Actual Play: Lady Blackbird Session 1

My F2F group's current GM was unprepared today, so one of the backup GMs stepped up with one of his "random, experimental, rules-light, crazy narrative games." I'm generally not fond of these types of games, but I try to be a good sport because it's not like my back-up campaign is prepared right now. In this case, I'm glad I did.

We played Lady Blackbird, a fairly straightforward rules light game with pregenerated characters in a prepared adventure. It's also free, so you can click on that link and read it yourself.

Mechanics

Each PC has several Traits, and each Trait has several Tags associated it. Whenever a PC attempts something, the player chooses an applicable Trait (if possible) and any applicable Tags from that trait, and then rolls 1d6 + 1d6 per Trait or Tag. Each PC also starts with a pool of 7d6, which can be applied to any roll, but are lost when used successfully. Each die of 4+ counts as success, and 2-5 successes are required depending on the GM's assessment of the difficulty.

This is no by no means a sophisticated or complicated system, but it is a straightforward system and it seemed to work reasonably well. There aren't any modifiers as such, but the GM can increase or decrease the difficulty depending on what the players are doing, so that wasn't a problem (unlike some of these no-modifier indie games). One twist that our GM threw at us, that I don't think is in the rules but should be, was the idea that we could have separate targets depending on how we approached a task: we might need 5 successes to win a firefight without any damage if we took cover, but we'd only need 4 to win if we fought recklessly but we'd automatically take damage unless we had at least 7 successes. That worked out really well in play, and let us tailor our approaches depending on how likely we thought we were to succeed in a task and how much we needed to succeed.

Lady Blackbird also has a simple experience system: each PC has 3+ goals, and they get an experience point whenever they do something related to their goals. 5 experience points granted a raise, which could be used to buy a new Trait or Tag. Again, this was simple but worked well in play: the goals were clear and had general applicability, so I could easy hit my goal of "Make Plans and Be Commanding" and the guy playing the mechanic could "Spout Amusing Technobabble."

The system isn't without weaknesses. Like all Trait based games, some Traits are just better than others: it's usually better to have the trait Batman than the trait Janitor. The Traits on the pregenerated characters were generally equivalent and widely but not always applicable, but I did find myself using "Ex-Imperial Soldier" a whole lot more than any of the others. A lot of that had to do with the scenario: we started as prisoners on an Imperial Cruiser, so my character's experience with the Imperial Military was more useful than his abilities as a Smuggler. Next session, I expect being a Smuggler will be a lot more important.

What Happened

We only had four players, so after the GM quickly explained the game and passed out the characters, we talked briefly about who wanted to play what, made some decisions, and got started. I was the dashing smuggler captain Cyrus Vance; everyone else was represented but the mechanic and petty sorcerer Kale.

The scenario starts with the PCs captured and tossed in an Imperial Cruiser's brig. We quickly broke up, beating up the Imperial Marines, stealing their uniforms, and trying to bluff our way out. This failed miserably - we beat up a bunch of marines, but the ship went to a Yellow Alert and we were ambushed trying to leave the brig area. Fortunately, our goblin shapeshifter snuck through the vents and flanked the Imperials, so we managed to break out and hide in some unoccupied crew quarters.

We had a vague long-term plan of using my character's Forgery ability to create some release orders for ourselves and our ship, and then just leave. This was highly complicated by the Yellow Alert, so we realized we needed to calm the ship down. Realizing that Lady Blackbird could create illusions, we hatched a plan to make it look like we had fled into a life raft, which our engineer would rig to launch and then explode. He'd jump off the back of the raft, land on the hull of the Imperial Cruiser, and get retrieved by the rest of us. Thanks to some improbably lucky die rolls, high player skill at Bullshit GM, and similar nonsense, our crazy plan succeeded. We fast talked the Imperial investigators and soon the ship moved off yellow alert.

The next stage our plan was to get our ship refueled, and then we'd need to figure a way to get on it and get permission to leave. We didn't have a plan for the last two parts, but good plans are like jazz and have lots of improvisation, so we started forging the orders to get the parts done that we could get done. About this point, the sabotage attempts that the goblin mechanic had scheduled to go off in another two hours (when we planned to leave the ship) started going off two hours early. Our dice were not rolling as well as they had.

