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the_eggwhite) wrote2012-12-17 03:31 pm
the_eggwhite) wrote2012-12-17 03:31 pm
It's been a while...
Using a bit of my lunchbreak (edit: and afternoon no-coffee break) to sneakily finish an LJ post I started last night... I thought I'd talk about gaming. Specifically roleplaying. Partly because it's always been an activity close to my heart, but also because I've actually done some of it again for the first time in... far too long. For somebody who still identifies himself as a roleplayer, I've done precious little actual playing lately.
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nishatalitha has been going to the London Indie RPG Meetup for a while, and I decided that I'd skip out of another regular SF meet I go to (it's annoying that they clash, but what can I do!) to give it a shot. I'm extremely glad I did, as I got a chance to not only play a rather cool new game, but I also got a chance to try out my first go at a GM-less RPG.
In this case, the game was Our Last, Best Hope (which I can't find you a link for because the work web-blocker says "NO!"). It's a game in which the players make up a team, mostly of scientific or techie types, and then try to resolve a major crisis that will otherwise kill everybody. The game does make the case that we're dealing with cinematic science here, rather than real science - there's no reason it couldn't be real science, but it would make it a bit harder to run, with all the fact checking, peer-review and academic / intellectual property bickering. I had enough of that when I was a real scientist. Yes, I really was - I worked on Artificial Intelligence and everything!
The game comes with three mission books, which aren't traditional game scenarios as such - they're just a bunch of stuff you can pull together to make a game around a particular theme. For our game we dismissed "Zombie Apocalype" as slightly done-to-death right now (heh) and declined the "Snowy Apocalypse" in favour of a "Space" themed apocalypse. Choosing to let the dice decide on our crisis and run from there, we basically ended up with the premise of Sunshine. We decided to run with that and leave the nonsense premise of "the sun's going to suddenly go out, let's restart it by going there and throwing Science! at it.
We then got to introduce a few game elements that we could call on for bonuses and flavour and very loosely specify the first few threats we'd encounter (not the order, though). These were along the lines of each picking who in the crew makes us crazy, who keeps us sane, what secret we're keeping, etc... Calling on these in play would give us bonuses when dealing with threats.
The way the game works is that first we're thrown an initial starting situation, which leads into the first scene. Scenes are led by each player in turn, and that player gets to frame it - setting where it takes place, who's in it, when it takes place, etc... The scene then plays out for a little while before a specified player decides to interrupt events with the first threat. Those in the scene then decide who's tackling the threat and the mechanics take over, with various skills, cards and story points being played to affect the dicerolls to resolve it. Resolution of the threat can lead to various dice being added to the crisis pool, affecting the probabilities of how the final endgame will play out - those dice can either be good dice or bad dice, depending on how things go.
The game started with a randomly thrown curveball to get things rolling, dropping a fatal virus on a (deceased) fifth crewmember, leading us into the first scene. Since I was playing the doctor, that fell in my court... so I started a scene in the advanced medical bay (which I'd introduced as a story element) with the plan of "take samples then put the body in a vented airlock to stop it spreading". I pulled our engineer in to assist, as he was the character who kept me sane, allowing me to play my "keeps me sane" card and get some extra story points. We were getting somewhere with that when the first threat was introduced - a hull breach!
Because the threats were specified as immediate threats rather than long, drawn out ones... some of them were resolved not by solving the problem, but by postponing it. Each time a threat was resolved, a new one was written and added to the pool available to use. Some of these new threats were actually revivals of old ones. For example, we had a recurring saboteur on board, and the virus from the first scene came back a couple of times. The immediacy of these threats allowed up to keep pressing on with a story, rather than it feeling like we were getting bogged down in an series of episodic threats. We actually ended up with two or three core threads of threat running through the game, which was pretty cool.
When a certain number of dice have been added to the crisis pool, the game moves on to act two. In act two, the threats become tougher, but there are less of them. Everyone now just gets one more scene, and when that's done and those threats are resolved... we face the crisis. It was in act two that I think I some of the best stuff happened. Which, given how things started for me in in the second act, might be seen as surprising.
My character died in the first scene of act two.
I was faced with a threat so tough that I couldn't address it alone - the failure of our radiation shield. We didn't have enough story points to bring anybody else in to resolve the threat, and my skills weren't going to help. But there was another mechanic that helped out. Death Cards. These work in one of three ways, as far as I can tell.
Death cards were given out at random at the start, and each describes the nature of a death. We knew what was on our cards, but nobody else did.
