Breaking the Ice -- Double Dating in the Dome [LONG]

[bluegargantua]

Hey,

I can speak without fear of contradiction when I say that Friday night I participated in the weirdest game of Breaking the ice ever.

Bryant, you're very sorry you missed this game.

At first, it wasn't quite clear if it was going to get off the ground. Breaking the Ice is a dating game and we had 3 guys and 1 girl...and the orientation of the guys didn't lend itself to any useful dating configuration. Plus, there was some amount of uncertainty and resistance to the concept of the game so there was a bit of wheel spinning while we tried to come up with something useful.

Eventually, we settled on the idea that the four of us were on double dates. Then we decided that we were four singles who's friends were all getting married and they kept sticking us together at the wedding receptions. So we were the last pathetic singles in our group of friends and that our "dates" were all going to be the wedding receptions of our happily married friends.

Then Jere said, "yeah, we're 32 and if we don't get married, we have to go to Carnivale".

Ladies and Gentlemen! We have a Theme! Desperation Double Dating in the world of Logan's Run!

Our take was that unlike the classic movie, if you got hitched, they didn't kill you when your crystal burned out -- the rationale being that if you're 33 and you can't find someone to settle down with, you're hopeless as a person and should be eliminated.

OK, so who do we have?

Couple A: Alice and Lance

Alice (played by me): based off the character creation, I was a woman who worked on programming maintenance bots and raced souped up dome carts in my spare time. I was relatively wealthy (as wealth is defined in the socialist utopia of Logan's Run) and my big conflict was that my desperation to settle down meant I moved too fast (again, relative to the free love and drugs life in the domes of Logan's Run).

Lance (played by Jess): Lance was a Florist who was really into plants, pyrotechnics and New Age-y mystic hogwash. He was kind and sweet, but had a short temper. None of which was helped by his complication: Alcoholism.

Couple B: Rex and Faygan

These two were almost a genetically uplifted chimp and gorilla couple.  In the end, they stayed human.

Rex (played by Kirby): Rex was a crooner, a famous song and dance man who also worked the planetarium and went cliff diving (off the artificial cliffs). His complication was an overprotective nanny-bot.

Faygan (played by Jere): Faygan was a hot, fabulous Trance drummer and syncronized dance expert. He was also a rebel who planned to escape the domes and Run for freedom (Rebel and Runner were his Complication).  He also belong to the mob (such as it is in the utopia of Logan's Run) and he was also a surfer (you'll see).

For couple B, we decided that orientation is completely irrelevant in the world of Logan's Run. They chose to swap body types instead.

So for the dates, we went back and forth and traded scenes. They were all for weddings of other people we knew and the game quickly went from being double dates to two completely different stories. You'll see.

Date 1: Traditional wedding

Round 1 (Alice and Lance): Alice tries to woo Lance with booze. He tries to woo her with flowers. No one is impressed.

Round 2 (Rex and Faygan): Rex sings a song for the couple but tries to woo Faygan through it. Then Faygan kicks up a hot drum beat and gets everyone all hot and bothered.  The two of them get a compatibility of music out of it.

Round 3 (Lance and Alice):  Lance tries to engage Alice's interest in dome carts by suggesting rocket-propelled modifications they might employ.  Additional investigations of a nearby cart prove interesting in a theoretical sense, and generates a compatibility over the carts.

Round 4 (Faygan and Rex):  Faygan pulls out all the stops and turns the wedding party into one giant bollywood dance number.  Rex is completely blown away and can't think of a good way to draw Faygan's eye.

Round 5 (Alice and Lance):  Alice suggests taking the cart out for a spin while the rest of the wedding party is wrapped up in this huge dance number.  She tries to impress him with fancy driving, he just gets sick.  They stop at a spot overlooking the hydroponic gardens and Lance tries to express the beauty of nature, but Alice just doesn't get it and Lance winds up drinking himself unconscious.  Their date is over.

Round 6 (Rex and Faygan):  Meanwhile, the dance number wraps up and Rex scoots out the back where an army of fans sweep them into the nearby Planetarium (what?  he needed to get the dice for it?).  They start up a lazer light show which attracts a lot of concerned nanny-bots.  Faygan's rebel side comes out and he organizes the fans into a dance mob to drive the bots back then grabbed a serving tray and pulled a total Legolas, surfing out the door with Rex under his arm.

At this point we said the date was over.  Despite grumbling over bad dice, Faygan boosted his Attraction up to 3, Lance was at 2, and Rex and Alice were struggling.  So we set up the next wedding for our dating duo.

Date 2:  Reservoir Wedding

This wedding took place near the giant reservoir/recreation tanks.

Round 1 (Faygun and Rex):  Faygan makes this outrageously staged entrance on a surfboard.  There was a band and a laser light show and everything.  He and Rex get the limelight compatibility.  Rex fails to draw Faygun's eye.

Round 2 (Lance and Alice):  Lance picks up Alice in a souped up dune buggy and takes her to the wedding.  He hopes to impress her with his driving skills, but he's been nipping at the demon rum and has a slight alcohol-related accident and slides off the road.  No one is hurt, but Alice is impressed.  (This begins one of several rounds in which Lance uses his Alcoholism to make himself more attractive to Alice -- Rex and Faygun have bollywood, we have the after school special!).  Alice helps fix the vehicle and the two of them grow a bit closer.  They take the compatibility Uninhibited (because when they stop worrying about impressing each other they get closer together).  They set off once again to the wedding (with Alice driving).

