Tim and I continue with the twosies!*

Seth sent me a copy of Showdown a bit ago based on the Mars Colony thread. Here's his Showdown development and playtest page at A Dark and Quiet Room. Seth, the only on-line playtest PDF I found isn't current. If the latest draft is publicly available, please post a link if you'd like.

It's a great concept which reminds me a bit of [Six Bullets for Vengeance] very first thoughts, with a slightly different sequence of play. You play the actual climactic showdown between two characters trying to kill one another (and believe me, one or both will succeed). With each round of combat, the fight progresses forward, and when all is said and done, you're trying to run the other guy out of dice before you run out. But also with each round, there's a flashback of the two characters interacting in the past, and those are played in chronological order. E.g., in the first round of combat, you also play the flashback scene which shows how they met. In the final round of combat, the flashback scene is about their final interaction prior to the fight.

Fighting runs you out of dice. There're a few nuances called stance and some other nifty things to mess with the mechanics about that. Flashbacks allow you to change the Qualities of your opponent. For example, my character has the Qualities "I think I am ... Objective / Righteous / Stoic / Compassionate." Say I lose a Flashback; that means that Tim can add "But really I am ..." with some word of his choice to one of these.

Basically, by the time the final round comes along, we know these characters a lot better, and effectively, the story is still about which character wins but not, after all, only in place to see which player wins. Beating the other player becomes a subordinate mechanism to the greater agenda of play which is to turn the whole thing into an emotionally-charged climax. Seth wrote in his blog:

Essentially, my mini-RPG Showdown is all about making the transition from “two people fighting” to “two brothers fighting” in play.

Hey, Ron. Thanks for setting this playtest up.

Currently I don't have a publicly available PDF except by request. So, if someone is interested in trying out Showdown, just PM me here at the Forge with your email address, and I'll hook you up.

Now, to answer questions:

That means that as our duel progresses, if I win Flashbacks, his character becomes more dangerously delusional about being a super-guy at all (considering that the "but" in my amending statements effectively contradict the original claim), but if Tim wins Flashbacks, my character becomes less noble and more villainous, depending on what Tim picks. Seth, is this range of Qualities allowed? Your examples are more like my character, concerning attitude and motive; is it OK to have a Quality be "I think that I am stealthy?" (or fast, or powerful, or whatever like that)

On page 9 of my copy, one of the Boundaries says narration has to stay consistent with Qualities. How can that make sense, when a huge part of play is forcing Qualities to change?

Also on page 9, location/warehouse, contradicts genre talk on page 6 regarding shootout in a warehouse

Page 12: "Once you adopt a Stance, it's gone for the rest of the game." But in the Stances table, for Swap Dice, part of the entry reads "If both of you chose this Stance ..."

Page 12: explain to me why the Flashback die wins by lower value instead of higher value like the Dueling die.

Page 13: up until now, the Upper Hand has been associated with the Combat, and the Flash of Insight has been associated with the Flashback. Yet now, the person who gains the Upper Hand narrates the Flashback (based on who got the Flash of Insight winning) and who gains the Flash of Insight narrates the Duel (based on who got the Upper Hand winning). I swear that confuses me worse to write it than it does to read it. First, do I have it right? Second, hasn't anyone been confused by all that in the playtests so far?

Page 14: Do I understand correctly that who dies is wholly up to the narrator of the final scene, without reference to the roll's outcome (and also acknowledging the constraint the successful action)? If so, that is totally consistent with the thematic priority that I talked about above.

Page 14: One of the Boundaries for the final Flashback says that "only one of the characters must be present," but another Boundary says "This Flashback is the last time the two characters interact in any way before the duel." Those are directly contradictory statements.

Hi Seth,

Fair warning: this post is strongly worded. Part of the reason is my limited time for editing and softening.

In the final manuscript, I'm planning on specifically calling out the fact that the replacement Qualities are not required to directly contradict the original claim. So, you don't have to replace "I think I am stealthy" with "...but really I'm a giant klutz". Sure, that's the obvious answer, but you could just as easily replace "I think I am stealthy" with "...but really I am a sadistic killer".