If you die due to taking a lot of harm then you can play your death card. If your death matches what's on the card then you die resolving the threat. If your death doesn't match what's on the card then you can cheat death and cash in your card to fix your harm and continue. But there's a third option.
If it's clear that a threat is going to kill you, and you can make the death on the card fit the scene? Then you get to have that death in a positive way that'll put a pile of good dice onto the crisis. Choosing noble sacrifice helps the team resolve the final crisis in a positive way.
When faced with a damaged solar shield causing us to be bathed in killer radiation, I was the only one able to act... and nothing I could do would fix the problem. So I decided that I'd play my "you will die by your own hand" death card to die carrying all of my crewmates to the one bit of the ship that was still shielded, giving my life that they might live.
Of course, because scenes can be (or include) flashbacks, my death didn't keep me out of the game!
As an example of still being in the game, one of the later threats was that the Sun Ignition Device was damaged... and that threat was resolved in a flashback scene. We played out how, before the mission launched, I'd been the one who persuaded the inventor of the device (one of the other PCs on the ship) that he had to go on the mission as well in case the device was damaged - so that threat didn't get resolved by action at the time, but just by the relevant character being there and inspired to fix the device. I was able to contribute to his resolution of the threat by my inspiring words before we even launched!
By choosing this way out, it appeared that I started a trend. Two of the other PCs also died heroically in the final act, leaving just one to face the final crisis. With hindsight, we think that he possibly should have actually died in his final scene too, but we weren't rewinding mistakes that went against us, so we didn't rewind that either.
The final challenge our one survivor faced was the challenge of being alone at the end of the world, driven mad by isolation... which he pushed through admirably and was actually able to launch the Sun Ignition Device into the star and survive to tell the tale.
I thought the pacing suffered at times, and it took me quite a while to get a hang on the structure of the games turns, scenes, cycles, threats, and so on. That said, I think I'd got a grip on it towards the end and I think it'd run more smoothly later.
My problem with pacing also got less severe as things moved on. As I understand from the chap who'd brought the game along, ours was a particularly slow starting game, and usually act one gets moving a bit faster.. Again, I think some of that was down to our inexperience rather than the game itself.
I feel that the GM-less-ness may have contributed to that, in that a GM in "facilitator-mode" can help smooth over those problems and keep the pace moving, whereas in a GM-less game that's not an option. I'm mostly going to put that down to teething troubles.
Pretty much everything else. The game was fun from end to end, and when it did drag a bit it was easily resolved. I liked the way that the game pulled in all the tropes from the "four scientists / engineers / space miners / doctors / soldiers must save the world when nobody else can" genre and folded them in together. I liked the way that flashbacks could be used to keep characters in the game after their death.
I liked the way that character death was handled, particularly the way that character defining heroic death was explicitly rewarded by the game and made to matter.
I already have. I was reading the PDF the evening after playing the game, and have a print copy winging its way across the oceans as I type.
Along with a host of ideas that could be played with the existing missions (space, zombies, snow) I can now see plenty of other options based on an assortment of films.
To name a couple of examples:
Global supercomputer out of control - (Wargames, Colossus: The Forbin Project)
Plague - (The Andromeda Strain, Survivors)
nishatalitha has been going to the London Indie RPG Meetup for a while, and I decided that I'd skip out of another regular SF meet I go to (it's annoying that they clash, but what can I do!) to give it a shot. I'm extremely glad I did, as I got a chance to not only play a rather cool new game, but I also got a chance to try out my first go at a GM-less RPG. the game
In this case, the game was Our Last, Best Hope (which I can't find you a link for because the work web-blocker says "NO!"). It's a game in which the players make up a team, mostly of scientific or techie types, and then try to resolve a major crisis that will otherwise kill everybody. The game does make the case that we're dealing with cinematic science here, rather than real science - there's no reason it couldn't be real science, but it would make it a bit harder to run, with all the fact checking, peer-review and academic / intellectual property bickering. I had enough of that when I was a real scientist. Yes, I really was - I worked on Artificial Intelligence and everything!
The game comes with three mission books, which aren't traditional game scenarios as such - they're just a bunch of stuff you can pull together to make a game around a particular theme. For our game we dismissed "Zombie Apocalype" as slightly done-to-death right now (heh) and declined the "Snowy Apocalypse" in favour of a "Space" themed apocalypse. Choosing to let the dice decide on our crisis and run from there, we basically ended up with the premise of Sunshine. We decided to run with that and leave the nonsense premise of "the sun's going to suddenly go out, let's restart it by going there and throwing Science! at it.
