Time

I'm currently in a play-by-forum game of Fiasco using the All the Damn Time playset. It's considered to be a dangerous, expert playset, mostly because everybody plays the SAME CHARACTER just in different time periods of his life, and they start intermingling in strange time-travel-y ways.

Unlike my other Fiasco experiences, we've been playing this one pretty serious and "realistic" as far as a sci-fi time travel thing can go without all the wacky Fiasco-eque-ness that usually ensues. The core thrust of the story so far is that we are all playing Sam, a garage-shop kind of scientist with aspirations of time travel, who is married to an artist. He has received funding from a mysterious technology group. And, oh yeah, his wife's artwork will be worth a LOT of money in the future, somehow.

I guess I just wanted to save this "scene" here that I "played out." For reference, in the future, Sam and Abby have an argument that causes an experiment that Sam is working on in their studio/lab to explode, with Abby saving Sam's life in the process, even though she dies.

A black die was selected, indicating that the result of the scene should end badly for Sam.

**************************

Sam sits at his desk. It's 1AM, and the only light that illuminates his office is a single wash of light from a desktop fluorescent. All around him, journals and notebooks spread about, open to seemingly random pages.

With a sigh, Sam leans back in his chair. "It's not going to work," he mutters to himself, "nothing is going to work."

"Nothing."

He stares around in his room in silence. Abby's not home, having gone to some high-falootin' art party. He thought that having the house all to himself would give him some time to think; to make the equations work.

But they don't. Not even close.

"Time to throw in the towel," Sam thinks. Too much of his life has been wasted chasing this empty venture. Time for a new beginning. A new start. Time for more time with Abby.

These journals have nothing of importance anymore. They are just a collection of flawed theories and bad math. Time to get rid of them....

THE KILN!!!! At Abby's studio. One big hot oven. Surely, that will burn all of these useless pages to nothing but a tiny pile of ash!

Sam gathers up a large collection of journals and notes into a big plastic storage bin. It's heavy, but he manages to carry it out to the truck of his car without pulling a disc in his back.

By the time he reaches the studio, it's begun to drizzle. By the time he manages to carry the bin into the back door of the studio, there's a steady stream of rain.

And by the time he warms up the kiln, and opens the bins, it's a full-on thunderstorm that is brewing outside of the small studio.

CRACK!!! An instant flash of white and a loud boom of thunder knocks Scot-Sam to the ground as the light quickly flicker off. Sam fumbles in the dark to a far corner. "I think that's where the flashlight was," he thinks. The wind of the storm howls through the back door.

But it doesn't stop. It's a voice. A woman's voice in pain.

Sam doesn't find the flashlight...but the burning coils from the kiln glow bright red through some cooling vents, powered by natural gas. His eyes adjust to the darkness and growing soft light of burning red heating elements. They are adjusted well enough to see the shape of a woman crumpled on the floor by the door. The smell of burnt clothing a flesh begins to flood Sam's nostrils.

"Sam...." It's Abby's voice. Dear God, it's Abby.

Sam rushes over to her, tripping over a small tricycle, "How the heck did that get here?" he thought, kicking it out of the way. The tricycle rattle quickly over to a bookshelf near the kiln, banging into the wood structure solidly, dropping some unused telephone books behind the kiln, which in turn knocked around the valve that connected the natural gas line to the kiln.

But all of this didn't matter to Sam. He knelt down next to Abby. Even in the dim red glow of the room from the heated kiln he could see she was badly scarred across the left half of her face...a recent burn.

"Christ, what the he'll happened to you?"

Abby lifted her head up weakly, as another thunder clap rumbled from above. She smiled slightly, "Sam...you're whole again. You're..." she grimaced in pain.

"Jesus, stay right there, will you. We'll get you to the hospital"

Sam raced over to the desk, noting a small pack-and-play crib off to one side with a glance of lightning through the front window.

He reached for his cars keys with a quick grab. Followed by a swipe at his cell phone in which his arm stopped still as a statue as the blue glow of his phone emitted a string of text messages that froze him.

"Party went longer than expected"
"Staying at my moms tonight"
"got a couple of good sales leads, talk to you in the morning"

Sam found himself breathing heavily, the rest of his body still. He jerked his head around to look at the shadow of the woman behind him.

Abby had managed to crawl herself up the door frame. She leaned against it in a hump, exhausted, wincing. In between painful breaths she muttered.

"I saw it, Sam. I saw it....all. The tradeshow...the morning after that night...on the library roof...the...trial...that accident at the lake...that night you won the trophy....bowling alley...the..."

