Hi,

Black Cadillacs is a game I've been working on for about a year now.  It's my attempt to make some sense out of war.  By "make sense" I don't mean "why wars happen" or even "why countries go to war".  To me, "making sense" is all about achieving a very personal understanding of war at an individual, human level.  It's an attempt at giving people like me, who have never fought in or been directly touched by a war, a chance to fumble in the dark and hopefully achieve some sort of meaningful experience about war.

The methodology I've chosen for fumbling in the dark is rooted in my relationship with my dad, who was a veteran of World War two.  A few years ago, I suffered a crisis of faith over how real and honest my relationship with him was.  This crisis was brought on by a realization that a completely unquantifiable amount of everything that he had ever said to me was quasi- to completely-delusional.  These delusions were after-effects of a war injury he'd sustained, and there was no way of knowing how long he'd been under their grip.

This led me, quite naturally, to using war stories ("the stories that make it back from the front") as a tool for exploring and (hopefully) touching what war is and what it can mean to people.

The basic structure of a game session looks like this:

• role-play a chunk of war fiction (soldiers, doing soldierly things, and all that that entails)
• tell stories about the fiction you just role-played.  The story is simultaneously a "version of events" as well as your personal commentary/editorial on the fiction itself.

The game is intended to be played over a half-dozen sessions or so, with the distinct purpose of allowing a significant number of stories to be told.  My hope is that some kind of understanding will arise out of the patterns and trends that emerge among the stories.

The game has been playtested twice already.  The first draft was playtested between October '06 and February '07 over the internet (chat rooms).  This playtest cemented some of the system -- it showed me what worked, what really didn't work, and where I needed to "sand off some corners".  For posterity's sake, I'll mention that the fiction centered on three North Korean infantrymen fighting a rear-guard action that led up to the Battle of Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War.  It's also important to note that due to both the inherent problems with the internet-as-play-medium and problems with the game text, we never actually got to "telling stories".

The second playtest was a very short-lived trial of the changes that came out of the first.  This time, the fiction centered on two skirmishers defending against the British during the Saratoga Campaign of the American Revolutionary War.  Although the fiction of this game was exciting and dramatic, the gameplay itself clearly showed that the changes I had made weren't improvements -- within minutes of starting, I knew that the inaugural session would also be the final session.

Since the Saratoga Skirmishers game, I've been plugging away at the text and massaging the system.  Last night, I had the pleasure of sitting down with three friends and kicking off Black Cadillacs' third playtest.

My intention for this thread is to discuss the playtest as it progresses -- from its infancy to its (hopefully) satisfying conclusion.  Along the way, I intend to reflect on where the system shines, where it's bumpy, and where I need help.  I heartily invite all readers to participate, whether you're a current playtester, a former playtester or simply someone who finds Black Cadillacs or my design goals to be interesting or engaging.

This is the game text that we're using.

Within the next day or two, I'll be posting my reflections on our first session.

Cheers,
Darcy

Oh.  I just realized that the game text doesn't include an image of the playmat.

Here's a low-resolution image that will make things clearer (hopefully).

Cheers,
Darcy

Hi Darcy,

I'm not very good at reading RPG texts for some reason, so I'm going to talk in terms of big picture and you can tell me what the game does at a similar level and how you'd compare your big picture with the one I describe.

I'll refer to the prince of nothing series of books, where certain characters work from the assumption "War is intellect", as in war is actually a discussion. It doesn't appear to have the same principles of discussion from an individual perspective as it destroys the very fabric that holds discussion together at an individual level - ie, living minds and bodies. But take a discussion between two men where one strikes the other to prove his seriousness - perhaps braincells and certainly skin cells will die during that blow, but it's still a discussion (if more violent than we normally witness). The men of each army can be compared to individual cells - which means the idea of war as discussion between the two armies isn't negated.

But at the individual level - who feels qualified to resolve the situation they are left in at the end? There's perhaps a terrible buck passing, but out of a sense of not being worthy. Those who are wounded but see others die don't see themselves are really having had the worst of it enough to know what conclusion to make. Those who see action without physical harm but others disfigured and wounded don't see themselves as having had the worst of it enough to know what conclusion to make. And so on, right down to the children of soldiers.

I wonder, even before war creation is laid out in the instructions, whether a big question should be proposed - whether the character decides at the end of the war, he is worthy of resolving in his mind all that has happened. On a side note, actually that's why I have trouble reading alot of RPG's - I need a big question like this to give any context to the rest of the games setting and mechanics.

Hope this post wasn't too blue sky theory - if it was, oops, it was a big long, sorry! :(

Hi Callan,

I'm sorry about my lag in replying.  I've been working on the (very late) AP report, and simultaneously figuring out how best to answer your question.

I'm not trying to blow you off, but I'm having a really hard time giving you an answer.  I think that I understand your question, but I'm not 100% sure.

Here's what I suggest: for the purposes of your specific inquiry, please try this:

• Ignore the link to the rules.  In fact, pretend that you never read them -- that file is pure rules, with no explanation or introduction!
• Re-read the first portion of my opening post, right up until the end of the bullet list.
• Check out this ancient thread (it's short, I promise!)
• Pop back in here and tell me what "big question" you think my game asks; we can talk some more then.

