The Forge Archives

Does a kpfs example really need a warning for content or language?  Consider yourself warned.

so my regular gaming group has been trying to get me to run fucking vampire lately.  yeah, like that's going to happen.  i've played vampire.  ok, so i've gone through fucking character creation, and 2 sessions, but that was fucking enough, let me tell you.

so i offered to run kpfs instead.  stupid players thought i was joking.  they thought that because i'd never gmed anything before, that i want use a system that they were really familiar with so they could help me out with the rules and tell me how things worked.  fucking cheat, manipulate me and run rings around me more like.

so they decided to make up characters for humour value, and we ended up with a couple of sad fucked up psychos who even gave each other the creeps.

seth:   "my name is seth.  i kill puppies for satan."
gm:    "hi seth.  tell us something about yourself."
seth:   "i have a bladed cock ring."
cordelia:   "that's the first thing you say about yourself?  you're a psycho!"
seth:   "i like kittens.  and i have a..."  he scribbles on the back of his character sheet then holds it up showing an H shaped device  "clamp to hold them still."

seth is the sort of low life scum that really makes your skin crawl.  he's a fucking amway salesman.  or he was.  there was an incident and he had to leave. something involving small boys.  not enough evidence to prove anything.  fortunately for him, less good for the rest of the world.  since then, he's stayed away from cute ickle humans, and got his jollies from kittens  the evil is good though.  and since seth knows very well that he's an evil fucked up bugger who's going to hell as soon as he's dead no matter what he does now, he's out for anything that can keep him alive a little bit longer.  except that, being seth, he's always looking for that extra edge.  satan's getting pretty sick of him leaving messages on the machine about how he could set up a pyramid scheme for evil.  oh and the clumsy shit keeps stepping on bugs by accident.

cordelia is a university student just on the point of getting kicked out.  she's already been kicked out of home by her mum.  something to do with vivisecting the cat on the kitchen table and leaving it pinned out there until it died of shock.  pretty fucked up, anyway.  she doesn't think there's anything wrong with what she does to puppies.  i mean, she's only trying to find out how they work.  and satan gives her power because of this because he's like a nice guy who really likes her and wants to make her happy.  yeah and the world is full of roses and sunbeams and uni lecturers who don't care if she hands her assignments in late and spattered with blood.  so i think you can see what sort of nut bar she is.

so, anyway they're both invited to gerald's birthday bash.  somebody makes the meatloaf joke.  cordelia refuses to talk to anyone and takes the chicken off into a corner to dissect it with a scalpel.  who cares that it's already dead?

when franklin shows up and says that gerald's locked up, they're all "you're a total shit, franklin, we're gonna make you bust out gerald."  so they kidnap him and compel him to drive them to willard in the beat up bi-lo delivery van.  rosalie scums a lift with them partly out of desire to see seth fall flat on his face, because he's really giving her the shits.  oh, and they steal the food from the party to take with them.

but first, a trip to the local pound.  cordelia breaks in and then wanders off on her own.  her focus of interest is suddenly puppy livers.  do i know why?  do i care?  seth finds himself some kitty cats.  do i have to draw you a picture?  oh, i forgot, seth already did that.

anyway, seth had just impaled his second kitten when a security guard comes to do his rounds.  seth hides and cordelia sets fire to the building to distract the guard.  the guard still hasn't got a clue what's going on but cordelia kills the phones anyway, and rosalie has to persuade seth not to club him over the head with a fire hydrant and leave him unconscious in the burning building.  these guys just don't know when to quit when they're ahead.  they leave just before the fire engines arrive and continue on to willard.

except willard's quite a drive and this is a shitty little delivery van and they're getting low on petrol.  cordelia offers to pay, and pretty much everyone else has a heart attack at her doing anything generous or thoughtful.  she heads into the servo, and stocks up on a whole heal of food, mags and ciggies.  then she pays on her cancelled credit card that's linked to her mum's.  mum hasn't managed to get it back off her yet.  of course, it wouldn't do her much good because it will be refused as soon as it goes in the machine.  so just as they go to scan the card she fries the machine so it has to be put through manually, and mum will get charged after all.  her mum already hates her, but now she just hates her more.  mum's gonna need to find a way to get that card of cordelia sometime soon.

