[Zombie Cinema] Great Balls of Fire
Christoph Boeckle:
Drat, sorry about the name Jaakko, I got mixed up there!
Jaakko Koivula:
No probs, I can't get any names right ever myself either.
Haven't seen the cards myself. Saw the Zombie Cinema box at the TraCon, but went for the ug-edition. I think Im conflicted about the idea of evocative phrases. I like the "one word, no explanations" -style of the sticks, even though I understand that evocative phrases can be very helpful. Less is more etc. I'd like to see the other edition at some point though, see how it's different.
Pekoraali:
Ron: Same, same but different... No GenCon experience here. I was looking for the Ghaal character from the notorious youtube document "The True Nordic Black Metal", only younger. I was not going to use the cards or anything because I already knew what I was looking for (a long ride to the main event). I was going for a split-personality, but realized that hey, this is a perfect spot for a small improvising. So I took some personality cards/sticks, got "gentle and Polite" and "Scared and Corrupted". So Pasi had two different strong personas which I changed every now and then. It was obvious that the Scared and Corrupted Pasi had locked the granny in the basement for some reason. I desided Pasi was "corrupted" in the Morrrrdor kind of way. The Gentle and Polite Pasi took care of his bats and offered people some tea when they came in.
Callan S: Pete chose a distant country house as the playground. He was cryptic about what his character "loves" and is "looking for", so I decided that the house is actually Timo Ruoho's granny's home. We later learn that it's this weird shit that's been happening in ?ernobyl (A tribute to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R.) that has forced Timo to travel to his granny, but _unfortenately_ the car broke down a few kilometres away. Jaakko's character had escaped from the Oulu prison and was looking for a place to hide. The reason why my character Pasi was there was never really explained, but obviously he had stayed in for a long, long time.
Jaakkko: I took the liberity to check the rules I had in the "Roolipelaaja" magazine and realized that the rules were not actually that different, I had just misunderstood them. I have played the game previously countless times, but we have always made the same basic mistake. We have moved the zombies after every player's scene whereas whe should have waited for the whole round of scenes. So my games had been previously a bit more hectic and without a true possibility for character or story development. Very funny anyways :)
There were a couple of improvements though, and I found them to double the enjoyment. The draws resulting in to the advance of the zombies and the possibility to overwrite the story by consulting the table. As a general rule though I must emphazise that new players should always remember two core suggestions. Firstly the playground should be chosen so that it has clear borders and all the characters are quickly together. Secondly every storyteller should remember to add an escape for the characters. Especially the main escape route should be established in the first few scenes. When everyone has some idea of where the characters are trying to get, the conflicts, the joined narrative, and such become much more easier to handle. Of course the player in charge can always change the main escape route, but it should always _be there_. As an example I built the "scooter" option in our game and Pete remembered it quite brilliantly later.
In this game I tried to create an alternative explanation for the events for a long time. Pasi had given the other characters tea. Was the tea drugged? Was there really so many bats? Was granny perfectly ok (albeit beaten and kept in the basement for a long time)? Was Matti Iäs just hearing voices? In the end it was however clear that the game had evolved in to a basic zombie splatter, not into a psychological thriller. The one thing I like in the mechanics is the possibility to build such alternatives and keep them open as long as possible.
Callan S.:
Quote from: Jaakko Koivula on July 30, 2010, 01:09:21 AM
The gran was missing. She hadn't been seen during the whole game and Timo's whole point was that he was looking for her. So of course when Timo heard her voice, he (true to horror-film cliches) panicked and opened the door. The attic was our safe haven that the zombies hadn't been able to breach, with just two exits: the door and the window. So when there was a grandmother-zombie at the door, the only alternative was to escape to the roof. Even though we knew that there was something waiting for us there also.
Oh, I get you. I kinda read it that they happened upon a door she was behind - then just ran the hell away from it, even though they were looking for her. So she turned up at the entrance to the attic and they opened the door and saw her z state - I get you now :)
Eero Tuovinen:
Ah, excellent. I've been on a break for a bit, so didn't see this earlier. Good to know that you got the game, Jaakko. I think your copy was the last one of the Finnish handcrafted edition, actually, so now we're just selling the English version. It is excellent that you found the time to write about your experience with the game. It's doubly excellent that you liked the rules text; I've had some self-seeking to do about writing rules text as it's become evident over the years that I'm not as clear to most people as I imagine myself to be, so it's always nice to stumble on somebody who doesn't have trouble understanding the way I write ;)
Your game report is very gratifying in that I can easily read between the lines and see the atmosphere - that's exactly the sort of play we fortunately got from the game when playing it for the first times in 2006. Especially the zany, tragi-comic characterizations, the uncertainty about the mental stability and moral character of the player characters, the strongly impressed and highly visual cinematic details (like the inhumanly strong infected hand - pure gold), and the creative uncertainty over the nature of the zombie threat are things that I like a lot myself in the game - it's a great creative rush to get through the first part of the game, get some solid characters going and then get to the creative payoff when the zombies are revealed for what they are, whatever it is. I know exactly what Sami (different from Sami Koponen who Ron mentioned) means about alternative explanations and the creative tension in finding out the explanation behind the events. The nuclear accident and the black tentacles are adorable elements, I couldn't have resisted bringing in aliens myself at that point - in fact, ambivalently mysterious alien visitors was exactly what we did once in 2008 when we did the "Russian nuclear reactor accident" thing ourselves, I seem to remember.
I've encountered that rules misinterpretation Sami mentions about moving the zombies after every turn instead of every round a couple of times. I think it's mostly in groups that first learned the game from the magazine draft, so perhaps I wrote that bit in there too vaguely. I have this bad habit of getting punctuous about my rules text when I get to writing it, relying a lot on the reader being as punctuous as I am about the terminology - I can totally imagine how I probably just have one sentence in there about when the zombie is moved, and it's something where reading "turn" instead of "round" makes perfect sense, and I never stress the matter, so it's easy to misread.
Sami: I definitely agree with you about the rules changes between the magazine version and the final rules. Making those changes was a very foundational experience for me as a game designer, as they were a direct outcome of solid, real, patient playtesting. I'd played the magazine version of the game a couple of times before it went to press, but I didn't really make an effort to change the rules at that point, as I didn't think of the magazine version as something that would need to be playtested; it was only after several more plays, some external playtesting and a couple of months of creative break that I pin-pointed what, exactly, the game would need to be complete and final. It's a textbook example of the ashcan method of development, in fact, although I didn't think of it that way when I wrote the game. I've never had trouble distinguishing between a complete and "almost-complete" game after that, though.
Zombie Cinema is very much to the instrument side of things rather than a ready-made backmusic track insofar as game design philosophy goes, so I think that you can and should be justly happy about your success in getting a creative concord going and succeeding in the goal of the game, to create zombie movie in words. It's a great accomplishment in personal, community-initiated grassroots art, even if the actual work is limited in time and has only one showing.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[*] Previous page