Again, I'm not trying to dodge your question, but I think that this might be a better way to attack it than me fumbling around.

Thanks,
Darcy

Hi again,

To everyone other than me & Callan: please don't try to answer his question for him in this thread.  If I change my mind about that, I'll let you all know.

Cheers,
Darcy

Session One

Housekeeping & Conventions
The bulk of the AP reports will be just that -- reports.  However, I'll be peppering the posts with questions as well as reflections.  Rather than appending them to the post, I'll be placing them in-line where the context is the strongest.  To help set them apart, Questions will be posted in this colour, and Reflections will be posted in this colour.  I hope that it doesn't need to be mentioned, but just to be safe I'll spell it out: although I'm posting specific questions and reflections, any topic is open for discussion.

Social Set-Up
It's worth noting that I was pretty choosy about who I invited to participate in this playtest.  I knew damn well that I wanted to go into some pretty dark places this time out, and since this test was going to see a significant number of sessions, I couldn't bring myself to go "there" with just anyone.  This isn't to say that the folks that I regularly game with are jerks or inconsiderate -- in fact, the opposite is true.  However, I know that I have a real problem with cutting people off mid-sentence and other listening-related foibles.  I figured that if I surrounded myself with some really good active listeners, I'd hopefully fall in-line.  Of course, only time will tell, but the early signs are that I made a good choice.

In the end, there were four players (including me).  The other three were GW (we've been gaming together for 7+ years, and we're the sort of friends who call each other up to get help with crappy household stuff -- moving, fixing roofs, that sort of thing.  We don't do this often, but we're both comfortable with asking); LO (a new gaming buddy, but we've had some excellent gaming together including rocking out at the Indie Table at CanGames this year); and SC (I've known SC for about a year and a half, and find that tempermentally, we're excellent foils for each other).  In addition to my relationships with everyone at the table, I knew that they've all played together before -- both with and without me -- and that they seem to get along nicely and are willing to "let it hang out" with each other.

In short, we had four people who were predisposed to doing the sorts of stuff that BC requires -- going to those dark places, and then coming back to talk about it.

The final important note is that due to geography as well as GW's dining room table currently being taken over by a brand new computer, we had to settle on a public space to game in.  We're meeting at a lounge at a local university.  It's not particularly high-traffic, and we were able to secure a booth, so we had a semblance of privacy.  However, I know that I was aware of the potential for eavesdropping at several points in the game.  I don't think that it coloured my play choices, but I could be wrong.

I'd be interested in knowing if the venue impacted anyone else's game experience in an unusual or noteworthy way.

Run-through
We exchanged some pleasantries -- I was late getting to the game, so I don't know what everyone else talked about while waiting for me, but they were mid-chat when I barrelled into the room.

We quickly secured our booth, swapped out a table that was sticky with...something, and settled in for a not-quite-quick-enough overview of my goals for the game as well as the rules.  LO hadn't played in either previous playtest while GW & SC had been involved with both.  The run-through was informative for both camps, as I had made some pretty drastic changes to the rules.  Similarly, I'm finding myself better able to articulate the goal of the game.  As an historical curiosity, check out my original call for playtesters thread as compared to the opening post of this thread.  Although the old thread is evocative, it completely sidesteps the issue of goals -- it hints at them, but it doesn't spell them out.  I'm still not satisfied with my current articulation, but it is sufficient for the current step of the process.

War Creation
Somewhere around the first phase of actual play (which essentially boils down to choosing a large-scale situation), I fielded a question to the group, "So, other than doing this as a favour to me, why are you here tonight?"  I'm not going to name names, but one of the players did mention that there were some outstanding personal issues with a relative that drew him/her to the game.

I can't explain how pleased and apprehensive I was in that moment.  If everything goes as planned, I now had another personally-invested player (other than me) who'll see the whole reward-cycle of the game.  This is exciting, and of course, it's also nerve-wracking.

Choosing a War
The creation of the war itself started quite slowly.  As the first step, it's not surprising that it's prone to blank canvas syndrome.  However, I made it super-clear to the group that I was interested in two things (the first as the designer, the second as a player).  First, I wanted to do something trickier with the game -- steer away from situations where the Troopers would be ad hoc or skirmish type units.  Instead of trying to sidestep the whole military experience and hide in the comfortable arena of "adventuring, but we wear uniforms", I wanted to be fully interred in military life.  Second, I recently saw Peter Weir's Gallipoli, and it showed me that trench warfare could be immensely moving & human while simultaneously being trench warfare.

Since no one else had particularly strong inclinations, we settled on the Great War as the top level of the War Creation.  Somewhere in here, GW commented that the rules don't require playing in an historical war, and he's absolutely right.  I'm not sure that I'm ready to pick up a laser gun and jet of with Flash Gordon, but I like the idea that it could be right for somebody.

Choosing a Side and a Front
Side and Front are supposed to be separate steps (Side, then Front), but once we picked a war, things started flowing pretty quickly; we got ahead of ourselves.  Since the structure is only there to get people thinking, I'm ok with it getting twisted a bit -- so long as everyone gets to the end.  We bandied about a lot of ideas, including when in the war, what front (we toyed with the Russian front in and around the fall of the Tsar), and other variables.  The conversation was pretty wide-ranging.  However, what did emerge was an overarching desire for a misery-laden situation.