they drive on and finish off the rest of the food from the party, the stuff cordelia bought, oh and seth managed to steal two kittens from the pound before they left, but he's reserving his strength so he only breaks their necks.  that's real restrained.

they get to willard, and pull up at the front door.  franklin just wants to go home to his mother.  seth makes him give him the van keys and wait in the van.  but franklin's pretty freaked and goes to get the spare set of keys hidden under the van.  seth makes him give those up too, and is about to hurt franklin when franklin locks himself in the van and barricades himself in.  sure, seth could get him out pretty easily, but franklin's crying and whimpering and doesn't look like he's going anywhere.  seth decides to have that particular piece of fun later.

willard's a pretty posh place.  it's made up of a number of old edwardian houses in perfect nick, and the place is just full of these beautiful gardens with perfect lawns and shrubberies and herbaceous borders straight out of some merchant ivory film.  like the kind of place that doesn't have keep of the grass signs because it's so classy that everybody knows that you shouldn't walk on the grass.  it's also pretty easy to sneak in to.  no fences, lots of bushes to provide cover and all the buildings not purpose built for security.

despite it being 11pm, they bang on the front door until somebody answers, then compel him to release gerald into their custody.  because, ya'know, subtle is for people with class.  except cordelia's all "why should i bother going anyway, that guy's under my evil power and i'll just wait in reception until he brings gerald to me."  because nothing can go wrong with that plan.

seth goes with the orderly to get gerald.  they have to go through a maze of small buildings and the player becomes really freaked out by the layout of the music building at my old high school and refuses to believe that that layout could be designed for anything other than an ambush.  ok, maybe i felt the same way when i had a music lesson and i hadn't done my practice, but i thought that was more a function of my own guilt and stuff, rather than the architecture.  they avoid all the security guards, because the alterations to the ground floor entrance to the grace walker building when i was in year 10 mean that the natural flow of traffic from all the places the security guards were takes them on a completely different route.  but no matter, because of the layout of my school, i mean, willard, each building is it's own discrete unit, so they'll have to break into each individually.

rosalie's thinks they're both dangerous losers, and decides to split as soon as she gets a chance.  but cordelia freaks her out.  another orderly shows up and cordelia tells rosalie to 'deal with them' but frankly rosalie doesn't need to take that shit from this little psycho, so when the orderly throws them out, and tries to call the police she goes along with it quietly and looks for an opportunity to drop cordelia in it as a distraction while she sneaks into willard elsewhere, but cordelia shorts out the entire city block.

seth gets to the secure wing and starts looking for gerald, but  on the second floor he bumps into a doc, and all this flashy use of power has left him without many options apart from bullshitting.  he's all "get out of my way, bitch" and attacks her, and gets beat up and knocked out for his pains.  he wakes up naked, shackled to a metal table in a bright white tiled room.  shouldn't have cheated, naked boy.

so poor seth gets tortured for a while, but the doc's interests in psychological torture don't really mesh with what seth finds disturbing and they pretty much talk at cross purposes.  of course, he could try to escape, but after his first wimpy girlish attempt he gives up and pretty much decides to lie there, scream for help and think dirty thoughts until he has a hard on.  maybe it was part of some plan that was going to let him escape through the sheer mystic power of his cum?  but we never got that far, because cordelia was up to stuff.

cordelia was chucked out of willard reception.  "ok, the frontal approach didn't work, i'll find somewhere else to wander in completely obviously."  this is the point where rosalie buggers off, but cordelia barely notices because she's found the central feature of a beautiful courtyard.  a fish pond.  "i wonder how their fins work?"  so she catches them, holds them under the water while she slices off their fins, and then flips them out of the pond to die.  she can hear seth's screams at this point, because the secure wing is just next to the pond, but who cares, because she's moved onto the water snails living on algae and shit.  she things that satan won't class them as vermin because they're doing a useful job in keeping the pond clean.  but they're snails, for fuck's sake, nobody loves snails.  except for cordelia, and she just likes cutting their eyes off.  it's pretty tricky though, and she gives once it gets tedious enough for her to notice seth's screaming.

