7/10/24 actual play: no country for fantasy men

First official playtest of my fantasy heartbreaker, tentatively named Coup Étrange.

I ran the game for Patrick and Tschesae, playing a magician and a commoner respectively. Before they made their characters, I gave them the prompts:

• As the huge red sun gutters in the sky, fabulous, trivial men scheme and cavort in the monuments of dead civilizations
• Magic is misunderstood and forgotten technology

Patrick's character, Marigold, before the start of play

Tschesae's character, Karl, after the end of session

I had prepared for a third player, Adam, but his internet went out so he couldn't attend.

My session prep consisted of a relationship map, a list of forces for two groups of gangsters, and the layout of an extremely barebones dungeon, actually just a house with some treasure, a trap, and clues. Most of this wound up being unimportant for the scenario.

The relationship map was composed almost entirely out of characters from the three players' contacts, with two additions, the two groups of gangsters.

I got advice before the session started that I should pare things down as much as possible, that most one-shots are over-stuffed. I'm glad I listened.

On the basis of that consulting session, I told the players the scoring rules: 1000 points for the radium gun, intact and charged, 500 if it's been used. Patrick gets 200 points if he can humiliate his rival. Tschesae gets 200 points per surviving family member, and if any of them die, he takes a 50% penalty to XP this session. Plus everybody gets points for money and combat as usual.

I intended the scenario as non-cooperative. Players could work together but would not be required to do so. I didn't convey this expectation very well; actually I'm not sure if I remembered to say it at all. In hindsight, I should say clearly in the session advertisement whether the game is cooperative or not.

I had no particular measures taken to ensure fog of war.

Anyway, on to the session itself.

We started with Karl off for a walk in the woods near Littleburg when he stumbled across the end of a robbery on a caravan. In the caravan he saw, and grabbed, the radium gun, which I had already explicitly identified as the macguffin of the scenario. He moved to save the survivors of the caravan, who were being beaten by the robbers, but was surprised from behind by a robber with an electric whip. He ran. Contested d20 rolls under Body to simulate a chase. Karl lost, a crit failure on a 20, tripping. The leader of the robber approached, brandishing his whip, and was about to say something like "turn over the gun!" when Karl shot him. 12 on the attack roll. The gun ignores armor and deals 3d6 damage. Guy gets vaporized. Since the robber wasn't in melee range yet I didn't even roll initiative. Karl runs while the rest of the robbers leave him (failed morale check).

Turn to Marigold, at a party at the College of Intellectuals in Cancer City. He gets a note from his underworld contact telling him that this morning (or yesterday? I might have said yesterday originally, and then accidentally retconned it to this morning) had hired some thugs to steal a radium gun from a caravan, but the robbery went wrong and the gun was missing. A golden opportunity to humiliate his rival. The rival, Meatclog Jr, was actually at the party, and tried to make fun of Marigold. But Patrick's wit was too quick for me, and with the benefit of a biting remark and a high speech-craft skill he cut Meatclog down to size. Since the remark itself was kick-ass and exploited a contradiction between two of my own statements (a contradiction I hadn't noticed) I gave it a base 4/6 chance of success, with two bonus dice from the high skill. It dealt 1d3 damage in Hero Points to Meatclog, who retreated. These would regenerate with a night's rest.

Patrick thought this counted as humiliating Meatclog, whereas I thought he would have to bring Meatclog down to 0 HP to humiliate him this way. In hindsight I think Patrick was right: he did enough damage to Meatclog to force him to retreat, which should count as a victory. +200 points.

After this Marigold left the party and went to his underworld contact, Meister. This seemed like a quick enough maneuver that it wouldn't take the maneuver turn, so I decided it took essentially no time. He learned the location of the robbery. Patrick wanted to buy a Geiger counter, to track the radiation of the radium gun. This was probably the most important move of the game. Meister didn't have one (2/6 chance for an artifact dealer to have a simple device probably common in this post-atomic, post-apocalyptic world) but somebody at the College did. Then Marigold took the ski lift to Littleburg.

At this point I realized that the two halves of the session were happening asynchronously. Marigold was maneuvering in Karl's future. Whoops! No way to undo this, either, since Karl's maneuvers create the game for Marigold.

We establish that Karl is not a distinctive looking person, so it's not necessarily possible to find him by description alone. In other words, the robbers would have to see him to identify him. He, likewise, would have to see them again to identify them. But he didn't recognize them, so they're not Townies.

Karl looks for one of the robbery victims, a woman who escaped the scene of the robbery. Littleburg is small and Karl knows it well, so travel between locations is free in terms of maneuvers. He guesses that she'll go to a doctor for her wounds. [Behind the scenes, I roll a streetwise check for her (a random wounded civilian in a strange town; will she be able to find the doctor easily?) and find that she gives up looking for a doctor and heads for the ski lift to Cancer City. I don't tell anybody that though.] The doctor hasn't seen anyone so Karl heads back to his bar and hides the gun in the basement. He lies to his wife about his doings but fails his "keep cool" task check (1/6 chance, bonus die for high Presence, would be better or even automatic if he were used to violence) so she sees what's going on. I picture her as a tough prairie wife in a western, so she confronts him and he tells her everything, except for the radium gun.