We quickly hatched a plan to bluff our way onto our ship as a bomb detection team, searching the ship under the Imperial XO's orders after he'd heard there was a bomb on our ship. This worked, but then the Imperial XO came down to find out what the hell was going on, accompanied by a couple dozen clockwork soldiers. The sorceress proceeded to use all her electrical sorcery powers to blow stuff up, and I teleported myself and the sorceress' crazy pit-fighter Imperial-hating bodyguard into the hangar control room, at which point violence ensued. We got through a couple more minor complications, took some damage to our ship, and escaped, leaving the Imperial Cruiser limping in our wake.

Summing Up

I've tried various rules light narrativist and semi-narrativist games, from Spirit of the Century to Apocalypse World to Donjon. I'm not generally fond of them: the rules aren't so much "light" as "incomplete", the mechanics are often horrible, and I'm usually not fond of the playstyle. Surprisingly, Lady Blackbird actually worked very well for me. Admittedly, the rules are so simple as to be nearly incomplete, but on the other the hand, they are very straightforward and don't have any special cases. I don't think the game would work nearly as well if we had to create characters, but for a fixed scenario with pregenerated characters, it was fun and relaxing. That's good enough.

Actual Play: Apocalypse World The Cirque Comes to the Depot

As my face to face group's unhappy encounter with Dungeon World, we bounced around some ideas for what to try next. We eventually decided to try Apocalypse World (AW). There are some good ideas in Dungeon World (DW), but they seem to be shackled somewhat by the constraints of the designer's view of dungeon fantasy. We were hoping that playing the parent system in the setting it was designed, unencumbered by those restraints, would be a less frustrating experience.

Character Creation

We started the traditional way, by tossing printouts of all the character templates on the table and having a rambling discussion of what they were. On the first pass, no one had a strong preference for any of them, though Will (the GM) did note that the Chopper (biker gang leader) could have a gang that wasn't a bunch of crazy savages, and that led to a riff on the "Shaolin Biker Gang" who used Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as a holy book. There was more hesitation, with everyone expressing a range of preferences but no solid choice.

Finally, Rachel committed to a Driver (wheel-man or Mad Max kind of character) based loosely on Jason Stratham in the Transporter movies. Since she was effectively including vehicles, I decided to go ahead and grab the Chopper and put the Shaolin biker gang into action. Ted looked at the Brain (mad psychic) and discarded it as too weird, preferring the psi-scientist of the SavvyHead instead. Derick committed to the Brain, and Joel decided to be the cult leader Hocus template. We made our choices off the templates, established our history with each other, and started discussing our settlement.

The Depot, the Dome, and the Stand

We all need a fortified town to live in, along with some themes. Two things had definitely come out of character creation: many of the characters were technology dependent, and many of the characters were crazy. So we created the settlement with that in mind.

We started with something that could provide mechanical services, like a municipal bus depot. With many of the vehicles gone, survivors could have repurposed the office space as living quarters, so that made sense to everyone. Will wanted a reason for all the psychic powers, and originally proposed the Dome as a buried hospital with a geodesic dome on top, but while we kept the mysterious buried dome, we named the hospital the Stand (from "St. Andrews") and noted that it once had an extensive psychiatric research wing. At Derick's suggested, the leaders of the settlement were a pair of dissimilar twins ("like Danny Devito and Arnold in Twins") collectively known as the Dispatchers, while law enforcement was provided by Chaplain Doom.

With the bones of the settlement established, we sat down to play.

Play of the Game

We started off slow, doing our own random things.The biker gang was cruising around time "in a high speed meditation exercise", Rachel's driver was working with Ted's mechanic to repair the 8-Track player in her van, and Derick's and Joel's characters were spying on people. None of this was particularly conducive to stuff happening.

 The first challenge that developed was a rogue Hocus type who trying to take control of Joel's cult. Since Ted and Derick were members of the cult, the three of them went off to deal with him. That turned out to be pretty inconclusive, with no one willing to escalate to violence or the threat of violence (in all fairness, only my character is particularly good at violence)  Their attempts at persuasion failed, and they eventually wandered off to regroup and plan.

