Lory Plaza,

Glory plaza it used to be called, but only Reverend Peters calls it that now. You can hear him sometimes on his PA speakers, mixed in with his gospel songs, before they drift into static as the power goes out.

We used to have power through cables, but they've long gone rusted through, so it's the old black gold again. If it were me I'd burn the stuff rather'n feed it to the gennies, but Doctor Valery says he needs it for something, so we mostly keep a trickle going when we can.

There's little courtesies like that, when it could be your swollen leg on the table and not old Cole's, but you won't find much for the rest of us.

Time was you'd walk into a place like this, and everyone'd be "can I help you" and "have a nice day". Now people tell you they want help, and with a knife in hand too, or quietly in your ear with metal at your neck. We still do a little real trade; with the armoured bus convoys or lone wanders, but it's mostly turned in, into tight deals for just enough, with people nursing their private fading empires in the gardening section.

You can find a little kindness in Ms Widow's place, if you pay for it, from bottle or skin. But that's one soft spot in a desert of sharp edges, old metal and dust.

Most of the town's gone under with that, all scrap, leaning walls and broken windows, with this "out of town" the only settled place we have left.

It's not as bad as it could be; the gangs have settled and mostly just play mayor, instead of playing army, and a man can claim some land for his business, if he can find some business to have. Some people can still find hope too, like that self-made Rev of ours, and we can all hear what he thinks: Passes out homilies about the future like sour apples, insulting everyone's business as evils "we" will overcome.... no wonder he never comes out of that booth of his.

But like I say, it's a sour apple, and we need to keep hold of all of those we can.

This is a report on my Rustbelt game, the players are me, my brother and two good friends. It started when one of those friends finally got bored passively playing his consoles and wanted to create stuff again, I'd been mildly plugging rustbelt so we gave it a go, with me running it:

Setup went pretty well; normally we pretend we can go without it, but honestly deciding to get a feel for the setting and what it could do worked really well, as did the lack of "balance" mixed with the expectation of vulnerability. Although I don't know how long the players will keep the warnings about character breakage to heart; I can see us getting attached to them.

Psych did a really good job of fleshing out all the characters, as one character started off as "the hulk as a mercenary in a western" and turned into a Bulgarian immigrant who tries to buy acceptance, while merging it nicely with the first.

The other two characters are built with conflicts already, from the indian bar musician who doesn't dare be a healer, in case he succeeds and devalues his defensive hopelessness, to the old independent hunter who is tied to the settlement by injury and lonelyness.

I found that woe and contacts were both very good for fleshing out history, giving just enough so the players could really get a hang of their characters voice. Obvious stuff I know but useful; we didn't make their histories, we concepted them in action then worked back to the past.

On the other hand, when prepping, I could have done with dials of some kind. We didn't really reach agreement on tone, regrettably, and that could come back to haunt us.

The imagined stuff shifts between people like this; one friend is very strong on wild west film-hardness as well as bioshock decay, the other on the semi-historical background and the game fallout, I'm mixing "Day of creation" by JG Ballard with deadspace and a creaking post-apocalypse, and my brother is going very much hand to mouth biological ruthlessness, a theme he's been mining for a bit, and perhaps I can push to it's creaking point. There's also a passing Dark Tower interest in the group, but I'm not sure that will come in very much.

On the other hand, if I can merge all that together, we could have something pretty excellent on our hands.

We extended setting prep far beyond the "requirements" of the game, so that suggests we are actually doing fairly well on colour, on the other hand, I'm not convinced I placed the spike well; it basically deals with a gruesome kidnapping to the contacts of two of the characters, in a way that shows potential to mulch up all the standoffs that keep the place ticking over. It's big, yes, but I'm not sure it will be that personal to the survivalist character; he will likely be there for mercenary reasons, to buy himself a little more space.

Error on that last paragraph; the kidnapping is of one girl, the sister of the bar-owner that Snake (the native-american musician) works for, and the girlfriend of one of the local gang leaders, an old friend of Victor (the merc).

There'll be more of this soon as that last post was written up mostly last week.

I notice this has been moved to playtesting, probably a better place, although some of the stuff I'll want to talk about will be more social than directly game system related.

Anyway my prep vindicated the spike to me, although I think it might be cool to reveal that in bits. While prepping I built up not only a basic pattern for the adventure, (on a rough 4 act basis) but also tried to find some interesting/thematic elements to build into things later, like finding random personal ways to hit each character or expansions to some of the npcs that could flower into full events. Hopefully I should have enough to work with whatever the characters do.

Pre-play some interesting social stuff happened; Victor's player suggested I included another friend, but I flat vetoed it, which is unusual for me; I normally love to pile people in and see where we end up, but my prep was to tightly focused for that, and I'm not even sure if the game can handle it. Fortunately he should be able to come in on the next yarn we do, which will probably be in about 4 weeks time.

Also when we all got to Snake's player's house, he was not settled for the game at all. We tried starting about four times, and then I realised that we just hadn't seen him in a bit, so I just suggested we leave gaming for an hour or so and just chat instead. This worked wonders, for all the obvious reasons, and when conversation reached a lull point, I just said with great enthusiasm "shall we play then?" to a unanimous "yes!", I suspect we had buy in. :P
The reason I'm so chuffed about this is that I avoided the usual pitfalls that damage our games; adding people till it breaks and using it as an excuse for meeting rather than "one of the things we do". Our group have diversified in the last year into doing all kinds of different stuff in different sized groups, without feeling we are "leaving someone out", 'cos we know we'll do something with them eventually. Growing up I suppose.

I mentioned that as we introduced the characters we would be going in turns "like in combat, except it's scenes", and I kept the order of rotation up for the whole game, except on one occasion where it unveiled one of the character's lack of influence in the story, something I hope to rectify. It just seemed to help people's interest in other people's scenes when they knew it would be coming round to them in a second. I think I'm going to keep doing that.

