The Forge Archives

I sat down with three friends, we played PUNK.
(This post is a ruse to distract Gobi from Iron Game Chef.)

Picking Genre: First, we picked the genre. Biblepunk won out, which then was fiated into CyberBiblePunk, in part because I thought I would be more at home with the subject. Biblepunk (roughly) defines the radical changes in the post-Jesus world, and there may or may not kewl powerz (ours lacked these, but took place in a futuristic version of Jueda). The Cyber part was largely color, with lots of nano-this, cyber-that, and holo-things.

As you can see, we started on a manic/silly kick. In part, because as a GM I usually feel enough pressure to jump into the comfort of "humor". (There could be an Actual Play thread in diagnosing this tendency out of me, if folks wanted to poke at it.) This set the stage for a style of play (backed up by the rules and my GMing style) that was sort of "gonzo", or off-the-wall in the vein of what octaNe seems to get at.

Character Creation The 3 passions were easily understood, and the player's came up with good ones, and almost all ultimately came into play! (I couldn't quite understand some of Will's but I eventually understood how to put them into play.) I had everyone announce their 3 passions in a circle, and wrote them down myself (so that I could emperil them.)

Then came the next part: the players meet in a bar, in-character, and thusly uncover their 3 traits. For our playtest, this was a wash. (And y'know, this was my idea once!) I set it up: "you're in a bar". And just as in real gameplay, that's a shitty prompt to give your players. They were good players - they picked up what genre-apropos cliches they could find and ran with them - but ultimately they had just discussed ideology for a while (cool) and not "uncovered" too much more of their characters (suck).

What ultimately ended up happening is that, once the bar scene had run out of juice, I just had them come up with 3 traits. What could I have done different? I think I was onto something when I used the "bartender" to start up discussions of current events with them. I talked about a recent martyred punk, and that in fact got them to talk about the tactics of taking down the Man (getting one player to start to reveal her "nonconfrontational" trait). So I think this was what I needed to do; just as one agressively scene-frames, this would be aggressive prompting (via over-friendly bartender) to get them to start talking about integral character questions.

As for the soundtrack, I kludged. I was just going to make my own mix cd, but I was short and time and used relatively generic-sounding background punk (Green Day and Low-Fidelity All Stars). My original idea was making a mix cd and letting the players "claim ownership" of certain songs, as if it was part of their mix, but in fact no one would recognize these songs adequately, so the result ultimately was: the soundtrack provided only color, and was not used mechanically.

It was suggested that more time spent (and not using the bar alone as the prompt) would have helped, perhaps simply letting them come up with traits in the first place. I also thought there was a bit of a problem with combining thought-out character creation - preparation of each character's soundtrack - with the ad-hoc creation at the bar. If I did this over, I would ask each player to send 1-3 songs they related to, alongside a potential trait describing each one, and mix all the players' songs onto a single CD for the session. (Which helps tie the session shortly to the length of a CD, frex.) I'm curious what you all think about this.

The characters:
Nadia Fear: betrayal. Fight: Usurers. Fuck: Knowledge. Traits: shiny metal teeth, underworld contacts, (1 other thing).
Erin Fear: fish. Fight: Masons. Fuck: Mary Magdalene. Traits: non-confrontational, alcoholic, (1 other thing).
Will Fear: Robotic Roman Super Soldiers. Fight: Obscure sect of blasphemers. Fuck: Something about a Western Schism. Traits: cyber-nunchukus, hates carnality, loves magic mushrooms.

The Players. You might have guessed from the above, or not; Will's player is a religion major and is brilliant and manufacturing crazy shit off the cuff. If anyone should have been *GMing* cyberbiblepunk, it should have been him! Indeed, this was poor genre choice as I've been raised with much less baseline Christianity knowledge than everyone else! I was okay.

The players were great. They're all nonpunks (like, um, me), but they all understand the literary "-punk" think as well as some parts of the punk mentality enough to fake it for the gameplay. They went around, they BSed (in ad hoc jargon!) about ideological differences, they retconned like mad into the non-existent scenery, they went about smashing the state in their own particular ways. The players were also very good at improvisation, which was vital. They picked up a good deal of authorial slack.

Our Story...