So, yes, Tim's choices are legitimate, though, as the rules state, those Qualities don't necessarily translate into competence. After all, those Qualities are at risk in the game. And, you are not required to follow suit by using replacement Qualities of the same nature.

My final manuscript will have a call-out on this point. The reason for the narration division is that, if you are narrating your opponent's success, you have every right to bend that narration to your maximum advantage, within the confines of the narration rules. You are supposed to be weaseling around as much as possible.

Page 14: One of the Boundaries for the final Flashback says that "only one of the characters must be present," but another Boundary says "This Flashback is the last time the two characters interact in any way before the duel." Those are directly contradictory statements.

At this point, this is in place to allow for certain final Flashbacks which were functionally solo scenes. The characters "interacted", but one of them wasn't present. Um, I'm thinking here of one character having left the other one a note saying, "Meet me at this location and we finish it" kind of thing.

Hey, Ron.

Regarding the replacement Qualities, I'll have to think on all that a bit. Because, as you note, what you're saying does conform with my broader vision for the game. Maybe I just need to steal your phrasing of "contradict or diminish", which is probably what I've been meaning.

This will open an interesting area in the design, because the replacement Quality will reflect what I see as "contradicting or diminishing" your initial Quality. For instance, in my previous example, the larger context (which was totally imaginary and therefore only existed in my head) supported the idea that "I'm a sadistic killer" was a diminishing of "I'm stealthy".

This is probably a good thing, though.

Regarding the warehouse example, I get what you're saying now. And yes, that's a point that's easy to address in the text.

Regarding the division of narration, you write:

I like this because it highlights the key issue that "who kicks whose ass" isn't actually something you can strategize toward in full (mechanics + description). Cool.

Oy veh. First, when you say, "to allow for," that's not what the rules say. Because the first phrase I quoted does say "only one ... must be present." That's unequivocal.

So are you talking about an option, within the larger category of running the final Flashback exactly as the others?

And since I don't have the rules right in front of me at the moment, I can't check this, but am I correct that the final Flashback is dice-resolved like all the others? If so, then how in the world is that possible when only one character is present?

I am not at all convinced that the one-character-only Flashback has any merit at all. Why is it so important to include the "note" option? It seems to me to be drained of all dramatic content.

GreatWolf wrote:
This will open an interesting area in the design, because the replacement Quality will reflect what I see as "contradicting or diminishing" your initial Quality.

Tim,

Yeah, that's exactly how you're supposed to look at it.

Ron,

I talked with one of my playtesters and a consultant...er, Gabrielle and Crystal. They both said that you make sense. I concur. So, go ahead and test the game with the assumption that replacement Qualities need to contradict, diminish, or pervert the original Quality. Let me know how it goes!

And the duel itself!

Our game-play

At first, we mostly traded the Upper Hand, with me slightly ahead on dice for a few turns, modified by a Duelling tie at one point that knocked down our dice totals a bit. Then it turned around really fast and I went from slightly ahead to decidedly behind; I was still getting the Flash of Insight most of the time and thus putting a lot of juice into the back-story, but Saracen took a beating after some cool moves in the beginning.

Given the lead, Tim then ran me out of dice, getting both the Upper Hand and the Flash of Insight at one point, and winning the dice game. It wasn't a foregone conclusion, though; I actually had larger dice throughout the second half of play, but rolled badly (2 and 3 on d12s, if I remember correctly) and one of Tim's Stance choices whisked away a crucial Duel victory at one point.

Our story

The Duel displayed neat reversals of fortune and personal dominance, along with fun gritty superheroics. Saracen dominated at first so that an impromptu hostage was saved, but then Bosch was no pushover when it came to hand-to-hand. We paid great attention to the option to include the loser's agenda, in two ways: (i) naming agendas either to be compatible or incompatible, and (ii) when compatible, sometimes including the loser's agenda and sometimes not. The effect included some important points such as when Saracen appropriated Bosch's pipe and tossed it over the side. Color was a lot of fun too, and one bit, a police helicopter hovering over the scene, became important later.

The Flashbacks proceeded through three scenes during the characters' shared military career (basic training, a bar scene, and a mission in Afghanistan), a veterans' war protest scene with them on opposite sides, the crucial scene in which Bosch convinces Saracen to become a vigilante crime-buster with him, their hero-duo scene, and the girlfriend argument scene.

