On Sunday I ran Best Friends at the Portsmouth RPG Club. The scenario I had casts the players as 6 members of a Disco band in 1979: a Cop, a Construction Worker, a Biker, a Cowboy, a Soldier and an Indian.
This was a dry run for the game I'm running at Conception. If you're likely to play that (and it's a blast, so I totally recommend it!) you might not want to read any further.
I'd only run BF briefly before and it was a learning experience. There seemed to be a lot I wasn't getting, which is I guess a polite way of saying that the book didn't really teach me very clearly how to run the game. Although the system was pretty easy to understand, there's a lot of Mojo which went on and made the game fly which I didn't get directly from the book. More on that later.
But anyway, on with it.
I created character sheets with the character's name, job and a photograph. So for example, one said:
My name is Ray and I'm A Cop.
I will also write in people Stuff in advance, leaving room for them to add extra stuff should they feel the need. This time around I just left Stuff empty and let them fill it in. Randy, the cowboy, gave himself a gun, a lasso and a horse for example. Pretty obvious stuff, but I think there are a lot of people who want to be told.
We did the standard Hatred Q&A, and got some pretty balanced characters. Everyone had 2 in something, 0 in something and 1 in everything else. This seemed pretty fair.
Nonsense was the important bit. I created 3 sets of cards, each with a piece of nonsense on. My first game fell a bit flat because people weren't really at each other's throats enough. So this time I created nonsense to deliberately set the PCs against each other.
The first set was a bit of personal nonsense. That was something which the character had which would create (I hoped) interesting situations during play. Some examples were:
I have to take special pills to help me dance.
I really am a [Whatever your character's job is]
I can't actually sing, I just mine along and hope no-one notices!
The second set was related to NPCs. The band's manager was Samantha Simpson, a retired supermodel and gay icon. She had an ex-boyfriend called Steve and new suitor called Ron.
Samantha is my hero! With her managing us, we're sure to succeed!
Samantha is an idiot! We need to ditch her and get a proper manager!
Steve and Samantha are meant to be together! Ron's a drip!
Ron and Samantha are meant to be together! Steve's a creep!
The last set was interpersonal between the PCs.
I love [Prettiest character]
I hate [Prettiest character]
I write most of the songs, so I ought to be the biggest star!
I'm the [Whatever your character's best hatred is]est, so I should be the biggest star!
The idea was to really stir things up between the characters, and it worked a treat.
I used the rules on Scene Framing regarding the last person pushed to. If nobody pushed, the GM (me) got to set the next scene or could give it to the last person who won a conflict. Nobody should set two scenes in a row, just to keep things moving more.
The basic situation was that the band wanted to release an album, but had to get a record contract. This required a demo tape to be recorded (on 8-track, of course!), and a Gig to be performed and a whole bunch of other stuff.
Other characters included:
Henri - A former member of the band thrown out for being mean. He played the role of the fireman and drove a pimped out fire engine.
Samantha - the band's manager
Steve - the owner of Marakesh records
Ron - the hick lawyer
Bruce - the purveyor of "Dancing pills"
Jack - A sound engineer
Highlights (which are repeatable) include:
* Convincing the busy sound engineer to record their demo by beating him at Pong.
* The concert at the YMCA.
* Trying to teach Randy the Cowboy to dance.
* Scoring speed instead of "Dancing Pills"
* Arguments over who gets a solo on the demo
And far too much utter, utter filth to even contemplate posting online. This really isn't suitable for kids or anyone easily offended.
Issues I had with the game:
* The first game I ran fell flat because there wasn't enough conflict between characters and they just ganged together to beat the external adversity. While I agree (as stated in the appendix) that external adversity is important, this game seems to fall completely flat without player vs player conflict. Most RPGs expect player to work together, so it's kinda hardwired into a lot of people not to upset the boat or fuck up the plans of the other players. Which is exactly what the game needs in order to work.
* As GM, your NPCs can't push to win conflicts. Which is weird for me, because I'm used to challenging the players (in a "ha, just TRY and beat me! Oh, you have..." kind of way) but explicitly cannot in BF. Which works very, very well, but is a bit of sea change for me and not as terribly clear as it might be.
