So, we sat down to play Perfect at GEAS, the Edinburgh University games society last Sunday. Hugo, Shevvy and Vicky had all expressed keenness the previous week, so this time we got round to creating characters and getting into some crime cycles.

Two of the players are new to gaming, but they’ve had some really positive experiences so far and are enjoying the play that they’re taking part in. The thing that attracted them to Perfect was the setting and colour, they really dug the idea of this stratified, repressed society of seeming elegance and morality, but with this undercurrent of criminality.

Rather than engage in collaborative crimes, we decided to have three crime cycles, one for each of the characters. From the get go, the players were totally up for contributing to the stories of the other characters and making this a real collaborative effort. This is an interesting contrast (something also highlight by Gregor is his recent Best friends thread), in hat the new players are lacking in preconceptions about what their roles are and what they should be doing: they put stuff in because it is cool and makes for a great story.

Each crime was quite different. One character (played by Hugo) had a passion to create art, but believed in Gailism and thought that Queen Abigail’s words had been skewed and misinterpreted. The second character (played by Shevvy) was the daughter of a powerful lord, outwardly a demure and beautiful create, secretly a debauched, capricious nymphomaniac. The final character (played by Vicky) was a chaste lady of high class, who felt repulsed by the touch of her husband, but felt a stirring of passion when another lady’s hand brushed her cheek.

In order to make the game more cohesive, we established some connections between the characters. The noble lady’s lordly father was head of the ministry in which the art lover worked. The art lover saw the chaste lady crossing his path on a regular basis and painted pictures of the unknown beauty. The chaste lady’s husband was a lackey of the powerful lord, and so on. Other, more slight and subtle connections were established both before the crime cycles began and during play.

Without going into detail, each of the crimes went really well. There was great narration and input from all taking part. The players were very satisfied that, having set out what they wanted to do and the goals for their characters, they got to tell those stories and have the entire group embroider them and help create a full experience. Strangely, all of the players were successful in their crimes, but this in itself lead to all sorts of repercussions (the chaste lady now had a clandestine love affair with her female friend, the noble lady successfully hid her debauchery from her father and the art lover found the images he sought and gained advancement in his government position.

We set up a final scene at the noble lords house, where all of the PCs were present. Intolerances were brought in at this stage, just to see how they worked. The art lover saw a painting of bright sunflowers that he had snuck into the lords house and hung on the wall smashed before his eyes as the noble lady exercise her intolerance for yellow flowers. The chaste lady was publicly embarrassed by her husband, who succumbed to a fit of passion and made a public disgrace of himself. The chaste lady was then taken away to be cared for by her lady lover. And the art lover intervened in matter of a nobleman unreasonably abusing his small son for an imagine transgression (his intolerance was an inability to stand cruelty to children).

The final moments of the game consisted of the chaste lady leaving the scene in a carriage, held in the arms of he lover and the noble lady and art lover exchanging harsh words and fiery glances, and a possible affair between them blossomed….

Everyone was happy with this final scene. It spoke of further stories to be told, but also provided a convenient end point for the game.

We did, however, have a few issues with the system, the main one revolving around Freedoms and the number of these which the characters had. All of the players expressed the opinion that with characters of high status, the number of Freedoms taken makes it difficult to recall all of the requirements, repercussions and so forth in play. In out post-game discussion, there was a general feeling that a maximum of 3 freedoms for any character would be a good limit in terms of playability and ease of recall.

From a GM point of view, I’ve also got a few queries about the Tension Levels and the setting thereof. There were occasions when the player set their tension level fairly low, but I considered the situation quite tense and important, so set my personal tension level higher (sometime much higher). Is this appropriate within the context of the game? Nobody was against this in the game, but it did provide a point where we wondered what was appropriate in terms of tension level setting.

Overall, we had a great game. All of us loved the setting and flavour of Perfect, the scenes that came out of it, the characterisation and conflict.

Cheers
Malcolm

Awesome, Malcolm!
Thanks for posting this Actual Play report.

Aside from those two issues/concerns (Freedoms and Tension Level), how did you like the system?

Also... do you have the character sheets?
I'd really like to see the Aspects and Intolerances of all three, especially Vicky.

From a GM point of view, I’ve also got a few queries about the Tension Levels and the setting thereof. There were occasions when the player set their tension level fairly low, but I considered the situation quite tense and important, so set my personal tension level higher (sometime much higher). Is this appropriate within the context of the game? Nobody was against this in the game, but it did provide a point where we wondered what was appropriate in terms of tension level setting.

We did, however, have a few issues with the system, the main one revolving around Freedoms and the number of these which the characters had. All of the players expressed the opinion that with characters of high status, the number of Freedoms taken makes it difficult to recall all of the requirements, repercussions and so forth in play. In out post-game discussion, there was a general feeling that a maximum of 3 freedoms for any character would be a good limit in terms of playability and ease of recall.

The final moments of the game consisted of the chaste lady leaving the scene in a carriage, held in the arms of he lover and the noble lady and art lover exchanging harsh words and fiery glances, and a possible affair between them blossomed….

Everyone was happy with this final scene. It spoke of further stories to be told, but also provided a convenient end point for the game.

joepub wrote:
Aside from those two issues/concerns (Freedoms and Tension Level), how did you like the system?

Also... do you have the character sheets?
I'd really like to see the Aspects and Intolerances of all three, especially Vicky.

Right. Did your players all create High Citizens or Citizens First Class?
At that point, Freedoms do start to get a bit ridiculous, but that is sorta the point.
The more power you have in society, the more you are constantly stepping on eggshells.

