Zombie Squad
Hey, check out Zombie Squad, a nice Dungeon Squad hack.
Fair Play
A Dirty Dame and a Lousy Flat-Foot
Caesar_X put together a Raymond Chandler inspired Fiasco play set. I have not tried it but it looks like fun – I appreciate the nice little touches like the potential for incest as a relationship. The whole thing feels right, and comes straight out of his love for the genre.
Outlining
Here’s what I learned from the most recent external playtest: Where the rules are unclear, people fall back on what they are comfortable with. Unfortunately, “standard” gaming techniques break Fiasco pretty bad. It’s not some ground-breaking new design, but there are things you do that are at odds with conventional tabletop wisdom. So the rules have to be crystal clear about procedures, and call out what to do when, and flag points where what you do is a little off kilter. So how to do that?
I’ve been steadily revising a cheat sheet, a “what to do when” document, so I atomized that into a very detailed outline. Like this detailed:
3.2.4.3 Keep any die that resolves a spotlight scene for your character in front of you throughout the game.
It’s four pages long and was a pain in the ass to put together. Then I cut and paste my current text into the outline by paragraph, wherever it referenced the outline. And here’s what I learned – there are big chunks of assumption, places where I don’t talk about what to do, when. There’s redundancy. There’s stuff that is presented subtly out of order. It was a really instructive and eye-opening exercise. It’s going to make the game text much, much clearer. I recommend it!
More Fiasco Playtesting
I wrote a bit about last night’s playtest here, and I built a little R-Map thing just to visualize it for myself, because the game privileges certain characters in interesting ways, and there’s no way to predict which will be privileged. That’s sort of cool. I think we’re used to perfect balance in terms of character-level involvement, equal “spotlight time” or whatever, and Fiasco does not really do that. And you’d think it’d always be about the guys with Needs attached, but that isn’t how it plays out. Also, death works fine. Your guy dies? Not a big deal in terms of participation and fun. Last night was more play than test, and I’m really happy about that.