Through these, Saracen definitely became the good guy (stoic to emotional, righteous to judgmental, objective to loyal, compassionate to loving) and Bosch definitely became the train wreck (fast to desperate, "invisible" to overconfident, strong to junkie, agile to mutating). Tim was rooting for Saracen even more than I was by about two-thirds of the way through play. On the other hand, self-destructive as Bosch demonstrably was all the way from the beginning, he wasn't totally wrong or pathetic either. We managed, surprisingly, to generate a rather poignant portrait of the two men's troubled friendship by throwing higher and higher tensions at one another.

The final Duel scene, narrated by Tim, showed how Saracen won and hurled Bosch from the bridge to die, presumably by impact with the water. The twist was that just after, the aforementioned helicopter lowered a ladder for him and Saracen climbed aboard. My final flashback explained this: Saracen was contacted and briefed by Homeland Security agent who shows him Bosch's track record of criminal atrocities (since the last Flashback) and says he's the only guy who can take him down. The implication is that they are forcing/tempting him to rejoin them.

So the story ultimately became the tragedy of how an Arab-American superhero could not escape the clutches of (i.e. service to) Homeland Security, due to his friendship with a war-scarred white American who himself could not let go of the Top Gun Maverick ideal of heroism.

Interesting observations

1. The duel is pacing, color, and (indirectly or directly) consequence for the central story of the Flashbacks. This is especially reinforced by the winner of the dice Duel having full authority over the winner of the fight. In other words, Tim won the dice, but he chose to have Saracen (my character) win the fight.

2. I'm not real good at the Stances yet; my last one didn't serve me well at all. This helps my sense of the game's re-playability, because I'd like to get better at this part of the rules.

3. How much competition is there? I see some, in a kind of secondary-cog way, giving some juice to the ultimately cooperative (and arguably pushy) process of posing adversity and revelatory-transformation for one another. As such, it works! But it's a lot different from Beast Hunters, which I see as a very functional genuinely-competitive game. Which leads to some comments I have about the text, which I see as being overly careful about trying to make competition fair and fun. I see that as a bit misplaced regarding the actually-facilitated goals of play. (In some ways, I see this as an attempt to lure people with promised Gamism and then switch-up on them to promote Narrativism. Which only works if they like/want Narrativist play in the first place.)

3. One of the key design elements is the number of turns relative to how many of the Qualities become changed. Basically, the maximum number of turns in play would be ten, if the players traded the Upper Hand and Flash of Insight back and forth evenly, and if there were no Dueling ties. And in that context, Flashbacks would transform all eight Qualities one by one well before play finished.

This gets modified in many ways. Ties in Dueling injure both sides, speeding up the end of play by one turn; consecutive Duel victories create discrepancies between pools, also speeding up the end of play by one turn. These effects tend to raise the chance of keeping one or more Qualities unchanged, but since the initial maxima are ten turns vs. eight Qualities, that means that this chance has to get a certain distance even to catch up. Conversely, ties in Flashbacks speed up the transformation of Qualities by one turn.

In our case, we ended up with seven turns, but given one Flashback tie, all eight of our Qualities did get transformed, the last one in the last (dice-driven) turn.

I have no specific recommendations about these features but I do observe that when you make a character, you better be willing to see all four of those things get diminished, twisted, or reversed, (almost) no matter how well you roll. I also wanted to write it out as a rules-dissection in order to understand it better.

4. Seth, take this as you will, but I see some influences of both It Was a Mutual Decision and The People's Hero.

Best, Ron

Excellent! Glad to hear that the game went well.

I had to chuckle when I read about the girlfriend argument. It seems like lots of Showdown games end up with a girlfriend being at the center of the trouble.

Through these, Saracen definitely became the good guy (stoic to emotional, righteous to judgmental, objective to loyal, compassionate to loving) and Bosch definitely became the train wreck (fast to desperate, "invisible" to overconfident, strong to junkie, agile to mutating). Tim was rooting for Saracen even more than I was by about two-thirds of the way through play. On the other hand, self-destructive as Bosch demonstrably was all the way from the beginning, he wasn't totally wrong or pathetic either. We managed, surprisingly, to generate a rather poignant portrait of the two men's troubled friendship by throwing higher and higher tensions at one another.

