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Actual Play Vignettes: [Six Bullets For Vengeance] - Die By the Gun, Part Two

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      CommentAuthorSouthpaw
    • CommentTimeSep 18th 2007 edited
     # 1
    The epic recap continued....

    • The Second Bullet - Lloyd Bennett
      "Pleasegodjesus don't kill me! Mama! Mama!"

      Now we had to figure out what happened with Lloyd Bennett to get Dave so mad. This is where I changed it up, particularly when Laurie took another point of The Gun. Someone has to die in every scene, but it doesn't necessarily have to be a shoot 'em up.

      Lloyd's an eighteen-year-old kid who just happens to be Dave Bennett's brother. I gave Lloyd the trait Innocence at 4. He's not a bad guy, but he was a part of whatever terrible thing happened to Laurie. He's working as a farmhand when Laurie comes in looking to water her horse. He recognized her right away and tried to make himself scarce, but she spotted him.

      This was an emotional scene. Again, he has to die, but he's not bad-bad like the guys before and after. I made him as pathetic as possible, yelling for his brother while the other hands tried to calm Laurie down. In the end it was The Gun vs. Innocence and Laurie shot Lloyd to death while he pleaded for his mother.

      Whew.

    • The First Bullet - Roy Fuller
      "You want to play some more?"

      And we thought the last scene was bad. This one had a whole section we skipped for reasons I'll explain in a moment.

      We actually kind of screwed this up, because this is the scene that probably should have been the epilogue. In it, all the (now dead) characters gather outside Laurie's house. They've just finished doing something terrible inside. Zach Tucker's been busted out of jail and now the men are heading off their separate ways.

      Roy Fuller (Rotten to the Core - 5), decides to go back in. Laurie's husband was the Sheriff and he's dead in there. The place is smashed up and Laurie's been beaten and gang-raped. Roy pulls his knife and we roll, Rotten to the Core vs. The Gun/Vengeance).

      Laurie didn't get a single success, and Roy got all of his. There were audible groans, and in the end we figured that what happened then was just so fucking awful that it was too much even to think about it. So we skipped past it and returned to Roy drinking stolen booze. He hears Laurie moving around, and then she stabs him in the neck with his own knife. He dies horribly.

    • The Epilogue

      As I said, the last scene might have been better as the epilogue, but since we'd already done what we did, we had to work around it. Laurie's player took over the role of her husband, the Sheriff, who's holding Zach Tucker in jail for various crimes. Zach tried to buy the sheriff off to no avail.

      The sheriff went home and Zach's buddies broke him out. We ended it with Zach saying, "I ain't ridin' anywhere just yet. I got a social call to make."


    And that's about the size of it. Play didn't take particularly long. Maybe 90 minutes or thereabouts. I understand that the system's gone through a number of alterations and it might not even resemble what we played anymore, but it worked well enough that I felt it was worth sharing.
  2.  # 2
    Oh, interesting. I'm sure Andy will be along presently...
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      CommentAuthorSouthpaw
    • CommentTimeSep 18th 2007
     # 3
    I should probably also point out that we named the game after the fact. Since "The Gun" played such a big part in the proceedings, the title seemed to fit.
  4.  # 4
    Wow Sam, this was an unexpectedly pleasant surprise to find this morning! Thanks for posting this, and for playtesting Six Bullets.

    As you say on the previous post, this is indeed an outdated version. I like to think it's come along a bit since then, but the basic premise and play structure remains the same - if you'd like to see the current version, let me know your address. This goes for anyone else who wants to see the game so far too!

    We've hit the problem you mention about rolling the dice even though you know the outcome - what we've done is made the roll about something different, not about the inevitable. So you know he dies, so you don't roll about that. You roll to see how hard it is for Laurie to get her revenge, how many innocents does she kill, how badly messed up does she get first, that sort of thing.

    Likewise the everyone has to die - the game I had at Spodley Grange with Malcolm Craig as the protagonist, which I talk about here, actually had a couple of the antagonists survive. And one killed "off camera" by the local sheriff, after beating up the protagonist. So not necessarily, but normally, everyone dies!