Here's an interesting observation: GW is a history wonk -- a walking, talking, socially-conscious wikipedia of more history than I'll ever know exists.  Through this whole discussion, GW is peppering us with various little factoids, and then this one comes out: late in the war, the German forces were so poorly provisioned that some of their offensives ground to a halt as their troops stopped to raid British stores.  That pretty much clinched it for everyone -- our eyes widened and we'd found our side and front.  Our Troopers would be starved-out Germans on the western front during the late years of the war.

Choosing a Unit
We didn't have a lot of talking to do here -- I think I speak for everyone when I say that we all assumed that the Troopers would be infantrymen.  However, the one discussion that we did have grew out of the same starvation factoid as our Side and Front.  We reasoned that the elite units (storm troopers, for instance) would likely be better provisioned than the regular grunts.  Choosing to shoulder a heavier thematic load, we went the poorly-provisioned route.

The War Creation list is the only element of the game rules that's never been revised -- what's written down is effectively virgin text.  Three playtests in, and it's still delivering.  The group concensus that's achieved has payed off in both North Korea and Saratoga.  This time out, it was no different.  Of course, I'll be interested to see if it holds up over a longer game, but I see no reason to question its usefulness.  However, something that I'm very aware of is that I tend to play 'traffic cop' a lot during this phase of play -- I keep everyone involved in the discussion.

Short of actually imposing a structure on war creation (ie: your turn, then mine, etc.), I don't see a whole lot that can be done to reinforce this.  Obviously, a carefully worded admonishment in the game text is in order, but I can't see anything else to do beyond this.  Can anyone else?

Foe Selection
This is the first major change to the game rules.  Although the game does have a GM (called the 'Foe'), until the War is created, no one is the Foe.  I'm pretty tickled over this change -- it keeps more people involved and completely equal during the opening brainstorm.  I also like the fact that when someone steps up to be the 'bad guy', you're volunteering based on a known quantity -- here's this situation that everyone's built together, and everyone's been talking about what they like and why they like it.  This is solid gold ammo for the purposes of knowing whether or not being the Foe is a good fit.

This time around, GW (eyes glinting evilly, I believe) volunteered to be the Foe.  I also mentioned that Foe duty wasn't necessarily fixed for the duration of the game -- there was the possibility that roles would shift between sessions.

Trooper Creation
GW got to sit back and consider his meaty situation while the rest of us dove into character generation.  One of my goals is to dodge a certain amount of "my guy" syndrome.  I figured that character generation was as good a place to start as any.  Although each Trooper player has stewardship over a given Trooper, that stewardship does not equate to ownership.  To reinforce this, I borrowed a page from Nathan Paoletta's carry, specifically his shared method of burden generation.  Essentially, characters are generated in small chunks, passed to the next player (who fills in the next chunk), etc. until everything that needs doing is done.

Although my intent was to chip away at the assumption of ownership, I discovered a nice side effect of this technique; I found it much easier to generate a character that felt fresh by getting formalized help from my fellow players.  This may seem obvious in hindsight, but it was a nice moment of discovery nonetheless.

Mission Creation
This went well, and we crafted a neat small-scale situation.  The game text calls it a "Mission".  Essentially, it's the session-specific parameters that can't be diverged from.  In fact, calling it situation is questionable -- some elements are arguably not situation elements.  What we ended up with were:

• For some reason, Morale was on the upswing in our trench.  GW suggested that we might be fresh transfers from the (victorious) Russian front.
• If this mission were a film, it would be shot in a jerky, hand-held documentary style.
• It's springtime.
• The weather is warm and sunny.
• There are bad omens. (What they are isn't specified).
• We are the victims of poor quality intelligence.

I found it interesting that we didn't set "mission type" as a parameter.

Certain parameters seemed to "grab" everyone more than others.  Specifically, morale, season and weather showed up during play more than the other three.  I have a question about this (because I've observed similar phenomena in both Korea and Saratoga), but I want to hold off asking it until I see if a pattern emerges.

continued...

Session One, continued

Scene One: Over the top
GW opened the mission with some historical knowledge for the players.  It's the spring of 1918 and the Troopers are all part of Operation Michael which revisits the geography of the Battle of the Somme.  He then explains that Michael marked the German high command's last big push of the war -- an attempt at staging a breakthrough of the trench deadlock, and victory.  He zooms in a bit and tells us that (of course) our Troopers don't know the big picture details.  What they do know is that this morning, when the whistle blows, we're going over the top and out into dead man's land.  He then specifically tells us that the whistle hasn't blown yet, and hands the scene over to the group.

The Rising Action (free play) of the scene was fun.  I know that SC has had trouble with this phase of play before (Hey, SC, were the Rising Action procedures helpful this time?).  On an individual level, I attempted to get out of my Trooper's boots with my Rising Action turns -- I narrated stuff like "somewhere down the trench, someone's whistling a little tune".  I really enjoyed this aspect of play.  It was a nice way to 'get into' the scene, but the enjoyment was balanced against the bloodshed to come.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty crummy at remembering fine details.  Did any of you remember specific Rising Action turns from this scene that you liked?

