Myself, Joe Prince, Gregor and Shevy got together the other night to talk of podcasts, gencon and to play some Mob Justice. We didn't get too far into things but it was entertaining never the less and allowed me to get back in the GMing seat after a long while being away from it.
I was a bit nervous having not run MJ, or a traditional GMed game, for quite some time. I had asked the players to email me their character ideas before we started saying I thought I might go for a detective based story. Boy did that change.
We ended up with:
Mike Degallo (Joe) - son of a former boss, not the brightest tool in the shed, but well liked and useful to have around as muscle.
Mary OBannon (Shevy) - a socialite, her father is running in the imminent mayoral elections. Well known around town and can charm her way into anywhere.
Sondra Kaine (Gregor) - A black torpedo, ex military, just working her way up in the mob and a surgeon with a sub-machine gun.
The game started off in the a cold new york dawn. The previous night Mike had hit it off with this beautiful girl, they had gone to a hotel and he had had the time of his life.
When he wakes up the next morning she is gone. Makes his way to the bathroom only to find her cut to ribbons blood everywhere, a single 4 leaf clover floating in the blood. Suddenly sirens go off in the distance, too soon to be anything other than a setup. He calls his old friend Sondra Kaine, who has looked after him in the past, and they arrange a place to meet up as he flees the scene.
Meanwhile uptown, Mary OBannon, is getting the news that her sister's body has been discovered in a sleazy hotel and could she come and identify it. Once she has laid her eyes on her sisters corpse, and after being told by the detective in charge that the suspect, Mike Degallo, may dissappear into the underworld, she makes a call to the Police Chief of the city. An old boyfriend, he agrees to give her a PI's licence and so she sets out to find out what happened. She decides to visit the morgue for the coroner's report first.
Sondra in the meantime is tapping some of her contacts for a lead in who might have set Mike up. Coming up with nothing particularly new, and guessing that the four leaf clover is a plant to put them on the track of a supposedly retired assasin, they head to the morgue to get rid of the body.
They arrive shortly after Mary, and she hides as they enter the morgue. They knock out the two men on duty, take their coats and try and act like morgue technicians as they go and find the body. Mary isn't fooled, they are after all mafia men and not actors, and confronts them. They manage to convince her, sort of, that mike didn't have anything to do with it and tell her that they want an 'independent opinion' on the autopsy.
As they leave some other gangsters, who had just missed them as they left the morgue, give pursuit, but Sondra's driving gets them out of danger. They head to a chinese doctor Mike knows for a second look at the body whilst Mary is deciding whether or not she is entirely convinced by there story.
So there we go. that was the first, pretty short session, and I hope to finish it off at some point, maybe even turning into a campaign. I would be interested to hear feedback from the players, and from you guys as to how this reads as an AP report. I need to get some practice at writing these things and am wondering if I should include more mechanical detail.
One thing I did learn from the session was that I am very rusty on explaining the nuances of the MJ resolution system, which led to some confusion for Shevy as I kind of rushed through the explanation in game. Need to polish that up.
Once I have that feedback I can publish it on other sites alongside my posts about the development of MJ.
Cheers
Iain
Aha!
Submitted by Gregor Hutton on Mon, 03/09/2007 - 10:39.
I have things to say on this but it will be later today (or this week) when I can get it all down.
I think your AP is fine, but I note that in telling it like a story you smear out some of the decisions made by players. I find that stuff intertesting, but I can cover it in my post, so no worries.
(As an aide-memoire to myself...) I guess the key to my post will be
(i) our familiarity with the rules as a group (GM and players)
(ii) our behaviours as players "in character" and "as participants"
(iii) a little bit about "getting a party together" and "story"
(iv) a player being uncomfortable about a rule and debating its correctness during play, and the frustration that causes.
Anyway, more later!
Oh, boy.
Submitted by Gregor Hutton on Mon, 03/09/2007 - 22:06.
Being on a plane is doing wonders for my gaming these days. At the ends of these trips I've been hooking up with fun games pretty much for the last month or so. The flights also give me time to turn them over in my mind and figure out what went right and wrong.
So, I've been flipping this one through my head and I realise that it's going to be a monster post. Instead, I will do it in chunks. I think I've got my head around what I want to say, but we'll see.
So, first up: The Easy Stuff.
(i) our familiarity with the rules as a group (GM and players)
We were completely unfamiliar as players of the rules. I think this is useful though, as many players sitting down for a game of Mob Justice will be in the same boat. Unfortunately Iain seemed to be in little better position than we were!