seth screams for a while.  did i mention that he cheated?

cordelia's not the only one who's heard the screaming.  a couple of security guards have heard it as they head to their favourite spot for a smoko.  the beautiful pond of course.  those fish are so peaceful and nice to watch as they go swimy swimy.  sitting by the pond watching the fishies and having a fag is probably the best bit of the whole shift.  poor cordelia, somebody's gonna hate her.  poor security guards, cordelia's all eviled up and never has much self-control.

cordelia compels one of them to go chase rosalie because cordelia don't like being double-crossed.  the other sees his mate under evil influences and gets god real fast.  he pulls a swift miracle and cordelia's suddenly feeling pretty odd.  like maybe some of the stuff she does it not totally justified, and maybe just maybe she's a bad evil person who does wrong things.  "must be indigestion from the chicken, or something," goes cordelia.  "i need to get something to make me feel better.  and find seth and rescue gerald.  that's a good thing to do."

so cordelia follows the screams and when she hits a door in her way she just turns into smoke and floats on through.  first floor.  sleeping inmates.  "boring."  second floor, an orderly.  who sees a cloud of smoke billowing up from the staircase, goes "shit, fire" hits the fire alarm and rushes downstairs with a fire extinguisher.

seth gets bored screaming.  he notices that there's a fly buzzing up near the ceiling.  "hmm, maybe if i kill it really evilly, satan won't be too pissed?" he thinks, "but how to get it so i can kill it?"  he huffs and puffs to produce lots of co2 to attract it, but that doesn't work.

then the fire sprinklers go on and cordelia turns into a little sooty puddle on the ground.  so it's back to human and no more floating through security bars.  no drugs found either, and when she looks in the little viewing windows on the doors of the corridor, it's just more inmates.  they're not sleeping anymore because of the sprinklers but if it's not an animal that can be tortured cordelia's not much interested in living things.  except that one of them's gerald and she manages to pick the lock on his door to spring him.

when the sprinklers go on, the water shorts out the equipment the doc's using on seth, so she goes off to find out what the hell is going on and seth's left all on his lonesome.  he decides to refine on the fly plan, and tries to shit himself but crapping on command is hard work.  then he realises that he's bleeding from the smack in the face the doc gave him.  so he starts worrying at his lip with his teeth until the blood is flowing good and fresh and that's enough to attract the fly, even despite the sprinklers.  seth catches the fly is his mouth and very carefully sucks its wings off, then nibbles its legs off before crushing it to death with his tongue.  now he's got some evil, but he doesn't think it's enough, so he tries to catch a second fly.

on the second floor (seth's on the third, but he don't know that yet) cordelia's pissed off some of the inmates by peering in the windows and then not letting them out.  they're getting rained on in their beds, for fuck's sake.  one guy pulls a zippo out of his arse and sets fire to his bed.  now the building really is on fire.  another does some mojo that cordelia doesn't see and blows the door of her room out.  she and her room make seem convinced cordelia's some sort of saviour and going to rescue them.  she gets them to help her break down the security gate on the staircase to the third floor.

the third floor looks like offices, rather than cells and cordelia starts searching them for drugs, or keys.  then she sees a light on in a room off one of the offices.  the door's half open and it looks like it looks from the other side.  she can see tiles on the wall.  "ha, bathroom, i know what'll fuck up anyone in there," and she call up sewage to come gushing out of every toilet and drain in the building.  there's a rumbling off in the distance and as it grows the room fills with a hideous smell like the world's worst fart.  then there's an explosion in the bathroom, a spatter of shit flies out the door and sewage starts flowing across the floor.  no screams from the room.  "oh well" shrugs cordelia, "let's just keep searching."

meanwhile, seth's just caught another fly when he hears the same rumbling.  a gust of evil smelling air comes from below him, and then suddenly a geyser of shit lifts up the table he's on.  it rises up in the air about a mete then tips over and crashes to the ground on its side.  seth's still chained to it, of course, because he doesn't feel like trying to break the chains for some reason, and now he's in a room filling with shit and the level is rising.  and what do you say seth?  "i shouldn't have cheated.  or i should have cheated a lot more."  damn straight.

