This comes almost a full week after the play experience, thanks to a very busy work-week after the con, so many details have vanished from my memory.  But I wanted to get this out there to capture a few cool observations from two demo/playtests of Blazing Rose.

Some context: Blazing Rose is my "story game of romantic rivalry."  Think of it like Shooting the Moon scaled up: some three, or four, or six player characters have all fallen in love with the same person (a shared NPC), and the game plays out their social one-upmanship seeking this Beloved's attention.  It started development last October, and had been through about five one-shot rounds of playtesting with my local friends before the draft used at Forge Midwest.  This was the first time I'd played it at a convention.

Game 1: "Cubes"

Brendan, Richard, Ron, Sean, Sabe (me), and Zach played.  Brendan and I had played before, but it everyone else came to it fresh.  The environment, in the main game room on Saturday of the convention, was noisy and chaotic, full of distractions, but the initial kibitzing to set up the game went without difficulty.  Building on Ron's kick-start suggestion of setting the game in a soulless corporation, we chose a Comedic, Confrontational game, in a workplace where what the company actually did was never described.  We were to woo Chloe Stern, the one warm personality amid the gray, before an imminent restructuring shipped some or all of us off to the Cleveland office (horrors!).

I've consistently seen that people love this part of the game, and "Cubes" was no exception.  Of special interest was the part where each player adds a "Problem" to a neighbor's character sheet: people grinned and groaned at the potential troubles their fellow players came up with, and owned them with perhaps more gusto than even the ones they invented themselves.

Main gameplay didn't run quite as smoothly, though we did all enjoy it.  The structure of the game as written is to have two "Acts" each made up of a number of "Chapters" equal to the number of players, each Chapter capped with a conflict.  I realized a couple hours in that this would not work very well in our situation: with six players, that'd mean twelve Chapters!  And since teaching the mechanics, running through scenes enough to involve all players, convention distractions, and general narration all played a part, the handling time blew up geometrically from what I was used to in my usual 3- and 4-person games.  In the end we cut it short, deciding after the first Chapter to run one more conflict and jump to Epilogues.  It worked out to everyone's satisfaction, I believe--so, lesson learned, stress test your game!  Pacing, here, was of more importance for fun than getting the exact prescribed story structure.

Some dialogue I had with Richard also illustrated a blind spot in my design.  I explained that while the game was about competition between rivals, the player-level interaction isn't really competitive; the opportunities for strategy are limited, and playing-to-win tends to sabotage the progress of the game.  Yet I'd mostly built mechanics around boosting your own character's chances and sabotaging others'.  Richard wanted more opportunities to "be nice" to other players!  Even though we'd set it up as a "Confrontational" tone, there were places he wished he could aid other Rivals in getting their stakes for a scene or the like, but which the rules didn't afford him.  (And that leads me to a question, for those who played: did establishing that Tone have any effect on the game, for you?  Did the story or play experience feel like the Rivals were really at odds?)

Lastly, a number of mechanical options fell through the cracks.  Ron described this as an issue of having many "little pieces" to keep track of.  The game includes several ways of picking up extra cards (used to control conflict) via reincorporating established narrative elements, but few players made use of them, leading to dwindling hands of cards.  Some means of using Asset/Problem traits never came up at all.  It's been my experience that as players grow more familiar with the game, they remember to invoke these more often, keeping their cards topped off, but new players tend to lag behind.  Sean in particular, with little experience in indie/Forge-style games, seemed a bit lost both in grabbing cards and in what to do with the spotlight in his scenes (which the narration bonuses should have been cues for).  It's a trade-off: reinforcing these elements with an explicit reward system, but steepening the game's learning curve.  I'm not sure yet which way I want to lean in my design.

As much as I'm criticizing here, the game was a blast.  Everyone who played took a copy of the playtest rules with them, which I see as a good sign.  ^.^  Thanks to all of you!  Let me know what you think of my observations.

(There was a second game the next day, but I'm running out of steam writing-wise.  I'll try to add a blurb for it later this weekend.)

I'm not quite sure what to add to this. I'll add the story though, to give a feel for what romantic rivalry meant to me in this context.

As Sabe says, we were all employees of an unnamed corporation with an unnamed product. Although the initial concept was of a soulless, monolithic organization, I never got that impression. It came off as more of an Office Space/Dilbert blend. Perhaps I'm repeating myself, but the setting came off as very "plain."

I put quote around that word to indicate my surprise. Despite the exterior trappings, the game was an enjoyable lark. The players all had personal background to draw on and inject into The Company, so it was a comfortable setting.

Zach - Chet Peterson, childhood friend of the beloved and junior VP at her company. He started out in a privileged position, having spent the twenty years between their first meeting and their re-acquaintance building up a substantial portion of "all of the flowers in the world." That Embarrassingly Sentimental quirk earned him some sympathy, I think.
Ron - Buzz, intern and courier. Wherever he went, things got done. While this burst of industry was rarely attributed to him, the Beloved noticed how he was always in the thick of things.
Sabe - Mitch? Is that right? He was the charmingly bumbling IT guy with a passion for graphic design. He shy demeanor eventually won the day.
Richard - The Beloved's ex, current supervisor, and favorite of her father. His attempts to repair what they had once had were hindered by his pompous baritone, but at least he wasn't ran out of town on a rail like...
Brendan - A private eye disguised as a temp worker, investigating the Beloved's father. Although she succeeded in her mission of uncovering sexual harassment at The Company, she was unable to convince Mr. Stern that his daughter was at risk from the rest of the PCs. (Because she wasn't! We were all gentlemen!)
Sean - Ace. (Chet, Buzz, and Ace! This was a game of boss names.) A former rocker and astronomy major, Ace wanted to get out of The Company and work at NASA. In the meantime he worked in shipping, singing his songs and dreaming of the Beloved.