So, we've got this leisurely thing going during rising action -- it's more or less pure scene-setting, with a healthy dose of colour indulgence.  Someone (me?) then throws a real zinger into the mix.  One of the guys in our trench breaks ranks and goes over the top prematurely.  Uh oh.  Oh, we ended up calling the guy "Fritz".

I don't remember if we went straight to the conflict proposal, or whether there was a little more rising action.  What did come out was that the conflict for the scene would be seeing if we could get Fritz back into the trench in a state worthy of combat duty.

The mechanics did what they were supposed to do early in the game -- give the troopers a nearly insurmountable challenge to overcome.  The conflict resolved very quickly (one Go for each trooper), and ended with a loss for the Troopers.  There was a neat mixture of declarations -- from the overt (SC levelling his rifle at Fritz to get him to duck or seek cover) to the expected (me screaming at the nearest NCO to do something) to the truly introspective (LO narrated paying attention to the rotten laces on Fritz's boots).

In fact, LO stumbled on one of the deeper mechanics of the game (which I hadn't even mentioned in the run-through of the rules) -- the original Go declaration included the Trooper's flashback to a trade with Fritz, which involved Fritz's boot laces.  It was so neat to see a player desire (flashback as declaration) supported by the mechanics, even when the player didn't know it was a part of the game.  Yay!.

Unfortunately for us, we were all mechanically weak (all rolling one die), so LO's memory didn't put enough "oomph" in our camp to scrape even a single victory in the first Moment.  Three wins for the Foe, and that's all she wrote.

During Falling Action, we wrapped the scene with Fritz panicking, plugging a shot at one of us, diving for cover and being arrested by MPs.

I enjoy the back-and-forth tension between the Foe's total authority during scene framing versus the Troopers' total authority during Falling Action.  In this case, we didn't leverage our authority in terms of constraining GW's upcoming frame, but I think that our Falling Action felt really good -- I know it hit a good note for me.

Scene Two: Can we get a break?
Scene two was interesting.  GW elected to basically carry on right where we left off -- it's now minutes later, and we're in the second wave of an attack on the British line.  This isn't a criticism of GW's choice of scene frame -- in fact, it's totally in keeping with the rules.  However, I am interested in knowing whether or not GW knew that a complete change of scene was OK too -- you didn't do it this way because you thought you had to, right?

We generally saw more traditional "PC Actions" as declarations during this scene, as the conflict centered around whether or not our chain of command would finally come through for us.  We're all bottled up at a break in the wire.  Of course, the system did what it was supposed to do, which is smack us down early on, and the Foe quickly marched to victory (although at least one roll was pretty close) in a mere three Gos.

The falling action of the scene entailed the squad standing around, dumbfounded and stunned from the friendly (artillery) fire that was meant to clear the wire, but was ineffective at doing anything but confusing us.

It's worth noting that the Troopers began strategizing on how to fiddle the Strain stacks during this scene -- we weren't effective, but we started trying to leverage more dice timed just so, as well as working at setting each other up for better odds.

Scene Three: This one's for the boys!
GW followed his previous scene frame habits, although I don't remember the specific details.  Essentially, we picked up seconds after the previous scene.  When conflict proposal time came 'round, I went out on a limb and (motivated by a pretty real sense of frustration and pathos for the Troopers) said that I wanted to see some good come out of the game tonight.  The Troopers' goal was that to a man, everyone in the platoon who was left standing would make it back to their trench.

This scene was awesome for me.  The individual Gos are a blur, but what matters is that as players (admittedly, there was a lot of coaching coming from me in terms of strategy), we were really working the system to our advantage, and we managed to pull out a win.  Which was so cool.  I actually let out a little "whoop!" when we were the ones who got what we wanted (for a change!).

We didn't actually get to do the Falling Action for this scene -- we were just about to do it when the timer went off, signaling the arrival of the endgame.  According to the rules, when the timer goes off, all play (including casual conversation) stops, and you proceed to the Endgame.

In my mind's eye, the Endgame is supposed to be this surprising thing -- you never quite know when it's going to hit you.  It didn't feel like that to me, but I'm interested in others' views, as well as also letting it ride and seeing what it is like.  Maybe it will never be shocking, but maybe it will be something else worthwhile.

Endgame
Due to the small number of scenes, which resulted in a small hand sizes, the endgame card game was quite short; it lasted a mere three tricks.  Unsurprisingly, as the Foe gets her cards for free (as opposed to the Troopers, who must buy theirs), GW's hand was much stronger than ours.  The net result was that LO narrated one portion of the closing fiction, and GW narrated two.  Alas, my memory fails me here, and I can't remember much.  However, I do remember that either GW or LO tied in some interesting threads from the scenes -- including following up on some jealousy on the part of the officers in our platoon.  I don't think that they liked the Troopers' take charge attitude very much.

GW expressed a great deal of consternation over the purpose, function and procedure of Stories.  I clearly haven't found the right words to describe what a Story is (as opposed to the fiction of the game).  Regardless, the rules say that the Endgame lasts 30 real-time minutes, so we'd budgeted that much.  The rules discussions surrounding Stories ate up so much of that time, that neither GW or LO crafted any Stories.  Interestingly enough, this may have led to a very positive development.  We elected to assign the Stories as "homework" -- GW and LO would bring the Stories to the next session.