Karl decides to spend the day at the bar, doing conversation checks to pick up rumors from the patrons. Soon the scene of the robbery is discovered and the whole town is abuzz. He gets 4 degrees of success on the task roll (4/6, 2 bonus dice for speechcraft, one for Presence, high base rate because a small town will happily gossip about this stuff) so he learns 4 bits of information: the robbers weren't affiliated with the gang in town, they made off with a load of spell books, and two other things I can't remember. He also looked for news on the wounded woman, who was seen getting on the ski lift to Cancer City.

[Behind the scenes, I make task checks for the robbers. They don't have any good leads or contacts in town, nor special skills, so while I don't remember how I set the odds, I can tell you they weren't good. After two maneuver checks, so at the end of the day, the robbers, frustrated, give up and go to a bar to get a drink.]

Marigold arrives at the scene of the robbery and tries to piece events together. He uses his fashion knowledge to notice that the victims of the robbery were wearing uniforms; they belonged to the artifact acquisition company owned by Adam's character. With the aid of the Geiger counter, he followed the radium gun back to town.

The bandits arrive at Karl's bar. Karl notices them, apparently before they notice him and ducks out. [I make a task check for each of the 4 bandits; 1/6. 1 succeeds.] He waits in front of the bar, hoping for somebody he knows (a cowboy who frequents the place, a friendly gangster belonging to the other gang, even just a sturdy guy with a pitchfork) to walk by, or in or out of the bar. Based on my experience loitering in front of small town bars  in the evening, I give it a 50% chance every 5 minutes. One of the bandits asks Mrs Karl where the bartender is. He fails his "stay chill" task check and freaks her out a bit. She visibly stiffens. Karl is watching through the window and notices this. (Watching through the window and watching the street? Hmmm, should have asked him to choose.) He bursts back into the bar and accuses the four strangers of robbing the caravan and killing those people. Because he's a trusted member of a paranoid and suspicious community, it's just a morale check for the townspeople (15 of them versus 4 bandits), 2/6 chance of success, bonus dice from outnumbering the bandits, Karl's speechcraft, and one other thing I can't recall. Success! The townsfolk demand the bandits leave, which they do.

Marigold arrives at the bar. Time has caught up. He announces that he's searching for a gun and pulls out his Geiger counter. Task check to see if he can follow the gun's complicated trail inside the building, and he cannot.

At this point we end play and simply discuss the resolution of the scenario without playing it out directly. Tschesae is happy to get the radium gun off Karl's hands, so Karl would somehow secretly approach Marigold to sell the gun. Marigold would pay its fair value.

I say that there are still a few loose ends to the scenario, but suggest that we're not interesting in playing all of them out to their conclusion. The two prominent loose ends are the bandits, who would come back later in the night to try and break into the bar, and Meatclog, who I said remained un-humiliated.

With that we awarded points and gave feedback. I gave Tschesae 500 points for the gun and 800 points for keeping his family safe. I forgot to give him 40 more for killing a 2 HD enemy. I think my scoring for Marigold was screwy though. He got 500 for the radium gun, plus another 500 because he could easily recharge it (supposing we didn't want to play the sequel adventure, where the characters figure out how to recharge the gun). In hindsight I should have given 500 points for the gun, doubled it for his personal interest in and use for the artifact, and then subtracted 500 points for the money he spent on it. And I should have given him 200 points for humiliating Marigold, since everybody else understood him to have done that. I will correct these rulings.

Finally the players added a sentence to each of their characters' stories. Tschesae said for Karl: I have taken advantage of a lucrative opportunity and stood my ground for what is right in this world. Patrick said for Marigold: Mr. Marigold likes guns now.

I said that if a player no longer wanted the character to say "I will do what it takes to become greater" they should add another sentence to the character's story and retire them permanently. Karl had earned enough points to level up, and rolled 10 HP, wow! so Tschesae figured he got the adventuring bug and would continue to rise in the world.

The scenario was ok. Karl's half was interesting. Marigold's half was not. It was like a mystery that was already solved.

Also Patrick didn't even consider the possibility that he wasn't playing a cooperative game until the very end, which greatly changed his play; for instance, he said he left the party scene and the big city much quicker than he would have normally because he intended to team up with Tschesae. He wasn't in the wrong here. Most of our games are cooperative. I should have told him, explicitly, that PVP was enabled and that there was no presumption of teamwork -- though of course it wasn't outlawed either. In fact he had no interest in playing a non-cooperative game. This possibility hadn't even occurred to me. Doesn't everybody else secretly yearn for PVP? I guess not.

We didn't test out many of the fiddlier pieces of the rule set. Mostly resolution came down to me thinking of a base chance of success and giving bonus or penalty dice for skills and stats. Sometimes we checked the stat directly, by rolling d20 under the stat. These things worked well enough, neither outstanding nor terrible. We'll see how we feel about them under further testing.

In sum, this was more a test of my scenario design than the system itself. I was stressed coming up with a scenario, especially such an experimental one, but I was pleased with about half the results. I'm not sure if or how I would run this scenario again in the future. My next playtest session will be more of a standard dungeon crawl.