Fair Play
Posted by Jason on January 6th, 2009 — in Check this out dude, Design, Fiasco
We’re ruminating on this now. It’s a layout and design challenge. Check this out:
JOEL: I want Stephen and Joy to have a scene. I want to convince her to seduce Pete Branch. [The rules for choosing to establish a scene are on page 55]
Everyone nods - it’s understood that the group will be deciding whether Stephen Caney manages to talk his wife into seducing Pete.
It’s a Friday night and we’re in my trailer. “Time Cop” is on the TV, and Caney’s on the couch in a bath robe, potato chip crumbs in his beard.
JASON: The place smells like ammonia and chicken fat. The shotgun is propped up against an arm of the couch.
Jason and Joel play out the scene in character
We’re out of everything, Stephen.
JOEL: Yeah.
So you’ve got three or four things going on there:
1. Players talking.
2. Observations of what players are doing related to the rules, and actual pointers.
3. Flags regarding player behavior (in this case dropping into IC mode)
4. Characters talking.
And they all get a little mixed up. IC and OOC communication is intermingled in real life, we shift naturally from one to the other, but rendering that clearly in text is sort of hard. Here’s one where IC and OOC get mixed together:
JASON: Pete, I’m so lonely.
MONA: And against his better judgment, against every instinct, he kisses her. Then he runs away.
JOEL: I’m so happy right now. This is all going to end in a terrible tragedy.
So IC speech, then OOC narration, then a player comment. Confusing. Or this:
JOEL: Maybe you ain’t and maybe you are. Maybe the fact that you just aided and abetted a known felon will come back to cause some kind of problem, who knows? I sure don’t. And he hands the doctor the shotgun.
So IC then OOC in the same paragraph. What game book handles this well? How to the JRPG replays handle it? What are some solid layout/typography techniques for making this clear and readable?
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Posted by Jason on December 19th, 2008 — in Fiasco
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.
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Posted by Jason on December 16th, 2008 — in Design, Fiasco
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!
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Posted by Jason on December 9th, 2008 — in Design, Fiasco
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.
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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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