My final flashback explained this: Saracen was contacted and briefed by Homeland Security agent who shows him Bosch's track record of criminal atrocities (since the last Flashback) and says he's the only guy who can take him down. The implication is that they are forcing/tempting him to rejoin them.

The duel is pacing, color, and (indirectly or directly) consequence for the central story of the Flashbacks.

How much competition is there? I see some, in a kind of secondary-cog way, giving some juice to the ultimately cooperative (and arguably pushy) process of posing adversity and revelatory-transformation for one another.

One of the key design elements is the number of turns relative to how many of the Qualities become changed. Basically, the maximum number of turns in play would be ten, if the players traded the Upper Hand and Flash of Insight back and forth evenly, and if there were no Dueling ties. And in that context, Flashbacks would transform all eight Qualities one by one well before play finished.

Hi Seth,

I think ... well, I think that half of you is jazzed about something that is a possible emergent feature of play, but isn't its point nor is it particularly constructive to design toward it. The other, sensible half of you is grooving on exactly what the game is about, but the jazzed part is a little giddy and drowns out the sense. The effect is to make you feel confused and stuck, yet enthusiastic at the same time.

It reminds me of talking to Jason about Grey Ranks. The following is paraphrased from a phone conversation a couple of years ago, and Jason, if I'm misrepresenting you or the conversation, please castigate me.

ME: It seems to me that the ultimate Premise of the Grey Ranks text is whether patriotism is worth sacrificing or even poisoning youth.
J: That nails it, yes.
ME: I'm curious about this antagonistic prose you've stuck in, here and here.
J: Yeah, I want the players at each other's throats.
ME: Really? I mean, literally trying to one-up or beat one another?
J (giddy): Yeah! Adversity! Torn loyalty! Emotions!
ME: Um, how does that get at addressing the Premise I mentioned?
J: Well, it does seem to distract from that, kinda, in playtest.
ME: And how has that worked out in the last stages of design?
J: Actually, I've been kind of stuck lately ... I can't seem to get the text to gel ...

The thing is, Grey Ranks benefits immensely from rules like risking and even destroying one another's character's Most Valued things, among others like how you move a token of your choice an extra step. But it seemed to me that those rules work the best because it's not about me doing it to you, so much as anyone being able to do it (including to oneself) when it seems to that person to be the best/right/perfect thing to do. As it turned out, Jason put that concept of "at each other's throats" behind him and focused on maximum emotional intensity given the ability to do terrible things to characters (including one's own), and the game in my opinion reached unique heights of power.

Similarly, I agree that it's true that the narration rights for Showdown permit the loser of a roll to mess a bit with the intensity of the loss. As the pioneer of this technique (Trollbabe), I have observed it a lot, and just as with Grey Ranks, I think that the key is that the narrator can modulate the severity of the loss to taste. Modulation means up or down to greater or lesser degree. Sometimes that means it's not much of a loss. Sometimes that means it's a hundred times worse than anyone else at the table would have done. You talk about weaseling the narration - and I don't believe you, at least not only and fully as the primary point of that mechanic in Showdown. I think the ability to modulate the outcome is far more varied, and thus far more nuanced, than the simplistic notion that since I get to narrate my guy's losing, I can make it a weeny loss, and thereby devalue your original agenda for the scene. If that were true, no one would be interested in winning the dice rolls and the game would become an exercise in passive-aggressive one-upmanship (downmanship?).

I can imagine, and have experienced myself in other games, a nice meaty moment of playing Showdown, when this happens:

I want both players to be struggling to be the protagonist of the story and feeling the pain as their prized Qualities--the things they love about their characters--are whittled away.

J: Actually, I've been kind of stuck lately ... I can't seem to get the text to gel ...

Hey guys,

I wanted to add my thoughts, which run alongside some of what's already been said.

First off, going into the playtest of Showdown, I was merely interested.  Coming out of the playtest, I felt excited and very satisfied.  So, Seth, whatever you do, make sure you keep working on this game.  I want to play again.  I want to try different sorts of fights and flashbacks.  I have specific people in mind that I want to play with.  This is the best sort of compliment I can give you.  It's a "small" game, but the subject matter is rife with possibility.