We then got to introduce a few game elements that we could call on for bonuses and flavour and very loosely specify the first few threats we'd encounter (not the order, though). These were along the lines of each picking who in the crew makes us crazy, who keeps us sane, what secret we're keeping, etc... Calling on these in play would give us bonuses when dealing with threats.
How it works
The way the game works is that first we're thrown an initial starting situation, which leads into the first scene. Scenes are led by each player in turn, and that player gets to frame it - setting where it takes place, who's in it, when it takes place, etc... The scene then plays out for a little while before a specified player decides to interrupt events with the first threat. Those in the scene then decide who's tackling the threat and the mechanics take over, with various skills, cards and story points being played to affect the dicerolls to resolve it. Resolution of the threat can lead to various dice being added to the crisis pool, affecting the probabilities of how the final endgame will play out - those dice can either be good dice or bad dice, depending on how things go.
Our Game
The game started with a randomly thrown curveball to get things rolling, dropping a fatal virus on a (deceased) fifth crewmember, leading us into the first scene. Since I was playing the doctor, that fell in my court... so I started a scene in the advanced medical bay (which I'd introduced as a story element) with the plan of "take samples then put the body in a vented airlock to stop it spreading". I pulled our engineer in to assist, as he was the character who kept me sane, allowing me to play my "keeps me sane" card and get some extra story points. We were getting somewhere with that when the first threat was introduced - a hull breach!
Because the threats were specified as immediate threats rather than long, drawn out ones... some of them were resolved not by solving the problem, but by postponing it. Each time a threat was resolved, a new one was written and added to the pool available to use. Some of these new threats were actually revivals of old ones. For example, we had a recurring saboteur on board, and the virus from the first scene came back a couple of times. The immediacy of these threats allowed up to keep pressing on with a story, rather than it feeling like we were getting bogged down in an series of episodic threats. We actually ended up with two or three core threads of threat running through the game, which was pretty cool.
A game of two halves
When a certain number of dice have been added to the crisis pool, the game moves on to act two. In act two, the threats become tougher, but there are less of them. Everyone now just gets one more scene, and when that's done and those threats are resolved... we face the crisis. It was in act two that I think I some of the best stuff happened. Which, given how things started for me in in the second act, might be seen as surprising.
My character died in the first scene of act two.
Death Cards
I was faced with a threat so tough that I couldn't address it alone - the failure of our radiation shield. We didn't have enough story points to bring anybody else in to resolve the threat, and my skills weren't going to help. But there was another mechanic that helped out. Death Cards. These work in one of three ways, as far as I can tell.
Death cards were given out at random at the start, and each describes the nature of a death. We knew what was on our cards, but nobody else did.
If you die due to taking a lot of harm then you can play your death card. If your death matches what's on the card then you die resolving the threat. If your death doesn't match what's on the card then you can cheat death and cash in your card to fix your harm and continue. But there's a third option.
If it's clear that a threat is going to kill you, and you can make the death on the card fit the scene? Then you get to have that death in a positive way that'll put a pile of good dice onto the crisis. Choosing noble sacrifice helps the team resolve the final crisis in a positive way.
When faced with a damaged solar shield causing us to be bathed in killer radiation, I was the only one able to act... and nothing I could do would fix the problem. So I decided that I'd play my "you will die by your own hand" death card to die carrying all of my crewmates to the one bit of the ship that was still shielded, giving my life that they might live.
Of course, because scenes can be (or include) flashbacks, my death didn't keep me out of the game!
Flashbacks!
As an example of still being in the game, one of the later threats was that the Sun Ignition Device was damaged... and that threat was resolved in a flashback scene. We played out how, before the mission launched, I'd been the one who persuaded the inventor of the device (one of the other PCs on the ship) that he had to go on the mission as well in case the device was damaged - so that threat didn't get resolved by action at the time, but just by the relevant character being there and inspired to fix the device. I was able to contribute to his resolution of the threat by my inspiring words before we even launched!
Attrition
By choosing this way out, it appeared that I started a trend. Two of the other PCs also died heroically in the final act, leaving just one to face the final crisis. With hindsight, we think that he possibly should have actually died in his final scene too, but we weren't rewinding mistakes that went against us, so we didn't rewind that either.
The final challenge our one survivor faced was the challenge of being alone at the end of the world, driven mad by isolation... which he pushed through admirably and was actually able to launch the Sun Ignition Device into the star and survive to tell the tale.
What I didn't like
I thought the pacing suffered at times, and it took me quite a while to get a hang on the structure of the games turns, scenes, cycles, threats, and so on. That said, I think I'd got a grip on it towards the end and I think it'd run more smoothly later.