    Thanks once again for running the game - I think this might be the first time someone other than me has ran it, and that's really quite interesting to see. I'd love to hear more thoughts about it. So what worked? What didn't?
    •  
      CommentAuthorSouthpaw
    • CommentTimeSep 19th 2007
     # 5
    Posted By: Andrew KenrickThanks once again for running the game - I think this might be the first time someone other than me has ran it, and that's really quite interesting to see. I'd love to hear more thoughts about it. So what worked? What didn't?

    Mechanically I think the most difficult part for us was figuring out when and how to turn Vengeance into a new trait. In the end we decided to simply drop Vengeance by one at the beginning of each scene and either adding to an existing trait like The Gun or creating a new one (like Quick).

    Having been through a situation twice where our protagonist failed her roll while the antagonists made theirs, we have a much better handle on what the dice are for game-wise and how to incorporate various results into the story. There was a pretty high ick factor in the penultimate scene, which I believe made the game a lot better, though it was pretty disturbing at the time.

    I find myself quite curious as to how the game would work with more than just our player-base of two. I tried to keep the scene-setting varied, and I believe I succeeded, but nothing beats having different people at the table with very different ideas about how things should go.
  6.  # 6
    Posted By: SouthpawMechanically I think the most difficult part for us was figuring out when and how to turnVengeanceinto a new trait. In the end we decided to simply dropVengeanceby one at the beginning of each scene and either adding to an existing trait likeThe Gunor creating a new one (likeQuick).


    Yeh, this is one of the bits that has changed for just the reason you mentioned - you now get a pool of vengeance dice (all shiny and red!) which you can throw into any roll. The caveat? Whenever vengeance dice get used, the narration has to include bloodshed, violence or death in some capacity. So you run the risk that if you lose, your opponent can make life really nasty for you.

    Posted By: SouthpawThere was a pretty high ick factor in the penultimate scene, which I believe made the game a lot better, though it was pretty disturbing at the time.


    I've put a section about lines and veils in for this very reason. It's fair to say that Six Bullets is going to be nasty however you play it - the question is, how nasty? My games so far have got pretty grisly, but don't seem to have strayed too far into the other horrible possibilities.

    Posted By: SouthpawI find myself quite curious as to how the game would work with more than just our player-base of two. I tried to keep the scene-setting varied, and I believe I succeeded, but nothing beats having different people at the table with very different ideas about how things should go.


    I've changed it so that there are always 6 antagonists and 1 protagonist. With 2 players, 1 player plays the protag, the other plays all the others, one by one. With more players, you just share out the antagonists, and people get to chime in and play npcs too, although I've found they don't, generally. The sweet spot seems to be 4 players - that way the antagonists get to play 2 each, which keeps the space between people doing stuff to a minimum.
  7.  # 7
    Posted By: Southpaw
    The sheriff went home and Zach's buddies broke him out. We ended it with Zach saying, "I ain't ridin' anywhere just yet. I got a social call to make."


    Oh, and this like? Sends chills up my spine, in a good way. Some things are far more powerful when not shown, just implied.
    •  
      CommentAuthorSouthpaw
    • CommentTimeSep 20th 2007
     # 8
    Posted By: Andrew KenrickI've changed it so that there are always 6 antagonists and 1 protagonist. With 2 players, 1 player plays the protag, the other plays all the others, one by one. With more players, you just share out the antagonists, and people get to chime in and play npcs too, although I've found they don't, generally. The sweet spot seems to be 4 players - that way the antagonists get to play 2 each, which keeps the space between people doing stuff to a minimum.

    Oh, that's in the copy of the rules we have... we just don't have more than two people. That's why I'm curious to see how it'd work out with a larger group. Different perspectives, different storytelling methods and so forth. I tried to change up the scenes a bit and I think it worked out, but there'd be a higher surprise factor, I think, if we had a larger pool of creative minds from which to draw.

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