Review: MONSTER OF THE WEEK

Urban fantasy is a genre that I keep coming back to, sometimes against my will, but always with a certain delight. It probably goes hand-in-hand with my love of comic books and superheroes, which delight in touching the ordinary with the fantastic (or, as Coleridge might have it, finding the ordinary in the fantastic). I was an early adopter of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and passed that affection on to my wife (who has not just embraced it but obsessed over it, sharing it with everyone with eyeballs to watch and ears to delight in the sharp dialogue). I've played a lot of games that drew from that well, and got a lot of mileage out of the Eden Studios Buffy and Angel games when I ran things like my formative HTHD game AMERICAN NIGHTMARE and my Victorian Slayer game SUNSET EMPIRE.

If I were going to run an AMERICAN NIGHTMARE game now, I'd run it with Evil Hat Productions' new take on the Apocalypse World engine, MONSTER OF THE WEEK.

The colourful cover is representative of terrific art throughout.

Shadowrun Addendum: The Sixth World

Just a short footnote to my post this week about running SHADOWRUN.

I happened to be browsing through the dusty depths of my hard drive and found this, a SR hack using the DUNGEON WORLD version of the Apocalypse Engine. While the overall "feel" of this hack is a little too crunchy for me, there are some really cool ideas you can borrow, including a section toward the end on making your own Sprawl!

Pretty excellent for anyone in a SR frame of mind, like me.

Quick and Dirty: GREEN STREETS

I spent a very happy Saturday afternoon last weekend watching the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie, INHERENT VICE. If you like good movies, this is something you should see. If you like Anderson, or Thomas Pynchon, or THE BIG LEBOWSKI (although it's not a straight-up comedy, like TBL, despite a lot of wry humour) you should definitely check it out.

The thing that was running through my head, as the credits rolled, was how the "drug addled detective" story seems to have almost become a genre unto itself in my mind. If you also include things like WITHOUT A CLUE, where a character with no real detective skills (in this case, the actor hired to pose as "Sherlock Holmes" by the real detective genius, Dr. John Watson) is forced to solve a mystery, or Douglas Adams's DIRK GENTLY (who solves "mysteries" by investigating the fundamental connectedness of all things), you've got the potential for some real fun.

INHERENT VICE and THE BIG LEBOWSKI follow in the tradition of intricate film noir detective stories like THE BIG SLEEP, and they have fun with the fact that their main characters don't have the streetwise skill to figure things out like Philip Marlowe did. Instead of clarifying the mystery by uncovering a series of clues, they make the detectives more and more baffled as they encounter a wide variety of colourful and bizarre characters in the sordid California underworld. They're more concerned with the picaresque elements of the story than in how the elements actually fit together.

I think the key to using this in a game context would be to follow the player characters around as they explore the underworld of your game setting, meeting a collection of crooks, lowlifes, nuts, corrupt cops, and whatever else tickles your fancy. Throw in the odd twist and a few action beats, then allow them to "solve" the case at the end.

I was mainly inspired, in the game design part of this, by the old ILLUMINATI card game and by the excellent ATOMIC ROBO RPG by Evil Hat. The former is a card game where players lay down cards with different outlandish groups on them (from the Boy Scouts to the CIA to the Bilderberg Group) and describe how they are interconnected, like a big diagram of a conspiracy that Spooky Mulder might draw. The latter handles "two fisted science" by allowing players to have a "brainstorm session" where they each pitch scientific theories about the Weird Thing they're investigating, in order to develop a solution. SCIENCE!

I think a game that approached solving a mystery by setting out each discrete element -- a clue, a character, a location, a secret cabal, whatever -- on a 3x5 card, ILLUMINATI style, has useful potential. It keeps the players looking at the different mystery elements throughout the game, and figuring out how they connect. And why would the GM bother to figure out a "correct" solution to the mystery, when the players can just retrofit one, ATOMIC ROBO style -- making some successful rolls to describe how the different pieces interlink and reveal the culprit. Simple! Sort of.

All the GM would need to do is come up with a starting situation and some ideas for locations and characters he could introduce, then run with whatever the player characters introduce.

Sounds like fun to me.

