Prequels

I've been thinking about prequels this week. It started as some thoughts about the Star Wars prequels, and I might blog about them another time. Where it ended, though was this thought:

Space Rat is the prequel to My Life With Master

The femme babes are all vying to be in Jack's orbit (so to speak, ahem!) and to do so they need to undergo a series of challenges. The reward is the attention of Jack Cosmos - a rat who turns out to really be a rat. Once the femme babes realise this, it's too late! They're caught continually running demeaning little errands for Jack. It's no wonder they end up with an amount of weariness and self loathing. All that effort for a rat? Eventually, one of them will recover enough self esteem to rise up and kill Jack.

The shift from Space Rat to My Life With Master is a bit like the tilt in Fiasco. "You find out the truth about Jack: he's a shallow rat. Now play!"

If I ever play this campaign, I think I'll spread it across six episodes. Three for Space Rat and three for My Life With Master - just like Star Wars.

All quiet on the eastern front

Go Play Brisbane was held over the weekend. You can see the remnants of it at the site. Overall I'm pleased with how it worked out.

As a GM, I stretched myself in two areas. First, I ran Space Rat for the first time. This is a simple and clever system (as I've written about before) and was fun to run. Everyone laughed - a lot. In fact, it didn't take much to keep the laughs flowing for 3 solid hours of gaming. In fact, I laughed more at this game of Space Rat than I've ever laughed at a sitcom. It's official: you get more laughs-per-dollar with Space Rat than with sitcoms.

The second stretch area was the Don't Rest Your Head game. I don't watch horror movies or read horror novels, as a general rule, so I'm not completely familiar with the tropes of horror. Typically, I run DRYH as an exhaustion game with very little horror content. This time I changed my tactic and brought the horror to the foreground. When things were getting a little light-hearted, dismemberment entered the conversation. When the players began to forget the sorrow and drive of their characters (beneath the surface... keeping you awake...) I put their related NPCs (the missing child or wife) in a torturous situation. It was my attempt at visceral horror, and I think it worked. The players stopped smiling and reconnected with their characters. Don't get me wrong; I wanted them to enjoy the game, but it's a horror game and from time to time I pushed the horror up to eleven.

And then, after the high of running games, I rediscovered the post-game crash. Those adrenaline cycles can be a real bummer.

Space Rat - One sided mechanisms

In this musing prose about Space Rat, I'm going to talk about the one-sided resolution mechanism that it uses.  That is to say, only the person who is attempting to complete some task or achieve some goal rolls dice.

(It's 2d6 plus modifiers vs. some difficulty number, by the way)

But the GM never rolls dice. And in contests between players, only one of them rolls dice.  Now this might leave some players thinking that they aren't involved in a contest, and to a small degree that's true.  However, the flipside is that if a player wants to have that kind of involvement in a scene, they need to drive it themselves.  This is an emergent phenomenon of the resolution system.  Players are driving the details of the story, whereas the GM is operating at a macro level, driving the plot and giving plenty of opportunity for tension and trouble.

Space Rat - Character Creation

This is the first in a series (a series which might be punctuated by diversions) about Space Rat: The Jack Cosmos Adventure Game (henceforth known just as Space Rat).  This is one of only a few Australian-designed indie games that I know about and I think it's worth some love in the blogosphere and also on your gaming table.  So stay with the feed for more.

Just for now, I'm going to let you know what I like about the character creation for Space Rat.  I think it has three main strengths to it.

1. It's quick.

Very quick, in fact.  For my style of gaming, this is important.  I need my players to be able to get up and running with a game quickly, and the important contribution that they make at the start is the character.  Making a character in GURPS or Champions or Burning Wheel takes some time and energy, whereas Space Rat characters (the Femme Babes) can be done in less than 15 minutes.  After that, you can start playing - assuming that the GM will let the players know the key rules as they arise during play

2. It gets the players thinking about the game in terms of prose, not numbers.

With the highly numerical games (see previous list) there is a lot of emphasis on the numbers, on the quantified aspects of the characters.  Immediately this frames the game for the players in terms of comparisons.  For Space Rat, there are very few comparative descriptors on the character sheet.  The bulk of it is text, written by the player to describe the character.  The other clever part of this is that you only need to underline the words in the paragraph to make that clause part of the character.  Compare against Spirit of the Century.  I've seen players have no trouble coming up with the novels for the phases of character creation, but then having some trouble putting an Aspect from that story into words.  Now, Space Rat is certainly less complex than SOTC, but the translation from text block to aspect (for want of a better word) is as easy as an underline.

3. It has a strong connection between the character and the story.

Because the characters are two-dimensional cliches (it's a comedy game - you need cliches for comedy) there isn't much clutter on the character sheet.  Therefore everything on that sheet can appear in every game.  Between the player and the GM, there's no reason that it can't all fit into the plot without feeling forced.

Where to play more indie games

Ever since the good response to the IGE at Gencon Oz, I've been thinking about where to host another indie game in a convention style atmosphere. Two ideas sound good to me. I can either run the event as a standalone event, just for indie games; or I can run a couple of indie games at someone else's convention.

From what little I know about the Brisbane gaming scene, it seems that there are a few places around that could facilitate this.

The Queensland Gamers Guild has gaming sessions every month, but from what I see of the schedule it's mostly for wargaming (e.g., Warhammer). Have I misread the QGG page?

Brisbane Independent Gamers seems like another option, but the game list seems to have a lot of miniature gaming.

Speak up, Brisbane indie gamers. Would you like an indie game there one day? Perhaps Spirit of the Century, or Space Rat?