We’ve played a few more sessions of Robots and Rapiers since the last writeup.  I think that we’re finally starting to catch a groove with the system.  Now that we’re comfortable with the mechanics, we’re starting to be able to be clever and creative with them.  Plus, the robots have arrived at the point where they are starting to break free from their programming, and they are finding that they are not on the same side of things.

Questing for Power

Ordinarily, the GM selects the next adventure.  However, the game allows for the players to purchase a scenario that they want instead.  This is necessary for the robots to take certain actions that aren’t…shall we say…allowed for in the basic programming.  Like this adventure, which was all about a trip outside of town to recover a power generator that they had stumbled upon in an earlier scenario.

Yves instigated the expedition.  He’s turning into a religious zealot determined to discover God.  As such, he’s on a collision course with the Cardinal.  He’s going to need his own support structure soon, and a power generator of his very own would be quite handy.  Gerard is his right-hand man, at this point, so he agreed to go along for the ride.  Xavier decided to go, too, although I think that he was wanting to keep tabs on what was up.  Achille was another matter entirely.  He didn’t want to go anywhere, until the rest of the group shamed him into going by embarrassing him in front of the entire crowd at the Tavern on the Green.  Plus, they lied and told him that there would be girls.  So he went along for the ride.

An Aside on Power

The need for power isn’t just a narrative convention.  Power has significant mechanical impact.  Dice rolls in Robots and Rapiers are made with a pool of dice, where you keep the highest die rolled that didn’t exceed your target number.  If your result matches the target number, then you lose a die from your die pool.  You can Refresh your die pool by taking a point of Long Term Drain:  in other words, a die that doesn’t come back.  You can only recover dice from Long Term Drain by recharging.  So, without a consistent source of power, a robot PC will eventually become incapable of any action.

The Cardinal controls the primary sources of power in Auvernais.  So, the ability to have an independent power source makes you more easily independent of the Tapestry.

Riding in Style

The power source was fifty miles away, and it would be heavy.  So the group figured that they needed to acquire a wagon.  Gerard tried to steal one without much success, but Xavier was more successful through a proper application of cash.  So the group headed out of town in Xavier’s new wagon.

One of the features of Robots and Rapiers is that each dice roll produces an amount of Result for the robot making the roll which can then be turned into bonuses on future die rolls.  Keith managed to acquire 14 Result when he bought the wagon, so he turned it into a pool of bonuses to future dice rolls involving the wagon.  So, eventually the pool would run out of bonuses, and so Xavier would have exhausted all his sneaky tricks with the wagon.  This was a significant part of the scenario that developed.

The group skirmished with the Cardinal’s Guards in Dupre, a ruined village northeast of Auvernais.  Achille leaped off the wagon to engage some of them while the others turned the wagon around to open fire with the cannon that Xavier had smuggled onto the wagon earlier.  (Keith made an Intrigue roll which allowed him to ret-con the presence of the cannon.  Another nice feature of the system.)

It was during this battle that Ralph remembered the rules for applying the effect of a roll to multiple robots.  This made a huge difference in combat.  Now, mooks will tend to go down faster, plus robots can do swashbuckly things in combat to take out more people.  This is good, because combats were turning into a bit of a grind.  This should keep the excitement level up a bit.

I had a couple of favorite moments from this battle.  The first was when Achille tried to stride dramatically across the street but was upstaged by the cannon firing, enveloping him in a huge cloud of smoke.  The second was when Gerard charged the Cardinal’s musketeers, ripped the arms off one of them , and bludgeoned him to junk with his arms.  It was cool and disturbing, all rolled into one.

Fighting for the Faithful

Things took an odd turn when the group arrived at the power generator.  There were a few robots bustling around the generator, getting ready to take it away.  At this point, everyone in the group had a different idea as to what to do.  Achille had scouted the area and was going to attack.  Xavier slipped away and put on his Black Wolf costume, prepared to seize the power plant for the Cardinal.  And Gerard charged into the clearing in the wagon, carrying in Yves so he could proselytize the robots.

The conflict quickly turned into an awesome PvP setup.  Yves quickly persuaded the workers to join his religion.  However, the Black Wolf then appeared atop the power generator, arguing against Yves, claiming that he was a dangerous heretic!  When Yves and Gerard tried to interfere, the Black Wolf gestured, causing the wagon to buck and slide around, knocking Gerard into the mud.

At this point, Achille came over to taunt Gerard.  But, when Achille tried to identify the Black Wolf, he was also knocked into the mud.

While the technicians stared at each other in confusion, the Black Wolf dropped a bomb down the chimney of the power plant and turned to run.  Yves leaped to the top of the power plant, groping down the chimney after the bomb.  Gerard pulled himself out of the mud and charged after the Black Wolf, with Achille hot on his heels.

The Black Wolf tried to evade Gerard, but he wasn’t fast enough.  Gerard tackled him, rolled him over, pulled his mask off, and rubbed mud in his face.  Then Gerard realized belatedly that he could figure out who this was.  He began to clean the mud from the Black Wolf’s face. At the same time, the Black Wolf pulled his dagger and stabbed at Gerard’s head.

Gerard’s batteries were already dangerously low, and this struggle was too much.  Just as he reached for the Black Wolf’s face, his power finally gave out, leaving him defenseless against the Black Wolf’s dagger thrust.

Then, just in the nick of time, Achille parried the dagger.

This is actually where we broke for the night.  Good cliff-hanger ending, eh?

Xavier set up us the Bomb

So, the situation broke into two arenas.  In the one, Yves is trying to fish out the bomb.  In the other, Achille is trying to convince the Black Wolf to retrieve and disarm the bomb.  Achille totally cowed the Black Wolf, but, before they could do anything, Yves fished out the bomb and ran towards Achille and the Black Wolf.  Achille saw Yves coming and was going to turn to run.  But then his programming took over and forced him to stay.  (I made a Role check to make him stay put.)