As I see it, the game is set up to encourage Story Now, but is teetering on Step on Up.  There is competition in the game, and sometimes it's not just between the characters.  Let me give you an example.  Early in the game, I don't think Ron or I cared what the outcome of the dice were.  We were just experimenting, trying to figure the game out.  Once we got a handle on the system, I think we both tried to flex our muscles a bit.  But what were we competing for?  Narrative control, not victory in the duel.  There were times when I really wanted to narrate the flashback or contradict one of Saracen's qualities.  I didn't want this because it would help me or get me closer to overall victory.  I wanted to because I had some great idea in my head that I wanted to be able to express.

At some point that changed for me, and I made the decision to forgo flashbacks.  I wanted to win the duel scenes.  I was down on dice.  The fight had been decidedly one sided.  I wanted Saracen to feel some pain.  This was the point that Ron described when he suddenly found himself behind on dice.  I started strategizing heavily towards obtaining a specific result.  Again, though, this wasn't about making sure that Bosch won the duel.  I just wanted the fight to be a bit more dynamic.  In other words, I had a narrative goal, not a traditional competitive goal.

So I was competing against Ron indirectly to steer the feel of the story in a broad sense, which was a bit odd.  But on the other hand, I wasn't really trying to specifically make Bosch win the duel.  At the same time, the game always seemed to be collaborative.  Once the "winner" was determined for each roll, we both worked together to narrate a satisfying result.  Does that make sense?

What worked for me?  First, as Ron mentioned, being able to redefine the other player's Qualities is great.  The fact that you get to do this even when you lose the duel scene is also great.  I like that you have to redefine them to contradict the original, but also that you are granted some creative liberty to reinterpret them a bit (just a bit though).

For Ron and I the game wasn't about winning or losing the duel.  As he said, even though I technically won the duel, I was very glad to be able to narrate Bosch's death.  Whatever competition I felt, it ultimately came back around to telling a powerful and interconnected story.  And I think this last point is key to the game.  If the game somehow became only about winning the duel, it would lose its power.  It may even become boring because, frankly, the dice strategy in the game isn't that interesting.  But it is just right for the type of narrative jockeying I described above.

Tim,

First, thanks for the kind words. I appreciate that greatly.

Now, the sort of competition that you're describing is the sort of thing that I'm wanting in the game. Because you're right; it's not about victory in the duel. In fact, generally speaking, the more you focus on the Duel, the more often you will lose Flashbacks. Rather, this:

So I was competing against Ron indirectly to steer the feel of the story in a broad sense, which was a bit odd.  But on the other hand, I wasn't really trying to specifically make Bosch win the duel.  At the same time, the game always seemed to be collaborative.  Once the "winner" was determined for each roll, we both worked together to narrate a satisfying result.  Does that make sense?

Seth,

I keep mulling over my thoughts about the game because I can't quite seem to find the right words to express what I experienced during the playtest.

I think my confusion occurs because there is a balance in Showdown between a fictional competition (the duel), which is represented in a secondary way via the mechanics (bidding and stances).  Nonetheless, the game is really only about telling the story of that fictional competition through what are ultimately Story Now, revelatory mechanics (flashbacks and qualities).

I think saying that I was "competing" for narrative control isn't quite accurate.  I was only competing in the sense that I was advocating for a particular outcome for the turn (winning the flashback or duel) and the chance to narrate how it all happens.  But win or lose, I would have been just as happy as a player.  There was nothing important (at the meta-game level) riding on the outcome.  I always knew that whatever happened would be interesting in terms of story.

I think that's the clearest way I can say it.

On a separate topic, I wanted to talk about the number of qualities for each character. As was mentioned above, it appears from our one playtest that both characters will usually have all four of their qualities rewritten.  First, Seth, has this been true in your games?

Second, if it is true, I wouldn't mind trying the game with one or two additional qualities just to increase the chance that one or two qualities wouldn't be rewritten.  I think going into the game knowing that nothing you write on your sheet will stay the same is slightly less interesting than knowing that almost nothing on the sheet will stay the same.  Allowing the other player to choose what stays and what goes is intriguing to me.  But again, I defer to you, Seth.

