Recent games AP reports

It Was a Mutual Decision (2002)

Photo of It Was a Mutual Decision, stolen from the internet

Played with Misha, Divya, and Ken. Misha and I are a real-life couple, and Ken and Divya are a real-life couple. Misha and Divya are women, Ken is a man, and I am nonbinary, though I played on Ken's team in the game.

All three, and everyone else I have talked to, were absolutely charmed by the premise of the game. It is an extremely easy sell.

The rulebook promises that the rat content will serve to soften the blow of the breakup content, and this is certainly what I observed in play. We would go from shouting and breathing hard as we hurled in-character invectives across the room, to giggling uncontrollably while figuring out how to add rats to the scene.

Authorities in play were natural and easy. Ken and I, and Misha and Divya, handed of narration without a word and without conflict. Everyone was creatively focused.

We did not put much work into establishing the social landscape around our core couple. The vast majority of scenes had only two people in them. I'd like to try harder to keep a stable cast of side characters in more games I play. I notice that I don't bring many in, or play them very assertively, in almost any game I play, with particularly notable results in my failed games of S/Lay w/Me and Cold Soldier, but also visible in Monsterhearts and the recent Zombie Cinema game.

Unfortunately I fucked up the rules pretty bad; I didn't realize that there was a strict structure to the turn, or that one side or the other got first dibs on the black rat dice. Ken swiped most or all rat dice most or all of the time, so our character quickly became extremely powerful and extremely monstrous.

We ended the session with the game incomplete. We found playing out scenes to be extremely joyful and easy, and we would linger in them without triggering conflict resolution procedures. (This was true long after we'd reached obvious conflicts -- we loved playing out toxic fights!)

I double we will have a second session for our fictional couple, because the woman character had twisted so hard so fast she became a horror villain before the breakup even started. More likely we'll play as different couple, and actually follow the rules. I know I am sure to play again. A lovely game.

Tunnels and Trolls 5th Edition (1979)

5th edition cover art

Played two sessions, first with Never, Tschesae, Sunbather, and Martin, and then with Never and Tschesae. I had never played with Sunbather before. Everyone else will be a familiar name to the readers of this blog.

The players played well, quickly grasping the tone of the game and the rules. Plenty of bold decisions and clever maneuvers.

First session I ran the dungeon in the rulebook. Second session I created my own dungeon. In general I am afraid of creating content. Luckily the game's whimsical tone, and the instruction that I should use a fictionalized version of myself as the creator of the dungeon, helped me through, and I made a small dungeon.

Prepping for this game is tricky. I'm not supposed to rely on modeling, as if I were playing a warg ame. And the book doesn't give room creation procedures like I find in B/X. Thus the dungeon is simply as challenging as I want to make it. I guess this is how videogames treat difficulty. They have no rules. They simply rely on the taste of the creator.

I'm still torn on T&T. Some parts of it are wonderful, and others are mystifying. I need more practice before I come to any definite judgements.

One observation: "character" is almost completely absent from the game. There's even less character-work than in a normal dungeoncrawler. Every player controls 2 to 4 characters at once. None of the characters can be described as particularly bold, cowardly, creative, or commanding, as a normal character would be, on the basis of their player's strategic decisions. So far actions simply emerge from the mass of characters.

Primetime Adventures 2e (2005)

This game has a lot of different covers.. here's the front of the PDF I have

Prepped for a game with Misha, Divya, and Ken.

When I asked Misha what her dream TV show was, she said she wanted to rewrite the new season of Gilmore Girls. Everybody else has watched a lot or all of Gilmore Girls; I have seen maybe two episodes, and disliked it. (I don't like how they talk.)

Naturally we can't just play "Gilmore Girls, but our way"; we should make our own show, reflecting our own interests, borrowing the theme and premise of Gilmore Girls to whatever extent we find comfortable. Or so I determined. Thus we are playing Return to Comet Cove.

When I introduced the game, I said that I was happy to be the Producer, but that any one of us would be a good fit. Misha volunteered, but decided not to be the Producer after I reminded her that she wouldn't be able to create her ideal mother-daughter combo as the/a centerpiece of the show if she were the Producer. That combo has to come from the players. Divya then volunteered. I was happy to see my play group taking interest in different responsibilities and authorities in play, and I'm excited to see how Divya does.