as cordelia, gerald and the two whack jobs come out of the office they're searching they bump into a doctor.  it seems she and the whack jobs are acquainted, because they leap at her screaming.  cordelia directs a swarm of cockroaches at her just for good measure and then heads into the office she came from.  off there she finds the room seth is in.  when the door opens a wave of shit comes rolling out and seth is just saved from drowning.  gerald rushes in to help him and quickly snaps the manacles in short order.

now he's only beat up, naked, bleeding and covered in shit.  oh, and his cock ring is missing.  he wants that back.

but he can tell cordelia where to find some drugs in this room because he'd seen where the doc got them while she was torturing him.  cordelia injects something at random and practically passes out from a massive dose of thorazine until seth can heal her.

seth quickly looks for his clothes, but finds them cut up into shreds.  he does find his cock ring and his kitten brace in a draw with a whole bunch of other similar toys.  so he swipes the lot.  still no clothes though.  but gerald finds some of the doctor's, and seth is soon cutting a stylish figure in a women's blouse and dress pants.

they make their escape via the fire escape.  there are a bunch of security guards standing around, but there are firemen, inmates and guards running everywhere and in the chaos they make it back to the car park.

the van's still there, and so's franklin.  so's a cop car and two fine brawny members of victoria police.  cops also have guns, and we all know what they do!  the policemen are talking to franklin and franklin's gesturing wildly and looking like he's getting a lot off his chest.  so they sneak through the bushes further down the road.  then cordelia turns herself invisible and goes off whistling up to the police car.  the cops have left the keys in it.  oopsie.  cordelia drives off with the cop car and picks up seth and gerald further down the road.  now they have wheels again.  and these wheels have sirens and lights.  ooooh yeah.  but they're a little obvious.

so they drive into the suburbs and dump the cop car.  they hotwire one car and drive on a bit further until they find a house with a dog and a car parked in the drive.  they piss off the dog for a while until they reckon the owner is good and awake then they knock on the door and tell the guy who answers to give them his car keys.  he does and then they break his dog's neck in front of him.  now they have a new set of wheels.

of course, there are probably a few people after them, like all of victoria police, and franklin's probably given then their names, so maybe going straight home is not a good idea.  "let's head to perth," says cordelia.  "nah," says seth, "let's head to sydney, the police there don't give a shit what you do."  so sydney it is.  they head out of town for the hume and head north.  of course, there's that whole issue of the mass escape from the mental asylum in town, so they haven't gone far when they see a police roadblock up ahead.  they pull off the side of the road and cordelia makes gerald get out and pretend to throw up like they've stopped because he's carsick.  seth nicks off up the slope of the highway through the bushes until he gets to the fence and hops over.  he's in a potato field, but further on he can just make out a field of sheep.  seth needs to work off some tension after his recent trials, so he sets about catching sheep and putting his cock ring to use.

cordelia and gerald wait by the car until they see another car coming down the road.  as that distracts the police officers, they too disappear into the fields.  except gerald gets stuck on the fence and cordelia just leaves him there.

soon she's chasing after lambs too.  cordelia even uses gaffer tape to tie up the sheep while she kills them.  because she's the sort of girl who keeps gaffer tape and a scalpel in her pockets.  they're both busy with that, when a bright light descends from the sky.  it's fucking space aliens.  because a couple of perverts just can't molest sheep in peace these days.  seth and cordelia hide under sheep corpses as a flying saucer descends from the sky.  the door cracks open and a ramp descends and at the top of the ramp stands a sheep.  it trots down the ramp and tries to approach the sheep in the field, who are a bit spooked, so it's busy chasing them for a while.

