So, literally within a day of requesting the playtest doc, the Pompey crew have returned an awesome actual play/playtest report of Six Bullets. I doff my hats to you all. I owe you a game.
The actual play report and playtest feedback itself can be found at UKRPG at the link above, but for my own future reference, I'll post my responses to the questions here as well. I'm interested in everyone's take on the comments below, not just those who played, so please post away!
Righty ho then, on with the game itself. Well, it sounds that after a shaky start, the game got good. But was that just as a result of the story, or did the game itself support that? One thing I was really worried about the manuscript was whether it communicated how the game was supposed to play, running backwards and all. It sounds like, epilogue aside, it did. Throwing each other little throwaway hooks to latch onto later is great, and exactly what we do when we play - did you pick that up from the text? If not, I'll need to make more of it. Now, onto the problems and questions!
The issue boiled down to when the Epilogue and Chapter Six started and finished (and what dice were available)... End of... well, end of the Epilogue or end of Chapter Six? Yes, the answer to that simple question burned an hour or so of game time.
You're not the first group to stumble here, so I think it might need some work. The epilogue starts in media res, without any explanation about what's going on. It ends when the credits roll. Metagame-wise (and mechanics-wise, as written), the epilogue is part of chapter six - it's the end of chapter six - but I separate it off to make the game start with a bang. When the credits roll you start chapter six, but chapter six ends at the point the epilogue begun.
Mechanics-wise, do you think it'd work better if there was a separate scene pool for the epilogue and chapter six, rather than have them share a pool?
"At the start of a chapter, the chapter antagonist dishes out roles and scene dice that can and should be used to play these secondary characters. You do not – and should not – have to wait for the chapter antagonist to dole out a character for you to play. If you have an idea for a character that fits in with the rest of the scene, grab some dice from the scene posse and bring them into play." Does this mean that I can physically reach across the table and take dice out of the hand of the spotlight Antagonist's player?)
There's a bit of ambiguity there, really. The intent is that the other players should feel free to grab dice when they want to get involved, but the text doesn't say where from. It seems a tad unfair that it should be from the antagonist's own pool - it should really be from the scene pool, which is made up of any dice the antagonist doesn't dish out at the start of the chapter.
The text was, to us, confusing here. It advocates that two players just step up to the plate prior to the Epilogue and through play we'll discover which of them is the Protagonist. Now the Protagonist gets 6 dice plus at most 6 Vengeance dice per scene, and the Antagonist gets 7 dice. So in the Epilogue, when the roles have yet to be decided, how many dice does each player get? The character sheet from the website also has (6 Vengeance Dice) noted next to the Epilogue portion of the Protagonists character sheet: now how can the Protagonist spend Vengeance dice when we don't know who the Protagonist is? In the end we just gave each player 7 dice in the Epilogue, with the Vengeance dice being assigned to the Sheriff after it rolled out that he was the Protagonist.
They should really get 7 dice each, as neither is the protagonist at this point. The way you handled it sounds right.
And if we're meant to just discover the roles through freeform play (sans dice), then why not simply allow folks to choose to play the Protagonist since that's what happens anyway if you freeform it? (Mick ended up playing the Protagonist, when he really wanted to be an Antagonist.)
This is the "going in blind" method I mention in the text - just sitting down and starting play, and letting the roles emerge naturally. You're the first group to try it like that, so good work. Whenever we've played we decide upfront who is playing who. Sounds like you'd have been more comfortable doing it that way, so maybe I'll tweak the text to put the emphasis the other way round.
Revelation Dice. Nope, not a single one was taken. The choice between 'take a Spare Die' or 'take a Revelation Die' always went with the Spare Die option. The Spare Die provides mechanical advantage in conflicts, whereas the Revelation Die just seemed (or seems) to provide a means of doing what we were already doing. Maybe you are not meant to reveal the story through organic play, but can only do so via the Revelation Dice mechanics? But that seems... off. The comment was that the Revelation Dice mechanic punishes cool story contributions.
That's interesting, actually. Did you use the revelation map to keep track of revelations and the story as it unfolded? In theory, the revelation dice let you add stuff to that, so you can narrate after a conflict "aha! but she was your daughter all along" or something like that. It's not meant for every detail, but it's there for the big reveals. It sounds like you did that naturally through play, rather than overtly adding them to the map. Do you think using rev dice and the map would have stymied the story?
The backwards structure also took some getting used to. Once we were over the hump of the final Chapter (Six), we got into the swing of it, narrating in details of characters that could be used in earlier scenes, and referring back obliquely to events in history that were yet to happen in game time. Great! But man, that first scene was almost a killer... the comment made at the table was that 6B4V is not a pickup game because of this structure. Proactive players are mandatory for this game, and I wonder what it would game like at cons where you don't know who is going to sit down at the table: a table full of reactive players might well die a death.
I've underlined your comment because I agree wholeheartedly, albeit with a slight caveat. One of our failed playtests fell down because the protagonist was reactive rather than proactive, which really doesn't work. I think you can get away with one or two of the antagonists being reactive, so long as the protagonist is proactive.
As to the comment about the backwards structure - it's quite a headfuck, I'll agree. But it sounds like you got it, and really embraced it. Is there anything that could make it easier to "get"? Did the text give you enough of an idea about what the game should look like in play?