In the meantime, the biker gang came back to the Depot with the report of vehicles on the horizon. After some discussion, everyone met up and headed out to meet the new and interesting thing. The vehicles turned out to be an armed tractor-trailer rig, carrying the "Cirque". There was a meet and greet, and the Cirque leaders convinced everyone to let them into town. We did figure out that they were a bunch of wandering thieves, and were going to try to rob the town blind. Since we lacked proof of any kind (beyond weird psychic impressions), we couldn't figure a reason to stop them and didn't particularly want to risk violence.

Back in town, Joel's cult had been acting up while unsupervised. Everyone interacted for a bit, and my character managed to convince Chaplain Doom to make him responsible for Joel's cult. (My intent had been to forcibly impress two of the cultists into the gang, but that I rolled a little too well.) About this time, Ted started his own thread, trying to find out more about the Cirque. I tuned out, but I understand it went well: Ted's character found out some stuff, got an evening with a prostitute, and learned they had some kind of creepy plan for him.

Meanwhile, Rachel planned to head out to the nearby hermitage to do some trading. I decided to go with her, and made Joel and his cultists jog the way over there in order to exhaust them and diminish the chances for mischief. There were some shenanigans on the way, but when we got there, the little settlement had been raided by cannibals. We did some more wacky stuff, including summoning Ted's character through the psychic maelstrom, and made a plan to track the raiders back to their base on the ridgeline. That's where we ended.

So How Does It Work?

Everyone enjoyed AW a lot more than DW. I think that AW is mechanically tighter than DW, with 5 more or less useful stats instead of the slightly flabby 6 stats of DW. It's a small thing, but it made a difference. In DW, needing to make Dex a dump stat (because you have to have a dump stat) was very painful, since you roll Dex a lot to avoid taking damage - but every other choice was worse. In AW, my dump stat was Weird, the stat for dealing with the psychic maelstrom. Having a low Weird cut off some of my options, but it wasn't mandatory stuff like avoiding damage. It was optional stuff like gaining special insight. Derick, Joel, and Ted had that stuff covered in spades.

The flow of AW was easier. DW is about dungeon crawls, and we all had certain expectations of what was going on. In AW, we were expecting combat to dangerous, and we basically didn't get involved in combat at all. Well, my character did, on one or two occasions, but I also had the backing of a 15 strong gang of armored bikers.

One other difference between DW and AW is experience. In DW, you get experience every time you fail a roll. In AW, you get experience every time you roll for something attached to either of two of your attributes. Since you get some choice of the attributes you get experience for, you tend to pick stuff that you're going to roll a lot. It changed the dynamic, since there wasn't a need to roll for stuff that was likely to fail in order to maybe get experience. There were a couple of times when I said, "hey, I could roll for that, but the issue is mostly settled and I wouldn't get experience for it," so I didn't go anything. It meant I was a little more detached from the game, but it also meant that play went faster.

What Next?

Since everyone had fun, we agreed to play again. We may not play for another two weeks because of Mother's Day, but we'll definitely play AW again.

Actual Play: Dungeon World Siege of Citadel

Actual Play: Dungeon World

My face to face group had decided to try Dungeon World. I'm writing something of an Actual Play and a playtest review from my experiences in the first two session. I'm not too positive about it thus far, and that negativity will probably creep into this write-up.

What Is It

Dungeon World is a narrativist, rules-vague, fantasy role-playing game with old-school trappings. By narrativist, I mean it is explicitly focused on creating a story, and uses a loose set of definitions of time, space,  and action in order to focus on the drama of the action instead of worrying about game balance or an attempt to simulate reality. By old school trappings, I mean it uses the most traditional of D&D roles, such as woodsland ranger and bookish wizard, and the traditional D&D races: dwarf, elf, halfling, and human. By rules-vague, I mean that it's a big book, with lots of specific rules that are vaguely worded and unclear.

One of the big concepts in Dungeon World is that the GM doesn't roll any dice and only reacts to character actions. I haven't really read the GM section of the book, so I'm not really sure how this works. As little as I understand it, whenever a PC has a failure or a partial failure on action, the GM selects from a list of moves that ratchet up the danger for the PCs. Since the basic mechanic is 2d6 plus a modifier of -1 to 3 and a full success only occurs on a 10 or more, the GM generally has lots of opportunity to select a move to worsen the situation. 