cordelia sneaks into the space ship while it isn't looking.  the sheep turns into a tall grey space alien with a blaster thing.  it catches a sheep then pins it down with tent peg like staple things and then examines it.  seth sneaks up behind it and tries to knock the blaster out of its hand.  it blocks the blow but the blaster goes flying anyway.  seth dives for it, and the alien dives for him.  seth gets kicked in the head and falls down dazed.  he gets kicked in the head again, then the alien.  it knocks him down and he's too dazed to do anything for a few minutes.  the alien approaches him, takes out one of the hooked pegs and fit's it over his wrist.  it doesn't quite fit over his wrist so they alien repositions it and pushes it through seth's wrist stapling it to the ground.  the shock of the pain brings him out of his dazed state and seth kicks the aliens legs from under him and rips the staple out of his wrist.  the alien takes one look at how pissed off his is, and runs back to the flying saucer.  seth grabs the blaster and shoots at him as he runs, but nothing happens to the alien.  instead, seth turns into a sheep.

"oh, yeah, baby," says seth, and goes back to making sweet, sweet love to the other sheep.

cordelia happily wanders into the flying saucer.  she finds a cabin full of jars with small animals inside, and takes the time to vivisect a few, just in case she's lost the knack in the last few hours.  she also finds a rack full of blasters.  "hey, i can do what ripley did and tape them together."  she fires all the blasters to check that they work.  now she's got four blasters loaded up and ready to roll.  as she heads out of that room she meets up with an alien at the top of the ramp.  she shoots it with all four blasters at once.  it turns into a chicken, it drifts up into the air, and it appears to be frozen in time.  so she sets fire to it and sets off to explore further.  she finds what looks like the cockpit and another alien it in.  again, floating frozen chicken; then roasted alive.  so she sets about trying to learn the controls of the flying saucer so she can use it's internal security system to see if there are any more aliens about, and what the police over the hill are doing.  eventually she finds that there's a third human-sized creature on another level of the saucer.

seth is still making sheepy love, for fun rather than evil, when gerald finally makes it over the fence and comes up.  he and sheep seth head inside the flying saucer to find cordelia.  they decode the blaster seth stole to turn him back to his normal shape.  she gives them the blasters and sends them off to find the third alien, while she works out how to fly the saucer.

seth and gerald find a lift and press all the buttons until it opens.  they get inside and press buttons until it moves.  it moves really quick and they are weightless for a moment then crash into the ceiling.  gerald throws up.  the lift comes to a stop at the same level of acceleration and gerald's vomit rains down on both of them as they crash into the floor of the lift.  gerald knocks himself out on a wall, so seth uses his unconscious body to hold the lift doors open.

he finds the right room and looks inside.  it's full of large cages, but all the ones he can see are empty.  he edges his way further into the room, blasters at the ready.  finally he spots a cage with an orang-utan in, and he shoots it with the blasters.  nothing happens.  hmm, must only work on humans.  and seth heads back up to cordelia, bringing gerald's unconscious body with him.

cordelia's got the flying saucer controls worked out enough to try a take off and they get it up into the air.  she tries to buzz the police officers on the road and nearly crashes the thing, but manages to pull up 10 m from the ground.  then they head off towards sydney.

"hey, isn't skippy living in a wildlife park somewhere in nsw?"
"yeah.  but it's not the real skippy.  there's been like seven skippies."
"so, it would still be cool.  we'll stop in."

*

My commentary.

This was my first attempt at GMing.  I suspect that kpfs is not a game that would suit all first time GMs, but I felt that it suited my own situation and needs rather well.

I play with two people who are very good roleplayers, who both regularly GM, but who are both used to being better roleplayers, by their estimation, than everyone else they play with.  They know the rules better, they know the settings better, they know better how our normal GMs think and what's likely to influence them.  I don't think they try to use it to make themselves more effective/whatever during games, I think they have got into the habit of expecting it to happen simply because of greater knowledge and experience.  I didn't want to end up GMing a non-functional game where I was unconsciously condescended to by the players, so when choosing what game to run, I deliberately picked something new and unfamiliar, with a setting that everyone is equally familiar with, that explicitly encourages the GM to be arbitrary and petty (not that I was planning to be), and that encourages the players to go sick (since one player almost always does, and so might as well be doing it within a framework I can work with rather than only react to).

