Tonight saw the continuation of the playtest that was kicked off in this thread on the Collective Endeavour after a hiatus of some weeks. That's actually proved to be beneficial, as the mechanical aspects of the game have undergone some change since then. This would be an opportunity to see how those changes actually affect play.

For those not familiar with Hot War, there's a bunch of information available on the CGS forums, including some stuff that directly relates to the background and what I see the game as being about.

One of the players, Blair, was coming into this totally cold, so he had something of a disadvantage from the start. Both Morgue and Steve had been part of the game and character creation process, whereas Blair had to adapt to the character that was handed to him, with much less knowledge of the setting elements than the rest of this. However, he did do an admirable job.

The real stress on this evenings play was to give the conflict mechanics a real booting to see how they held up. The changes that have taken place from the almost straight port of the Cold City mechanics to the current iteration of Hot War have been quite substantial, altering the tone and themes of the game radically. Cold War is all about the decay in trust, Hot War is about building relationships in the aftermath of the apocalypse. An important difference.

So, it was conflict ahoy, almost from the get go. If this were a BBC drama (which is the tone that we chose to set at the start), we would have got about fifteen minutes into the programme during this evenings play. As a bit of backstory, the characters are going undercover in Battersea to root out a corrupt, venal local politician who is attempting to set up a power base for himself in defiance of the Government. The characters find themselves in a work gang, being forced to hand over their ration cards because "That's the bosses orders, see?"

Conflict ran good and hard and it was nice to see that the GMs power of framing scenes didn't cause a diminishment of the contribution from the players. They took the scene and ran with it, playing things out to conflict. The opening scene moved nicely into a fairly harsh section, where in an interior scene in a dilapidated terraced house, some French refugees are found and driven out (the characters and other having been seconded from the work gang for this task) and multiple conflicts regarding their fate and the standing of the characters in the eyes of their fellows grew out of this.

These scenes helped establish the brutal nature of the regime in Battersea and how far the characters were willing to go in order to keep their cover and get in deeper. Neames was on the verge of administering a beating to the adult refugees with a pickaxe handle, Perkins whacked the work gang leader across the back of the head and Beaumont was attempting to be a force for order and calm amongst it all. We also saw Blair bring in one of Beaumonts hidden agendas (he wants to save as many refufgees as possible and get them to a better life outside of London) to effectively allow the escape of the refugees.

The establishment of character (Neames show to be immersing himself in his cover, Beaumont exuding leadership and establishing himself as a rallying figure for the downtrodden people and Perkins acting without regard to consequences) worked really nicely.

The real value here was in thrashing out some of the flaws that became apparent in the Relationship and Consequence mechanics. it was immediately obvious that the concept of having reciprocal relationships (operating in a manner similar to Trust in Cold City) was flawed and met with problems when relationships were taken as consequences. The conclusion was that relationships should be all about the relationship from the point of the view of the character. If an NPC with whom the character has a relationship has a reciprocal value, then cool. But if not (and there's always the opportunity to establish that in play) then cool.

The second issue was with conflicts and consequences. More conflicts resulted in 2 successes than any other number, so that section of the consequences table came in for some scrutiny. It became apparent that when spending 2 points, there were a lack of viable options for failure, particularly when you were in violent conflict. the addition of a new type of consequence "Temporary (remainder of this scene) negative trait" would be an effective fix here.

Just to note, you trade successes for point to spend on both success and failure consequences. So, with 2 successes, you can buy 2 points of success consequences for yourself, 2 points of failure consequences for the opposition, 1 point for both and so on.

So, in light of this extremely valuable playtest, there are going to be some changes to the text! Relationships will undergo change in light of our experience with them and consequences mildly revised to make them more applicable to more situations.

I hope that Blair, Morgue and Steve might chip in with some of their thoughts on tonights game at some point.

Cheers
Malcolm

It was a poppin' good game. I went through a bit of a head-shake about how consequences related to conflicts - my character would go into a conflict wanting to achieve something, but after it we didn't really find good matches in the consequences list. (The temporary trait addition came out of that.)

My response - to parse the process as:
Conflict winner determined
> Mechanical consequences chosen by winner
> Results of conflict happen (through narration, reflecting initial intent and scale of chosen consequences)
> Consequences happen

In other words, the consequences are not the results of the conflict. So if my intent in a conflict was to knock the guard down, I would narrate that, and choose a consequence that arose from that. It got hazy around the limits of narration - could I just narrate that the guard was knocked straight unconscious? - but we agreed that that would be a temporary (scene) trait mechanical consequence.