My problem with pacing also got less severe as things moved on. As I understand from the chap who'd brought the game along, ours was a particularly slow starting game, and usually act one gets moving a bit faster.. Again, I think some of that was down to our inexperience rather than the game itself.
I feel that the GM-less-ness may have contributed to that, in that a GM in "facilitator-mode" can help smooth over those problems and keep the pace moving, whereas in a GM-less game that's not an option. I'm mostly going to put that down to teething troubles.
What I did like
Pretty much everything else. The game was fun from end to end, and when it did drag a bit it was easily resolved. I liked the way that the game pulled in all the tropes from the "four scientists / engineers / space miners / doctors / soldiers must save the world when nobody else can" genre and folded them in together. I liked the way that flashbacks could be used to keep characters in the game after their death.
I liked the way that character death was handled, particularly the way that character defining heroic death was explicitly rewarded by the game and made to matter.
Would I buy it?
I already have. I was reading the PDF the evening after playing the game, and have a print copy winging its way across the oceans as I type.
What ideas did it give me?
Along with a host of ideas that could be played with the existing missions (space, zombies, snow) I can now see plenty of other options based on an assortment of films.
To name a couple of examples:
Global supercomputer out of control - (Wargames, Colossus: The Forbin Project)
Plague - (The Andromeda Strain, Survivors)
no subject
I'm guessing it's designed for a small number of players and wouldn't scale easily to a larger number?
no subject
no subject
One thing that RPGs in general lack is strong story-arc structure, since they tend to be open-ended "soap opera" sort of affairs, rather than closed episodic affairs. The exception to that at RHUL was always the "marathon" story, which followed conventional story structure more closely.
Making the transition from RPGs to written fiction has highlighted this for me big-time, since it is (IME) one of the biggest differences between RPG and other media.
no subject
no subject
Does your game have a fifth act -- a denoument?
(The place the difference between Hollywood and five-act structure is most visible to me is what they did to The Lord of the Rings to film it. Tolkien wrote five-act structure: much of the Shire and Bilbo's birthday was written as Act 1, and Act 5 was the Scouring of the Shire and Frodo and Sam going to the Grey Havens. So Hollywood had to truncate it, replacing the exposition at the start with a voiceover, and dropping the Scouring of the Shire altogether.)
(If it was good enough for Shakespeare mumble grumble... )
no subject
Essentially, Our Last Best Hope has the following:
Mission Prep
This is equivalent to first act - you find out who the characters are, and the basics of how they relate to each other are introduced, but not expanded on. The crisis is chosen, the assets are put into play, the plan is outlined (this being the plan of what to do when the destination is reached, not how to reach the destination). The crisis is essentially a background thing at this point - more setting than plot, if that makes any sense. It doesn't actually come into play - you just pick what's being worked towards.
The Choice
This is basically the kickoff for the game - it sets the ball rolling by forcing a choice on the group about how they'll proceed towards the crisis. It's where the action starts. In the game I played, it landed in my lap as the doctor, because the fifth crew member (in our four player game) had just died of a previously unknown virus. In a spaceship. The choice was "do we press on". The main choice for us as players was how it would affect us and how we'd proceed with our mission. We (obviously) chose to press on regardless, but try to contain the problem.
This kicks off act one, and is equivalent to the catalyst / inciting event in the three-act model, and the response to the choice pretty much defines the story that the threats all fit into.
Act One
This is the journey to the crisis, and it's structured as a series of spotlight scenes, each concluded by a threat. This expands on the interplay between characters, and brings a lot of the stresses between them to the fore. The shape of the story that unfolds here is largely defined by the choice.
This is probably fairly analogous to the rising action of Act Two in the three act model.
Consequences
Act One ends with a change in circumstances, the nature of which is determined by the cumulative results from the various threats in that act. In the game I played, this played out with us basically being left with a slightly screwed up ship - we'd exhausted the supplied in the medical bay and our solar shield was buggered enough that we couldn't adjust our course or use it for anything fancy anymore.
This is roughly analogous to the switch from act two to act three in the 3-act model - I don't know if that bit really has a name... but it's the point where the action starts moving towards a climax rather than just growing.
Act Two
On the cusp of the crisis, the team face a few more threats - much riskier and flavoured more by the changed enviroment imposed by the consequences and the impending crisis.
Crisis
Things then come to dealing with the crisis itself, which is equivalent to the 3-act model's climax. The game doesn't explicitly require a denoument, but it does suggest and extra scene after the crisis has been addressed (in flashback if everybody's dead) to tie things up, but that's treated as optional.