The Coyotes of Chicago
Jonathan Walton:
Wow, that video of the coyote running down Chicago streets is amazing. Also this game concept is really cool.
PeterBB:
Quote from: Jonathan Walton on April 09, 2012, 03:41:20 PM
Wow, that video of the coyote running down Chicago streets is amazing. Also this game concept is really cool.
Thanks! :)
So I have a new idea. At one point in my brainstorming, this game had two PCs. I'm wondering if that's maybe an important element to put back in, so that there can be more interaction and discussion of the mystery and such. The problem is that I'm worried it will feel redundant, since Alex doesn't have much by way of mechanics and therefore mechanical differentiation is difficult.
One possibility I'm starting to like is the idea that a second character is actually someone's Mystery Sheet, in sorta the same way that every NPC is a threat in AW. They can have key scenes like, "Disagree completely with Alex's plan" or "Do something dumb without consulting Alex first".
Thoughts, on either another PC or else a character-based Mystery Sheet?
The other thing I've been up to is continuing to noodle over how the dice mechanics should work. One constraint is that they should have a pacing mechanic/resource economy built in. I'm having trouble deciding what the balance between "letting the mystery players have creative freedom" and "injecting uncertainty and surprise" should be. I have been considering several options, arranged approximately by increasing uncertainty/surprise:
Option 1: There are lists of things you can do ("capture Alex", "destroy her equipment", "threaten someone she cares about"), and they cost tokens. Spend the tokens to do the thing. No randomness, so it's basically just a pacing mechanic.
Option 2: Same as the above, but now you roll dice equal to the tokens you spend, and you get to spend hits. You can aim for a certain number of hits, but no guarantee you'll get it.
Option 3: Something like AW moves:
When you want to capture the PC, roll+tokens spent. On a hit, she moves where you want her to. On a 10+, choose two. On a 7-9, choose
one:
-She doesn't get a chance to tell anyone.
-You take away her stuff.
-She is still physically or psychically restrained, even in the new location.
On a miss, Alex can make a hard move.
Option 4: Random tables! Spend one token for a d4, two for a d6, or three for a d8. When you try to psychically influence Alex, roll on this table:
1: She turns the tables, not only beating back your psychic assault but also learning one of your secrets. She may ask you one question.
2. She has a fleeting desire to listen to you, which she is able to beat back.
3. You successfully implant an idea, image, or mood, but she knows it's foreign.
4. You get her to take some quick action of your choice.
5. You get her to believe something is her own idea, when it isn't.
6. You move her to a new location or change her mind on some important question.
7. You take complete control for about half an hour. She wakes up with no memory of what she just did.
8. You semi-permanently get her to believe something, regardless of how absurd or opposed to her own interests it is.
(You can make this slightly less random by being able to move up or down on the table to some limited extent, or by making it "d4, d4+2, or d4+4" instead of die sizes. You can make it more random by taking out the choice of die size, or by making the tables less thematically consistent.)
Thoughts?
PeterBB:
Hmm, smaller problem first: What sorts of things might the mystery players want to do in the first place?
Relatedly, what sort of fiction does the game so far remind you of? Any book/tv/movie suggestions?
PeterBB:
Here is the latest version! I added a pretty simple (but hopefully good) dice mechanic stolen shamelessly from AW, and edited a lot of the other text. I now need to actually put in the work to write the mystery sheets. My first attempt wasn't high-stakes enough; I want things to be more dire than "weird lights". I'm definitely going to have one of the sheets be the other research assistant, and I need something about either lanterns or mimics for ingredient purposes, but I'm still tossing around ideas of what exactly I want them to be. (I think there will be four sheets, supporting between three and five total players.)
Quote
Playing Alex:
One of you will play Dr. Alex Stokes, a recently minted Ph.D. in Wildlife Ecology and a massive badass. You work as a research assistant for Dr. Stanley Gehrt, the world's leading expert on urban coyotes. According to your research, there are over 2,000 coyotes in the Chicagoland area. You use video cameras, radio collars, and good old-fashioned leg work to study how they live in such an artificial environment.
The other research assistant is a grad student named Thomas Meyer, with whom you're on pretty good terms. You'll meet him later.
Fleshing out Alex's personality and history is the first thing you will do as a group. If you already know who is playing Alex, go ahead and let that player take the lead here. If you don't know yet, just go with whatever sounds cool to people, and then decide after.
Your choices are meant to give you a starting place, and don't have any mechanical effect. Just go with whatever seems cool, and gives you an interesting character to play. Remember that you will be investigating some creepy weirdness, so making Alex curious or brave or reckless or oblivious or something is probably a good idea.
Creating Alex's character is important, because it's your first chance as a group to decide what sort of game you're playing. If Alex was raised by a secret society and has powerful fire magicks, that will lead to a very different game than one where Alex went to prep school and is especially good at data collection. I suggest aiming for something like Indiana Jones; you wouldn't quite call him “realistic”, but at least he doesn't break the laws of physics. But feel free to play with it, just so long as everyone is on board.
~~~
What is Alex's gender?
How do friends describe Alex?
Who and what does Alex care about?
What are Alex's exceptional talents?
What is one weakness Alex has?
