Last night I had the privilege of playing in a convention-style demo game of <a href="http://atarashigames.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=31" target="_blank">Classroom Deathmatch, the new tabletop RPG by fellow Portlander Jake Richmond.  In this game, we all sat around the table and took on the roles of multiple Japanese high schoolers yanked from their schools and forced to participate in an all-out mass slaughterfest to the Last Man Standing, in a vein quite similar to the movie <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Royale_%28film%29" target="_blank">Battle Royale.  Unlike all the RPGs I'd played up until this time, I didn't get much opportunity to grow attached to the character I started with, as we very quickly started killing each other off so fast that sometimes we didn't even finish writing down the character information before we had to select a new one.  In my opinion, that kicked ass.

There were five of us at the table, and I didn't really know any of them - which is how I prefer my demos.  Jake ran us quickly through the rules before we started, an act which I both liked and disliked.  On the one hand, we needed to know them, and thankfully they were amazingly easy to pick up.  On the other - and this is entirely due to my nature as a hands-on learner - I always prefer to just start playing and let the rules come out as they are needed.  But I tend to find myself the too-picky minority in this, and my slight dislike here is in no way due to any faults in the game or its presentation.

The game opened with all of us randomly drawing characters from a stack, randomly rolling the weapon given to us, and quickly adding some personal touches via Traits.  Some of the weapons were hilarious in their apparent uselessness (the frying pan, for example, or the low-battery laser pointer); I lucked out and started with a Katana, and thus my carnage-driven approach to the game was sealed.  After that, Jake set the first scene and we mostly took over from there.  Whenever I play a new game for the very first time, I like to go balls-to-the-wall with the rules, and this game was no exception.  I used dice left and right, and took as many opportunities as possible to test mechanics which had not yet entered play.  Given the premise and the general theme, I decided to ham it up with over-the-top "Vohl-KAY-noh PUNCH-uh!" accents, but I think this annoyed some of the others, so I stopped fairly early on.  Good thing, cause I could have really annoyed them with my second character, a geeky catgirl anime buff.  Teehee.

The mechanic for resolving conflicts was pretty intuitive, and the deceptively simple way of raising dice by pleading your character's traits was a lot of fun.  Devising a way to convince the rest that my character's knowledge of Quentin Tarantino movies should allow her to deliver a bloodier-than-usual death blow was quite amusing.  However, my favorite aspect of the system would hands-down be the mechanic for determining the results of success and failure.  When I succeeded, the player I had written down as my "best friend" dictated the outcome, and when I failed, that task was instead handled by my "rival."  Throughout the course of the game, we had some awesome descriptions of success, but those were greatly overshadowed in magnitude by the absolutely gruesome descriptions of our failures.

According to the rules, a character can pretty much be killed at any time when the outcome of a conflict is being dictated.  However, in order for the character to die, the speaking party must actually use a variant of the phrase "and they die" during this dictation.  Characters could even be killed during the outcomes of completely unrelated conflicts.  Whenever a character got killed, the player randomly drew another and rolled for their weapon, and we kept going.  At various moments, players had the opportunity to start a new scene, framing it with creative input from those involved.  I got the notion that the game encourages this at many moments, but due to the carnage approach of this particular session, most of the new scenes that got started involved the introduction of a new character.

The game ended after three hours, but I could have gone on for many more.  While the game seems to be geared towards one-shots and demo play, I can see it facilitating multi-session play with a close-knit group and/or a house rule or two to limit the fatalities.  I'm told that Jake's previous games were not nearly as murderiffic, though, so perhaps I was just a tad too bloodthirsty (heh).  Having the ability to casually whack a character with an off-hand remark during any conflict outcome probably fueled that thirst, but I think on the whole it really helped with the flow of dramatic license.

I look forward to playing this game again, and I think it would be pretty simple to use as a fun way to introduce my mostly traditionally-minded regular gaming group to some different styles of tabletop RPGs.  Sadly, I did not get to purchase a copy from Jake, because printing delays ensured that the books were unfortunately not present.  Next time, gadget... Next Time!

Hey there,

I personally thought your volcano punch performance was quite impressive :) But then I was just an outside observer.

It's not really surprising that the game turned out to be humorous.  It's one of the ways we deal with death.  That's why so many horror movies are over the top to the degree of being silly.

I also noticed that you guys were going through characters rather quickly, as you mentioned. It seemed like the premade characters were what made this possible without disrupting the flow of the game, along with quick ways of establishing connections (including the flashback mechanic).

Thanks for posting Nathanael. As I said before, my personal experience with the game has been more daramtic and traumatic. This was the first time I've played Classroom Deathmatch as a comedy, but I think it worked well. I've seen characters die earlier in the game (believe it or not), but I've never seen players go through so many characters so fast! That was really something!

If we had more time I would have liked to slow down the pace just a bit after the initial orgy of bloodshed and give you guys a chance to figure out what your plans were. Would you have found a place to hide for the evening? Kept on your killing spree all through the night? Declared yourself to be allies and settled on a temporary truce? There were several great moments in the game where fragile alliances fell apart quickly under difficult and suprising circumstances. I think you guys did a fantastic job of not only playing off each other and one-uping each others descriptions but also of adding real character to your Students, many of whom didn't even live long enough for you to choose their Traits!

"Would you have found a place to hide for the evening? Kept on your killing spree all through the night? Declared yourself to be allies and settled on a temporary truce?"

Had my first character (Kido) survived, I was planning on building towards something of a breakdown that night, while hunkered down somewhere.  Probably process his love to that girl... forgot her name...  swear to protect her and try again to remove the hammer from his skull.

But I think I got almost... addicted to Nick's descriptions of the carnage.  He has a pretty vivid imagination =)

That would have been great. Love confessions lead toward great scenes! But I know what you maen about Nicks descriptions. Half the fun of the game is in using the descriptions of sucess and failure to create chaos!