* The reason that works so well is because we had this whole "We can do anything, if we can put aside our differences for long enough" thing going on. Really, the only people the PCs can't automatically beat is each other, so really that's where all the conflict has to come from.
* If I have any issues with the actual mechanics of the game, it's that there isn't any reward for getting what you want. There's nonsense, which is presented as a neat, quirky thing at the start of the rulebook but is actually the thing which drives most of the actual play. But there's not reward for following your Nonsense or penalty for contradicting it. I'm not sure how you'd implement that though, but I dunno, for something so important it doesn't really have any rules.
All in all: An excellent session of an excellent game. To be fair, it's not hard to get the guys at Portsmouth at each other's throats and that definitely helped.
Great Rich
Submitted by Gregor Hutton on Tue, 15/01/2008 - 12:44.
I totally agree on your points.
I guess my playing preference is that I'm cool with players screwing things for each other as it's character-vs-character, not any socially awkward player-vs-player dynamic going on.
But how to get that across? Um, I'm not so great on it.
However, I do hope to publish a book called Petty Hatreds at some point with drifts, settings and alternate rules (for using chargen and then a more "traditional" system; for groups of two or three players; for spending currency on scene framing authority, and so on, with the GM putting these back into the system through external adveristy supported by these GM chips). So, I'll badger you when I get on to that for any help you can give.
:-)
Nonsense on cards (sort of like a situation generator) is a cool idea (maybe I should get one of these Oracles...). As the GM has no chips when I have a group that probably needs a "GM-ly" figure to show the way I play a character and stir it up that way.
Subject Field
Submitted by Rich Stokes on Tue, 15/01/2008 - 13:16.
I guess my playing preference is that I'm cool with players screwing things for each other as it's character-vs-character, not any socially awkward player-vs-player dynamic going on.
That's exactly it!
Yeah, how do you put across that it's Character's getting antagonistic and making
"Life" harder for each other that makes the "Game" more interesting for the Players?
Most people (all right, probably fewer these days actually) are used to a very Players vs GM stance and find it hard to break out of. So getting them to cross that line and create adversity for each other is the hard bit, I guess.
I'm not sure it needs mechanics per-se, just a strong emphasis in the text. I said it a couple of times at the start of the game "You guys are going to be at each other's throats. The more you guys push that, the better the game's going to work." and I guess that was all it took.
Other thoughts:
* The game was really fucking filthy.
* Having a girl playing really helped. I think a lot of male players assume that when there's a female player present, they need to be more polite, not make as many crude jokes/comments and generally raise the level of decorum above what it usually would be. Which is total and utter bollocks in my experience, because girls tend to be, if anything, filthier than the blokes. So having Cath playing probably brought the tone down even further than it might have otherwise been (given that you have a bunch of guys pretending to be a gay disco group, it was pretty low already, y'dig?).
* Two chips per person is definitely the way to go. Explaining to players that if they run out of chips, all they have to do is force a conflict with another player so that they have to be pushed a chip and then having two chips per player is a great way to stir things up! I noticed you do this at Gaelcon, it's ace.
* I had a bunch of likely events lined up and made them clear to the players. You're pretty much going to have to record a demo at some point, you're obviously going to be playing a concert at the YMCA etc etc.
* The thing with the cards, yeah, I thought it would force those conflicting nonsenses without being carved in stone. Also, people really liked getting them at random and having to deal with them. A more generic version would be really cool, but I fear it's a lot of work. Getting specific ones is really easy (if the characters are running a shop to impress their parents, here's a set of nonsense...). Maybe this is a good way to write up scenarios, like a formal structure for situation creation?
For me...
Submitted by Gregor Hutton on Wed, 16/01/2008 - 17:15.
For me the other cool thing about the inter-relation between the characters is that they are Best Friends -- these are people who know each other intimately well. These are not random, chance characters who have just met each other. They have hatreds and inter-connections with each other at a very deep level. Nonsense has festered between them over a long time, equally they have bonds of support too. They shouldn't just walk away from their Best Friends over a slight or a disagreement.
I really dig this setting for it, and I'm not surprised it was outrageously funny and filthy. I hope for a similar outcome at Conception.