QuoteSo they were at the bar, and Nadia decides to go use holospraypaint in the public Ares emporium, basically copycatting this martyred punk Jimmy, and he totally pulls it off solo, horrifying lots of Romans. Erin was pissed at the negativity, and she went off to call up her Mary M., and even scored a date with her... after her scheudled midnight hit on this Masonic Bank (Ursurers! Masons!). Woah. Will went off and found a shack of those disbelievers he hated so much, and ended them easily with those CyberNunchukus. Mary M. calls back the kids and has them case the joint, and Nadia, hopped up on mushrooms, makes a psychic link with a Judeans wage-slave, and discovers the Code to the big vault. Will meanwhile questions Mary M.'s purity ("hates carnality"), and gets his ass handed to him; in humility, he seeks out his master, who instructs him to betray his friends (he lost his roll). At midnight, they all assault the bank, crashing through the stained glass windows in excessively artful fashion (Erin lost her roll to convince Mary M. to play it safe), where they crack the vault. Nadia beats Will to the alarm, but Will grabs Mary M. and hurls her into the head of this Huge Roman Mecha Guardian, which falls over, blocking the vault entry. As Nadia set the dynamite to end the bank (and Will escaped through another stained glass window to start acting like a villain), Erin picked up the bloody body of Mary M. and tried to escape - only to find their band of rebels totally surrounded by Neptunian Centurions. There was a fight, and the punks got harshed up major, and woke up bloodily ina dumpster.

And we broke to get Chinese food. Whew.

The Gameplay and Mechanics. I played it like MLwM, basically going around the circle in turns, letting players start off with some IC talk, then framing up the next challenging scene, roleplaying that a bit, then rolling for the outcome. I think this was necessary, especially since PUNK as such doesn't have heavily hookage going on. It feels like precisely the game where throwing punks right into the action, over and over again, is right where it needs to be to keep up the tension. All be told, PUNK's rules don't have a lot to go on except clean mechanics and a clear premise; as a GM, I made up for the rest with piss and vinegar.

The system was fast and easy to work with. Some traits were a lot more useful and more frequently employed (ninja), but it all seemed quite functional and fast, and most rolls only got 1 or 2 traits into play. I forgot to hand out the Anarchy/Authority tokens, but the players remembered, which was a good sign. I ruled that you could spend tokens after a roll (against what was written, in fact), and it seemed to work out. Players did like the system, and they instantly dug the implicit unfairness/cleverness of the Authority/Anachy tokens and the whole "you win I narrate, I win you narrate". (I mean unfairness as perversely stacked odds against the punks, and not ruleswise unfairness.) As The Man, being able to invoke use of someone's Authority token against them feels very cool and invasive. Heh.

I usually made up suitable numbers for The Man's opposing rolls - 2 for normal, 4-5 if this was really hard. I felt that simply assigning traits to tasks/people wasn't so helpful; I basically thought of assigned traits to retroactively justify the number of dice I wanted (although this all took a split second anyway.)

Regarding narration: I realized I really WANTED these folks to narrate their successes too, since they were so good at it, but if I just let them by fiat, it would have broke the whole economy of Anarchy/Authority tokens. (And of course, they don't want to narrate ALL the time.) Some folks have questioned the goodness of systems where players pay to narrate, if that's in fact what you want to encourage. Personally, I think as The Man I should have only narrated successes as marginal victories, or "Yes, but..." events. As such, they got what they wanted when they won a roll, but it would feel more genre-appropriate if I largely cheated them OUT of their successes.

Also, villainy: Will was going into villain land, and I even suggested on one roll that he could just burn all his Anarchy on the next roll, so he could become an agent of the Man. That would have worked, but then he couldn't continue playing. On one hand this is like Humanity in Sorcerer keeping things genre-appropriate (if you haven't recently earned Anarchy from the sting of passionate failure, you're not much of a PUNK), but this also says there's lots of room for defining a "PUNK", and this definition includes potentially evil folks, which I think is alright.

Finally: multiplayer resolutions and player-vs-player resolutions. Eh, no prob. In PvP, I just had players roll against each other, with the same rules (i.e. the loser narrates his defeat); in the climactic PvP fight for the alarm, the punks took turns spending that extra Anarchy token to put them just slightly over the edge. IMHO, that worked out fine. Multiplayer resolution was all parties rolling, including the Man. If any punk rolled higher than the Man, there was an overall success, but any punks who had rolled lower in the process get jacked up severly. Somebody or other ends up narrating. <g> These are just my house rules, and I think there's nothing wrong with that. (These may not need to be clarified in the final version of the rules; maybe letting folks come up with house rules is a feature, not a bug?)

I think that's everything I got. Good gameplay. If I was going for a slightly longer / more serious game, I'd go with a more easily accessible genre/ideology set, let folks spend more time on character concepts + mix cd tracks, frame hard all the time, and especially give more prompts at the bar (maybe allow 3 traits from the mix cd, 3 traits from the bar).

