I ran a convention game of Cold City at MACE in High Point, NC this weekend and it went very well.  I'd previously run a three session mini-campaign of Cold City, so I knew the rules and the setting and was confident. 

I created five pre-gen characters, one from each occupying power and a German, and made sure that they all had mutually exclusive national and hidden agendas.  My goal was to put them in situations in which they had the opportunity to betray one another, and let the game drive itself.  We had four players, and the French RPA agent was left out of the mix. 

Cold City really demands a lot of prep, and to some extent a linear plot.  I had a series of NPCs, situations, and events prepped, but remained flexible, cutting out some bits and truncating others based on the actions of the players.  I'd also given them memos from their superiors that offered ways forward and suggestions about prominent NPCs available to them.  These were, curiously, largely ignored and nobody shared their personal information. 

I established that a pair of RPA agents had gone missing, and that they needed to be located and recovered.  The players went on a clue hunt in the Berlin black market, as well as tossing the flats of the missing men.  I used these scenes as a chance to introduce the game mechanics through some Influence and Reason rolls.

There were some satisfying scenes in which they uncovered the information necessary to find the missing guys.  I introduced real people from history - a pair of ex-OSS agents drummed out for coruption, returned to Berlin on the take, and a very creepy ethnic German Serbian ex-Waffen SS officer who operated a brothel running young boys.  The players seemed engaged with the puzzle hunt, and put all the bits together before charging off to the scene of the weird action - the gun tower of Flakturm II, known locally as "rubble mountain", in Friedrichshain, east Berlin.

The area was cordoned off by MGB and Stasi troops, which they had fun avoiding.  Inside the perimeter were roaming bands of S-T zombies and, deep below the bomb shelter, a freaky Nazi high energy physics lab with a strange, deadly Incursor that generated horrific filaments of glass.  It was very pulpy and fun, and there was a good amount of skullduggery as hidden agendas came into play when they uncovered a trove of documentation on "Project White Horse".  There was no fabulous betrayal, but the happy-go-lucky British agent did end up bleeding out, trapped by an explosion, with the Incursor bearing down on him.  He shot himself in the head as an excellent and evocative end.

I had been concerned with Cold City's die mechanic, which I'd found unsatisfying previously.  In the convention game there were the expected abundance of partial successes, but overall it seemed to work smoothly for us.  The full successes were fairly rare but that made them powerful.  The system was easy for the players to grasp and we had three enthusiastic "indie gamers" and one guy who was new to the scene.  Everyone commented on their delight in the setting. 

Hey Jason,

Sounds like a great game (and con!).

I had been concerned with Cold City's die mechanic, which I'd found unsatisfying previously.  In the convention game there were the expected abundance of partial successes, but overall it seemed to work smoothly for us.

Hi Emily,

There's a thread on our three session game here, where we talk about the troublesome way the dice tend to go.  We played wrong, but even the parts we got right tended to favor "partial successes", which in Cold City mean that you achieve your intention but in a limited way or with extra difficulty, and without suffering or inflicting consequences, which are mechanically relevant in a big way.  So unlike Sorcerer, to which Cold City owes an acknowledged debt, you can win in a way that is not definitive.  The way the dice play out this happens very frequently - in the four hour convention game, we had three regular successes and one significant success.  Every other roll, perhaps a dozen, was a partial. 

I played in this game!

I'd like to comment on and ask some questions about this game, as well some general meta-game issues it provoked in my head.

Jason wrote:
I'd also given them memos from their superiors that offered ways forward and suggestions about prominent NPCs available to them.  These were, curiously, largely ignored and nobody shared their personal information. 

Hey James,

Thanks for the thoughts.  I'm hoping Malcolm will address your mechanical questions. 

The note-passing guy - that was where his comfort level was.  I agree that complete openness on that level is a good, fun thing but I made the snap decision that all his metagame subterfuge wasn't really going to do any harm.  I had to weigh the note passing against the time it would take to explain to him why sharing his secrets was cool, and dealing with squashing his fun, potentially.  I'm sure I could have handled it differently and better.  If it is any consolation, the final line of the game - yours - made the whole session for me:  (Russian agent looking at a satchel of ruined scientific notes, covered in acid)  "You've just killed my entire family". 

The in-game memos I handed you guys were just clue sticks (go see this guy) and additional color.  I guess I expected you to say "I know this dude who might know something about the whereabouts of Shraft and Feld..."  It wasn't a big deal at all and, in retrospect, not surprising given the paranoia that none of it got shared.