Some Freedoms - like Freedom of Assembly - are actually easier when you are of high rank.
Freedom of Assembly allows you to join any social event, so long as no one of higher status is present... But if you are CFC, then that never happens anyways.

want to go into more detail about the characters (their Aspects, Intolerances, Certifications, etc) or talk a bit about Crime Cycles (How aggressively did you set Tension? Did you save up points at all? Did you spend points equally on Calm/Discovery, or did you focus more heavily on one of them?) then that'd be awesome, too.

Malcolm wrote: We only played out calm and discovery tests, then moved on to the previously described final scene which brought in the intolerancs of the characters.

David wrote:
So I take it this means you NEVER won a test as the GM; the players won every Calm and Discovery test?

If so, what about your Banked Opposition Points? Were you actually using all Fear and Inspector Points in the Calm and Discovery, leaving nothing left over if there had been Interrogation and/or Conditioning? And *still* losing?

If so, horrible luck, that. Or, maybe, you were underbidding Tensions.

I have wondered (but lacked sufficient playtesting to determine) if there is a misbalance between the open-ended and cumulative "advantages" a character can buy/define versus the fixed maximum Opposition Points generated by the Player-GM bidding process (20). Maybe the bidding needs to be open-ended as well; requiring some expansion of the Payout, Fallout, Conditioning, etc charts?

Or maybe you could do a "Beyond Perfect" expansion, which deals with things like stupid-high Tension Levels, world-shaking Payouts and Fallouts, and end-game build-up and examples. For instance, it seems that some players reach an "end game" by virtue of all-but taking over society, with their stacks of advantages and Trusts and such. They can attempt--and routinely succeed at--TL 20 crimes every day, all day long.

OK, rambling OFF... but I had to bring this up, as Malcolm's game seems heading the same way (particularly if the player characters are never being Conditioned!).
David

Aspects
Flamboyant (2)
Believes nothing bad will ever happen to her (3)

OK, rambling OFF... but I had to bring this up, as Malcolm's game seems heading the same way (particularly if the player characters are never being Conditioned!).
David

Catherine: 12
Tarquin: 13
Abigail: 9

joepub wrote:
Malcolm, rules clarification: When you buy an Aspect with a Level 2/3/4 gain, it still only costs 1 Build Point. (but, you must set the aspect's fallout at the same level as the Gain).

Here's an example:
1. I spend one build point.
2. I create my evocative aspect description: I killed a man.
3. I pick a Level 3 Gain.
4. I pick a Level 3 Fallout (gain lv 3 = fallout lv 3).

Honwever, a point for Malcolm: If you accumulate points in Player A's cycle, you can spend them on Player B or C's cycle.
You do know that, right?

If you had done another round of Crime Cycles, do you think you would have seen some 13-16 range tensions being set?

As we were playing crime cycles in a concurrnet rather than consecutive fashion, how would you say we should appraoch this? For example, we ran through Calm scenes of each character, then back to the first character again and ran a Discovery scene. So, we had to keep note of the opposition pool for each character. Are there opportunities to switch dice from the pools or can this only happen if crime cycles are running consecutively?

I framed the scenes myself using a lot of consensus and suggestions, which bent the rules about trading-off scene framing a little (which the text calls "narration" for some reason), but not much considering that I think they'd have floundered a bit, and that I called for so much consensus before officially starting a scene. Admittedly, this wasn't a clear decision, because I merely forgot the rule.

I did do something else which isn't in the book. It breaks no rules, and without it, I don't think play would have worked well at all. I ran two Crime Cycles simutaneously, one for each character, alternating attention back and forth between each one, and rolling a die apiece for each character at the same time.

Don't get me wrong. These were not collaborative crimes and each was handled exactly the same, mechanically, as if I'd run each one from stem to stern in sequence. Doing it this way simply meant the camera was rolling on each one at the same time. It's much, much easier than it sounds, and I recommend it in general for practically any game, when dealing with utterly-disconnected scenes.

Crime Cycle #1: Neville nipped a drink in an alley; Mordecai shirked work due to a hangover and showed up late. They both failed their Calm Tests and got Interrogated, and they both got Discovered and Conditioned. Mordecai resisted Conditioning; that was the only success. They both seized upon Payout and glared at me. On the other hand, they were both pretty pumped that the characters had succeeded at the crimes, based on simple agreement. They'd chosen a lot of Tension points, so as it turned out, Brian was empowered to throw off the Conditioning immediately.

Crime Cycle #2: Nevillle climbed up a big tower and dumped the Eye of London into the Thames (Brian was pretty pissed off at being Conditioned!) (note as well that I didn't make a big deal about using London landmarks; whatever); Mordecai poisoned the caviar at his factory, killing (as Brian said) thirty-seven people. It was sort of interesting that at first Brian and I kind of blinked at him, what, you're poisoning people?, and then when he smiled and said, through the caviar, we nodded. This time, I think Neville got away scot-free, and Mordecai got Interrogated but not Discovered.

Crime Cycle #3 (collaborative): Now, we used the collaborative rules. It was easy to point out that Neville needed a new source of booze, and that he also might have tracked down Mordecai via the poisoning incident, as a peer of the people who'd been hit by it. So! This crime is best described as "bootlegging absinthe together." And the bastards got away with it!! Both players had the system down pretty well at this point, and I found that what looked like a clear GM advantage in Opposition Points initially, in the first Cycle, didn't stand up so well once they could hammer my rolls with multiple Aspects. I even used 7 Opposition Points I'd banked, to no avail.

(Granted, I think they got to double-dip on Aspects once or twice because I was too tired to monitor it. We'll be more careful about that next time; this time, we were simply getting the Cycles down.)

Perfect, and in particular this group of characters, if a game that I'll be revisiting in the near future. Some rejigging in light of the greater clarity regarding Aspects will be required, but i think we could see more great play come out of it