Wow, I never thought anyone would actually playtest PUNK. :P Somehow I got the idea into my head that small games aren't viewed to as meant-to-be-played, even by more open-minded gamers. It's great to see  how well it turned out, despite the problems.

Stuff I'll work on in the future:

[*] Make picking a genre of punk an actual step in beginning play.
[*] I'll really try harder to make the bar scene actually functional, probably by including your suggestions for aggressive prompting from the bartender or other patrons.
[*] Figure out how to better integrate the front-heavy soundtrack prepping with the lighter improvised character creation in the bar scene.
[*] Mention retconning as perfectly acceptable and pretty much expected.
[*] Explicitly state that gameplay usually follows a chitchat-action-chitchat-action cycle.
[*] Allow spending of tokens after a roll. May as well.
[*] Ditch the anthropomorphisation of challenges with traits. The Man just declares a difficulty and retcons reasons for it afterward.
[*] I had hoped that the Man's confrontational stance meant that his controlling successes implied that he'd cheat the players somehow. I'll make this more explicit.
[*] Include brief multiplayer and PvP resolution rules.
[*] Or... follow Dev's advice and make the creation of house rules a feature. I wonder if that seems like too much of a copout on my part though. I'll think about it.[/list:u]

I'm very, very pleased that anarchy and authority worked out well. I'm curious though, since they can do two different mechanical effects, which was the one most often used?

Thanks so much for testing out the game, it warms my heart.

Now, slag off! \m/ -_- \m/

Quote from: gobiNow, slag off! \m/ -_- \m/

Best. Smiley-esqe thing. Ever.

As for Anarchy/Authority points: there were fewer Authority points to go around, so they were less used. Players used Anarchy points (albeit rarely) to make successes happen, and not so much to take over narration, but I covered that (by not being adversarial enough).

There was one point of ambiguity I forgot to mention, being: the scope of die rolls. Sometimes I rolled for individual actions (multiple times, sometimes for multiple players, within a given scene), whereas other times I had it be the one roll that determined the outcome of the scene in a sort of MLwMesqe vibe. It was noted that this sort of variance was unhelpful; next time I'd come up with a more standardized form. If I was running a short-form sort of game, I'd go with the latter, whereas if I was running something more open-ended (frex, an episode in a longer run of SpacerPUNK), I'd go with rolls working for individual actions...

Although, earning Authority/Anarchy points makes more sense for scene-based rolls. (If I was doing, say, 6 different rolls for just hacking a single system within a single scene, earning Authority points this way feels wrong.)

I tend to favor scene-based resolution, but I like your suggestions. How about a small compromise: In short games, scene resolution is the standard. In longer games, rolls happen for individual actions, but only one roll in the scene can accumulate anarchy or authority tokens. Good?

Good - or I'd say that those important rolls work for "important" parts of the scene. But also, I've never tried doing a longer-term game with a scene-based resolution, and there's no reason why not.

EDIT: Yeah, I think I may have switched opinions mid-thought. But scene based rolls are feeling right.

What was the general "mood" of the group after the session ended?

The feeling was "Wow, that was wacky,"; we ended in part because of the time, and somewhere between getting into the energy and also just about being ready to move on. Not surprisingly, a lot came off as silly (because I played it that way, granted). The story got more coherent as we went on, surprisingly, and if we had started from more cogent premises & character concepts there could have been more in it.

Certain traits were necessarily used over and over again, which makes sense since there were only 6 to play with anyways. This was fine, but I do wonder if I tried this for multisession play (which you're wary of) if there would be some repetitiveness to how actions were described; but that's the price of simplicity, and of not wasting excess time maxing out your dice pool.

Some part of my brain says "I want a bit more" - i.e. I'm curious what other rules can be delicately added to give it that little premise kick depending on the precise genre. Teasing out potential genre-specific mechanics could be fun (when you have time). Of course, if you're happy with this as is, that's nifty too. It's quite artful.

Do you think there's any possiblity, maybe, of making this so that it could be readable by first-time players, without an RPing experience? You'd have to expand it slightly, but if the potential players dug were varying punk rock geeks who "got" the very initial premise, they could pick up on the rest. (And speaking of features as bugs, the sort of invariances of dealing with the adversality of The Man - a Social Contract issue waiting to spawn its mighty head - might lead new players to seek out different rules, while understanding WHY they were seeking these out.)