Starting with Victor, I got his player to read out/explain again what his character was like, to see if anything had changed in terms of the concept over the week, and also to get us all in the right headspace. I've found a short description of your character does wonders to get you back into that world, especially over a long break.

In short Victor's parents came from Bulgaria to America for a better life only to find that thanks to the rust it was even worse there! I'm afraid to say Bulgaria was standing in for "poor eastern european country", although it did have a little more colour thanks to one of the players having been there. Being trapped by a slowly crumbling economy and infrastructure, the family settle. Victor gets involved in gangs due to his unusual size and strength, but over time becomes more estranged as he really gets that big (tough 10). Eventually he gets betrayed by one of his gang and has to leave the town (we're going to slowly fill that in over time), developing serious rejection issues on the way. He grows into a travelling mercenary using his wealth to buy friends, with his parents dying while he was away (interestingly this doesn't hit him that bad; he was more into his gang than his family, I'd like to pull that out sometime). Sometime after this he the attention of a mysterious client, a smug mastermind character who calls himself Wraith. (Imagine the devil from reaper with more posturing and less actual show of power.) He has some other contacts in other places, but those are the relevant ones here.

The scene starts a little while after the end of a job, with Victor reaching the end of his money. The barman of the pub he enters recognises him, and directs him to a phone that has been jury-rigged at the back of the bar. Naturally it starts ringing as he gets to it, and he accepts a new job; find a kidnapper known as coyote last seen heading towards Lory Plaza, and deliver him dead or alive to the square on the edge of the town (the old car park). He'll be able to get equipment from a guy called Loomis (this was pulling in one of Snake's contacts, a drug dealer/fence character with a weird habit for turning up unexpectedly when he can make a profit). Agreeing the terms he sets off, using some of his last money to get a ride back to his home town.

The we move on to Cody, (who I inexplicably kept calling Cole!) an old hunter who's hunger is for independence, but has a long standing leg injury that means he needs to stay near a doctor. The events that caused the injury changed his life, when the effects of the rust first came to his survivalist camp in the mountains, where he lived with his wife. He blames himself for not being able to save her from a bear attack, and now "won't let any beast get the better" of him.

His first scene is more substantial, with my brother doing in depth narration of an old survivalist's wake up routine and house, which was actually pretty evocative of a tough lonely guy, with us all pitching in stuff to make it cooler. (I tried to get different pacings in the different sections, to match the players) He starts tracking this animal that seems like a heavy wild cat, but with one of the prints being a bit messed up. As he follows into the remains of the town I start putting on the mood music, until he finds the tracks lead up to a hole, where a bus seems to have come at some strange angle and smashed down into a basement, which is still overshadowed by the structure above it. Most of the area has been stripped of all it's metal, but the bus is mostly in one piece. As he goes in I have him roll cagey, he succeeds and sees a lynx-like creature jumping him from the roof, where it has been secured by a sucker foot, and he is able to shoot it out of the air before it gets to him with his high power scavenged crossbow and it disappears down the hole from the recoil. (basically this sequence gave me an opportunity to show the resolution system against a flat challenge in two situations and an opposed contest, pretty much everything in this hunting sequence is staged to show off some feature of the basic mechanic)
He then climbs down the bus to collect his kill, finding it quite tricky, and finds the lynx with his bolt still in it lying in a pool of some engine/chemical gloop. He pokes it with a knife and finds it leaves an instant stain that is hard to get off, twigs that this is probably why the bus has not been scavenged, and reluctantly leaves his kill. (I noticed he had lovingly described his equipment so I thought this might be a good way to lightly poke him with rust effects, like a knife that never comes clean)
Climbing back up I noticed that his leg wasn't coming up very much, as we set it at a difficulty of 10, so we had a "leg roll" to see if it plays up. I probably won't do this for other injuries, just this special one.
Finally when getting out into the sun he sees an eagle is roosting on the top of the building, considers getting it's eggs, but gives when he sees it is a hard climb.

Then we get to snake, who's player is having second thoughts about his character's hunger/faith combo, which is basically that he wants to help, but copes with his frustration by a faith that the world is hopeless. We realised that basically gives him nothing to do, and so changed it to "you can only change the small things", with the idea that it could become the original if it's zeal gets high enough, but other than that will be still allow action.
Snake is an american indian guy who's tribe was wiped out, and so is trying to recover the traditions of his ancestors, even though it reminds him of what he has lost. There's an added irony that he is basically doing it wrong, mixing up traditions from totally different tribes.
He has been hired by a woman who calls herself B. Widow to play in the downstairs of her bar/brothel, mainly because he gets people in the appropriate mood of sadness and nostalgia to get her the right kind of customers.
If this were a different world they would actually be a pair in some rom-com about people from different backgrounds getting over their differences, but it's not that world, so they never do anything about it!
So basically this guy's life is one whole bag of understated poignancy, which is going to get turned upside down for better or worse (both obviously!) by the changes that are about to happen, but until then we just play out some fairly straightforward scenes underlined by all that:

He finishes up his set and finds someone's leftovers to eat, not wanting to waste anything, and hears sounds of a disagreement upstairs, suprising since the ceilings are naturally pretty soundproof, something along the lines of "....I don't do that....My money...." and an angry customer comes down the steps (I made a choice that we would keep the women-exploitation level down in this situation, based on my impressions of what Snake's player envisaged, doesn't mean that won't change later on though, which I think we might veil). Snake sort of insults the man and defends his freind in the most standoffish way he can and does a pretty good job of avoiding greater confrontation, with the man sort of huffing into his moustache and moving on. The barkeeper (who has his own weird mannerisms and backstory, due to being a recovering soldier) then makes a quiet joke about taking people's leftovers and the two of them start to chat. Snakes modified traits come into play with him dodging the subject of their growing isolation by giving the barkeep a better cloth to wipe the glasses with. We finish off with him going off to bed and being slightly woken by gunshots, which he assumes are part of the general background gang-fighting between the main gang and the ones in surrounding areas.

