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February 6th, 2006
03:19 pm - More Actual Play -- Buffy Role Reversals
The Friday before last, we played another episode of our Buffy the Vampire Slayer campaign, "Silicon Valley Slayage". It was notable for the technique of role reversal which we used -- I started a thread about it on The Forge Actual Play called "A Little Role Reversal".
At the start of the game, the current GM ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) whumpdotcom asked for all of our character sheets, took them and shuffled them around, and then handed them back out -- with everyone ending up with a different character sheet. He then described to us waking up on Sunday morning in other bodies. A big part of the game was role-reversals of our usual selves. I put up a summary of the game in our session logs at:
3.09 "Switcheroo"
The interesting bits of role-reversal included me doing a Liz-as-Chip impression of wacky banter; and Cynthia switching from the older, somewhat passive leader Roberta to the butt-kicking bodies. It wasn't the deepest or best of the season, but I thought it was interesting for the device used, and wondered at what other role-reversal people have done. I think the forceful start-of-session approach worked well. It's more interesting to do role-reversal into roles that people don't normally take.
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December 28th, 2005
12:29 pm - Tarot Use in Buffy
So in the last session of our Buffy campaign, we tried out something a little different. We briefly used a tarot mechanic based on lee_os's game, Star, Moon, Cross (ed.), which I had tried out at AmberCon NorthWest a few weeks earlier.
So at this point in the campaign, I felt we had a bit of a problem. I had game-mastered episodes 3.04 to 3.06, but I felt that in episode 3.06, I had stomped on player choices made in 3.05. So in episode 3.05, they eventually let a chipped vampire (i.e. who was prevented from harming humans) and a zombie go, rather than destroy them. In episode 3.06, those two both caused further problems and they destroyed them. I think that was harsh, but also pushed the both characters and players to make tough decisions. However, talking in particular with zdashamber, I think it was clear that the characters needed more information on which to base their decisions.
This could come as a info dump from the GM, but I thought it would be more interesting to make it an exercise. So I made a pitch to the other GM, Bill. We game-master alternate sessions -- he did 3.01 to 3.03, then I did 3.04 to 3.06, and he is now doing the next three. Each episode is based on a short pitch from the other GM. Here was my pitch for episode 3.07: 1) Trying to find out what is going on with Shub-Niggurath, the crew try a magical tarot ceremony with Rufus to reveal what is going on.
NOTE: My idea here is to try out a one-off mechanic based on a game I tried at AmberCon. Basically, we have a tarot deck, and all of the players go around drawing cards either off the top or from a nine-card face-up "kitty". Each player gets to make one suggestion, and then there is a round of other players adding elaborations to that suggestion. The player would make up something about the background, which the character is divining as truth in the ceremony. So Bill took this idea, and game-mastered an episode around it. The key difference from the Sun, Moon, Cross mechanic is that here, all of the information is learned in-character by the PCs as part of the ceremony. This was intentional -- the point was not to move to more out-of-character stance in general, or to continue with the mechanic, but rather to re-set the campaign.
A summary of the session is on my website as 3.07 "In the Cards". So we've got a bunch of established facts for the PCs to go on -- some vague, some less so, but overall good. It didn't go as well as the "Amber Shadows" game which Lee ran at ACNW, meaning I think there were not (ed.) as many definite or strong choices in the events. Partly this was because the players (two in particular) were relatively low-energy on a Friday night. So there will be some more elaboration of the ideas presented happening later.
I pondering about using this as a technique more in the future, but I think I have to wait and see future episodes to really judge how well it worked.
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August 1st, 2005
06:38 pm - More on Buffy
I've been meaning to write more about the Buffy campaign that I've been playing, but it will take some time to write up in more detail. In older comments, chgriffen had some questions about the Buffy campaign I've been playing. He writes:
Let me just ask one thing--what are the rolls in the Buffy RPG for? I.e., do you resolve the combat and only the combat with the dice?
That's where most traditional RPGs are at, and that's why I'd rather play PtA. I don't want to let the dice decide whether Buffy kills the vampires. I know she will. I want the dice to figure out whether the fight helps her to overcome her self-doubt, or whether she can do it without going so far off the deep end that she scares all of her friends.
I want rolls to be about the character's issues, not the fight. The "wargame with an RPG on top" history is so evident in games where what you roll for is blow by blow combat and you have to insert the issues manually.
Some people can do that well. But they're the people who can twist and tweak any game. Heck, I've been playing "freeform" (dice-mechanic-less) for ten years. But most people stick with what the game text gives them, and in many instances, it's a combat simulator with some vague personality and issue ideas attached.
We use dice in general for the success and failure of tasks -- of which magic and combat are key ones, but Influence, Notice, and technical skills also play a role. I guess that is a key distinction. We don't roll dice for issues like whether Iffy feels vengeful or who is in love with whom. Dice are for the action, whereas the issues are handled by player choice. Physical action (combat and otherwise) and tension over it are a vital part of the drama, I think, and those are the parts that we use dice for. Character and plot decisions are made by the players. (Note also that this is not mystery, so Notice rolls are rarely pivotal by design. It is fairly trivial for players to solve mysteries by plot twists.)
I'd like to consider a sequence from the climactic final multi-part episode last season as an example.