The third element of the endgame is the mechanical effects on the Troopers -- who dies, who distinguishes himself, who gets to go home?  Although the Troopers' purchased hand cards weren't terribly impressive, all three of us had managed to keep good enough cards from the mission generation game that none of the Troopers took a dirt nap.  However, none of them got to go home, either.

LO and I both had Troopers who distinguished themselves, which reminds me that we forgot to work this fact back into the endgame fiction.  I'll be interested in seeing how much of a balancing factor that Mettle (gained by distinguishing oneself) becomes in the long term.


Closing Thoughts
I'm concerned that too much may be going on during the endgame -- there's a lot of data to process, a certain amount of retconning required (the retroactive shoe-horning of the narrative facts derived from the death/home/distinguish analysis), and on top of that, you're playing a card game.  It may end up being one of those elements that shines once the players get it.  It may just be too much processing for what it does.  Wait and see.

I'm very happy with the Conflict portion of play.  Moments and Gos work well.  The currency of Strains is smooth, and I'm particularly thrilled at how the narrative impact of a given strain is its mechanical weight.  Previous iterations of the rules included specific rules that made Hubris different from Horror, which was different from Valour; all three Strains are treated equally now.  However, their impact on the fiction is telling.

I noticed that the winner of a given Go rarely (if ever?) chose to narrate.

Cheers,
Darcy

Hi Darcy,

Pop back in here and tell me what "big question" you think my game asks; we can talk some more then.

Hi Callan,

Too blunt?  Maybe for some, but we're good here.

I've been mulling stuff over, and here's what I've got for you; your assessment ("...I think you're [sic] still looking for what big question you should be asking...") does not fit.

And the reason it doesn't fit is tied very intimately with why I've been having a hard time answering your initial query.  However, trying to answer you has forced me to articulate something important, so thanks!

Black Cadillacs doesn't ask a question.  It states something: War is fucked up.  It fucks with the people who fight it, and then it fucks with the people at home.  Let's talk about the last part.

Is that useful to you?  Again, I'm finding this discussion fruitful, so thank-you.

Cheers,
Darcy

Some people would have said it doesn't fit, then started waffling on about what they say they want, but not saying much except about game world colour, token smattering of this or that feeling, and talking about all the lose ends to follow up (but never getting into why you'd follow any) all while making several points but never saying which is the most important. But you didn't - you actually cut to what you wanted. I can't figure out the words, but I wanted to note that to be encouraging about it :)

Stating something is good. And that statement isn't to be screwed around with for something like mechanics.

But the final element 'Let's talk about the last part.'. At a mechanical level, as I understand the mechanics, you can't talk by making statements to someone, you have to ask questions of each other. Otherwise it's someone speaking and the other listening - that's not really talking about the subject. It's really a mechanical issue - to get talk going, there must be atleast one question.

The statement is sacrosanct, obviously. But at the same time you do want to talk about it. If you agree with the idea (needing to ask questions to talk about this), perhaps there's a subject related to the statement, that you could gather questions from?

Hi Callan,

Here's the idea:

We play out the in-theatre stuff (traditional RPGing, more or less) to gain a mutual context for the players.  In doing so, we also invest in the fiction.  Those are both important elements that lay a foundation for the conversation to come.

Then we begin the conversation about how war messes with people, with a special eye to the membrane that separates the in-theatre from the out-of-theatre.  We conduct this conversation exclusively through the medium of Stories.  Stories are versions of the fiction we've just experienced -- they may be nearly identical, they may be dramatically different.  However, what's important is that they're based in the fiction, and that they're targeted at characters important to the Troopers.

There are no explicit questions in this conversation.  However, each Story can be seen as a commentary or judgement on what has gone on in the fiction.  Each Story can be assumed to end in a challenge along the lines of "So, what do you think about that?" or, "I don't care if you disagree, that's the way I see it".

Essentially, the intent of "talking about it" is that the conversation is inferred.  It's rooted in the subtext of play.

Cheers,
Darcy

I'm offering the following as a perspective - it does conflict with some of what your saying, but not for the sake of making a point, just for the sake of showing how my perspective is different. And, err, that might be useful.

Reading through your actual play account, I don't really see a conversation. I see alot of diverse elements brought together, much like an actual war would force a bunch of diverse elements together. It's kind of like a series of eye witness accounts from a trial - if you took the written form of all those accounts and spread them out before you, it would describe an event, but it would not be a conversation.

And then in scene three, I'd describe it as you deciding to push for some closure to these accounts. Given that the endgame didn't pan out, I think scene three was the end game.

When conflict proposal time came 'round, I went out on a limb and (motivated by a pretty real sense of frustration and pathos for the Troopers) said that I wanted to see some good come out of the game tonight.  The Troopers' goal was that to a man, everyone in the platoon who was left standing would make it back to their trench.

This scene was awesome for me.  The individual Gos are a blur, but what matters is that as players (admittedly, there was a lot of coaching coming from me in terms of strategy), we were really working the system to our advantage, and we managed to pull out a win.  Which was so cool.  I actually let out a little "whoop!" when we were the ones who got what we wanted (for a change!).

Hi Callan,

I just want to make something clear.

The "conversation" that I was referring to in my previous post doesn't happen during the Scene-to-Scene play of the game.  It happens as a result of the Scene-to-Scene stuff.