Tim wrote:
Seth,

I keep mulling over my thoughts about the game because I can't quite seem to find the right words to express what I experienced during the playtest.

I think my confusion occurs because there is a balance in Showdown between a fictional competition (the duel), which is represented in a secondary way via the mechanics (bidding and stances).  Nonetheless, the game is really only about telling the story of that fictional competition through what are ultimately Story Now, revelatory mechanics (flashbacks and qualities).

I think saying that I was "competing" for narrative control isn't quite accurate.  I was only competing in the sense that I was advocating for a particular outcome for the turn (winning the flashback or duel) and the chance to narrate how it all happens.  But win or lose, I would have been just as happy as a player.  There was nothing important (at the meta-game level) riding on the outcome.  I always knew that whatever happened would be interesting in terms of story.

I think that's the clearest way I can say it.

On a separate topic, I wanted to talk about the number of qualities for each character. As was mentioned above, it appears from our one playtest that both characters will usually have all four of their qualities rewritten.  First, Seth, has this been true in your games?

Second, if it is true, I wouldn't mind trying the game with one or two additional qualities just to increase the chance that one or two qualities wouldn't be rewritten.  I think going into the game knowing that nothing you write on your sheet will stay the same is slightly less interesting than knowing that almost nothing on the sheet will stay the same.  Allowing the other player to choose what stays and what goes is intriguing to me.  But again, I defer to you, Seth.

I've read over the rules a few times now and I've just been idly wondering about some things... keep in mind that I have not play tested the beta yet.

How do you feel about the following suggestions?
standardize the dice mechanics, say, always roll d10... have a specific number of Rounds... more robust stance selection... instead of injuring dice you gain "victory points"... the outcome of the duel would be decided by the final victory point total... ties represent both characters dying with the player that has the Upper Hand token narrating the outcome... perhaps aligning Maneuver then Resolve and Memory then Resolve...

Tim,

Hey, one more thought. Instead of increasing the number of Qualities, you could reduce the number of dice. This has been one area of the design that I've revisited from time to time. The obvious answer is to drop the d12s; however, dropping the d4s would increase the uncertainty of winning Flashbacks. So I could see either way working. Playtesting on both these options would be helpful.

MacLeod wrote:
How do you feel about the following suggestions?
standardize the dice mechanics, say, always roll d10... have a specific number of Rounds... more robust stance selection... instead of injuring dice you gain "victory points"... the outcome of the duel would be decided by the final victory point total... ties represent both characters dying with the player that has the Upper Hand token narrating the outcome... perhaps aligning Maneuver then Resolve and Memory then Resolve...

Heh, I won't lie... I pretty much expected this response but I figured that I'd give it a try. =)
Ah, well, I already sent you the revised version... Take it with a grain of salt, I suppose. When I get a chance I'll play test both versions and outline the major differences in how the game plays out.

GreatWolf wrote:
Hey, one more thought. Instead of increasing the number of Qualities, you could reduce the number of dice. This has been one area of the design that I've revisited from time to time. The obvious answer is to drop the d12s; however, dropping the d4s would increase the uncertainty of winning Flashbacks. So I could see either way working. Playtesting on both these options would be helpful.

Tim wrote:

GreatWolf wrote:
Hey, one more thought. Instead of increasing the number of Qualities, you could reduce the number of dice. This has been one area of the design that I've revisited from time to time. The obvious answer is to drop the d12s; however, dropping the d4s would increase the uncertainty of winning Flashbacks. So I could see either way working. Playtesting on both these options would be helpful.

Seth, that's an interesting idea, but it would have the unfortunate side-effect of shortening the overall length of the game -- which I thought was just right.

Considering that it was split across two sessions which included playing another game as well ... the total probably clocked in at three-plus hours. It didn't feel that long in play itself.

I would like to lobby for keeping the range of dice and the consequent time in play. I think that less Flashbacks automatically means letting the players off the hook for plumbing the depths of just how badly whatever relationships or events prior to the duel went sour. At present, the current experience includes a certain, "What, one more?" stage which I think is productive: "Yes, one more, and it is this."

Best, Ron