Her eyes got wide with fear.

"The explosion... MY GOD, the explosion...the operating table...what they were able to piece back...the CNN interview..the foothills over by the zoo..."

She crumpled to the floor writhing in pain.

Sam rushed to her side and picked her up. Even though she had been talking slowly in short breaths, Sam's mind was racing with what he was hearing as if she was talking at a million miles per hour. Some of the things she mentioned had indeed already happened. But others? Were these future events? This clearly wasn't "his" Abby.

But now there was no way he could take her to the hospital either. He knew the philosophical issues of two Abby's existing in the same time stream like the back of his hands.

He carried her over to the old, musty couch that Abby would often take naps on during her long "creative impulse" sessions. He held her close, feeling how heavy and slow her breaths were.

Another lightning flash. Across the room Sam noticed the family portrait on the wall. It was a picture of him in his finest suit (granted, not too fine, all things considering), with his arms around the waist of Abby, who held an infant boy. Both parents smiled proudly.

Sam rubbed his eyes, wondering what kind of tricks the night, the storm, and this other Abby were playing on his mind.

"You're so warm," she spoke softly, "and you're whole again." She looked up at him, longingly, determined, "Don't let me wake up again."

"What?"

Her one good eye that wasn't scarred burned into his eyes with as much energy that she could muster, "When I wake up...that's...when it happens....I don't want to do...do it again....it hurts tool...much..."

"What? What happens? What do you want me to do?"

She put her head down on his lap. He could feel the tangle of burnt hair through his fingers.

"I'm too tired..I can't do it...but you..have the strength...don't let me wake up..."

A flood of memories came pouring in to Sam's mind, an uncontrolled river of images, and sounds, and touches, and smells all at once of his son. His son, Max! Maximilian!! How could he ever forget about his only son!!!!!

"Please, for me, Sam...let this be the end of it..." her voice trailed away.

***********

Her heart didn't take long to stop beating after he had made the cut. It was only a few bucketfuls. Hopefully, the heat of the kiln would scorch the blood away. The body on the other hand....

He turned to watch the final ghost of Abby's body simply fade away, as if it was never there, returned to the ether. The buckets he held, on the other hand, still contained her fluids. His mind still raced. Time travel MUST be possible! Maybe it has something to do with REM sleep, or brain chemicals during the waking process? Of course...Sam had never taken into account the human elements in his equations!!! That must be the missing puzzle piece!

The storm had passed outside. There was no thunder anymore, but a constant potter of rain continued. It would be dawn soon.

He opened the top of the kiln. He had this niggling thought that he should avoid walking into a tricycle by the kiln. But it was a foolish thought, and Sam laughed at it as having a tricycle in this place would be ridiculous. He looked at a bare corner of the room, and felt like "something" should be there, like something had gone missing from it's proper place, but he couldn't fathom it.

Once dawn broke he sat on the couch, reviewing his notes, looking for places where he once had mystery, but now had clarity thanks to the "other" Abby. He looked at the morning light that was streaking across the bare wall opposite to where he sat, and had this funny feeling that that would be a perfect place to hang their wedding picture.

***********************

It didn't end badly for Sam in the typical Fiasco style, which usually means getting thrown into a trunk of a car. But he did wind up killing his wife-from-the-future at her request, and doesn't remember the son he never had.

So I can't say it ended that well for him. Well, except that he doesn't give up on the time travel thingy. At least he's got that going for him.

Those Summer Nights

So, in case you are wondering; no, you cannot load custom fonts on an iPad.

I came to this conclusion fairly quickly. I have recently received an iPad2. One of the first things I wanted to do was load up one of it's "fully featured" word processing apps, and create a Fiasco play set on it. Unfortunately, Fiasco uses a bunch of fonts that aren't considered to be Apple approved. And with that out of the way....

One of the things the Fiasco guys have been taunting Fiasco fans with is their upcoming compendium with all sort of new Fiasco goodies, including a hack of the system that let's you play the game in a way to recreate 80's teen comedies in the style of John Hughes movies. They (well, Jason Morningstar, the prime designer of the game) likes to call it a "gentler" fiasco.

This dovetails into a recent spring break trip where we took the kids to a local indoor water park for a few days. Floating around the lazy river, one can't help but notice the many late-teens who are life guarding the place, kind-of watching over numerous kids under 8 years old and their parents. Not too mention the kids workgint eh towel counter, the ticket redemption area of the arcade, etc. It can't be THAT luxurious of a life, but granted, probably better than slinging burgers.