It happens (in my mind's eye) in the interplay of the Stories that players craft during the Endgame phase, and it can only happen over time -- you might not see a conversation evolving until two or three games are played out.

As I mentioned in the AP report for session one, we didn't get to craft Stories that evening - it was assigned as 'homework' for next game (due to time issues).

So, assuming that my idea that this conversation can occur is correct, it hasn't even started yet for Barbed Wire & Bayonets -- GW & LO have just taken that first inhale before firing their opening shots.

Cheers,
Darcy

PS -- none of this is meant to refute anything you've said, I just want to make sure that we're talking about the same stuff.

Hi,

Just a quick housekeeping note: I'm lifting the restriction that I laid down in this post.  Thanks for respecting it.

Cheers,
Darcy

Yeah, it'd be good to get a rounded set of evaluations here, so I hope a few other voices can post about this game with it's important subject! :) What do you think, forge? :)

Hi,

I've got some new material to share.  This first post will essentially be an appendix to the AP report from Session One.  If you recall, I mentioned that due to rules-teaching, our group didn't actually get to the "making Stories" portion of the endgame; instead, both GW and LO agreed to craft their stories as homework.  The playtest group recently received GW's stories via email.  I was beside myself with excitement; sitting in my inbox was the real beating heart of Black Cadillacs; Stories are each player's opportunity to editorialize on the group's choices.

So, what did GW choose to do with his own private soapbox?  I think that the best answer is to lay out a little context, and then to post his story.  In fact, GW won two Stories during endgame, and chose to effectively tie the two together.

Both of GW's Stories focus on Gerhardt Steigler, SC's Trooper.  The fictional events that GW based his stories on were:

During Scene Two, the goal for the conflict was along the lines of "Does our command structure finally come through for us?"  As previously mentioned, the Troopers lost that conflict, so the answer was clearly "no".  However, what I failed to do was mention some of the finer details of that scene.  The Troopers were part of the second wave of the assault on the British lines.  By the time we were into the structure of Moments and Gos, the first wave had been cut to ribbons.  As our little platoon drove forward, we were bogged down in no-man's-land at a bottleneck in the wire.  On one of SC's Gos, his declaration was along the lines of "the god-damned artillery get something right for a change and they blast this fucking wire for us".  This would have really helped the troopers out a lot if it had succeeded.  Unfortunately, SC's dice weren't up to the challenge, and GW beat him handily.  GW elected to spend the resulting currency, which left SC the narration duties.  SC wrapped the Go by having the artillery barrage come down a little too close to the troopers, temporarily stunning Steigler; the befuddled trooper would then go on to wander aimlessly towards the Brits, and get tangled up in the wire.  Wow.

During Scene Three, which was the retreat, I had the British gas us.  If my memory is good, this declaration was made during the rising action of the scene.  The goal for the conflict was to "get every able-bodied man back to the trench".  Since gas was now a factor in the fiction, it wasn't a surprise that gas masks featured prominently in the resolution of the conflict.  My exact memory of the Steigler-Gas Mask related details are very fuzzy.  However, what I do remember is the following:

• Someone's gas mask was broken, faulty or missing.  The someone was either Steigler or an unnamed supporting character.• There was an attempt at looting a gas mask from a fallen comrade• Steigler rememberd "the secret of the urine-soaked rag" as an alternative to proper equipment.  This was a (mechanical) memory, conjuring up the character of Farber, Steigler's mentor in the army.• The urine-soaked rag failed.  Badly.

Now, here's the story that GW wrote:

News from the Front
As relayed in local papers

Despite the success of other units in breaking the British line, our local boys floundered at the wire. Poor leadership led to a breakup of the second wave which retreated with heavy losses. Shortcomings in leadership could not stop some of our boys such as Pvte. Steigler who attempted to force his way though the intact wire despite the obstacles in his path and heavy British shelling.

Unfortunately, the retreat of the second wave blocked the advance of the third wave just as the line was hit by a British gas attack. Again, Pvte. Steigler rose to the challenge by offering his gas mask to another man whose kit had been damaged in the charge. Pvte. Steigler is being considered for the Heroes' Cross. A reward richly deserved by this credit to our hometown! Pvte. Steigler encourages young heroes not to wait to be drafted but to enlist right now as the war will soon be over as the British run away from First Quartermaster-General Ludendorff's master strategy to win the war for the Fatherland!

Hi again,

In addition to my previous post, I also wanted to summarize a discussion that Callan and I have been having privately.  We'd taken our discussion off-thread to clear up some misunderstandings.  We're now ready to bring the meat of that off-forum discussion into the light of day.

If I'm summarizing them correctly, Callan had raised the following concerns:

• The heavy emphasis on "Stories", which are nearly an appendix to play, raises the question "Well, what's fun about the rest of play- y'know, the normal RPG stuff?"
• If people want that meaty conversation (Stories), then delaying that conversation is a touchy issue; meaty conversation is what they came for, you'd better deliver, damn it!.

So, given that Stories are where I really want the game to shine, why all this emphasis (in terms of proportion of play-time) on non-Story stuff?  The short answer is that the Stories have to be about something, and that something is the collaborative Fiction; especially important is the notion of commenting on the choices made collectively by the players via the medium of Stories.  That's why I think of them as personal soapboxes.

