"Who are you and why are you in my closet?"
This evening, at the suggestion of theblunderbuss, four of us sat down to play a game of Fiasco. It's a GMless game that involves making your characters together by figuring out how they're related, giving them motivations, and then setting them off with an idea of their aims and seeing how badly wrong things can go. The style it's aiming for is the idea of a caper movie, and I think we got that, although possibly at a slightly odd angle.
Explaining this may be a little tricky, so let's start off with a crude ASCII diagram of what the relations between characters were...
Relation: INTRIGUE Needs: REVENGE
cswetenham <-- "Who are you, and why On the Captain, because --> theblunderbuss
are you in my closet? it's now or never
^ ^
| |
Relation: FRIENDS Relation: INTRIGUE
Affable tramps with Mutinous
an eye for mischief
Object: UNMENTIONABLES Location: MAYHEM
Sacrificial dagger with Boarded and
engravings of the loathsome ravaged
Sea God
| |
v v
Relation: SPECIAL Needs: TRUTH
bouteillebleu Captain and Chief "Why are we so very, zacrias
Engineer very off course?"
(If that doesn't show up properly I will not be surprised.)
The setting was on board a ship, the Leviathan, sailing to New York - I believe it's the Transatlantic playset, and we came up with the relations and things-to-mention above and then figured out from that what on earth our characters were.
theblunderbuss played Chief Navigator Bratwürst, who we decided was probably mutinous against the ship's captain and going to try to get support for this.
cswetenham played Captain Frederick von Ib, the captain of another ship who had got drunk and woken up in the navigator's closet aboard this ship.
I played Captain Otto Green, the captain of this ship, who had an old friendship with Frederick (we interpreted "affable tramps" fairly liberally). Part of the setting involved the captain trying to get to New York as quickly as possible to win the Blue Riband.
zacrias played Harold Ernest Fletcher, the ship's chief engineer, who the captain fairly rapidly came into conflict with about whether the engines could go any faster.
Act 1 started off with said argument between Fletcher and Green, then went straight into a flashback about how the two captains met in Bangalore many years ago and where the sacrificial dagger came into it (given to von Ib by a woman he rescued in a shipwreck), and then a ridiculous recurring injury for Green. Then we went on to Bratwürst finding von Ib in his closet and an exceedingly odd drunken conversation, and then Bratwürst attempting to persuade Fletcher to mutiny with him and... not "failing", exactly, but I'm not sure what they succeeded in if anything, other than making me laugh so hard at the conversation that I couldn't breathe. :)
Next was Fletcher and Green again, with Fletcher passing on news, and then Green and Bratwürst and an argument about whether going to New York via Iceland was really the most efficient way. (In the end Green argued Bratwürst down from a week's stop in Iceland to four hours, the stop being excused as "taking on ice".) Bratwürst then got on with loading said ice into the ship and into the pantry, where he discovered von Ib investigating the ship's pantry thoroughly for alcohol and bemoaning his lack of captain's hat, and then Bratwürst and Fletcher discussed things again and finally decided to mutiny for real this time.
We paused there for a bit for snacks and a drink, and also to determine what the Tilt for this game was - what way it would go wrong. We got the following:
FAILURE MAYHEM
A stupid plan, executed Magnificent
to perfection self-destruction
We didn't keep these in mind during Act 2 as much as we might have done, but mainly because we were already executing stupid plans, and magnificent self-destruction was liable to happen anyway.
I'm a little more hazy on memories of Act 2. A ship was sighted gaining on the Leviathan, and as it got closer it turned out to be the Sprightly Mare, von Ib's own ship, manned by his first mate and an assortment of other crew. von Ib ended up in the captain's quarters on the Leviathan where he and Green reminisced, there was an argument over Green's captain's hat, and Green ended up somehow with both his hat and the sacrificial dagger. von Ib attempted to get back on board his ship, which he managed, whereupon his first mate threw him in the brig for possibly being an imposter.
The crew then prepared to repel boarders from the Sprightly Mare - Bratwürst and Fletcher did very well, dispatching all but three of the Mare's crew, and then persuading one of the remaining ones to "capture" them, take them to the captain and take him into custody. In frustration Green threw his captain's hat out of the porthole of his cabin.
Somehow von Ib found his captain's hat again, and he and Green persuaded their captors to let them out; the two ships then raced for New York, with Bratwürst and Fletcher making it first.
After the main story was done we totalled up how we'd done. ("How we'd done" involved white and black dice. In both acts you got a white die if you ended a scene well for you and a black die if you ended it badly for you; you could either choose how to set up a scene to start with, or how it would resolve. In Act I, when you got the die you then had to give it to someone else; in Act II, when you got the die you kept it.) We then each narrated small vignettes, four short scenes each, based on these.
Bratwürst became a captain of his own ship, and also started cooking again as he once had before he became a navigator.
Fletcher won the Blue Riband with Bratwürst and ended up as a famous well-respected engineer (one of his vignettes involved opening a new factory).
Green was still a captain but not for as big a ship. His last vignette was as a much older man, searching out in the Atlantic and finally finding, forty years later, the captain's hat he had thrown overboard.
von Ib was likewise still a captain, and still drinking brandy and so on with enthusiasm.
Not sure how much this sort of writeup can convey the fun from this, but I very much enjoyed coming up with character ideas collaboratively based on fairly general links - the ones we chose gave enough detail for us to think of good ideas, but not so much detail we were constrained. In particular, having four characters each of which had a link with two others meant that we had to come up with something consistent to work with, and it meant we had quite a cohesive cast. (We also ended up playing random characters in larger scenes - most of us ended up playing random members of the Sprightly Mare at some point or other, for example.) Given that the part of games I find most difficult is character generation, I'm quite happy with how it works in this one.