Here is our text summary of our characters and setting:

Me:

Sheriff Harvey "Harv" Johnson Jr
Issue: responsibility
Edge: small town cop
Connection: father, former chief Johnson Sr
Connection: ex-wife Jill
Sets: bachelor pad with Dad, front office of the police station

"Responsibility" is not quite the right term. He's torn between protecting images (of the town, of his family, of himself) and his desire not to be an asshole. What's that called?

Ken:

Kai the delinquent . Used to be a miscreant and learned many skills in that past. Threw the sheriffs son under the bus . Younger sister Bailey. Struggles with hedonism. Wants to be there for Bailey. Lives in a seedy part of town hangs out by the logging manufacturing plant.

The sheriff's son Ken mentioned is in fact my character's son.

I don't think "hedonism" is quite the right term for Kai's issue either. He's saddled with a certain responsibility, and it's difficulty for him to bear it.

Misha:

 Rebecca is a 37 year old single mom and former party who runs a hot chocolate cafe in a charming logging town. Daughter Becky (Rebecca JR) is her 16 year old loser daughter, and Jill is a 30-something history teacher at the Cedar Cove Public High School

Obviously based on the mom in Gilmore Girls. Her contact Jill is my character's ex-wife.

And the setting is Comet's Cove, a small resort town in the Smokey Mountains, in the early 2000s. The town is on a lake and surrounded by a forest. Half the town is picturesque, has a log cabin aesthetic, and caters to tourists. The other half is dominated by the logging industry.

Zombie Cinema (2006)

 

Zombie Cinema cover from the website. I think my copy looks even more boring, just a black VHS box with the name on it. Maybe it faded?

Played with Indigo and Raine, two coworkers. I had never played with either of them before, and they had never even met each other. Both play modern D&D regularly. I don't believe either of them has played any other games.

In this game, players go around in a circle framing scenes. Within scenes, they play freely until conflict arises. Then the winner of the conflict resolution procedure narrates the results.

(This combination of rules is extremely powerful. When you play well, the game is dynamic, even breathless.)

At this level of abstraction, the game closely resembles both Shock: and Primetime Adventures. I tried to take the lessons I learned from Shock:, and apply them to this game; and I will try to apply my experience from this game, to the upcoming Primetime Adventures game.

Raine was uncomfortable with the responsibility of scene-framing, and often content to play passively, making small mischief (appropriate to an 8-year-old girl, their character) but otherwise contributing little. Almost every conflict with their character involved one of the two adult characters saying "Do this!" and the child saying "No!" and running off. Since we only had 3 players, we sorely lacked drama in many scenes, as Raine's character was just not capable of providing meaningful conflict.

This is an odd sort of perfect storm between a player who is -- by their own description -- happier going along for the ride, a character who is not very interesting, thematically, and a small play group. I think this would not have been an issue in a larger group.

That said, Raine was an enthusiastic participant, offering commentary and jokes as appropriate.

Indigo played well. He began by offering a detailed tragic backstory for his character, none of which came up in play. If this bothered him, he showed no sign. I think he adapted to the unfamiliar rules very quickly.

We had one significant error in the rules: for some reason I had us reroll ties, instead of moving the zombie pawn forward. Less significantly, we didn't take the zombie's position on the board as an indicator of their diegetic threat until about halfway through the game.

By that halfway mark, we figured out how to tell if a scene was going to lead to a conflict or not, and breezed through non-conflict scenes quickly. (Of course we might have rather framed scenes that lead to conflict!)

In the end, everyone died with two or three squares to go. No chance of victory, but a lot of fun!

After the game we played "Stars and Wishes". Indigo noticed that, nearly every scene, we moved physical locations, and he said he would have been interested in a game where we were less mobile. I loved that observation. In effect, every third scene we discarded whatever geography we had built up in the prior scenes. We might have more fun if we reincorporated more details of the characters' environment. "Kept state", if you will.

I will certainly play this again. It's small enough that I can carry it around and bring it out whenever the situation presents itself.