I dropped the ball on this one, we did a "test scene" between Snake and Loomis that was just an example, and dropped this first scene in at what was in my mind the evening of the spike, so there wasn't much space to go. Really unfortunate, as I wanted to include a bit of his pre-spike relationship with B, which is a big part of his character that never went anywhere. What is more, I totally neglected to do his music via the resolution mechanism, which should have been amazing; price as bringing in elements of his past to up the intensity of a song thats going flat, and risk people mentioning them later, or just take a tears hit. I'm considering doing a recap scene next session to rectify this, but I'm not sure what it would do to pacing given what happens later in this session. I'm undecided because he is basically not currently much of a "rustbelt" character, but I feel we should "give him a chance" to be that understated person before it goes serious, if only because the contrasts will be enhanced.

Once I put all the analysis in this seems to take ages! There were 2 more scene turns before we took a break in real time, but that should be enough substance for now.

Fantastic. Thanks for posting this -- I occasionally need a jolt to get back to work on this thing (which is 99% done on writing, but layout and illustrations are looking daunting).

I've got a few thoughts. Let's take 'em one at a time.

Psych did a really good job of fleshing out all the characters, as one character started off as "the hulk as a mercenary in a western" and turned into a Bulgarian immigrant who tries to buy acceptance

On the other hand, when prepping, I could have done with dials of some kind. We didn't really reach agreement on tone, regrettably, and that could come back to haunt us.

While prepping I built up not only a basic pattern for the adventure, (on a rough 4 act basis) but also tried to find some interesting/thematic elements to build into things later, like finding random personal ways to hit each character or expansions to some of the npcs that could flower into full events. Hopefully I should have enough to work with whatever the characters do.

I'm undecided because he is basically not currently much of a "rustbelt" character

adversity across the moral spectrum.
In playing this game, I have obvserved four general types of morality among Rustbelt PCs:

1. Basically good; they stick to their ideals and look out for each other, or at least try to, despite how hard it is to do so. Hope is their keyword.
2. Merely ugly; they’ll do whatever it takes to get by, and don’t go out of their way to help or harm unless they can help themselves in doing so. Tenacity is their keyword.
3. Actively bad; faced with the cruel reality of life in the ‘Belt, they say “fuck it” and commit atrocities with glee as an act of rejection, refutation, rebellion, and/or revenge against society, morality, and the universe in general (even if they don’t think of it as such). Depravity is their keyword.
4. Hard and stoic; they think that they can ride fences, remain unattached and inaccessible, and be just fine. They won’t hurt nobody, and they won’t let nobody hurt them – they’ll just stay uninvolved. Detachment is their keyword.

PCs hop between these all the time. They start as one and usually change to a different one by the end of a Yarn, and often go through another one or two on the way there. The PC who sticks with one of these all the way through a story is a minority case (and usually frightening and exhilirating in play).

If you can identify which sort a PC is at a given time, that’s a great handle for how to challenge them. Just look at their keywords: everything you need is right there.

“Oh, you’ve got Hope, do ya? Just how much? What about when you get fired, your wife leaves you for your best friend, and your teenage son gets beat half to death by a street gang?”

“Oh, you’re Tenacious, are ya? Are you tenacious enough sell out a buddy to get the money you need to eat and get your fix? I mean, it’s him or you, right?”

“Oh, you’re Depraved? Seriously? Even when this girl displays sincere, positive emotion for you and is trying to establish a connection no matter how horribly you treat her?”

“Oh, so you’re Detached, huh? What about when your next-door neighbors get sold to slavers? Including their eight year old daughter? She used to play hopscotch in the street, right in front of your house.”

Those are, of course, pretty extreme examples. I just used extreme ones to hammer the point home. You want the extremity of the question to match the extremity of the PC’s moral stance as closely as possible, and you want to start small and escalate from there. Take note that if you challenge low-grade hope and it stands up to the test, then that’s an escalation of hope. Time to escalate the challenge against it.

Marshall, I really think that should be in there! Most importantly because it encourages the GM to do something with the players that no existing incentive or imperative does; try to soften the character. Many good GMs will do that anyway, but insuring that the depraved or disengaged also can invert from their position makes the game have more legs and still be about "tenacity depravity and hope" as the starting page suggests. All existing system elements focus on the first two, aside from hunger and absolving woes.

Feel free to use the quote, but I would add the other bit, because he really did combine the two, a "yes, and" thing you know? I can tighten up the grammar if you like:

Psych did a really good job of fleshing out all the characters, as one character started off as "the hulk as a mercenary in a western" and turned into a Bulgarian immigrant who tries to buy acceptance, without loosing his first ideas.

Marshall wrote:
I've run Rustbelt games where when Jordan's character is in the scene, it's a dark, seedy psychodrama mystery, and when Ryan's character is in the scene, it's a free-wheeling, anime-ish (in thematic, not cinematic, terms) Western. When they're both in the scene, it's really interesting -- because those two tones were both extensions of the characters' personae. Where they clash is where the characters will clash. Any reconciliation between these tones is reconciliation between the characters.

We also got the price system working really well here, with Cody's player for the first time getting hit by how stubborn his character is; because he gave him ok-ish physical stats to show a very fit man well past his prime, he realised that the lifestyle Cody lives is only just within his grasp, and how important it is to him not to be injured.

Before I get onto Victor. Marshall, I have a question about prices; the summary I have been using for the price rules is as follows: No matter how many oppositions/dangers you have, your performance beating them means you resolve them all. But if they are higher than performance, then you must pay price for each individually. If there is active opposition, that can stop your action but is not mutually exclusive with it, then you must at least pay enough price to match it's performance, or your action will be stopped. Does this summarise how you meant it to be played? My original understanding was that price like performance dealt with all dangers and challenges simultaneously, but the combat examples suggested otherwise.

