

Actually, I didn't think of de Sade initially...I actually was inspired by a line of dialogue from the comic Faust: Love of the Damned, where a character describes the weird practices of a certain Parisan brothel and its proprietor.  But almost as soon as I started writing his background I realized I was describing de Sade, and that informed my initial image of the character, as well as some of my play.  Given the events of the second session, I think I've gotten away from that a bit, but the comparison will always be there.

Curiously, by making it all so public, and by getting in so many fights with the social and moral authorities of his time, de Sade actually robbed himself of many of the sensual pleasures he purported to be pursuing. This suggests two corollaries:

1) Real hedonists don't talk about it - perhaps with the exception of Casanova. They just go on and do it.

2) There is intense pleasure to be found in bucking social authority, substantially more than can be got out of kinky sex, at least for some people.

If I recall correctly, Simone de Beauvoir suggests in her Must we burn Sade? that the marquis was looking for literary and moral recognition as much as anything else. He wrote numerous plays, several novels and some philosophical treatises, many of which were actually published, though often anonimously. Sade wrote partly because he wanted to be known as a good writer, and partly because he wanted to justify his own desires using the then dominant rationalistic philosophy. (The only book that couldn't possibly have gotten him either, the 120 days of Sodom, was written in captivity, when chances of publication must have seemed very meager anyhow.)