Cold City
Last night we played Cold City, and it worked out quite well. We managed to fit character creation and a complete story into 3 hours; for what I intended to be an extended demo of the game, that was perfect.
The scenario I spun up on the fly (with helpful suggestions from the players) isn't going to win any game design awards, but we managed to get a good balance in usefulness of the three attributes, Trust went up and down, and Agendas came into play. A couple of times the Agendas impacting conflicts were probably a bit of a stretch, but since our entire game took place in the U-Bahn in a glorified dungeon crawl, that was fine. The Trust mechanic worked particularly well - it's clearly the centrepiece of the game, at the heart of the system's output of fun.
We didn't have any problems with the core system, but I was a little shaky with consequences - they felt a little loose and fiaty, where I'd prefer more solid guidelines you could then drift from. It's possible I just need to re-read that section of the rules, and I feel like we made good decisions about consequences in play anyway. The players particularly enjoyed flipping Traits between positive and negative from consequences, and often "stunted" their way into flipping a given trait for a particular conflict.
There was general agreement at the end that it would be a great system for a short (3 or so session) campaign, and if a 3 session slot comes up, I won't hesitate to bust it out again.
The scenario I spun up on the fly (with helpful suggestions from the players) isn't going to win any game design awards, but we managed to get a good balance in usefulness of the three attributes, Trust went up and down, and Agendas came into play. A couple of times the Agendas impacting conflicts were probably a bit of a stretch, but since our entire game took place in the U-Bahn in a glorified dungeon crawl, that was fine. The Trust mechanic worked particularly well - it's clearly the centrepiece of the game, at the heart of the system's output of fun.
We didn't have any problems with the core system, but I was a little shaky with consequences - they felt a little loose and fiaty, where I'd prefer more solid guidelines you could then drift from. It's possible I just need to re-read that section of the rules, and I feel like we made good decisions about consequences in play anyway. The players particularly enjoyed flipping Traits between positive and negative from consequences, and often "stunted" their way into flipping a given trait for a particular conflict.
There was general agreement at the end that it would be a great system for a short (3 or so session) campaign, and if a 3 session slot comes up, I won't hesitate to bust it out again.