Anyway back to the game:

Victor comes off the bus in the early evening before the night of the spike, slightly groggy but determined to get down to business. He walks out into a dust filled carpark, with the lamposts rigged up like treehouse crow's nests, with guns trained on the bus. A few people have got off already, an indian man with an old wheeled travelcase, a chinese guy with just a sack, and over near one of the lamposts a black guy with a tottering pile of boxes is trading with a man with blond bowlcut hair on a battered quadbike with a trailer. Victor ignores all this and strides on towards the main settled area, but someone recognises him.

One of the snipers aboard the nearest tower calls down, for him to stop and state his business, but he just spins and stares at them. They are armed with a rifle and who knows what else up there, he just has metal gloves and a ruthless attitude. (Influence challenge, advantage to the watchman/sniper) The moment is hard to replicate here, but they just standoff, mexican style, as everyone else feels the mood change and makes themselves scarce. After a lot of significant pauses and some very slight dialogue, the watchman lets him go, regretting his lack of nerve, with a parting shot that he will tell Zach he's here. As Victor walks off he can here an argument raging in the crows-nest behind him. (Deadlock system worked; rolling off instead of bidding gave the person loosing a chance to come back, and on draws we added little dialogue pieces to add to the tension, or cut to other people's reactions. Otherwise those draw rolls could have been a little weak, but we turned them into an asset. I mentioned to the other players that he had just given the boy up there a woe, and he had just outburst at his friend's complaint and caused an argument, Victor's player was chuffed, and we managed to show up more of the rules, that boy may come up later, oh and Zach was a friend of his from before he got kicked out, one of the few to stick with him/treat him properly)

Victor enters the more stably developed area of the town, on the lookout for a bar where he can ask about Loomis, the guy who will be getting him his equipment. (I left equipment vague so Victor's player could fill in the blank about how Victor normally does things) Finding "B Widow's bar" he enters only to find the patrons shunning him, except for the indian man on a little piece of stage, who is lost in his own world playing an improvised instrument. This total rejection in his home town triggers his woe, and he copes with using the last of his money to get totally drunk. Now as we've already said that Loomis turns up when he can get some money, not necesserally when it's convenient, we decided to have him turn up here.

At this point Snake's player suggested that he take over Loomis, which I thought a brilliant idea, especially as his character is unlikely to be involved given that he is playing in the background. We work out what we had considered Loomis' mannerisms to be, settling for a breathy mexican man with a tendency to slink in unnoticed. We also settled that he will get half his own pay when the job is completed, making him quite on Victor's side.

At this point we amused ourselves by having Victor fight his inebriation to get words out, with the price being sweat or saying the wrong thing, and the stat chosen colours how his player plays drunkenness. The scene is pretty much untranslatable, especially as I had very little to do with it, but was pretty awesome, with Snake's player giving Loomis a lot of comic touches, which I'm going to have to find a way to use and subvert. :P Victor's player goes for weapons, and so gets a shotgun/blunderbuss/pipe gun, but couldn't think of any other tools Victor would want. I was a little surprised at this, but it emphasised something I hadn't previously realised, Victor was much more a mercenary/gun and battering ram for hire than a bounty hunter, so this job was a bit of a leap for him, especially given he would have trouble given his history. A side note of this is that Snake became aware of Victor, as some seriously hard drinking new guy who knows his drug dealer. That won't be a side note for long hopefully.

After some useless drunk investigations and sobering up sufficiently, (which took most of the evening) he decides to go for the old hideout of his gang. I would have stopped here, but my eyes popped at him going into what I had previously set up as the centre of events and so I carried on. As he goes out to he sees a few people climbing onto the roofs to set up camp in the remainder of air conditioning units, and stalls shut up in the closing dark. As he gets into the area where he was before he notices that buildings have been moved a little, with some of the old ways through boarded up. He comes to a place that used to be a garage and is overhung and unlit. (grizzled check for ambush, fails and can't find any reason to push, at last!) As he walks in he suddenly finds a gun on the back of his neck and a voice says "who goes there". We all stop a sec, but Victor's player barrels on with a smirk. Victor spins round with his elbow and gauntlet to hit the man away and shouts "It's fucking Santa!" (which sounds awesome in a fake bulgarian accent by the way! The contest was just trying to stop the shot with a price in blood, which the assailant gives on, partially because we added the dice roll twice by accident, and because they rolled extraordinarily low even with advantage) the boy (as it turns out to be) is knocked flying and slowly gets back to his feet, meanwhile a gun and more cool headed voice appear from the shadows, defusing the situation and saying they just want to bring him in. The two guards/ambushers bring him in to the old ganghouse, one of those old american semi-mansions redone as a kind of fortress, with bunkers in the bay windows.

As they approach though, suddenly the weirdest sound of struggle and who knows what else comes from somewhere up ahead, full of roaring, screaming and a few gunshots. At this point Victor and his guards check for fear, with the previously cool headed guard legging it. Meanwhile the house is erupting into people shouting and running around, general chaos. Victor just strides into the middle of this, telling the people on the door that he's being taken to Zach. They let him through and he just walks into their fortress with people rushing around on every side, before recognising a familiar voice shouting behind the next wall. (Now this is me justifiably "going easy" on Victor, as he waltzes in to possibly frame himself. Just seemed perfect for him to single-mindedly plow through the confusion)

Zach is a storm of misfiring authority, knife into the table and all that kind of thing (I suggest people mentally add swearing as appropriate as it'll just slow down the scene!), he is demanding that people find his girl. Then he is stopped mid-flow by seeing Victor walk through the doors, and says something along the lines of "What the hell are you doing here?" (At this point I warn Victor's player of Victor's vulnerability here, given his sensitivity to his history here; pointing out that if he's not careful his psych will get played like a keyboard! It's a bizarre kind of threat given but I want to insure that his portrayal of the character's approach to a sensitive area is consonant with how he would portray the consequences.)
Victor plays it completely streight: "I am here to find a kidnapper, called Coyote." Zachs, eyes widen, and he orders everyone out of the room.

