Fair Play
Posted by Jason on November 29th, 2008 — in Design, Fiasco
I’m still chugging away at Fiasco, and it is getting sleeker and sleeker. Here’s an example of a play set - I like this form factor. Two double-sided pages; you use two for engineering the fiasco initially then flip them to get a handy “what do we do when?” reference and the two other bits you need mid-way through the game. I like this particular play set a lot - I think it front-loads some fun potential conflicts without being too focused.
I’m open to suggestions about how to present this information, although I think giving each 36-item list half a letter-sized page offers a nice amount of breathing room.
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Posted by Jason on November 20th, 2008 — in Check this out dude
Hey, my adventure Khas Fara, Village of Fear appears in Fight On! #3. I really like Fight On! and appreciate what they are doing. Issue #2 evoked many fond memories.
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Posted by Jason on November 9th, 2008 — in Conventions, Fiasco
I just got back from MACE 2008, where I pinch-hit for Andy “I am laid up with Asian Death Cough” Kitkowski. Attendance was down 40%, which is ominous and not really unexpected given the economy, but there was still a room full of roleplaying games and gameage going on at all times. Unable to run Andy’s lunatic sessions, I ended up rolling a one-player session into Jeff Collyer’s PTA game (where my Edges were “The Dark Arts” and “The Dork Arts”) and running a playtest of Fiasco in the evening for five people, four of them pretty new to this sort of thing. I hadn’t tried it with five and it worked fine - they ended up with a very dark and funny story about two feuding brothers waiting for their father to die, with the women in their lives conspiring toward their own ignoble ends. There was some murdering, some pathos, two car crashes (one real and one faked), and a lot of laughter at the table. Outside of gaming I got to spend some time getting lost in High Point with the gracious and always-burning Luke Crane, which is such a pleasure. Luke also gave me some important notes on Brighton Beach attire and attitude for my Russian Mafiya PTA series. Come to MACE next year!
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Posted by Jason on November 1st, 2008 — in Check this out dude, Fiasco
I’m diligently plugging away on a small but fun project called Fiasco, which is ready for outside playtesting. It’s designed to emulate a certain sort of mishap-filled caper movie, and one of the fun bits is that you pull elements from sets, and these sets define many facets of play - the location, but also the tone of both the prospective crimes and the degree of carnage that will ensue. I’ve written a few and asked friends to author some too. Here’s Kevin Allen Jr’s awesome New Jersey set*. This is a bit of an information design headache as well, but I think I’ve got the whole “display both 144 discrete items and their causal and functional relationships in two 6×9″ pages or less” thing licked. Let me know if I’m wrong, or if you’d like to play Fiasco. 3-5 players, two hours, lots of mayhem.
*His set is actually better than this, including much more detail, but this is a format test first.
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