Ok, so the Fiction is necessary.  But is it fun?  Let's ignore 'fun' in the usual RPG sense; Black Cadillacs has all of the social aspects of any RPG, and that is fun, but it's really just 'baseline' fun, isn't it?  Black Cadillacs provides extra fun is in the following ways:

• The hunt for cards during conflict resolution is nifty.  There's a nice tension between winning a go (on one side) versus improving your own hand/denying wicked cards to the Foe.
• Winning a Go grants the winner a choice, to spend the currency generated by the win, or to narrate the results.  This choice is consistently engaging; it's very important to spend those points, because they directly impact the next Trooper's die pool; however, the allure of narrating tugs awfully hard, too.
• There's a second neat feature underlying the spend/narrate choice.  The spending always happens before the narration (keep in mind that it's always spent on the three strains: Hubris, Valour and Horror), and the fun part is that it acts as a constraint on the narration; yes, this means that even if you're 'only spending', you still get to keep your finger in the pot.  Do you want something nasty to happen as a result of the go?  Dump all those points into Horror!
• Stories are supposed to be about moments in the Fiction that moved you (the player) in some way.  It doesn't have to be deep, world-sweeping stuff.  It just needs to be a moment that made you say 'whoa' or 'no way' or even 'cool'.  Keeping an eye out for those moments and cataloguing them is really fun, especially when coupled with the anticipation of making a Story about them.

That last point brings me to a really excellent concern that Callan raised.  Anticipation is a significant factor in the Fiction/Story dynamic.  Callan was specifically worried about players being 'strung along' and not achieveing that fulfillment or payoff that Stories provide.  I haven't experience that in play, so I'm not terribly concerned.  However, the concept of anticipation has really stuck with me; I need to find more ways for the pre-endgame play to heighten and intensify the anticipation of the endgame.  I don't even know where to begin doing that.

With that in mind, I'd like to go forward in the thread with the question 'How does this heighten anticipation?' always in the background.  Sometimes the answer will be 'no at all, and that's ok', but I'm eager to find the moments that ratchet that anticipation up.

Cheers,
Darcy

Session Two

Social
LO and I were the first to arrive, and I had a big ol' tirade (the good kind) about how awesome my HoundCon game of Lacuna had been.  I was pretty animated, because the game had been fun.  We caught up a bit, and waited for SC and GW.  We got started a bit late, as GW was held up in traffic because of an Ottawa Senators game.

Here's the thing: we'd all had long days, and were all in various states of tired-ness.  This is important, because it's about the only thing that's holding my hand; I'm ready to can this playtest and tear the whole game back down to first principles.  But I think that our fatigue played a significant role in what happend next.  Because of that uncertainty, I want to try at least one more session before letting the axe fall.

Mission Parameters

• Trapped• The only people we can talk to are the Brits• No Food• Early Dusk• We've got a machinegun• Our COs have written us off

 


Scene One
GW opens his frame with a little research; he shows us some diagrams of trenches, how the 'fighting' trenches were arrayed in parallel 'layers', with each layer connected to the one behind it by perpendicular trenches (to allow travel to and from the front).  He goes on to explain that earlier in the day, we'd been part of an assault, and our platoon had done quite well, penetrating a trench or two into British land;  we found ourselves in what's called a 'support trench'.  Unfortunately for us, none of our fellows fared as well.  In the chaos of the assault, we missed the sounding of the retreat.  It's getting dark and we're cut off (as per the Mission Parameters).

I was uneasy from the moment that 'trapped' was introduced.  That parameter is a huge limiting factor on the fiction -- but the purpose of the playtest is to see what breaks, right?  I could also see a couple of interesting ways to leverage it, so I wasn't terrified.

During the rising action, we discover the follwoing: an NPC in our platoon, Johann, had been shot in the assault; he's not dead, but he's in rough shape; the machinegun is a captured British jobbie; the support trench we've overrun is some sort of communications hub, as indicated by a righing telephone (!); one of the British 'corpses' is actually very much alive, and reaching for the phone; the Brit is quasi-delusional, he thinks that we're just lazy and unhelpful (rather than German!).

We bandy around a conflict proposal, and settle on "Do we avoid discovery?"

The conflict resolution was fun, if a little choppy -- we had some hard times coming up with declarations.  However, we saw some neat Gos.  The two most memorable ones were:

• Ripping the handset off of the phone, then waving it up in the air as if to say "stop calling, our phone is broken", only to have the handset shot by a our own sniper(s)!• Pvte Schillo propping up corpses in a Bosch-esque tableau to attempt to fool passing Brits into thinking that all was normal.  Schillo also swapped helmets with a corpse so that he could add to the ruse.

The nifty part was that we actually won the conflict!  Great, we've fooled the Brits.

That's where things sort of fell apart...now what?  As a group, we were really stumped.  Since we'd successfully hidden ourselves, the pressure is off.  It felt wrong to solve this anti-dramatic situation by proposing a new conflict that would invalidate what we'd just accomplished.