Another big concept is there are very few situational modifiers. I think this is a nod towards rules-light gaming, but it has the weird effect that there's no such thing as a simple task: scrambling up a 6' fence while running from dogs is as likely or unlikely to succeed as scrambling up a vertical 30' wall while running from demons. Instead of variability, there's supposed to be variable risk/reward: getting bit by a few dogs is less worse than getting bit by a bunch of demons.

The Story Thus Far

We started with three PCs: Thaddeus, a human paladin (of no particular god, because while paladins have to be Lawful and Good, they don't apparently have to worship anyone, as far we could tell, because the rules are vague); Robin, a halfling rogue; and Hawthorn, a human cultist cleric of Sucellus, the god of secrets. We were joined in the second session by Florian, a human spoony bard because all bards in Dungeon World are spoony.

The PCs were at a festival on the island of Citadel, hanging out in a temple at midnight, when something happened outside. Going out to explore, they were attacked by ghouls (turned after a lot of failures) and Sucellus instructed Hawthorn to signal the fleet blockading the island off-shore. The PCs soon discovered that the island had shifted in time about 4 weeks and been taken over by powerful, evil elementals. They worked their way down to lighthouse, got beat up by said elementals, and used the signal light to send semaphore messages to the fleet. The fleet requested the PCs get a magic mirror from the Sterling house, which would allow faster communication.

Robin had experience with the Sterlings, having helped their daughter elope some years in the past (and looting the place in the confusion). The PCs snuck up the house, broke in, fought another thief, and tried to get into the Sterlings' magically warded treasure chamber. After repeated failures, they attracted the attention of the evil elementals, who started knocking the house down and encouraged the PCs to just tunnel through the walls. The PCs broke into the vault, stole the mirror and some coin, and then fled through some hidden tunnels into the hills.

Eventually they used the magic mirror to conflict the fleet, and got a little more information: the festival had been intended to bind a powerful elemental spirit to the island's defense, and apparently had been reversed. More information was probably located in the magic academies' vaults beneath the hill. The PCs then proceeded to explore the halls, trying to find something more. At the end of the session, the PCs had found some magic loot and possibly one of the vaults, but nothing definite.

What Do I Like So Far

Uh... the nice thing about narrativist games is that time and space are vague. You can have a combat that last for "a couple of minutes" and is resolved with only a few die rolls. That vagueness lets PCs experiment more and do more cool things: climbing up a wall and jumping onto the neck of a low-flying dragon is a perfectly reasonable thing when the game is freed from the bounds of yards and rounds and seconds and maneuvers (while in GURPS, that kind of action takes 2 minutes of game-time to resolve in a combat that's over in 7 game seconds, so no one does it).

The "indifferent success" mechanic is interested, and it'd be really great if it were applied consistently and well. For instance, a PC throw a big party, and picks all 3 of the following options on a 10+ and 1 of them on a 7+: befriends a useful NPC, or hears rumors of an opportunity, or gains useful information, or doesn't get into special trouble of some kind. That's an interesting set of choices.

What Don't I Like So Far

A lot of the specifics of the indifferent success mechanics don't mesh well together. The standard melee combat action damages both the PC and the monster on an indifferent success, so it isn't unreasonable for a PC to accumulate 3d6 damage in the course of a single combat. Magical healing either can't be repeated or attracts attention on an indifferent success, and only heals 1d8 in either case (and definitely attracts monsters on failure). So using magical healing after a fight has a very high chance of bringing another round of monsters for more damage before it actually heals the damage from the previous encounter. That's very discouraging. If combat were less deadly, or healing more reliable or more powerful, it'd be tolerable. But as it is, our party's cleric and paladin don't want to try healing unless we absolutely have to. The risk is too high for the minimal reward.

I also don't like the general vagueness of the rules. The rule book runs 360 pages plus appendices, and at that point I don't think it's crazy that we shouldn't be having a debate as to whether paladins need to have gods or not. I'm not saying that you can't get a lot of rules debates (or constant failure, or worthless healing) out of Moldvay Basic D&D, but Moldvay is 64 pages. If you're going to vague, at least be concise.

We're still moving up the learning curve, and maybe I'l like the game in a few more sessions. Our second session was mostly better than our first, at least. But thus far, Dungeon World seems like a good concept poorly executed.