GASP Games Day Playtest Campaign

The feedback from the April game really encouraged me. On the question of "What did you like most?" two players talked about the way that the rules focused them on unique local features. And on the question of "What did you like least?" Giuli started talking about the logistics of writing things on the map. I've looked forward for a long time to the day when the answer to that question would focus on something that mundane.

Not that we didn't find some problems. With this version, I didn't have any fate points in play at the beginning of the game at all. Shifts on a successful roll would generate fate points for the place, which you could then get out to players via compels. Unfortunately, without fate points to use for compels, it looks like it made things a little too easy.

Framing the goal-setting part as a round of scenes seemed to help, but I thought of a way to improve that further. Places start with a number of fate points equal to the place's rating (so, always at least one for Average). You set a scene at the place where you go about your normal routine (so, alleviating the pressure of having to come up with something clever on the spot). The Spirit of the Place then uses that fate point to make a compel (integrating the first compel into the fluency progression) to make an attack. Now, players have a prompt for what kind of goal they want to pursue. A ferocious auroch tried to attack them? Maybe they want to set the goal, "Slay the auroch!" or "Calm the auroch." Did the bridge snap as they tried to cross it? Maybe now they have a goal of, "Build a new, better bridge." (So now, the players have a prompt to work with when they come up with a goal, rather than have to come up with something on the spot.)

I've used two measures in previous games to set the difficulty for a goal: set it as one higher than the rating of the direction you want to improve, or set it as one higher than the place's rating. Both often gave us goals that we could accomplish too easily, particularly in the first game. I think I have a better idea.

Goals start as Average, but you can use compels to complicate them. When you do that, the rating goes up by one, which increases the goal you have to meet for each roll, and the number of times you have to do it. When you complete the goal, it only changes the place if it has a higher rating than the place's highest rating. That gives players more of a reason to have competing ideas of how to improve places. Let's say I want to increase our family's Brewers from Average to Fair. To do that, we need two places with Fair Brewers. If we have a place with Great Herders and Average Brewers, then I don't need a Fair goal to improve our Brewers there, I need a Superb one. And if you want to improve our Herders there still more, then you'll just make it even more difficult for me to improve our Brewers. That might make it even harder for me.

Which brings me to another issue we ran into. The Fathers in the Land of the Three Rivers pull their trappings and imagery from the Roman Catholic Church, though their actual beliefs look more like animism (aside: yes, women can become Fathers, and yes, they still call them Fathers). Because of this, they recognize the Cardinals as their spiritual leaders. The birds, not anyone across the ocean. So, when the elder went up the Falcons' Nest (the Cathedral of Learning, now inhabited by peregrine falcons) and found a red feather, he became convinced that the falcons had killed one of their Cardinals. With his family divided between the Falcon and Panther clans, he saw this as a dire portent that the Falcon clan had attacked the sacred birds. He wanted to lure a panther into the tower to rout the falcons, in order to restore balance between them. My young Father found out about this, and thought it would lead to war between the clans. I wanted to do more than just block his pursuit of the goal—I wanted to stop him for good. On the spot, we came up with the idea that whoever completes the goal (gets the last success) can determine how it comes about. In this case, his goal of "Bring a panther to the tower" ended with my character chased into the crumbling ruins of a gothic cathedral, running up the collapsing staircases, until I came to a broken wall and leapt out of the way as the panther pounced, so that it went straight out the window and fell to its death some twenty storeys below (made more poignant by the fact that I, like the elder, belonged to the Panther clan, so this counted as murder for me). The Spirit of the Place added that I found a cardinal lost in the ruins with a broken wing. The falcons hadn't attacked it—they'd tried to help it. I came out of the tower, cupping the cardinal in my hands.

It worked out really well for this particular case, but do you think this rule works well in the more general case? Could we improve the options for how one character might try to completely stop another's goal? Maybe instead of trying to fulfill the goal, I have to inflict consequences on the other player to the point where he has to give it up?