I felt that a GM completely unfamiliar with the book will have read it recently and (reasonably) thoroughly before launching into a game. This wasn't the case for us.
I guess Iain's overfamiliarity with the book hurt him here, as he hadn't played it in months and his head is full of mechanics of other games. Sure, the residual info is there but it was rusty and we were all fumbling about a bit.
I've played it before (long ago) so I had a rough idea and I'd played a demo of a skirmish. Joe perhaps had been in a demo before, but maybe not. Shevy hadn't played it before at all and I think, initially when choosing characters, she was under the impression that it was set in the 1920s.
So, what can I take out of this:
So, that was the easy bit.
Players of Mob Justice: it really helps if you take a little time to make sure you know a bit about the world and the rules.
It also helps for us poor poker players to have the Quick Start rules in front of you with the hand strengths on them.
Two minor points about the character sheet: we need a box for Damage Taken and the list of Hand Strengths. A sequence of a skirmish would be good too, but I could live without it.
Good points Gregor, thanks
Submitted by Iain McAllister on Mon, 03/09/2007 - 23:23.
Good points Gregor, thanks very much.
I really should have reread my own rules before the game and noted stuff down that I had forgotten or was rusty on. A bit arrogant of me not to and I apologise.
I think we rushed into getting things going cause I felt Joe wouldn't get to play much any other way, but I should really have taken the time to take you through the 20 min demo beforehand to give you a better idea of the rules.
I'll get some cheat sheets printed out for next time we meet.
Looking forward to rest of this.
Cheers
Iain
Mob Justice now available!
'The Giant Brain':Small games, big ideas.
Unfamiliarity
Submitted by David Donachie on Wed, 05/09/2007 - 06:59.
That can happen in any game though can't it Gregor. Ideally when a group sits down to play a new game the GM, at least, is familiar with it, but it doesn't always happen that way. I myself have in the past been so keen to run a great new game that I got that I'd barely absorbed the setting, nevermind the rules, but jumped into a setting anyway, its what rulebooks are for :)
And I'm sure most of us started off in a gaming group where no one knew what they were doing.
(ii) our behaviours as players "in character"...
Submitted by Gregor Hutton on Mon, 10/09/2007 - 17:57.
Oh, I noticed a few comment in the ActualPlay.com thread about just writing up AP as fiction, Iain. You might want to take a look at that, or spin a thread off to talk about that.
Anyway, a quick point here for part 2, the meatier ones to follow I'm afraid.
(ii) our behaviours as players "in character" and "as participants"
The three players all acted very differently as characters in my opinion.
I think I had a very authorial input, and didn't act as much "in character" as the other two. I haven't found my feet with this character yet, which is typical for me. I like to work my way into them and see what I like and don't like, what works and what doesn't. I guess it comes from not having a "stock character" that I play, or my reluctance to take an easily grabbed proxy.
Joe was the most immersive I felt and that was a flag about other things to me too (see below).
Shevy played a pastiche dame which fitted in well to Iain's story, and as a character she was midway between Joe and I.
As participants it was a bit of a mish-mash. (And these are just my observations!)
Joe just wanted to play a game, preferably without any hassle. When things got bogged down in rules discussions (more later) he dropped into immersing in character wherever and whenever possible to get some fun out of the session. His gravelly voiced mobster was bounced along through Iain's "story before" (again, more later) and I'm guessing that was the most pleasing bit of the game for Joe.
Shevy was the most questioning of the participants and the one blocking the actual play (more later). I don't think she enjoyed the game much at all, and was confused about how any of the procedures actually worked. My perception was that Shevy didn't buy into how the rules worked and the burden of proving that they did work, or whatever, was cast towards Iain and the other players. The fiction from Iain also made it more confrontational since it pitched two of the participants (myself and Joe) against the other (Shevy), which just was bad all round. However, away from the "system" Shevy did go against character to make sure that the party formed up by the end of the session, so it's not like Shevy didn't want to be in a group. Still, I'll write more about the rules stuff later.
Me, I got dragged into the rules discussion as I tried to explain it to Shevy, without any success. I should have flagged it up much earlier and backed out, so that's on me. The rulkes themselves are clear (why they're that way is a discussion for another time) but I think the over-explaining from Iain and me didn't help. We should have just said: that's the effing rule, right? I think I was trying to knit the story together from the start (meeting up with Joe) but I see now that this was me trying to patch a bad start, we should just have done over from the beginning. I also stupidly played to the conflict Iain had badly created of having Shevy as separate from Joe and me. We should just have glossed over it and "given" ratehr than have a conflict over something as trivial as whether she spotted we were mobsters or not.