We played two circles, where everybody was in a scene. The first circle had three scenes. The first involved me, Richard, and Brendan; Brendan's character was being castigated for her lack-luster performance. The real goal was to show Chole, who was also part of the meeting, who cared most about the company. The second was a solo/montage of Sean's character pining for Chloe. The third was Ron and Sabe jockeying to show Chole that each one cared more about community service than the other.

Each scene ended with the players stating their hopes for the scene. They played cards and explored the mechanics. Further narration.

At this point we realized that the game was much too long, if played as written. Sabe mentions this above, and Ron suggested looking to Shock: for an example of a game that had a worthwhile pacing system. We decided to do one more circle, but involve all of the players as well as solve one of the Beloved's issues -- reunite her with her father. Clearly, the character who could do that would earn an eternal place in her heart.

Sean set the scene at a bard across from The Company's main office. It was karaoke night, and everyone who was anybody was there. Even the C.E.O. himself, Mr. Stern! Chet arranged a father/daughter duet, there was much cajoling and subtle oneupsmanship, and the pair eventually sang. Mitch and Ace were tied for Affection Points, but Ace bowed out with honor. He learned that he was a rocker through-and-through, and used his brief time with Chloe to fuel a life of continued rocking out. Brendan, Richard, and Ron "lost", tied for the fewest Affection Points. Chloe slowly faded from their lives. Chet remained her friend, a fate which everyone else judged to be worse than breaking up with her -- she chose Mitch, after all. I narrated that they were good friends and had no hard feelings though, so there!

That's how it went down. I didn't feel like establishing the Tone before the game (confrontational rather than friendly) did much for the fiction. All of our characters had goals, and I get the feeling that they would have disagreed frequently even if the Beloved wasn't in the equation. We were all at odds, but I think that's necessary in a game billed as being about romantic rivalry.

Hiya,

I'm sorry not to have come to the thread earlier - I'd actually drafted up my own starting post and then got distracted, and missed this thread starting up.

Anyway, this was the game during Forge Midwest in which I was the most distracted. I had Annika on my lap nearly the whole time, and she required several dedicated attention periods concerning food, diapers, and other baby things.

Regardless, I became extremely wrapped up in certain plotlines. I liked Zach's character, the rich friend, quite a bit, and ended feeling sorry for him. I really liked the way that the story actually turned out to be about music, as the two musicians ended up neck and neck for the Beloved. Baldness, sadly, ended up being a less-important feature for success, although I was entertained by various people's use of the concept in character creation.

I found that playing Buzz more as a complication for everyone else was more fun than driving for the romance. One of the features of play, if I understand correctly, is that consequential plot outcomes don't happen in every scene - only in the final scene do we resolve who gets the Beloved, and it seems to rely pretty much on what happens only in that scene. What that meant, for me, was an almost complete disconnection from "the goal" during play; I literally did not care whether Buzz ended up with her or not. I did like playing him relative to her, and I found the other group members' input to his epilogue very, very satisfying, because (a) it meant they were engaged in his saga and (b) it was so, so, so perfect for him and her.

(Please correct me if I'm mis-remembering some aspect of how earlier play feeds into success at the end.)

That leads to my main criticism at this point: that competing for story control is very often not fun. (Capes fans: yes, yes, fine. Whatever.) What actually constitutes the point for Blazing Rose is a little obscure, and in our case, I think we fell back on the idea that we are there simply to manage to put together a reasonable story using the structure built into the rules. This is perilously like storyboarding, or worse, like storyboarding-by-numbers. As a novelty, it feels fun and awesome and wow, but ultimately, once one gets past that door, it's not hard. A person finds himself wondering, "Hey, why did we make it so hard when we played all those other games," and moves on. After that point, a game which merely generates story structure is not sufficient.

What makes the process more fun - and this is stated in the assumption that the goal of play is to generate a punchy story, one we care about - is uncertainty. One such uncertainty concerns long-term outcomes, but knowing that what we do now will matter eventually. That means that I may succeed in a particular scene, and know that it might affect my final chances, but not to be absolutely sure. Another such uncertainty concerns how the game ends, which is the essence of my suggestion at the time, to have any given scene actually end the story if certain conditions are fulfilled or if some particular card outcome occurs. My main example for that is One Can Have Her, not because it's also a romantic-rivalry game, but because the uncertainty about when/whether a given story will end plays a huge role in the decision-making. I think Blazing Rose would gain a lot from that feature, although certainly it wouldn't have to use the same techniques at all.

Side point: I think that choosing "confrontational" among the characters does not play into that point above, and we shouldn't let that be a distraction in dealing with the point. For me, the confrontational element of our game (again, among the characters) was important and interesting - not because it really meant literal confrontations very often (it didn't), but rather the idea that whatever we did in a scene, it would probably trip somebody else up. To me, that was confrontational enough and in many cases very satisfying.

Best, Ron