Quick and Dirty: FateSystem

One of the coolest things Robin Laws did with his excellent, now award-winning, design for DramaSystem was to make the parts modular: if you don't like the "procedural" rules that he includes for doing things that aren't engaging in high-stakes drama -- and, with respect to Robin, I don't -- you don't need to use them. The rules for dramatic resolution work perfectly well as an overlay on your favourite set of RPG rules, and that's a big feature for me. If the purpose is to encourage people to try out playing in a style that includes more drama, why not allow them to do that with their favourite game system? How about a little drama with your Pathfinder, or Traveller...

...or Fate?

Anyone who's read this blog before or listened to the podcast I do with my friends knows that Fate is a favourite in these parts. It hits the sweet spot in terms of tight, flexible rules that aim for narrative collaboration and heroic action. Fate fits a lot of the games we play just like a glove. 

In Fate as written, you use the same set of rules to model conflicts whether they are physical or social. Indeed, using the Fate "fractal" (or, if you prefer, the "Bronze rule") you can model any number of interactions in a game using the same basic rules. That's a lot of power. 

I've used Fate to run full-on social combat before, playing out pivotal interactions in a way that was, I must admit, pretty satisfying. When we talk about social combat, we're usually talking about a conflict playing out between a player character and an NPC, and you could still do that if you want in a scene where you're playing out a high-stakes argument to change a character's mind. Well and good. The most important purpose of using the DramaSystem rules for dramatic conflicts alongside Fate would be to model interactions between two player characters, however. As I've said before, something we've found after years of HTHD play is that dramatic scenes tend to happen most often between two PCs. These are the foundational conflicts and deep interactions that form the basis for our play style, and the fact that players are at the center of that has everything to do with why it is so rewarding. Like the main cast of a television show, the player characters are the ones whose stories and relationships are the most important. That's as it should be.

The dramatic resolution rules in DramaSystem are so light as to be almost non-existent, and I feel like they'd do well in terms of running a game where you often want the rules to fade into the background. That's pretty much how it goes in an HTHD game. Most of the time, you want to concentrate on the people and their problems. When you need a little crunch, you can go to the full Fate system and roll some dice. And, unlike some story gamers, I still likes my dice. 

If you were to do this, I'm picturing a Fate Accelerated variant that models jobs (much the way that Jadepunk does) so that it's clear those rules are there to handle procedural stuff specifically, not social interactions. Running something closer to Fate Core would require stripping out some of the social skills. I'm not sure off the top of my head what other implications that might have. 

The only part of this that demands a little thought, or perhaps some experimentation, is whether the tokens you receive for agreeing to a petition in DramaSystem could be interchangeable with Fate points on the crunchier end of things. I suppose it comes down to how much you use the two systems. If they're well-balanced, with equal parts drama and action playing out, then you probably don't need to worry about drama tokens throwing the Fate point economy out of whack. Accepting a petition might effectively become a kind of "compel", for which you get rewarded with a point as usual. It might be easier to keep them as discrete units which do their own things, on the whole, but as my friend Rob has observed, there is a lobe of the human brain that likes things tidy, dammit, and do we really need to have two different point economies side by side instead of one?

Has anybody tried this?

Quick and Dirty: Hacking Fate Accelerated

Getting back into running Fate Accelerated again has me thinking of other ways I could use this game system. The Approaches are a nice broad way of talking about ways that you can have characters take action, and a quick re-skin could give you an easy "in" to create themes for a particular setting.

On the bus, the other day, my brain was wandering around the idea of what it would look like for running a game focused on Game of Thrones-style court intrigue, treachery, and knives sticking out of people's backs.

The Approaches might look something like this:

Calculating (Careful)
Canny (Quick)
Cocky (Flashy)
Covert (Sneaky)
Cruel (Forceful)
Cunning (Clever)

Why all the 'C' words? No particular reason except that there are a lot of splendid ones.

I've also been toying lately with the idea of pre-defined Consequences along the line of Conditions (as they appear in the Fate Toolkit). In a game like the above, you might have social Conditions like Embarrassed, Humiliated, and Disgraced.

If we were to do away with the Stress track altogether, things could get ugly fast, with a Success with Style leading to immediate humiliation.

And if I wanted to make violence as dangerous as possible? Have physical conditions, but make them Wounded, Maimed, and Deceased.

Note: I'm trying a few different things to keep me writing in this space on a more regular basis. You may see more Quick and Dirty pieces like this, and maybe things like game reviews as well. Any ideas or requests are welcome.