Having zeroed in on the matter at hand, Victor has saved himself from memory lane trips. This grew to be more of his thing as time went on, not avoiding background style characterisation, but embodying it as negative space in sudden cooperative or aggressive swiftness. He tries to give as much of what he knows about the Coyote as possible, without giving away any of his new life, and Zach listens, thinks, and decides to show him up to "the room" (I had Zach role savvy to see how much he recognises the truth in what Victor says, at least in terms of plausibility, through the red mist. He decides to check Victor's reactions).

At this point it goes a bit csi rustbelt, but with me trying to present clues in a way I thought matched his style. So he notices that there has been a fight in here, but with most of the action focused on the side nearest to the door to the porch. That door has been blown almost to splinters, with the inside door frame gouged by what look like sharpened hooks. A dresser by a window has been smashed down and in as if by an impact, and the window above it is smashed. He decides not to bluff Zach, and tells him he thinks the kidnapper left through the door. Zach shows hardened enthusiasm at this, saying "Now we have a trail."

Then we cut to Cody, waking up the morning after his fishing day, intent on getting some new knife-treating oil. He once again carefully plans his route (rolling thorough) to avoid trouble and gets to town safely, only to see young gang members swarming the streets. As he approaches he feels regret at having to come here, and not being able to make his oils himself, and outbursts his frustration at the boy guarding the street corner, insulting the improvised spear he's made from some building fabric. Naturally, this outburst hits the boys faith, that he is making himself a man by being armed, and he outbursts that it would be good enough to kill Cody. Brilliantly, Cody leaves the death threat alone and says "You've got more important things to be doing with your time".

I seriously loved this, because it shows something about arguments in rustbelt and perhaps in real life, but I'll just finish this section first. As Cody passes the gang-kid he sees a few more hassling the veg merchant, and decides to sort it out. (His player decided that because of his high thorough score Cody would have a keen sense of order, and not want to see the town messed about. So much for my "mercenary" impression! Glad to hear it too.) We finish up with two of the characters ready to spring into (more) action, and one slowly finding his feet (I hope), but all of us satisfied with what has happened. Whoo, first session! Exhausting in play and text. :P

But onto the outburst thing, the way we played replicated something I have observed in real conversation; sometimes arguments are just people trying to offload pent up fury to someone who will take it, and if not, it just goes round and round. It's really not about convincing anyone. The great part about rustbelt as we play it is that an outburst will not convince anyone of anything, it's just for you, unless you _mix_ it into trying to convince someone, where (as I later did it) it adds to the difficulty of the action, given the intensity of what you are trying to express. This makes everything up to (and often including) moral outrage a self-centred thing, where you can just spew venom and go home. Fascinatingly, to actually act to change something, requires a whole extra set of choices and commitments through the price system, which feels pretty life-like. You have to appeal to the person you just insulted to actually change, or go and move that stuff you were just shouting about. Satisfying!

JoyWriter wrote:
No matter how many oppositions/dangers you have, your performance beating them means you resolve them all. But if they are higher than performance, then you must pay price for each individually. If there is active opposition, that can stop your action but is not mutually exclusive with it, then you must at least pay enough price to match it's performance, or your action will be stopped. Does this summarise how you meant it to be played?

At this point we amused ourselves by having Victor fight his inebriation to get words out, with the price being sweat or saying the wrong thing, and the stat chosen colours how his player plays drunkenness.

Having zeroed in on the matter at hand, Victor has saved himself from memory lane trips. This grew to be more of his thing as time went on, not avoiding background style characterisation, but embodying it as negative space in sudden cooperative or aggressive swiftness.

But onto the outburst thing, the way we played replicated something I have observed in real conversation; sometimes arguments are just people trying to offload pent up fury to someone who will take it, and if not, it just goes round and round. It's really not about convincing anyone. The great part about rustbelt as we play it is that an outburst will not convince anyone of anything, it's just for you, unless you _mix_ it into trying to convince someone, where (as I later did it) it adds to the difficulty of the action, given the intensity of what you are trying to express. This makes everything up to (and often including) moral outrage a self-centred thing, where you can just spew venom and go home. Fascinatingly, to actually act to change something, requires a whole extra set of choices and commitments through the price system, which feels pretty life-like. You have to appeal to the person you just insulted to actually change, or go and move that stuff you were just shouting about. Satisfying!

Marshall wrote:

JoyWriter wrote:
Does this summarise how you meant it to be played?

This is 100% correct.

"If there are more than one challenge simultaneously, that would either provide an extra danger or also stop the characters intent succeeding, then do steps 1-4 as above.

Step 5: Compare your performance individually to each different challenge. If in each case your performance is higher, then you avoid all the dangers and succeed with your character's intent. If not, then for each challenge where performance is lower, you must choose to push or give vs each one, with the price in each case equal to the difference between the challenge and performance. This can mean paying multiple prices simultaneously. If you give at one of them and not the others, it either stops you succeeding, and/or adds the danger to the result, depending on the type of challenge it is.

Examples of other challenges are dangers of shooting bystanders in a firefight, or your leg injury stopping you vaulting a gap, or another character's interfering.