I learnt a number of things from the experience.  I must keep reminding myself to play the NPCs, otherwise I forget.  Playing NPCs is hard and I will have to practice.

Grief is hard.  I don't think I gave them nearly enough.  But then when I did what I thought were mildly bad things to them, that I knew they were creative enough players to think of a dozen ways out of they flailed about incapacitated.  I feel bad about Seth's player in particular because Seth spent a good long while chained to the table.  Ok, so he failed the first roll to break one set of chains.  But he then basically lay there and made no further attempts to escape.  And all the while the player is looking genuinely sad and frustrated that his character is stuck in a situation he can't see a way out of.  Maybe he was trying not to do too much "I see a rat in the corner of the room and try to entice it over", or "as the doctor bends over me I try to filch the pen in her lab coat pocket without her noticing" because he was worried about how I as a brand new GM would cope with it.  Bur frankly, I put his character in that situation precisely because I knew that the player was perfectly capable of exactly that sort of thing.  So maybe I need to talk with him about it?

In general, it felt to me that either I was letting them do stuff with too little resistance, so that it was boringly easy, or that I made it so they couldn't do anything at all.  I hope that finding a middle road comes with practice.

I did change the way the thought form assimilator worked, because it struck me as funnier at the time.  It was about 11:30 pm at this point, so I may regret that decision at some point.

Both players created character that pretty much fit in with what I know of their styles in the past.

Seth's player pretty much twigged straight away to some of the moral aspects of the game.  The inevitability, the whole futility of redemption thing, the spiralling into ever increasing darkness that's pretty much the only path for the character.  He created a character that easily allowed him to reflect on the character actions, and one who could not be justified in anyway as a nice guy.  He also knew a bit more about the game than the other player, and I suspect that he cheated because he knew I was interested in seeing how the game handled cheating

Cordelia's player did what she usually does, and created a character who has an extreme view point that means that the characters actions are completely justified and not at all wrong from the character's view point.  She plays a lot of mad people and religious fanatics.  Preferably mad religious fanatics who think that their god talks to them.  Then she tries to influence the game world such that their god does in objective fact talk to them.  This has two major effects.  The player does not have to examine the moral choices of her characters at all.  Whatever evil they do, she can say that it's not actually evil from the character's perspective.  The second effect is that nothing she does is wrong, according to the players logic.  And anyone who disagrees with her character is objectively and provably wrong.  Her character thinks X because she thinks her god told her so.  The god does in fact talk to her.  Therefore anybody who argues with X is wrong.

Also, she uses the character's madness to justify doing whatever the character wants to with extreme focus.  Like the not talking to NPCs unless it was to order them around and so on.

I have to admit that a significant part of my decision to run kpfs was curiosity to see what she's do in a game where the basic set up assumes that the PCs are bad people.  As you can see from the actual play above, she did go the mad, 'I don't believe there's anything wrong with what I do, I'm just out of touch with reality' route.  One session was not enough to dent this.  Maybe more would?  I need to talk to her and see what she thought of the game.

The Line

We didn't really encounter this in a way that I can confidently identify.  Fucked up stuff was going on but I don't think anyone got extremely uncomfortable with anything that happened.  Except for one thing that seemed to disturb the players when I didn't intend it to at all.

GM:   Seth, cut back to you.  What are you doing?
Seth:   I'm having sex with a sheep.  Not to kill it, just for fun.
GM:   Ok, so you nudge the sheep to glory.  I see both players flinch and put their hands in their faces.  There's a moment of silence that's surprise on my part, and what seems to be horror on theirs.  And then you see Gerald's finally made it over the fence and he joins you in the field.

I'm not sure what it was.  We were fine with the idea of bestiality and raping kittens to death earlier in the evening.  I'm not sure whether it was the idea of the sheep enjoying the experience, or the admittedly colourful turn of phrase I used.  I think if I'd known what caused it, I could have followed up better, and maybe kept the game skimming along just on that point of uncomfortableness.  But I hadn't a clue, it was late, I was tired, and I was planning to wrap things up soon anyway.

Anyway, it was interesting and I enjoyed it.