Scene Two
There was a great deal of meta-game discussion at this point.  GW felt like his scene-frame was overly-constrained, both by the Mission Parameters, and by the outcome of scene one.  He didn't know what to throw our way.  I mentioned that he needed to bust out of the box, and suggested fast-forwarding to the next night, and dumping some new grief on us.  He turned his nose up at that (I think it's because he didn't buy the idea that the British would not notice our presence for an entire day).  The obvious solution was a involving whoever was sent to fix the phone, but for it to be legal, that would have to be at dusk too.

He finally settled on putting us in a moral quandry: we saw British reinforcements bypassing our position, heading for the front.  This was a good solution to the scene frame problem.

However, the rising action was very clunky.  Speaking for myself, I knew what I wanted next: some sort of neat rear-area guerilla tactics scene where we heroically harassed the Brits from within their own trench system, causing confusion and hampering their reinforcement agenda.  However, I felt hampered by yet another stipulation of the rules: the Troopers can not be removed from the fiction except during the Endgame.  Since I didn't know when the timer was going to go off, I didn't feel comfortable diving into what would be a high body-count scene!

I'm presenting those internal thoughts to explain why I was tentative about some of my Rising Action turns.  I'd really appreciate it if some of the rest of the crew would do the same.

The Rising action eventually established the following ideas:

• Our Unteroffizier (roughly equivalent to a Sergeant) was seriously considering surrender as a means of saving his men.• Some of the men in the platoon had begun grumbling over what they perceived as weakness on the Unteroffizier's part.• Johann wasn't getting any better.  In fact, he was sinking into shock.

Out of this comes the conflict "Does the platoon mutiny?"  For the sake of clarity, I'll mention that the Trooper's 'side' of this conflict is an emphatic no.

Here are some of the neat Gos that we had during resolution:

• One of the dissenters asks Wolfgang (me) to choose a side.  I botch my roll.  Wolfgang begs off -- "I'm not with you, but I won't stop you either."• Gerhardt tries to diffuse the situation by passing out liberated British rations.  Botches his roll.  All he comes up with are smokes.

The conflict concluded with the Troopers losing.  We took the scene wrap-up fiction into some seriously messy territory.  The mutineers appear to back down, and then, when the Unteroffizier turns his attention to poor Johann, they slit his throat.  We were all shaking our heads in that "this is horrible, but it's also so right" kind of way.

Scene Three
This was the scene where the game really took a turn for the worse, at least at the meta-game level.  As players, I think that we collectively felt like we had painted ourselves into a corner.  What's strange is that as I'm writing this (about two weeks later), I find the fiction we created interesting and moving.  However, in the moment, things felt incredibly awkward and wrong; this sense of wrongness was not rooted in being squeamish, rather it was due to being overly constrained as authors.

The upshot of this was that our Rising Action was incredibly disjointed and choppy.  We were all over the map, and a lot of our unease was seated in one of two chairs: we'd bitten off more than we could chew with the mutiny and murder; we were massively constrained by everything else I've mentioned already.

We ended up discovering an aid station in the British rear (I don't know about anyone else, but my "believability-o-meter" was in the danger zone at this point -- how the fuck did we slip this far into the British zone?  seriously!).

The conflict that came out of it was interesting: Do we maintain some shred of humanity and stop the mutineers' crazy attempt to attack a hospital?

That was a close call for me -- I don't know what I would have thought of the Troopers had we failed that conflict.  Murdering hospital patients?  Man....

Endgame
Somewhere 'round here, the timer went off.  The endgame cardgame resulted in no deaths, no tickets home and no distinguishment (the last part is particularly apt!).  And then, holy fuck, did we pass judgement.

The endgame fiction went like this:
We're captured.  We're put into hard labour digging trenches for the Brits.  There's all sorts of nasty diseases that take their toll on the squad, paring it down.  Then, we're shipped back to a POW camp in Canada.  On the way our transport ship is torpedoed.  That's where we ended it!

The stories themselves were a little rushed, but interesting:
Wolfgang was characterised as an instigator in the mutiny, rather than a passive accomplice (by LO)
Gerhardt was characterised as a coward (the cigarette incident), rather than as an earnest resister (by Me)
Gerhardt was characterised as not only a mutineer, but as a British Spy (same incident) by his own player!

Overall Reflections/Questions
I feel like the constraints placed on the fiction by the Mission Generation are too tight.  I'd never felt this before, but we sure felt it tonight.  I've got one idea about fixing it, but I'd appreciate some outside opinions.

Hiya,

This is all about slaying Dragons.  Dragons are the things in Black Cadillacs that stop it from doing what I want it to.

Dragon #1: Blank Canvas Syndrome
We've all felt it, whether it was as an over-taxed GM trying to prep the next CP2020 game or as a player in a GM-less create-a-thon.  Blank Canvas Syndrome is that moment where you must...be...creative...NOW!, and come up blank.

I think that this Dragon rears its head in BC via a minion; let's call that minion constraint.  Specifically, the constraints imposed on the mission by the six mission parameters.

Here's what I'm thinking of for slaying it:
Winning a conflict allows you (the winner) to change the nature of one of the mission parameters.  For example, maybe in Session Two, scene One, we could have changed the parameter "Trapped" to "Hiding...for now".

Here's my question to you:
Is your swordsmithing better than mine?  If so, please speak up.  If not, please comment on mine.

Thanks,
Darcy