If two characters intentions mean they are providing a difficulty to each other, but it is possible for both to succeed simultaneously, then add each one's performance as an extra challenge to the other's action. If your character beats it with their own performance or pushes to meet it, then they can overcome the interference. This doesn't mean they stop the other guy, only that the other guy didn't stop you. If they don't meet the challenge and give, then they don't get their goal because of the interference. Then carry on to steps 6 and 7, remembering to include who pushed against who's interference in the narration. [Then put in that bit about initiative]

Deadlock
If the two or more characters' intentions cannot be met simultaneously, and the characters with the lower performance push to match the higher one, then they go into deadlock. [The deadlock stuff, moving from 2 character to 2+ character deadlocks, then back to mentioning steps 6-7, then I'd put in Cooperation and Preparation and the examples]

At one point, I did present it all unified like that. But I decided to go with a separated format, so that you could look up procedure for specifically what's going on, right now, during play. "Learn this book, then play" doesn't really work for me and my friends; I have to be able to look things up as I go. That's why I did away with the unified presentation: so that me & my friends could use the text effectively to play. And then, the separated presentation still managed to confuse people (including, if I remember right, Ron and Paul, so I must've flubbed it fairly bad), so I went with the current one, with its spot rules.

Frankly, as far I'm concerned, the spot rules for interference and such are already implicit in the check & conflict rules -- I didn't design the interference rules, I discovered them, during play, as implications of the basic rules. The spot rules aren't patches; they're just call-outs and clarifications.

JoyWriter wrote:
As an interesting note, this means that one character could push to meet a certain challenge, when under diametric interference, and then back down in a deadlock with the other character. I imagine a fight for a gun on a splintery bridge covering this; he could give vs getting the gun and not fall, or give vs falling and get the gun. Can you imagine what it would be like if one of the players gives vs falling but the other doesn't? I can imagine one of them hanging off the other still scrabbling for the gun, or them pulling it off the other after struggle and falling off the edge, Gollum style. If you take out initiative both are viable. Of course if they are particularly stubborn they could both just fall of the bridge still grappling!

Interesting, I didn't consider the "no one gets it" option. How can they both back down in a deadlock? I thought that the moment the lower-rolling one backs down, it's over. I do get the significance of the terminology, check vs challenge and who can push, but what I felt was really important to spell out was the distinction between "performance vs all" and "push vs each", as transferring the first mechanic to the latter one weakens choice tremendously. I was just being sloppy on the thing I wasn't emphasising!

Now time has moved on since I played the next session, but as I recall, part of my objective was to right the wrongs of the previous session, predominantly the lack of focus on Snake.

So I tried doing a rewind from where we were to give Snake's player more of a bedding in, plus I was going to be shaking up his relationships soon so I wanted to set the base line for that to matter.

Immediately starting we hit some problems with minutia and potentialising. I was trying to draw out contributions from Snake's player and he was trying to see what I wanted, so it took a jolt from my brother to move on from "so he could do this or...." to actual contributions. I was fishing as much as he was, seeking to ground the relationships and behaviour in something we found thematically interesting. The template for the scene ended up being wake up/daily routine, as much for the success of Cody's scene the previous session as any rational choice. I'd be interesting in hearing "scene starting patterns" that would suit it better. In playing out the relationship between B and Snake, we had the problem I now realise of familiarity drift, in other words though we had stated that the characters were close but always kept apart by the harshness of the world, as we got used to playing them together the social dynamics warmed too smoothly. We went from distant to close, with the implication that had they stayed in view any longer they would actually have got together. The dynamics were more like people reconciling after an argument than people who can't quite be open with each other.

My solution to this is to include more "walls", so that the softening and hardening of their interactions can add more beats to these kinds of scene. Quite honestly Snake had very few walls to getting closer to her, it would have to be almost all on her side. For this reason I'm going to potray her in future as having problems with physical intimacy, besides being otherwise quite self-assured (elements of the girl from "a scanner darkly"), and from her reaction to Snakes apathy; so I'd make her more dynamic and purposeful, at least in terms of aspiration, but never able to share that side with Snake.

Having set up that Snake knows a lot of the people thanks to acting partially as a "garbage guy" (his faith about waste), and created the character of Jon, a non-confrontational veg trader who keeps safe because of undisclosed links to one of the high-ups in the gang, we felt we had enough of a feeling of what the day to day would be like. Who Jon trades with and what exactly he trades may become more significant later on, if I've got Snakes themes right.

From that we jumped back to Cody entering the town mid morning after the spike, fresh from shrugging off an argument. He sees Jon being hassled by three young gangers and decides to get involved. As he get's closer he hears that they are looking for the bosses girl who has run away, and may be hiding in his store-room. Cody (or rather his player picking up my tone of voice) realises that they are actually just using it as an excuse to get into his stash, after convincing them by some lovely display of logic that I only remember part of (and savvy influence check, the first test of the influence rules) that she wouldn't go to Jon to hide, and that Zach would be pretty unimpressed if he heard that they were trying to lift some potatoes instead of finding his girl. Reluctantly they agree and move on, and Cody goes on his way to find some replacement knife oils.

As he gets to Rosko's place, the fur merchant who also supplies him with treating oils, he notices that despite it's fortress exterior the area around the front door has been all messed up. He goes in to find Rosko out of breath and haggered looking, fixing a hook on a wall that had been pulled off. When Cody asks if the gang kids have been through he huffs into his moustache and points to the broken stuff. "They came in here trying to muscle in, on some made up excuse no doubt. I sent 'em packing."

Cody mentions that they were probably seeing if he was hiding Zach's girl who has run away. This rattles him, and he comments that could shake things up quite a bit. He goes downstairs to get some more oil but sort of crashes his way down the stairs, as if he is more exhausted than he's letting on and is noisily grabbing onto stuff to steady himself. When he comes back up he clearly does not want to talk about it and instead inquires on how Cody ran out of oil so fast. This leads to his curiosity that the creature Cody saw had purple flecks in it's fur, and after they have a bit of a moment enjoying their common independent/survivalist mentality Rosko says that he'll give him the oils in advance for the next one of those cat thing Cody catches. He doesn't drive a bargain quite like he normally does, with Cody presuming it's because he is glad that at least someone here will honour their bargains.

With that Cody decides to get to the bottom of what is shaking up his small stake in this town, and heads to the bar to find out.