The grenade thing - from my point of view the outcome wasn't even relevant.  I didn't have a dog in the fight and as soon as I introduced that element of danger I realized that Cold City didn't have a strong way to address it.  So I improvised, and all the player positioning tomfoolery was a little counterproductive.  On a positive note, it did lead to the fun endgame for the British guy, who was injured in the blast and began his self-sacrificing death spiral. 

The American and the Russian go to East Berlin, make some inquiries, fail a few rolls, get nothing for their trouble.  This was just the GM dropping the ball and following the rules - in retrospect there were plenty of alternatives open to me, but in the moment I didn't see them.  Again, I appreciate your comments!

Jason,

Dropping the ball - hey no sweat - it's a con game! Bowen's suicide in the approach of the glowing ball of death was classic, to be sure.

I'm waiting patiently for your take on the DiTV game, btw. Now that, that game I think was your crown jewel at MACE.

Jason wrote:
Cold City really demands a lot of prep, and to some extent a linear plot.  I had a series of NPCs, situations, and events prepped, but remained flexible, cutting out some bits and truncating others based on the actions of the players.  I'd also given them memos from their superiors that offered ways forward and suggestions about prominent NPCs available to them.  These were, curiously, largely ignored and nobody shared their personal information.

I had been concerned with Cold City's die mechanic, which I'd found unsatisfying previously.  In the convention game there were the expected abundance of partial successes, but overall it seemed to work smoothly for us.  The full successes were fairly rare but that made them powerful.  The system was easy for the players to grasp and we had three enthusiastic "indie gamers" and one guy who was new to the scene.  Everyone commented on their delight in the setting.

JamesDJIII wrote:
I played in this game!

Item 1:
I think at one point you mentioned that the conflict resolution mechanics didn't cover all events. In our case, the corpse we found of one of the black marketeers was booby trapped, and a grenade fell out. There was a lot of excitement about who was where, who was going to get hurt, etc.

I did notice that a couple of players immediately went into Abused Player mode, as if their description of just how they were positioned and their reaction to the live grenade was going to deflect a casual hosing by our GM. (I'm not saying Jason did this or even intended to do this.) I think this is a pretty common reaction. I've seen and probably have done terrible things to players when that haven't, to my satisfaction, sufficiently covered their cans with color ("I move the sword this way, carefully using my gloved hand, which is on the other side of my shield, in case the jar of green water explodes...").

I thought about this a lot, in fact. I'm guessing that you could infact turn the craziness about who is where with a simple conflict - Who Planted the Grenade Vs. People in the Way. I haven't read Cold City's text well enough to figure this out, so please, correct me if I'm wrong.

I also wanted to ask about a comment made by another player about passing secret GM notes. I personally can't stand all the note writing, but maybe there are games where this is really needed. I'm going to take a stab and guess that you could do Cold City without them, at all.

<snipped specific detail>

Does Cold City allow for all the players to know what's happening? I think it could - why not a conflict that is all about whether or not "my Russian agent has a contact in the German's organization that neutralized the acid" (Color) based on me, the player, trying to win the conflict against the German agent's efforts? Or, if I decide not to do this, but I want another conflict about how I have some papers the German missed?

I'm not clear about how Cold City would negotiate the scope of the conflicts from big to small, and how they relate. I'm also asking because there's a lot of other games with similar features of resolution. Again, if anyone can help break this down, perhaps in another thread(?), that'd be very helpful.

Item 2:
Jason presented many NPCs, like the Waffen SS pimp, etc. I did get frustrated trying to navigate from one part of the clue hunt to the other. I've played and run games where the clue hunting was a big deal. You look down at your notes and you realize the person the players are talking to have NO information that will help them, or he does, and the player has blown the roll! What to do?

Does a game like Cold City allow for partial successes to introduce facts that might not otherwise be? Is it a conflict to be resolved with dice if the player wants "to convince this Stazi thug to open up about who's dealing in black market Nazi bio-tech" and the GM knows the prepared NPC really doesn't know anything about it?

Overall, I had a good time sneaking down into the bowels of post-war Berlin, dodging undead Nazi corpses!

Hey Malcolm, Cold City works great in a four hour time slot.  Of all the games I ran, it seemed best suited for that amount of time.  I specifically set it up to highlight the setting by including investigation, S-Ts, and an Incursor.  If we'd had time I also had an Alternative in the wings.  Three hours would have been too short.  And the hidden agendas rarely got invoked due to unfamiliarity and perhaps the thrust of the adventure - this may be an artifact of convention play. 

In terms of prep, I used the example materials in the book as a guide - the Spandau scenario has a lot of detail and is generally linear in form.  I can't imagine coming up with something like that on the fly.  Running a straight monster hunt would be easy, though.  I used existing material from my previous play sessions and still spent a couple of hours putting it all into a form playable in one four hour block.