I'm sure there's typos left in this, but I can't find them at the moment.

Damn, I love reading this shit.  kpfs is the best thing to hit Actual Play since, um, the second best thing hit it.

Definitely have a talk with the players, either as a group or individually as you see fit.

Are you going to run another session of the same game?

Regarding The Line (tm), I think that's funny.  You can fuck a sheep without a problem, sure. But the sheep should NOT be popping its cookies in response to your administrations. Heh.

My mouth is hanging open at the obscene beauty of that line.  That's ... god damn.  Knowing that there are people out in the world who think fucking sheep is a laugh but fucking sheep until they come is disturbing - I am filled with joy.  I never imagined that people were so cool as it turns out they are.  People are like the best thing ever.

Puppies doesn't really provide adequate GM support, so it only makes sense that you had trouble with it.  It just sort of abandons you to negotiate grief on the fly.  So I'm sorry for that part.  There are a couple of things I do when I run it that might help, I'd be happy to tell you about them, but they're kind of random.

Thank you so much for playing my game, Claire!  And thank you for writing it up like this!

-Vincent

I think that this has to be the most interesting first-time GMing story I've ever read. And the fact that you picked something that would take their normal play style and turn it up in intensity was a great idea. If someone can convincingly play their character in kpfs as justified, they could do it anywhere.

I also have to say Vincent's bit about the mental institution being based on the GM's high school really makes these play recaps unique. I'm so used to thinking of Willard's as a monolithic institutional building that your version was a real surprise.

Hi Claire,

I think you handled these players' foibles perfectly, up to and including Seth strapped to the table.* In my view (just a guess at this point), the player felt confident that you would author his character out of the situation and was rightfully bewildered when you just poured on the suffering. Did he get out of it? Yup. Cool.

In fact, I suggest that talking with them is unnecessary. Just keep playing, with these characters, and pour on ten times the suffering. Add a couple more players if you can; nothing generates exponential suffering like KPFS characters who keep stepping on one another's toes.

Best,
Ron

* Was it Dr. Skippy who was torturing him? Please let it have been Dr. Skippy! No one ever uses Dr. Skippy enough in their first KPFS sessions (sniffle, sob).

Ethan:

I'm glad you enjoyed reading it.  I would like to run another session of the same game if the players are agreeable.  The characters basically did a heap of things that will bring down a heap of trouble on them, and I think it would be great fun to play when they've got the police, the army, the space aliens, the shadowy organisation behind Willard, and Cordelia's mum all after them.

I'm going to have a chat with the players and see if they are interested in playing another session, and really take it from there.  That may turn into a discussion of what they liked/didn't like or not, and I think I could work with either.  Maybe even get another couple of players.

Vincent:

I was pretty stunned by the sheep thing, because I wasn't expecting it to disturb them.  But in the past I have shocked them with a turn of phrase that was a little more evocative than they expected, so it may just be shock at the crudity rather than the idea itself.

I went into it knowing that I was going to have to negotiate a lot of stuff on the fly, and I picked the game partly because I wanted to see if I could.  I'd thought about it beforehand and decided how I'd generally approach things, I just failed to do what I planned as well as I'd have liked.  I had half expected to have more players, since we'd been talking vaguely about me running something for both the two I normally play with and two other people they normally play with, and more players would have let me put a lot more of it onto them.  Extra tips would be great, though.

Andrew:

Thanks.  I figured that my life would be easier if I made potential problems work for me rather than against me, and it made things much less stressful.

Ron:

Thanks.  Seth didn't get out of the situtation until I told the player to pull his finger out and do something, so I think he was a bit stumped.  I got quite angry with him, which I don't think was the best response.

If they want to keep playing, I am inclined, like you suggest, to just keep going rather than hold any deep and meaningfuls first.  I think I'd get better answers to most of the things I'm unsure about from that than from asking the players directly.

And, sorry it wasn't Dr Skippy, it was Dr Faith.  I deliberately didn't use Dr Skippy because I thought it was the obvious choice and so probably over used.  I've thought of a way to bring him back into the story though, so I might get to inflict him after all.