We switch back to Snake, with me hoping to produce underline contrasts between this day and the last. So instead of starting with him waking up hung over, we start with a dream:

Three horses trudge through a river of sand, approaching a wall of TVs, stories high and buzzing with static. As they reach it the wall dissolves into dust to reveal a silhouetted figure, that snarls at them.

Snake wakes from this and scribbles it down in picture form, in case it becomes important later on. As he leaves his shack he meets not Jon, taking his cart and horse off to trade, but a bald ganger with his gun pointing at the sky. He immediately asks Snake where he was last night, and who can second that. (At this point Snake draws his gun and says "this does" or something, and we all go "what??", and "woh, would your guy do that?" at this sudden escalation. Apparently Snake's player took the raised gun as a cue for imminent combat, and expected a D&D style roll for initiative, despite what had been mentioned in the first session about the lethal and serious nature of combat in this game. I said that it was totally fine for him to fight if he thinks that's how his guy would react, and he said he thought Snake had been pretty boring so far so he thought he'd liven him up a bit. I said that I hoped that the situation I'd set up "if I've done my job right", would lead to Snake getting into action anyway. I'm not sure if this was the right call, as I felt that the system could handle a lot of different styles of character, and Snake didn't need to be like Victor to be interesting. My concern now was that this was almost against the books instructions to let players get themselves into trouble, and possibly getting in the way of him engaging with his character.) Rewinding from the other stuff, instead Snake convinces the guy by showing him that the room has obviously had a guy in it all night. Satisfied the guy goes more on his side and starts asking him if he's seen anyone unusual. Snake recalls that he saw a big heavy drinking guy in the bar the night before, and the ganger thanks him and says he'll look out for that one. When asked what is going on he says he doesn't really know, but someone got into "the den" last night and caused some trouble and he's been asked to find him. (basically I played up the confusion in order to see if I could set the PCs against each other)

Heading inside the bar he sees two of the higher up people from the gang talking to B, and her trying to steady herself against the news. (I could have made more of this, but I just couldn't get B's character down so I played it pretty straightforward). Snake comes in as they leave, and she collapses onto a stool by the bar, she sees him and immediately launches into asking him for help, something like this:
"She's gone Snake, she's gone"
"Who ... ?" cut off
"Jen's gone, someone took her"
"But how?"
"I don't know, but you've got to find her, get her back safe"
"I'll do what I can"
(I'm not sure why I thought this exchange would be more dramatic, but Snake's split second pledge of help skipped out some of the cool lines I would have liked to add like "I've never asked you for anything Snake but I need you now, find my sister" and similar. It's a shame because we didn't make this the turning point scene it could have been, where Snake is shocked off his bum into action. As much as anything I don't think Snake's player understood the freedom he had yet.)

With him decisively leaving the pub, I ask what he will do now, thinking that as someone with connections to almost everyone in town he could try and get background info or find a trail, or he could use some of the indian-vision mojo I suggested with the dream, or who knows what else. Unfortunately the player was not prepared for this level of investigative freedom so he went "but where can I go?" I add that he can sort of add things to the world by the implications of what he wants to do, and he says "I want to meet someone in the street Snake can talk to" "who?" "someone with a beard". With that little to go on I pull on one character I previously thought it would be interesting for him to interact with, a high up in the gang who is "coordinating" the people investigating the main street. He is actually Jason, the guy who betrayed Victor.

Now Jason is a big guy with bodybuilding tendencies who has an issue with "outsiders". He's a bit of a racist, so perhaps not the most helpful choice if Snake is to get some information. Basically he tells Snake that some outsider who came on the bus yesterday has kidnapped Zach's girl, and he is going mental about it. Snake immediately considers Victor and gives a basic description, setting off all kinds of dark imaginings in Jason's head. He calls one of the smallest kids in the crowd, a little headphone wearing pre-teen called Jackson, who he tells to show the way back to the den, "cos Zach needs to hear about this". (As background he wants to settle the old score about who was right about Victor, as well as set himself up for getting more leadership using this situation)

I tell Snake's player that he doesn't need to go there immediately, as Jackson would be pretty happy to follow Snake around for a bit, but he decides to follow the path layed out. (At this point I mention that Snake sees Cody heading towards Rosko's fur shop, just to give people a grasp of the timing of these things, keeping reasonably strict timing could come back to haunt me, but so far it's been awesome)

They climb up onto one of the roofs, only to see a few of the people who set up camp there being pointlessly harassed, and hearing the starts of gunfire at the edge of the gang's territory. As an aside he notices that Jackson's earphones are not plugged in to anything. They set off towards "the den". (etymology? the gang have a slight lion theme going on, and the word sounds childish enough to suggest they haven't quite grown up)

Back with Victor the night before, the explosion of wood splinters and glass that were once the door, spur Zach into manic energy, and he runs back inside to get his rifle and a torch. I ask for a savy check from Victor as he goes out onto the balcony, which he fails and doesn't push on. This doesn't matter because Zach comes back and climbs his way down one of the poles holding it up, onto a cart parked outside the kitchens, and shoots of in the direction of one of the buildings, following some of the shattered glass reflecting in his torchlight. Victor can't be bothered with all this slickness and just jumps down, two stories, taking the impact with tough, (streight success no sweat!) and follows Zach. He heads towards a building where Victor sees now in the dark there is a little red glow in one of the top rooms. They burst their way in and up some rickety stairs, only to come face to face with a sniper in gang colours, lighting a cigarette and looking out at one of the paths from the den. Zach is a little confused at this and the two question him: "I'm your doorguard, the best sniper in this place" "So what the hell are you doing spoiling your night vision? I'll be back for you."