~~~
Before you go on, make sure that you know who is playing Alex. If that's you, your job is to show how awesome Alex is, to react to all the weirdness the other players will be throwing at you, and to try to figure out what the heck is going on. Don't worry about doing the sensible thing. You're in a thriller movie, and you're a badass! (Even if you're a prep-school, data-collecting badass, you're still a badass.)
Mechanically, you have a lot of power as Alex. You can pretty much just do what you want, and the other players will have to spend tokens and roll dice to interfere with you at all. You have to stick to narrating just what Alex does, but feel to make her incredibly competent and clever. You'll need it.
(Note: I'll use female pronouns to talk about Alex through the rest of the text, but of course you can pick whatever gender you want for your Alex.)
Playing the Mystery:
The rest of you, you get to be the weird, creepy world that Alex has to deal with. Each of you should take one of the mystery sheets for your special rules. Don't show anyone else your page, and don't tell them what's on it, either.
As a Mystery player, your goal is to make Alex's player go “holy shit, seriously?” as often as possible. If you don't mess with her, Alex's player won't have any way to show how badass she is. Try to scare her, frustrate her, and most of all, creep her out. Also, try to always have a working theory about what is going on behind the scenes. Your theory won't line up with what the other Mystery players are thinking, which means you have to be flexible, but it gives you a direction to take things.
Most of the time, you can just say what you think should happen. Your Mystery sheet will give you some things to work with, but you are not in the least restricted to those things. As a group, the Mystery players have power over everything in the world that isn't Alex herself.
Alex is special. As the hero of the story, she will run roughshod over all of your plans and creations. Because of Alex's badassery, there's a special rule about her:
If you don't want Alex to succeed at something she's trying to do, you have to spend a Mystery token and roll some dice.
Alex is going to survive, and she'll continue to be a problem for you. But the dice will let you make her life very complicated in the mean time. Here's how they work:
When you spend a Mystery token, roll two six-sided dice and add them up. If you want, before the roll you (or one of your generous fellow players) can spend extra Mystery tokens to increase your result. Each token is worth an extra +2 to the roll. After you roll, take your result and look at this chart:
1-6 means that Alex was just too much for you. Despite your best, most creepy efforts, she prevailed.
7-9 means that you get to mess with Alex in some ultimately temporary way. The thing she was chasing escapes, she gets separated from her companions, Dr. Gehrt is mad at her, she is supernaturally terrified and runs for her life, or something like that.
10 or 11 means that you get to do something that will more seriously interfere with Alex's life or her plans. She gets captured and taken somewhere mysterious, she loses important equipment, she gets injured, her best friend isn't speaking to her, she develops an unnatural fear of coyotes.
12 or more means that Alex's life is changed irrevocably. She is fired from her job, she loses a hand, or her best friend dies. These moments are rare, and are the scars that Alex will carry with her after the events of this story are over.
When narrating the result of a dice roll, remember that Alex is still a badass, no matter what happens. Most of the time she doesn't really fail, so much as she's overwhelmed by a situation she didn't anticipate. Don't narrate: “You punch the guy, but it doesn't do much. He laughs at you and grabs your wrist.” Instead, narrate: “You punch the guy, and he's out like a light. But as he lies there, his eyes open again, showing only white. He says, 'Nice to finally meet you, Dr. Stokes,' as you feel two men you hadn't seen come up behind you and grab your elbows.”
In fact, it is against the rules for you to narrate Alex directly failing at one of her exceptional talents on anything less than a roll of 12. (You should feel free to invoke her weakness in your narration, though. That's one place she does fail.)
Tokens and dice rolls are a limited resource. As you use them up, you're getting closer and closer to the end of the story. Once you're out, you're out. You can't roll any more dice, so you can't hurt Alex any more. She's escaped, she's won, although perhaps at great cost. Take another scene or two to wrap things up, and then you're done.
This also means that you can greatly affect the pace of the game based on how you spend your tokens. If you only spend them one at a time, and only from time to time, the game will feel like a long struggle that occasionally flares up with drama. If you spend them all quickly on a few rolls, then the game will be short-lived but constantly dangerous and high-stakes. If the game is moving at a pace that isn't working for you, change the way you spend your tokens!
So much for tokens and dice. Now a few words about the mystery sheets. Your sheet will have the following elements:
A motif. This is an image or idea that you should try to incorporate whenever possible. Be creative, and let yourself be drawn in whatever direction you find inspiring. This is just meant to give you a starting point. Try to develop it, and see where it leads you. If what starts out as creepy voices on a tape turn into machete-wielding cultists, that's perfect!
A few key scenes. You don't start with any Mystery tokens, which you will need to make Alex's life more difficult. This is how you get them. The first one is set up pretty explicitly for you, you just have to provide the cool narration. The others will require a little more interpretation. Don't worry about it until you get to the point where you want the tokens, and then just go with whatever makes the most sense, based on the game so far and your current theories about what's going on. Since you can't show anyone your sheet, you're on the honor system here. Just narrate your thing, and take tokens if you think you deserve it.
A motivation. This is a little bit more meta than the rest of it. This gives you a goal to shoot for, in relation to the things the other players are narrating. Don't worry about pushing this with every single thing you say, but keep it in the back of your head and do your best to bring it in when you can.
PeterBB:
I'm having a playtest this afternoon. Here's the playtest document!
http://semielgames.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/game-chef-playtest.pdf
Currently at 3035 words. :)
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