We played the second playtest game of Six Bullets last night. This time round we had the right number of players (7), and with a mix of veterans and newbies, we had a good mix to roll along nicely. My regular group games online, so I have the luxury of having an actual transcript from play, which I've posted to my playtest wiki.

Starting out

We decided for a change of setting this time round, and Jan suggested a sci-fi, whilst Rob suggested film noir. So we blended the two into a Blade Runner meets Sin City style affair, a perfect backdrop for a gritty tale of vengeance.

Rob volunteered to play the protagonist, Hanigan, whilst Dave got the chief villain, a guy known as Bulldozer. The stage was set, and we were off with a bang!

The game

The first scene immediately threw up a problem or two. The scene was set, with a spot of foreshadowing for later, and a showdown between Bulldozer and Hanigan in a garage. But almost immediately we hit a conflict, and Hanigan had no choice (or so we thought) but to roll his vengeance dice. Of course this cut the scene off really quickly, as Bulldozer died as a result. The rather cut and dried nature of the scene seemed a bit jarring, whereas it had worked well in the first playtest.

The second scene went without a hitch, and was great fun to boot! Who doesn’t like cybernetic, talking apes! The scene was set in a none too salubrious bar. Hanigan entered, so did Sim, the owner. We had a goodly amount of talking back and forth between Sim and Hanigan, and the pair riffed off one another nicely to add to the fact sheet, as well as to the setting a little more.

The other players joined in the fun too (whereas in the last game most of them sat back when it wasn’t there scene), creating secondary characters. Of course when the scene exploded into actions, there were plenty of innocent standers-by! We briefly debated whether secondary characters could die when vdice weren’t rolled (they can, if someone chooses to kill them), and whether the protagonist could kill secondary characters if he won a conflict with vice (yes, inadvertently, but he can only roll them in an attempt to kill an antagonist).

In the third scene we hit a few more problems. The first of these was play style. Darren, who although being a veteran of Polaris, set the scene and seemed to be intent on putting obstacles in the way of the story. He put his character, Licifor, on a secret island, surrounded by traps and an army. We ran with it, but perhaps understandably wound up with a few narrative conflicts to play out. And therein lied the problem.

Now character conflicts were all sorted. Everyone knew when to declare them, how to set the stakes and when to roll the dice. But when it came to narration, and disputing someone else’s narration of an event or inclusion of an idea, we came back to the problem – how do you resolve it? In the current draft of the rules you resolve it like a character conflict, dicing off using one of the character’s attributes. But this seems a little incongruous for a narrative conflict, to use a character’s attribute to negotiate an unrelated, out of game narration issue?

Fortunately, it was never really an issue – in each conflict negotiation won the day, so dice were never needed.

Some canny narration by both Rob, and Olly (taking it upon himself to play ExpertSys, the computer that controlled Licifor’s base) kept the story moving in the right direction quite nicely, although the scene went a bit crazy towards the end as Darren seemed to lose sight of the genre entirely … It felt more like a boss fight in a video game than the feel and tone we’d been going for so far, but this wasn't really an issue with the game, more with the group. It came out good in the end though.

And it was there that we left it for the night as it was 1230. We’re coming back to it next week to finish up.

So, onto questions:

1. narrative conflicts – how best to adjudicate them? We’ve nailed why they happen, and how they happen, but how to resolve them when negotiation breaks down? A straight dice off between players, perhaps with bonuses for having a stake in the outcome? Or a dice roll based on the player’s character? Or a combination of the two?

2. That problematic first scene – how to strike the right balance between making it cinematic and punchy, and being too short? Is this just a narrative issue?

Hmm, I've just thought of another question.

3. How best to reinforce genre and theme? It hasn't been a problem up til now - everybody has wholeheartedly embraced the setting and the theme, but last night Darren seemed to push it a bit too far. He seemed to switch genres whilst nobody was looking, and suddenly we were in some sort of occult/super spy mashup. So do you think some sort of setting/genre reinforcement is needed, perhaps by virtue of some brief setting/genre tenets established at the beginning? Or is this just another game group thing which relies on the other players to self-police and to issue narrative conflicts to stop situations like this arising?

We had the second session of the playtest last night, although it was only a short one and we got just one scene done. I've posted the scene here.

This time we didn't have any trouble with genre, although the rules for a tie with no successes caused a few issues. If a tie is rolled and nobody rolled any successes, then one of the other players got to narrate (in this case, me). The antagonist wasn't overly happy with my narration of the conflict, and the lateness of the hour caused some tension out of character. We sensibly decided to end after the scene and resume when we were all fresher.