My name is Ray, and I'm a Cop.
Submitted by Richard Lacy on Thu, 17/01/2008 - 11:15.
My name is Ray and I'm A Cop.
Hey! That was me!
If I have any issues with the actual mechanics of the game, it's that there isn't any reward for getting what you want. There's nonsense, which is presented as a neat, quirky thing at the start of the rulebook but is actually the thing which drives most of the actual play. But there's not reward for following your Nonsense or penalty for contradicting it. I'm not sure how you'd implement that though, but I dunno, for something so important it doesn't really have any rules.
This might be difficult to grok for new players, but getting what nonsense you want should be its own reward. A mechanical reward would only cheapen things I think (like, its just a means to an end then, like, "damn I need to get some nonsense done so I can get the reward").
By parallel, a new DnD player might go "Yeah, but why do I want to level up? You're just gonna increase the level of the monsters. It makes no difference!".
The reward is things being more interesting and fun. Making the nonsense random and set in stone makes it a challenge too (I guess there's a danger that someone might not jive with all the nonsense they are given, but giving them three to choose from alleviates this).
All in all: An excellent session of an excellent game. To be fair, it's not hard to get the guys at Portsmouth at each other's throats and that definitely helped.
Yeah, we're lovely like that. Hehe. With strangers it may be more difficult, but just do the same emphasis that you did with us: "You are best friends, but you are at each other's throats. And character versus character is not the same as player versus player".
Forcing the players to utter out loud "I hate 'character x' because she is tougher than me" is really good by the way.
Of course, the starting set up works so well because you have to do something difficult together. Hence you are close proximity to each other trying to succeed personally as well as a whole. You do need some factor bringing the PCs together just so they can be in the same situations to have conflicts with each other.
What also helps about the starting set up is that it feels kinda inevitable. Of course we're gonna do the demo, and play at the YMCA and be world famous (duh, its already happened. And NPCs are a pushover). So although we had to do it, as a player I didn't have to spend much effort thinking about how to get it done, leaving more brain-space available for conflict with other PCs.
Some points about the game, all minor:
I'd have each player utter a stat before moving on to the next stat, eg. so everyone says who they hate because they're pretty before moving on. Get everyone involved at once.
Regarding the tactics of the game, could we have space on the character sheet to show who hates us for each stat? That way its easier to work out what conflicts will get chips pushed towards you.
I thought we weren't all that good at framing conflicts. It's mechanically important who frames them (because they set the stat), but going from the organic "everyone chips in" free narration of normal play to explicitly setting a conflict just wasn't done. Conflict setting was also just organic and freeform. Maybe explicitly reward the player who says "conflict!" with the privilege of setting the stat and stakes, in a "Snap!" kinda way.
That may be too jarring, and it wasn't a big problem in a friendly game (I just asked the player involved "So what stat you using for that?"). But it might be an issue if people are honest-to-goodness competing to get their nonsense done.
Cheers for a good game! To both of you!
Rich, Some really
Submitted by Rich Stokes on Thu, 17/01/2008 - 12:08.
Rich,
Some really interesting points there.
The thing about rewards is very valid, I'm just concious of the fact that a lot of players really do have a (often subconscious) taboo against fucking over the other player's characters. They need encouragement to make that leap from "I'm spoiling Rich, the player's fun" to "I'm spoiling Ray, the character's fun and making the game more fun for Rich the player"
Good call about the character sheet. Having the name of the person who hates you for each one would be useful.
Yes, conflict framing wasn't very tight. As you say, the game didn't really suffer for it but I'll need to keep an eye on it. I was (hopefully) keeping on top of it, but I thought it was usually pretty obvious who was using what after the first few minutes. That might not work so well with other groups.
Glad you had fun, thanks for the feedback!
Character Sheet
Submitted by Gregor Hutton on Thu, 17/01/2008 - 12:43.
Yes! I'll do something on the character sheet before the end of the week. Great idea.
Initial feedback from Malcolm when he playtested it at ORC for me was that players bristled at not setting their own character's stats. There are a few points in the game that are like that, where they're at odds with convention I guess.
Thanks for the feedback and hope Conception goes superwell.