Round 3 (Rex and Faygun):  Rex takes Faygun to the top of a faux cliff and they go cliff diving.  Faygun is impressed, but not Attracted.  But when they swim over to the raft with Faygun's Mafia band on it, Faygun instigates a full-tilt water ballet number culminating in a fade-to-black and coming up on a post-ballet beach scene where Faygun promises to take Rex with him.  Rex is impressed.

Round 4 (Alice and Lance):  Long about this time, that couple B was in a heap of trouble.  Alice makes an insane jump in the dune buggy to land them on the beach.  Lance isn't thrilled about it, but he's so happy to be alive his Attraction to Alice grows (Helsinki syndrome).  Lance, fortified by danger and pina coladas, makes a drunken engagement proposal to Alice.  And she accepts!

Which means we're now ready for...

Date 3  Alice and Lance get hitched!

Round 1 (Alice and Lance):  All the weddings have had a theme.  So our wedding has one too:  it's a Christmas wedding!  Alice and Lance are busy with lots of preparations.  The actual date is the reception the night before.  Alice has been using nanny bots to keep Lance sufficiently inebriated so he won't reconsider his offer.  Lance surprises Alice with a portrait of himself (he'd picked up Vain as a trait).

Round 2 (Rex and Faygan):  Rex steps up and croons White Christmas for the happy couple (but really, it's all for Faygan).  Faygan steps up and calls down the mistletoe for a big kiss (we were all very annoyed he'd thought of it first).  Faygan was also rather annoyed that his initial roll had over 7 dice and he still only got one success and had to go to re-rolls.  But in the end, he continued to sweep Rex off his feet.

Round 3  (Lance and Alice):  Realizing that once again, a wedding has turned into the Faygan and Rex show, Lance drags Alice into a private room and really opens up to her.  He decalres his true and faithful love for Alice and the two of them share their first kiss.

Conclusions:

 Lance and Alice get married and live happily (and dangerously) ever after.  Over time, Alice comes to realize it's not the alcoholism she loves, it's the side-effects of heavy drinking she really enjoyes.

 Faygun and Rex make their daring escape during the wedding ceremony.  But since they're effectively a couple, the Sandmen have no reason to chace them down and they get away scot free.

My favorite quote:

 (After the first big kiss between Alice and Lance):  "Honey!  You taste just like Soylent Green!"

Our thoughts on the game:

 1.)  It's nice to do a goofy game, but people were interested in running more serious games.  The goofy game helped get inhibitions out of the way.

 2.)  There's a box for word association during character creation.  It's very small.  We all just wrote on the back of our sheets where there was more room to work with.  

 3.)  The endgame is kinda weird.  We were able to come up with epilogues on our own even though none of us were close to the right number of compatibilities.  I might use those endgame levels as a guide rather than a flat-out arbitrater.

 4.)  There's still that weird bit in character creation where you have an idea about what you want to do, but the word association pulls you in a completely different direction.  Still not sure if this is good or bad.  It's definately a test of your adaptibility.

 All in all, it was a fun fast game.  If you're skittish about running it with groups that aren't the right gender/orientation balance or the idea of relationships is a bit scary, a slightly goofy premise is a good way to break the ice on Breaking the Ice.

 Mucho thanks to Emily for the playtest copies.

later
Tom

[Jere]

I'd be interested to do this again, a mroe serious format this time, as I'd like to see how it behaves a second time through.

I mentioned to my wife the next day that it felt like a lot of the corporate etam building seminars I've gone through over the years. Not sure thats a good thing.

And now I really need to figure out my thoughts of why this game and My life With Master are not roleplaying games but something closely related.

[Emily Care]

And thanks way much to you all for trying it out. What a hysterical game!  I would be curious to see how it works for you with a more serious setting, but   water-ballet and nanny-bots--my god, I'm almost grateful for the awkwardness that brought this into being.  Makes me want to run a game of it set in a Marx Brothers movie.  I've been thinking about a character with "babysitting a leopard" as a complication would be a good way to do Bringing Up Baby.

Many thanks for the feedback. The epilogue clearly needs work and the dice/trait pool at the start needs to find the right balance.  I'm curious to hear how it was for people to have to come up with things for the bonus dice and the re-rolls.  I found that could be hard.

As far as it not being a role-playing game, I believe I understand the debate, but in my personal view it is the presence or lack of role-playing per se that would make it cross that line, rather than the open-endedness of a storyline, which is what MLWM and BtI share.  It may seem like the options are limited in both, but I'd instead say that they are infinite yet bound.  

yrs,
Emily

[bluegargantua]

Many thanks for the feedback. The epilogue clearly needs work and the dice/trait pool at the start needs to find the right balance.  I'm curious to hear how it was for people to have to come up with things for the bonus dice and the re-rolls.  I found that could be hard.

 I think that a lot of the time, we went for re-rolls and added negative traits that we could always call on.  I added "talks too fast" and "reckless", Jere added "incoherent" and "not too smart" and stuff like that.  These negative traits were pretty much always available no matter what the situation.

 Thet's the tricky bit about the positive interactions.  I program robots and Lance arranges flowers -- it's tough for our work traits to meaningfully interact.  Perhaps it might be useful if couple got a free compatibility.  There's usually some common element that draws two people together, even if it's only "nice personality".  But having that little something could really help drive the story and get the dice pools building up for you.

later
Tom