How should you play In a Wicked Age (IaWA)?

In this week’s Playtime I’m looking at the silent partners of IaWA, the unmentioned Do’s of the game that aren’t explicit in the game rules, or tricks at the table that season the experience of play.

Game Play

Desire

Go into every scene wanting something specifically from somebody else. It’s less important to think of how you’re going to get it than it is to know what you want.

Characters are opportunities

Assume that whatever you want, no matter how big or small, is being withheld by another character. Find that person and take it.

Collective Storytelling

Everyone pitch ideas during scene framing. Once in a while, every few scenes, it’s nice to paint a collective backdrop, or even a montage, using the round-robin method.

I say “It’s night time at the gallows,” you say, “a drunk is vomiting against a wall,” he says, “two watchmen are shoving a girl down a dark alley,” she says, “in the window of a high watchtower, a man snuffs out his candle.”

Brevity

Unless you’ve got a grand plan, keep your scenes brief. The more scenes the better, at least until you build narrative momentum. The interesting scenes will organically beget conflict while the less important ones will colour, and each will be apportioned the appropriate duration.

World Building

Expectation

Colour the backdrop. You don’t need to explore every minutiae but it’s useful, for example, to highlight the tone, mood and theme of your setting before play begins. It answers important questions like “is this about betrayal?” and “do they have lasers?”

Invert the Cliché

Inevitably, you or a friend will suggest a cliché. Don’t disregard it offhand. Take apart the components and turn it upside-down.

I say, “there’s a princess held captive by a dragon,” you say, “what if the dragon was being held captive by the princess?” he says, “what if the dragon was dying and it was the last female alive?” she says, “what if the princess was eating her scales to give herself eternal youth, and the dragon is now mangy and ill treated?”

• I’m getting absorbed by the HfL mailing list. Goddam it! Time to turn off the browser… ahh,that’s better.
• What not to do when playing In A Wicked Age http://cobwebgames.com/index.php/playtime-in-a-wicked-age-donts/
• Today I’m off to Itzacon to play, among other things, Team Fortress using Spirit of the Century.
• Last weekend: Spirit of the Century, Mage, Hell for Leather and WFRP. I’m all gamed out.
• Building some CSS for a new wiki. I forgot how late CSS makes you work.

For this week’s Grind I’d like to talk a little about the results of a playtest I ran at Itzacon last weekend.

What a bunch of creationizers! The two newbies (Alan Jackson and Joanne Cross of Conpulsion fame) dished out superlative brilliance. We got to play space anarchists in a world of moon cities and uber-mines. Think of it as Hfl: Ecopunk.

World Building

Setting: Space, heavy machines (a la Aliens), mining facilities
Adversary: The Corporation
Gore Threshold: 5
Connection: “GreenWar,” eco-warriors
Drop-Off/Objective: Drifting escape pod / Lunar space lift
Checkpoints: Travel to the Moon, Destroy the mining crater, Get on board the executive Express Lift

Characters

I’m not one to dwell on the characters, but we ended up with some total gold:

• Bob “the Bean Sprout” Jones, the cowardly genetic scientist—”Helping plants fight back!”
• Equality, the arrogant internal commissar—to make sure we did our terrorism by the book
• Lars Moondust, the negligent demolitions guy—with tie-dye grenade belt
• Sumant, the obsessive hacktivist—best line: “I’ll find the info with my laptop,” before using it as in implement of torture

Gameplay

So much good stuff. How to summarise? Here’s how one of the players described it:

Just returned from ITZACON, where we had a brilliant game playing members of GREENWAR…plants for planets! Planets for plants!…blowing up orbiting nuclear power plants with modified bean sprouts, organizing a robot uprising on the moon and assorted shenanigans.”

Assorted shenanigans = The most hippie-minded terrorists I’ve ever encountered in fiction. We even had hemp spacesuits and “the Volkswagen camper van of stellar technology.” It was B movie extraordinaire, with a tinge of green, what you might think of as Hippysploitation.

Nevertheless, everyone died in the end. Well, nearly everyone. After we exploded the moon and replaced the surface with man-eating bean sprouts, our geneticist got hoisted by his own petard. Nyum, nyum, said the enormous vegetation. Lars got everyone to the roof with the obligatory “get to the chopper!” line before meeting a similar doom. Nyum, nyum, again. Sumant took bullets to the face just after he announced that we always survived machine-gun barrage. Which left Equality to bring the good news of the Corporation’s destruction.

20 years later we get an awesome panorama. A gigantic space log trundles past the camera. Slowly it reveals all the planets in the solar system, each puffed up with vegetation like a gargantuan hedgehog. Plants for planets! Planets for plants!

Result: Very funny. But too easy. For this session I tried experimenting with a larger die size (16mm) instead of the usual 12mm option. It made the game too easy, which was still fun, but with reduced tension. Only in the Finale of the game did we adjust the die size back to normal. And then everyone started dying.

Feedback

1. Change Felonies so they scale with ethical impact (in the current system, killing ten goons has less impact than torturing an old friend). Good call.
2. Scale the number of Checkpoints to the number of players. I considered it, but I’m not happy extending the length of gameplay (no matter how many players there are, right now, the playing time does not change).
3. Punish Failure/Collapse with more Story Pips. Going to test it. Seems like a good idea. I’ll discuss why another day.
4. Siege Finale should be the default game. Agreed.
5. Guidelines as to how to scale difficulty based on Wounds. E.g. “If you have 0 Wounds when you reach the 1st Checkpoint Challenge, you should all be using the Expert circle.” Good call.

I’ve got another playtest coming up this Wednesday. I’ll test out the first and third suggestions. Awesome.

This week in Playtime I’m going to talk a little about what you shouldn’t do when playing in a game of In a Wicked Age. Specifically, this is about what I shouldn’t do, but since we’re all family here maybe you’ll glean something useful from my mistakes.

Last month we started a game of In a Wicked Age (IaWA), Vincent Baker’s indie RPG of Sword & Sorcery. If you haven’t heard of it, think (Conan + D&D) x Hippies. It’s the type of game that tells interesting, multi-generational stories of heroism and betrayal. Like Dynasty with more punching.

Here’s what I learned.

• Do not ignore the setting
• Do not scheme
• Do not parley
  

How did I make all of these mistakes? I played a lawyer. Have you ever read/watched Conan? Remember the barrister guy from the first story?

I could end this post there, but I’ll expand for clarity. Sword & Sorcery means fighting and magic. It’s all about man-handling and sweatiness. I ignored the setting, chose to play an unusual personality—who belonged in another kind of story—and then mewed against the system when my character didn’t fit. You see, what I really mean when I say “do not ignore the setting” is “the setting is baked into the system.” Like many indie games out there, IaWA is a collection of tight rules aimed at delivering a specific experience. If I try to steer around it, I’m essentially trying to break the rules.

Furthermore, as a lawyer, I tried to scheme. IaWA shines best when players allow for the unexpected. When two players want opposing outcomes, you get this fabulous negotiation which can spit out unforeseen results. “I want to kill the girl!” “You can’t kill her. But let’s say you think she’s dead.” When you plan, you lose your flexibility, and in a game of sex and violence flexibility goes a long way.

Finally, and this jumps back to the first no-no, IaWA is most fun when people are fighting with their bodies, not their words. As a lawyer, you really put yourself in a tough position. However, that’s not the worst of it. You also drag the rest of the group down. When I try to coerce you to do me a favour, I’m bringing Wormtongue to the table. You can’t fight Wormtongue with fists. It’s not interesting. So players end up in conversation. The lowest common denominator.

Having said that, there were lots of things we did right. Maybe I’ll talk about those next week.