In the game, the crew had just found that a horrendously dangerous magical ceremony had been performed at a morgue where the body of a girl they had known was. When they heard that people left just five minutes ago, the two fastest PCs (Iffy and Dot) immediately ran out. They caught an Indian woman and two men in the parking lot outside, and the two men drew guns while the woman started the car. We moved into combat, and as her first action, Iffy unleashed her full power on one, immediately downing him with 36 Life Points of damage. She then flew down past the other and drew a sword to hamstring him. Dot jumped through the front windshield of the car into the passenger seat and grabbed the woman to stop her. Moving out of combat, Iffy smashed through side window to grab and threaten the woman. Afterwards, I followed the Buffy damage mechanic for negative Life Points for the men. The result was that by the time they got back, one of them died while the other one was stabilized by another PC and brought to a hospital.
Now, all that was expressed solely as action and dialogue. According to some rhetoric that I have heard about representational mechanics, this scene was thematically meaningless. Because there was no "Fury" stat or rule for Iffy's Issue, the action was purely a cold simulation of fighting with no drama or meaning to it. However, I felt quite differently about it. I felt there was great dramatic power in letting the actions and their simulated consequences speak for themselves. All of the players were pretty shocked at Iffy's actions here, and especially at the results.
Now, it is entirely possible that we could have conveyed something more explicitly. So, for example, Iffy's player Bill could have declared (Note: This example is now edited with corrections from Ben Lehman.) "I'd like Protagonist Development scene, where Iffy savagely attacks Rupa and the men in the parking lot." (specifying Focus, Agenda, and Location). Now, I don't mean to disparage that approach -- but I at least don't see that it's inherently superior. I do intend to try PtA at some point, but at the moment we're all pretty psyched about the Buffy game, and looking forward to its third season.
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July 17th, 2005
01:52 am - Buffy vs PtA
While it would be interesting to see how the Slayer stacks up against school moms, this is about the Buffy RPG system and Primetime Adventures...
In response to Vincent Baker's post on Setting and Source Material, John Harper recently posted "The Right Tool for The Job", where he writes:
Now it's our turn, as RPG players, to pick up the Firefly RPG and create a new story. What tools do we get? Do we get anything even remotely like what the writers were using for their creative, collaborative endeavor? No. Instead, we determine things like how strong Jayne is, on a scale of 3-18. And how many hull points Serenity has. And how many days travel it is from Persephone to Cheyenne. And how much "damage" an Alliance stunner does. And, gods preserve us, what River's "carrying capacity" is.
The writers didn't need any of that crap to create new Firefly material. And yet, RPG books are full of it.
and
What do we do, if we don't want to wargame and roleplay on top of it? Matt Wilson has an answer. He wrote a clever little game called Primetime Adventures. It actually takes that functional creative process that the Firefly writers use, and turns it into a fun activity you can have with your friends over a few evenings. And you know what? If you follow the steps in the game text, you can create some pretty nifty stories of drama, adventure, and relationships -- kinda like those wiley Mutant Enemy folks.
So this is something of a poser to me. To explain, I am currently co-GMing a campaign using C.J. Carella's Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG, which I am enjoying very much -- entitled Silicon Valley Slayage. Now, Carella's BtVS system most certainly has Strength ratings for the Slayer and all other characters, damage ratings for the weapons used, and so forth. I post the character sheets online, if you're interested. So it seems like our game is what John Harper is talking about.
However, I am pretty satisfied with how things have been going. All the players have been very positive about the game and its direction, and moreover felt that it has lived up to the standards of the show. For example, at the end of one episode (I forgot which), a player raved that she thought it was better than any of the Buffy episodes she remembered. Also, in contrast to his view, I have never felt the urge to make the game more like scriptwriting. Quite the opposite. I've felt at times that treating the game like scriptwriting has been a problem for play.
As I ponder it, I'm not sure I see the screenwriting parallels in a first place. For a television series, a screenwriter will generally get a series bible, which is a document mostly covering background and characters -- reading often like an RPG sourcebook with the mechanics stripped out. The only example I could find online is the He-Man Series Bible. Then again, many in the industry (like Lee Goldberg) dismiss the usefulness of such bibles.
So I'm trying to picture what the game would be like using Primetime Adventures instead of Eden's system. Now, I haven't played PtA, but I've bought it and read it thoroughly now. I've played Theatrix and Soap and My Life With Master and Dogs in the Vineyard -- so hopefully I should have some credibility. But offhand, here are my thoughts: - As a Buffy game, I'm attached to blow-by-blow combat. This is an action series, after all. I feel that it's pretty solidly in the spirit to have a rousing blow-by-blow combat.
- I don't like explicit an explicit singular issue per character. While I'm not thrilled with Eden's Drawback system, I would be equally unthrilled by singular issues for this campaign. I have enjoyed the characters being emergent and seeing what they're about over time rather than being "issue characters".
- The plotted story arc also concerns me. For Silicon Valley Slayage, I have avoided preplanning character arcs beyond an episode or two ahead. Too often, a player is missing, or simply too tired, or simply didn't click with what was being presented. Many of the character story arcs have taken very unexpected turns based on the in-game events -- like, say, Dot and Max getting together (in Season One) and having a baby (in Season Two); or Chip's various ill-fated romances; and so forth.
- PtA's fan mail is more continuously used, while Buffy's Drama Points are bigger chunks used relatively rarely. This isn't a huge deal, but I have a mild preference for big chunks.
This isn't to say that PtA wouldn't work -- but rather to say that different things have worked in our Buffy campaign. Anyhow, I don't mean to pre-judge PTA -- I intend to try it at some point. But on the other hand, I did feel like I should justify my choice of Carella's Buffy system. Still, I'm curious what other PtA players think.
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