Instead, Achille snapped out his rapier, knocking the bomb out of Yves’ grasp, sending it flying through the air.  At the same time, the Black Wolf attempted to deflect Achille’s stroke to send the bomb back towards the power plant.  But he failed.  Instead the bomb landed exactly where Achille wanted it:  in the middle of the fleeing technicians.  In one swoop, Achille eliminated all of Yves’ congregation.

Not Raising the Dead

At this point, Yves set up to perform a miracle.  He was going to bring his followers back to life.  However, despite opposition from most of the players at the table, I crushed this with a Role check.  I needed to roll a 1 on 1d10; it only took me five tries.

This was interesting, actually.  Ralph really wanted to pull this off, so he should have called for a Self-Awareness check to “lock in” his right to try to raise the “dead” robots.  If he had done so, it would have been cake.  Between his Self Awareness of 6 and his Spark Trait of “Faith: 3”, he would have needed to roll anything except a 10.  Instead, he didn’t call for the check, so he was slapped down.  I think that it worked, too.  Yves picked up 5 Inspiration, which is most of the way to another level of Self-Awareness, and it only reinforced Ralph’s desire to break Yves free of the few remaining shackles of his programming.

So they buried the remaining robots, except Gerard.  Then they loaded the power plant onto the wagon and headed back to Auvernais.

On Initiative

Here’s an important point.  Nearly all the action that I’ve described was performed using the conflict system.  I’ve grown rather fond of the conflict system, especially initiative, which is quite clever and cinematic.

Here’s how it works.  Conflict starts when someone decides to roll dice.  If you want to get in the first shot, then call for a die roll.  At this point, other people line up to Augment you, Oppose you, or Augment your opposition.  This bit can seem complicated, so I end up sketching little dice diagrams to track who is Opposing or Augmenting who.  It works out very well in play.

Anyone who successfully Opposes another die roll gets a claim on initiative.  So, after a given dice diagram resolves, you check to see if anyone can claim initiative.  If so, then that character goes next.  If there are more than one, then the GM decides if the conflict should split into two parallel conflicts or not.  If not, then the claimants dice off with a d10.  High roll gets initiative.

If no one has a claim, then all the players except the one controlling the last acting character may dice off for initiative.  This bit is important.  At this stage, the players are vying for initiative.  One immediate consequence of this is that the GM only has to roll for one initiative, as opposed to rolling for everyone.  This is a good thing.  But there’s another application of this technique.

We’ve had a couple of bombs in our game so far.  This system doesn’t have strict timing; resolving a given dice diagram takes…well…however long everyone thinks that it should.  So when does a timed event, like a bomb, actually happen?

The answer that we’ve discovered is really quite clever.  You treat the event as its own character.  When it successfully gets the initiative, it can try to resolve.  In other words, when the Bomb gets initiative, it can try to blow up.  Of course, this is a die roll, just like any other die roll, which can be Opposed and Augmented.

In play, this initiative system ends up recreating the sort of swooping camera work that you would expect in a swashbuckling movie.  The camera focuses on a flurry of exchanges, then eventually cuts away to another part of the battle.  Maybe two conflicts run in parallel for a while, cutting back and forth, until they form up again into a seamless whole.  It’s really quite good, and it all ends up making “movie sense”, which is essentially one of the design goals.

Concluding Remarks

A PvP session like this will end up with repercussions.  I predict that we will look back at this scenario as being the tipping point, when the group finally began to shred apart into warring factions.  I certainly hope so.

Hi Seth,

I think Robots & Rapiers is a game built upon tipping points. One of my favorite experiences with it, in a much earlier version, was playing 5 Spark robots. I found the constant, roughly 50% conflict between programming and whims to be incredibly fun; it was right at the point in which the programming could not reliably produce "the adventure," for the whole group, and the whims could not reliably add up to a real personality, for a given robot. So what happened was simultaneously spastic and yet completely understandable.

All of which is a fancy way to ask, "What was the Spark level" for the player characters in this session?

Ralph and I have infrequent but intense bull sessions about Robots & Rapiers. I think the game design turned an important corner of its own over the last few months, and I can't wait to see it take its final shape.

Best, Ron

I don't have the character sheets to hand right now, but there's currently a range of Self-Awareness between the PCs.  Gerard is the lowest, with a 1 (I think), while Yves is up to 6.  The others are around 3-4.

Right now our game is on hold for further work to the Tapestry rules.  I think that the in-game rules are just about ready, but the world mechanics are moving too slowly to keep up with the robots' transformation.

Yeah, I'm really pleased with where the game is now.

A few <ahem>years<cough> ago when the "quick start" rules were released at GenCon the game was doing everything I wanted it to do.  Except for one small thing...it was totally not fun to play.  I* didn't even want to play it.

Thankfully, as an indie publisher who isn't trying to pay the bills with the revenue I had the luxury of taking it back to specs and in the several iterations since then have reached a spot where the actual in-game action is a freakin' blast to play. Some minor tweaks and some better structure to the text and its pretty much golden at this point.

But now we're able to get to the parts of the game that had received the least attention before.  The interlude and world building aspects...things I didn't get to see much of until the actual play part got nailed down.  In a familiar refrain, its doing everything I wanted it to.  Except...it's totally not fun to play...not even for me.  But now being able to see what the actual hurdles are I think fixing it will not take much more than the Will on my part to rip my beloved mechanics to shreds and do it differently. 

Hopefully that will be proven correct when we pick back up and finish.