At this they double back and go the other way the broken glass could have lead, through a set of barricades and wire that have been set up to block the route. Zack slips through from his memory of when they put it in, and Victor just ploughs through it (pushing, powered by "If you want something, take it", standing more broadly for his juggernaut attitude). He gets his coat torn up by wire and broken metal and bruises his shoulders but manages to smash his way through without loosing pace, only to see Zack climbing what looks like a water tower. (At this point I had been tracking Zack's sweat as well as Victor's, and the simple pace is exhausting him, with him running through sweat like anything) Zach crawls inside the metal drum and drops one of the sides, revealing a set of jury-rigged searchlights. He starts scanning the rooftops manically, calling down to Victor that he nearly has "them", and to be ready to go. (At this point it was fortunately clear from my protrayal that following the "GM track" in this case is a stupid idea, as Zack is putting in more energy than sense, because neither of them are a tracker in any real capacity.)
Victor shouts up "This is stupid, you'll never get her back this way", to which he replies "Shut it, they've got to have come through here" (again don't forget to add copious swearing to taste!) Victor shrugs and walks off into the dark. "where do you think you're going?" "To find your girl." "Victor, you get back here, get back here!!" He sort of strides off leaving the shouting and screaming behind, all of us enjoying the fact that someone has taken initiative. "So", I ask the player, "what does Victor do?" "He needs a telephone, a marshal he knows owes him a favour". We decide that given the time, past midnight, he's probably not going to break into some random's house, we decide that this being a shopping centre, it would have had a public information point, so he heads over there, paying a little sweat on a test to find it.

He finds that the telephones have been replaced by wires spanning from the broken phone booths to the now fortified information point, with "information and communication for a price" sprayed onto the corrugated steel that covers the windows. He bangs on the door to wake up anyone inside, who resists by trying to sleep through it, but who's grizzled is no match for Victor's tough, as usual. He hears a heavy slightly wheezy man coming down the stairs, and then the heavy door replacing the old automatic one swings in, just enough to reveal an overweight bleary eyed man behind a large crossbow like contraption mounted to the floor for just this situation.

"I need to use your phone" "Come back in the morning, and I might see you then" "Someone has been kidnapped, the girlfriend of one of the gangers, she could be in danger" "she's not _my_ girlfriend, why should I care"
Aware that the direct route is in this case through a crossbow, Victor leaves it go, and instead looks for structural weaknesses in the armouring added around the windows. Finding one, Victor then smashes through, punching his gauntleted hands through the gap between two sheets and pulling himself through. (The thorough check gave him an advantage, but this took quite a bit of sweat.) As he gets through he sees that the whole room is full of various types of recording equipment and computers of different ages that have been salvaged here, but he also sees the man tripping his way back down the stairs towards his crossbow turret-thing. At this point I assumed Victor would throw himself behind a table of computers to dodge the bolts, but no, his player decides to launch him over them to knock the man away from his turret as he struggles to grab it and focus it on Victor. He crashes his way through monitors and tape decks, cutting his ankle on some TV glass, but managing to land on the info guy before he gets it trained on him, knocking all the breath (and fight) out of him.

At this point it's quite straightforward to convince him to set up a phone call, although he still manages to be snide while winded and demands he get some payment for this. He takes Victor over to a ham radio set, connected up to some cables and an old telephone receiver, after swinging the dials to get rid of fuzz and sending some clicks over the line, he gets a sleepy lady from another town, who took over when the automated exchange went down. After a few other connections and various different forms of dialling, he gets to the phone of the corrupt marshal, annoyed to have been woken up but hoping it could be an opportunity to reverse their favour situation. He gives some basic info, that he looking for someone called coyote and he needs to know how he could find him. The marshal thinks about this and says that he'll need some kind of tracker, and he knows one very good one from that area, who moved in since Victor left, an old man named Cody Barnes.

The "both back down" option is available when the Deadlock roll-offs are tied. Both players have to agree to it.
As for the nastiness of Pushing vs. each, well, them's the breaks, kid. You gotta take a broad, general view of things. The resolution mechanics are deliberately designed to make things very undignified and desperate. You only get to be a hero if you hurt yourself doing it.

Speaking of which, did I mention that Victor's stuff is going very Sin City? Especially now. It just gets Sin City-er as it goes.
Oddly enough, the one time that one of my players made a PC who was Tough for 10, it was very Sin City also. Which suggests that "Tough for 10" makes people think of Marv, which would be awesome, because he was my model for Tough for 10.

Is there more stuff that was played that you haven't posted yet? I ask because I'm curious if Snake's player has yet to grasp how he has plot authority where his character is concerned. I'm pretty sure he'll figure it out, but I'm curious if he has yet.

At this point the reports are two short sessions behind reality, and the emotions described are a composite of my tidying up my notes and my actual current concerns. It's sort of like when writing these I rewind mentally to the point at which I wrote the notes in order to recreate the experience, I'm a little ill at the mo so I don't have the mental energy to go back and disentangle them.

Suffice it to say, most of his effort is going into working with his character concept he made at the start and making it interesting, through deeper characterisation, rather than strategising. In other words he's taking his time working from psych out, presumably based on my "the spike should do it" encouragement, as well as his own natural skill set.

In contrast, Cody's numbers have been surreptitiously shifted by his player, just to suit the in-play identity a little better, and Victor is pretty much going from strength to strength, as his player almost accidentally layers in elements of more and more characters he likes. Marv is definitely in there, with some strange company.

On Snake's player, my intent has been to try to give him characterisation opportunities and a safety zone, but always imply new avenues for action. I can't work out if his characterisation focus and concerns are actor-ly perfectionism, falling back onto familiar ground, or problems with the original concept. It's probably a bit of all of that, and preference too. Though a brilliant player he's quite good at second guessing himself, and I'm trying to find the balance between encouraging him to find his own way rather than copying others and simultaneously be adventurous.

And before you scream at the idea of a safety zone in rustbelt, don't worry, it's only safe in that it tells you up front what the choices are, it just so happens that they are all getting worse on every side!