One of the movie I've enjoyed in the last year was Adventureland, which did a really good job as far as capturing the whole 80's teen movie zeitgeist. And it seemed to capture some of the realities of someone I knew who used to work summers at Great America. Things like there being a sort of pecking order with regards to your position there, and how the coolness of the jobs there were directly proportional to how easily you could accidentally a group of people. In other words, the ride operators had the cool jobs; the kids hawking the carny games, not so much.

This leads me to the inevitable conclusion of trying to create a Fiasco playset based on a teen romantic comedy centered around these teens who work the summer jobs at a local water park.

Which had some interesting little battles.

The typical Fiasco playset includes all sort of nasty things. Things that people want to keep secret, things that people desperately wants, and things that can lead to violent deaths. While there are emotional stressors in your usually teen comedy, they generally don't have any truly violent or despicable detail. There's a certain innocent quality to those things. I was looking for things that were more bittersweet and less violently confrontational. It was kind of fun plucking out interesting little bits of high school experiences from 25 years ago to put into the playet, such as using film canisters to carry not rolls of film, but as a secret compartment to carry vodka shots.

And there's a lot of elements to create. It's strangely seductive to create or suggest dark "what's the absolute worse way things can go wrong" details given the confines of a certain theme. But coming up with simple objects and needs that try to lead a story down the path of "the geeky guy trying to win the cute girl" angle of Say Anything is kind of hard due to the simplicity of the situation at hand. heck, the standard Fiasco playset usually has a whole category dedicated to weapons.

The Tilt Table has the same issues, of course; and in some ways is much worse, as they are designed for things shift the game into complete disastrous chaos and bodily harm. I needed gentler tilts obviously. I threw away pretty much the entire aftermath phase, and replaced it with something else. Something that again, doesn't have the characters writhing in agony over loss of limbs, but instead constitutes telling the story of that crazy summer with questionable truths to their character's kids.

So, hopefully, Ducky DOESN'T die (like he would in a normal Fiasco game), and Bender does the get the girl in the end (while defiantly shoving his fist in the air, of course).

Feel free to take a peek at the PDF here. It's uder the "files" section. If it doesn't make any sense what-so-ever, you might want to check out the free sample of Fiasco here.

*********

As a strange side note, Those Summer Nights! is oddly sitting at the top of "The Hotness" chart for RPGs on RPGgeek. The file itself only has 14 downloads. It's sort of an interesting comparison of the kind of hype it takes to get anywhere near the hotness top on the BGG side. I'm guessing it's because BGG is truly the one-stop shopping area for board game geek, while RPG geeks have a bunch of other sites floating around in that network. So it's easy to skew the hotness charts on the RPG side.

Holly Jolly

Boardgamegeek (well, really, rgpgeek) is running a Fiasco playset design contest. So, that sounds like fun. Here's a link to my entry.

The concept of the theme came from a thread on story-games.com, which is a forum dedicated to narrative RGPs, and is pretty interesting to read. They use a lot of big words over there, and a lot of big-named concepts, and ideas are generally well shared. Unlike board game design, where it seems a lot of it is "I've this this great idea, but I'm not telling you because you'll steal my secrets."

Anyway, the theme is centered around Rankin Bass holiday specials. Unlike most fiascos, which have a sort of gritty, losers-trying-to-better-themselves-in-a-really-bad-way kind of thing, Holly Jolly! is a bit more fanciful, with nods to magical devices, and talking animals. Or in the case of the cover artwork as shown to the left here, animated talking and singing snowmen. Well, animated before being stabbed by the North Pole marker in the chest and his umbrella through the eye.

Of course, there's a still a pretty good chance that Santa Claus is going to wind up being tossed into the blades of a large snow thrower, like all good fiasco's should end.

Random Bits

I managed to play a game of Fiasco is real-life finally. It almost feels more like an improv game than a "game." And the whole experience of the game was pretty hilarious. Since Fiasco does a really good job of creating a narrative, I felt it was only proper to write up a session report in a story fashion, as your typical session reports are a bit dry for my tastes.

Click here to read it, and try and figure out who "wins".

Kickstarter.com is an interesting website, dedicated to independent artists and such, looking for way to fund their little (and sometimes big) projects. Tasty Minstrel Games is experimenting with it to try and get a new game funded for publishing. Others have managed to crack their funding barrier, but with a cheap "buy in." It will be interesting to see if their current funding efforts maintain its velocity for the next 24 or so days, or if it peters out. I know Seth has a couple of interesting things planned up his sleeve in order to keep interest high.