Ahh, hindsight.
But I think it flagged up the warnings about game prep and how Mob Justice needs to work, which I'll cover in my next posts. (Coming at some point soon-ish I hope...)
So, basically an avoidable train wreck and troubles caused by an unconvinced participant.
I think a lot of these
Submitted by Iain McAllister on Tue, 11/09/2007 - 10:15.
I think a lot of these problems came from my lack of game prep andmy rustiness as a GM. I haven't really had proper regular gaming for a couple of months and maybe should have eased myself in a bit better.
I didn't mind the conflict between players I had set up as I kind of anticipated you three coming together to work out what the hell was going on. Any suggestions on how to do this better would be greatly appreciated.
It should have probably been the case that I gave you a bunch of pregens rather than taking charcter suggestions from the three of you.
Iain
Mob Justice now available!
'The Giant Brain':Small games, big ideas.
Hey no problem...
Submitted by Gregor Hutton on Tue, 11/09/2007 - 11:39.
...and this will segue nicely into the next post from me when it comes.
And don't be down on the game as this will generate some really great advice for people looking to kick start a Mob Justice game off, and I think they should.
As as aside I spoke to John Wilson about it last night and I was enthusing about the actual procedures of play in Mob Justice, and dissecting other games to show him how they work in comparison. We were very upbeat about it.
I am a little down that the
Submitted by Iain McAllister on Tue, 11/09/2007 - 12:56.
I am a little down that the game wasn't enjoyed by all, but not about the game. I believe I made a great game in MJ and it taught me a lot about the process of design and production which I am trying to apply to my new projects. I am already thinking up a cool thing to do with MJ for GEAS, but more on that later.
Cheers
Iain
Mob Justice now available!
'The Giant Brain':Small games, big ideas.
I take it you're going to
Submitted by Andrew Kenrick on Tue, 11/09/2007 - 14:49.
I take it you're going to play again? This is all excellent feedback for making sure everyone enjoys themselves next time!
I would certainly like to,
Submitted by Iain McAllister on Wed, 12/09/2007 - 08:55.
I would certainly like to, just depends if we can all meet up again!
Cheers
Iain
Mob Justice now available!
'The Giant Brain':Small games, big ideas.
Yes!
Submitted by Gregor Hutton on Wed, 12/09/2007 - 09:28.
Hopefully next week!
Joe speaketh
Submitted by JoE PrincE on Wed, 12/09/2007 - 17:06.
I'd been waiting for Gregor's meat before commenting. Cease your tittering.
(As an aide-memoire to myself...) I guess the key to my post will be
(i) our familiarity with the rules as a group (GM and players)
(ii) our behaviours as players "in character" and "as participants"
(iii) a little bit about "getting a party together" and "story"
(iv) a player being uncomfortable about a rule and debating its correctness during play, and the frustration that causes.
...the meatier ones to follow I'm afraid.
I think Gregor has put it pretty well so far. Train wreck maybe a little harsh and I think Iain did know the rules - you need to work on explaining them!
We played for about 1 hour 40. I had fun mostly through immersion as mentioned earlier. I like Mikey, though was a bit uncertain of how to act in the Sin City scenario - he's no Marv!
I feel I'm learning MJ , I'm feeling my way into the game and loading up on story chips.
A MJ tutorial that gradually introduced the mechanics would be good.
I'm not sure about: how GM opposition is determined each scene, how the storyline works, authority over the fiction and how the MJ world is different to the real world.
It took a while to get the party together and I wasn't keen on having a PvP setup with Shevy against the two of us.
As for point 4, I think Shevy was just poking at the system trying to figure out how it worked. Some of the options - like changing the conflict stakes when you raise - left her a bit bewildered. I think Shevy was just asking for clarity of the rules and narrative authority.
The way we initiated a negative conflict - to not get recognised as mobsters was a bit strange to work through. Especially because we could raise and alter the stake to negate the conflict Shevy had previously won - to not get spotted.
Once we get over these hurdles we should be on for a good game - the little I do know of the system is great, I think it's an even better poker resolution system than Dust Devils.
+++
JoE
+++
Prince of Darkness Games
Rock N' Role-Play....
Thanks for the input Joe. I
Submitted by Iain McAllister on Wed, 12/09/2007 - 20:25.
Thanks for the input Joe.
I will be giving the rules a thorough read through before we next play and I think we should probably start again. I am going to start a new thread on prep for that game.
Cheers
Iain
Mob Justice now available!
'The Giant Brain':Small games, big ideas.