Fiasco was a very fun way to spend three hours or so with friends, and is a great one-off game. Looking forward to playing it again at some point with a different playset.
Explaining this may be a little tricky, so let's start off with a crude ASCII diagram of what the relations between characters were...
Relation: INTRIGUE Needs: REVENGE
cswetenham <-- "Who are you, and why On the Captain, because --> theblunderbuss
are you in my closet? it's now or never
^ ^
| |
Relation: FRIENDS Relation: INTRIGUE
Affable tramps with Mutinous
an eye for mischief
Object: UNMENTIONABLES Location: MAYHEM
Sacrificial dagger with Boarded and
engravings of the loathsome ravaged
Sea God
| |
v v
Relation: SPECIAL Needs: TRUTH
bouteillebleu Captain and Chief "Why are we so very, zacrias
Engineer very off course?"
(If that doesn't show up properly I will not be surprised.)
The setting was on board a ship, the Leviathan, sailing to New York - I believe it's the Transatlantic playset, and we came up with the relations and things-to-mention above and then figured out from that what on earth our characters were.
theblunderbuss played Chief Navigator Bratwürst, who we decided was probably mutinous against the ship's captain and going to try to get support for this.
cswetenham played Captain Frederick von Ib, the captain of another ship who had got drunk and woken up in the navigator's closet aboard this ship.
I played Captain Otto Green, the captain of this ship, who had an old friendship with Frederick (we interpreted "affable tramps" fairly liberally). Part of the setting involved the captain trying to get to New York as quickly as possible to win the Blue Riband.
zacrias played Harold Ernest Fletcher, the ship's chief engineer, who the captain fairly rapidly came into conflict with about whether the engines could go any faster.
Act 1 started off with said argument between Fletcher and Green, then went straight into a flashback about how the two captains met in Bangalore many years ago and where the sacrificial dagger came into it (given to von Ib by a woman he rescued in a shipwreck), and then a ridiculous recurring injury for Green. Then we went on to Bratwürst finding von Ib in his closet and an exceedingly odd drunken conversation, and then Bratwürst attempting to persuade Fletcher to mutiny with him and... not "failing", exactly, but I'm not sure what they succeeded in if anything, other than making me laugh so hard at the conversation that I couldn't breathe. :)
Next was Fletcher and Green again, with Fletcher passing on news, and then Green and Bratwürst and an argument about whether going to New York via Iceland was really the most efficient way. (In the end Green argued Bratwürst down from a week's stop in Iceland to four hours, the stop being excused as "taking on ice".) Bratwürst then got on with loading said ice into the ship and into the pantry, where he discovered von Ib investigating the ship's pantry thoroughly for alcohol and bemoaning his lack of captain's hat, and then Bratwürst and Fletcher discussed things again and finally decided to mutiny for real this time.
We paused there for a bit for snacks and a drink, and also to determine what the Tilt for this game was - what way it would go wrong. We got the following:
FAILURE MAYHEM
A stupid plan, executed Magnificent
to perfection self-destruction
We didn't keep these in mind during Act 2 as much as we might have done, but mainly because we were already executing stupid plans, and magnificent self-destruction was liable to happen anyway.
I'm a little more hazy on memories of Act 2. A ship was sighted gaining on the Leviathan, and as it got closer it turned out to be the Sprightly Mare, von Ib's own ship, manned by his first mate and an assortment of other crew. von Ib ended up in the captain's quarters on the Leviathan where he and Green reminisced, there was an argument over Green's captain's hat, and Green ended up somehow with both his hat and the sacrificial dagger. von Ib attempted to get back on board his ship, which he managed, whereupon his first mate threw him in the brig for possibly being an imposter.
The crew then prepared to repel boarders from the Sprightly Mare - Bratwürst and Fletcher did very well, dispatching all but three of the Mare's crew, and then persuading one of the remaining ones to "capture" them, take them to the captain and take him into custody. In frustration Green threw his captain's hat out of the porthole of his cabin.
Somehow von Ib found his captain's hat again, and he and Green persuaded their captors to let them out; the two ships then raced for New York, with Bratwürst and Fletcher making it first.
After the main story was done we totalled up how we'd done. ("How we'd done" involved white and black dice. In both acts you got a white die if you ended a scene well for you and a black die if you ended it badly for you; you could either choose how to set up a scene to start with, or how it would resolve. In Act I, when you got the die you then had to give it to someone else; in Act II, when you got the die you kept it.) We then each narrated small vignettes, four short scenes each, based on these.
Bratwürst became a captain of his own ship, and also started cooking again as he once had before he became a navigator.
Fletcher won the Blue Riband with Bratwürst and ended up as a famous well-respected engineer (one of his vignettes involved opening a new factory).
Green was still a captain but not for as big a ship. His last vignette was as a much older man, searching out in the Atlantic and finally finding, forty years later, the captain's hat he had thrown overboard.
von Ib was likewise still a captain, and still drinking brandy and so on with enthusiasm.
Not sure how much this sort of writeup can convey the fun from this, but I very much enjoyed coming up with character ideas collaboratively based on fairly general links - the ones we chose gave enough detail for us to think of good ideas, but not so much detail we were constrained. In particular, having four characters each of which had a link with two others meant that we had to come up with something consistent to work with, and it meant we had quite a cohesive cast. (We also ended up playing random characters in larger scenes - most of us ended up playing random members of the Sprightly Mare at some point or other, for example.) Given that the part of games I find most difficult is character generation, I'm quite happy with how it works in this one.
Fiasco was a very fun way to spend three hours or so with friends, and is a great one-off game. Looking forward to playing it again at some point with a different playset.