Vines

So after rambling on and on about finding narratives and such, I quickly put together a prototype of a game that is very much as far away as possible from a narrative game. And, for an experiment, I've put it up on boardgamegeek and asked for playtesters, just to see how that goes.

The central play of the game revolves around a very large dice pool that everyone shares. Pulling out sets of dice (straights, pairs, trips,"additions" and so on) let's players collect resources. Combining certain resources scores points. It's inspired by the "Fiasco dwindling dice pool mechanic", as previous mentioned.

Additionally, a player may roll additional dice into the pool if there is nothing there that the player wants. however, the price of this is that any new dice that are introduced to the pool that aren't pulled for resources simply become available fodder for the next player.

Which, from my solo playtesting, seems makes for a game that's pretty interesting. And, since I'm always on the lookout for new and different ways of things, an added plus to the game is that it is a dice game, but plays much different with the dice, since almost all dice games seem to use the "re-roll your dice three times and score" Yahtzee method. But then again, the core of it is stolen from Fiasco....

Anyway, I'll have to see what is made of it from the 'geek.

Measuring the experience

I've been poking around at "story-games" recently. This is a relatively new, relatively indie sub-category of role playing games that have popped up. In a nut shell, the crux of these games is about leveling up or churning stats, but instead focus on the creation of a good story, often without a game master running things. In a way, these are more like improv tools or things to break writer's block than games.

And that's what I'm finding appealing about them.

For the most part, board and card games are about following rules to "win the game." The thematic experience is usually there more to explain why you are doing things, but usually have very little "feel" of doing those things. It's about some combination of luck and the skill in finding efficiencies with in the rules. While those can be great experiences, or awful, to me there seems to be very little to walk away from the table aside from, "here's that great move that I pulled off to win the game."

I'm at the point now where I feel like I want something more than just following the path to the greatest amount of points. I'd like there to be some other attachment to the "narrative" of the game; I want the experience to more of an experience than just a race. These games are more about cerebral machinations, while I'm looking for more emotional and narrative connections.

*****

One of the more talked about games from the last year or so is Train. It's a game with a trick ending, a game that the designer claims to have an emotional appeal to those who played it, and even deciding not to play it is playing it. A lot of her discussions on the game seem like far-reaching "artistic vision" kind of stuff to me, but hey, everyone has to have a world view of their own stuff, I guess. There is nothing about the actual game system itself that stirs the emotions...just the tacked on theme of one of the most painful events of human history. Then again, it's kind of nebulous what the game actually is, given that she apparently she refuses to release the rules and the card data for review. In other words, the theme needs to be experienced for the emotional impact. Her other projects are also about emotionally heart breaking themes of human doing other humans wrong in grand ways. I'd be interested in seeing if she could capture the same type of emotional responses by not themeing a game around some terrible historical tragedy.

On the other hand...

I do think that they are good art pieces; and probably better than most mass produced games, from what little one can discern about them from afar. They get people talking about things in constructive ways.

Why I bring this up is the one unique thing I've found about Train from a rules standpoint is this: apparently the games doesn't describe a win condition. There is no mention of an ultimate goal with which you are striving for. Which is pretty powerful stuff. Here's why:

Without a known win condition, the player is left to determine his own experience with the game. It's not about optimizing moves better than the other players, it's about optimizing your turns in such a way to gain the best experience that you, yourself have created as a goal. And I can change that goal on a whim. It's about the experience.

Story games seem offer this kind of open-ended structure from a different angle; it's about the story that's created, the travel on the road, the experience of getting the end. The winning is in the creation of a story that is uniquely yours.

*****

Of course, with all that said, the one game that has really struck a chord in me is Fiasco. It's a game where the initial setup of the game is creating the relationship between the other player...then you fill in the blanks about your character. After that, you take turns creating a twisted little story of desperate people doing things that they shouldn't be doing, and things spiral out of control.

From a design standpoint, it's a simple game, but there's some really interesting mechanics in play. The create-the-relationships, not the character thing, as mentioned above is pretty brilliant. It allows for easy "change your locations" scenarios by simply using a few different charts. If you poke around on their website, you can see that they come out with a new "playset" every month, around a different location, era, or theme.

There's also mechanic of pulling dice from a central pool which is more fun that it should be that determines the relationship details, and if a character in a story is having good or bad outcomes.

It's worth a read of the rules to understand what is going on, and how easy it is for players to create their own messed up worlds. And to use as inspiration for other things.