The game also has a distributed GM structure, with each Antagonist responsible for framing their own Chapter and providing opposition to the Protagonist. This worked for us, we all liked doing it. Mick, as the Protagonist, had to play the Protagonist the whole way through the game, which while done with aplomb, was not as cool - we thought - as being able to play an Antagonist with their very own death Chapter, and then to be able to play a whole assortment of NPCs. I had great fun playing the bollock-stabbed Dewey and rotten-mouthed old Finnegan, and the other Antagonists likewise.
Now that's also interesting to hear - it's normally the opposite way round when we've played. People have loved playing the protagonist, but less so the antagonists. And it's great that you all enjoyed playing the NPCs - I wasn't sure people would go for that as an option. My players have tended not to, and just to sit back for the most part. I wonder what could be done to make the protagonist's role more appealing?
"What Does Killing This Antagonist Cost The Protagonist". In our opinion, this should be written in big red letters in the game text, because we felt it was the central theme that underpinned all conflicts. That the Antagonist will be killed - see my other comment futher below about this - is never in question, so having the Protagonist really having to Pay Mightily to see through their Vengeance seems golden.
Absolutely. And it's not just about screwing over the protagonist and make him make hard choices (which you seemed to relish doing in chapter one - did you do this elsewhere too?), it's about trying to paint him as the bad guy. It's possible to come to the end and look back and think "shit, he was just a nasty, cold-blooded killer." This happened in one of our games, when it turned out the protagonist was some sort of smuggler and bootlegger who was stiffing over the townsfolk. The antagonists were just bringing him to justice!
Question: perhaps we missed this in the text, but it wasn't clear if loaded attributes could be reused in a later conflict in the same Chapter if they had already been used previously (in the same Chapter)
Yes they can. Once an attribute is loaded you can use it as much as you like, so long as you're not stretching the narrative to do so.
The number of dice provided to each Antagonist seems really low. (7) It seems like there will be only one or at most two conflicts per Chapter because of the paucity of dice. Is this intentional? The comment was made that 6B4V couldn't be a con game because you'll never stretch it out to last four hours. Most of our chapters were single conflicts, and we're not of a mindset to 'roleplay' interminably about crap that isn't meaty and dramatic, so we breezed through chapters, firing out what we thought was good story and having a blast roleplaying, but we were all done in under three hours - and that was with an hour or so pissing around about the Epilogue.
I'm still fumbling about trying to get the right number of dice for each chapter (or maybe it should be for each scene?). I'm trying to weigh up giving the antagonists enough dice to do stuff, without making it so that they can dogpile the protagonist and leave him with no dice to fight back with. Maybe I'll try upping it, or force the antagonist to split his dice up more evenly between scene dice, npcs and his own pool.
Time-wise, I've had the game last 4 hours or so, but I've also had it last no time at all! There doesn't seem to be a standard time so far. Maybe refreshing dice each scene rather than each chapter would encourage you to delve into the chapters a bit longer, or don't you think that's necessary?
I - personally - also wonder why each and every Antagonist has to die. The game would play out perhaps not better, but differently, if the option to humiliate, degrade, mutilate, or even forgive each Antagonist was an option. Modelling this mechanically would be nice, with the option not to kill the Antagonist only an option if no Vengeance dice are rolled: if you roll Vengeance dice then blam, brains must be flying out the backs of heads. (Maybe the text does say this, which is cool, but I can't see where.)
They don't, or at least, they don't always. In at least one of the games I've played the antagonist was the wife of the protagonist, and she left the story by being given a choice to leave or die. She left. In the same game, most of the antagonists died off screen, after we'd faded to black. I'll make that more explict. I think so long as they leave the story in a final manner, that's good.
I do like your suggestion of vengeance dice though - that could work nicely. The text says that: "if a vengeance dice has been rolled as part of the conflict, then the narration of the outcome must include violence, pain, injury or death in some capacity, to someone in the scene." I'm sure that could be expanded upon to include your suggestion too.
About half the group disliked the default Western setting. Feels like a bit of a snarky comment, 'cos it's Kenricks game and he can damn well choose whatever genre he wants. 6B4V does lend itself to playing in any time though, so a Point Blank setting is totally doable.
It's a revenge movie, but not necessarily a Western revenge movie. The game is presented like that for consistency and to match the artwork - I'm planning on putting a few one page ideas for different settings at the back. I think we've played it as a 60s gangster movie, a Blade Runner-esque cyberpunk movie and a 3 Musketeers type epic, which ended (or begun) with a swordfight with the Pope. I'm sure it'd work brilliantly as a Kurosawa-esque Japanese flick too.
Anyway - cheers very much for playing! Hopefully you'll be up for playing it again sometime!
Ok, for the sake of feedback
Submitted by Andrew Kenrick on Mon, 22/12/2008 - 15:41.
Ok, for the sake of feedback on the specific design issues here, I'm going to distil the thread down into some questions. This is partly to clarify my own train of thought, and partly to see what other people think.
1. Epilogue - do you think it serves an important purpose on its own, or should it be rolled into chapter six? Do you think it should be mechanically distinct, scene dice-wise?
2. What is the best way to help people "get" the backwards narration aspect?
3. Scene dice - should scene dice refresh every scene, or be kept as one set per chapter?