There might be some hooks in working out these break points, but it seems from here that it'll keep working well.

A few thoughts occurred to me after the game:

Conflicts are the only way to improve. I'll be pushing for more of them next session.

I really wanted to start using relationships in my conflict rolls, but couldn't find a way to justify them yet. I think relationships - and complex conflicts involving many relationships at once - will become key to games of Hot War.

I guess that means a strategy for this game is to affiliate with people who can help you and your hidden-agenda related conflicts, so that you can resolve them positively.

I'm really looking forward to next Wednesday's session.

Excellent feedback and turnaround, Malcolm. We will incorporate this into our follow-up playtest this weekend!

Chris

Posted By: komradebobMalcolm:
This next bit?

" The palace is gone now, " Private Thwaite said, referring to Buckingham Palace "It's just walls everywhere.But none of them are connected."

That's just fucking weird and creepy.

Seriously.

It is, isn't it?

You know what's creepier and scarier?

That entire journalists account of the fighting in London is based entirely on accounts of the Battle of Grozny during the First Chechen War. The words that are spoken in that segment are stuff that people actually said, only with the names and places changed. I lifted the idea from a J G Ballard short story, where he uses news reports about the Vietnam War and changes the places so that it becomes a story about the Second Civil War in England. Standing on the shoulders of giants and all that.

Cheers
Malcolm

Agreed. As a GM, the B&W pics provide a framework (that the players specifically requested) for bangs that I was going to create anyway based on their character sheets and the game setup. How cool is that?!?

Malcolm, you might think about making the above a stated part of the rules, or at least GMs notes on running the game. It could be very helpful for folks not used to running this type of game.

I call it..."pin the bang on the picture". [ducks]

Tonight represented the final session for this particular game and it certainly proved to be another corker, both in terms of the fiction that came out of the game and the changes to the mechanics. Going into the game I'd looked over the character sheets and noted relationships that had lain unused, some of them pretty powerful and/or important. So I scribbled down a few potential scenes that might get brought into the game. This also helped to structure it in my head, which was pretty handy. All in all, we got through a total of 11 scenes, way more than in previous sessions. Everyone later commented that our feel for the mechanics, the characters and the way the story was going really helped with this.

To cover off the scenes, they broke down like this:

Scenes 1 & 2 involved getting a message from, and then meeting, the 'inside man' who had been mentioned during the game creation phase, but who hadn't yet come into the story. This also drew on the 'B&W photo scene suggestion' from Morgue, which had also lain unused since the game creation phase.

Scenes 3 & 4 revolved around Dupont, the French refugee father whom we met in the very early stages of the first session. He was now back and armed with a shotgun, looking to kill Moreley, the work gang leader who ordered him and his family beaten. Although Moreley was duped into coming outside, Neames (Steves character) intervened and he was then captured. The following scene was one of the most powerful we've yet had, where (again drawing on a 'B&W photo scene suggestion' from the game creation phase), Neames was handed a gun and told to execute Dupont. The scene took place in a dank cellar, with Beaumont, Neames and Perkins all involved and all having to make sacrifices and be complicit in the death of an innocent man.

Scenes 5, 7 & 10 all involved the appearance of Mary Pike, the girl whom Perkins wishes to marry. All of these scenes built the relationship up, through a quest for black market tins of condensed milk and Perkins blurting out to Mary that he is actually a spy of some kind. It's the first time we had met Mary and, had the game been continuing on any further, the story of her relationship with Perkins would certainly have formed a major thread.

Scenes 6 & 6 saw Beaumont being recognised by Lieutenant Commander Barlow, a Navy colleague who arrived in Battersea with a motor gunboat towing a barge, on a mission to collect refugees for the camps in the Thames Estuary. Beaumont was recognised by Barlow, who proceed to ruin Beaumonts good reputation in the eyes of the men of the work gang before bringing him on board the gunboat for a brandy. We then had a flashback scene to the English Channel during the War, when both characters were on a destroyer defending against tentacular leviathans. The conflict that emerged told the story of Barlow using his tiny amount of seniority to force Beaumont and the sailors who respected him to machinegun boatloads of refugees trying to escape to England.

Scene 9 say Neames meet with his brother George in a dingy pub drinking ersatz beer. This is their first meeting in five or six years and George is hostile and suspicious. The main thrust of the situationis to bring this relationship into the story and to involve George in the plans that Neames has for taking revenge. Both of these outcomes were met, and in spades!

The final scene saw the Boss of Battersea wheedling the characters into spying on his wife, who he presumes is having an affair (she most certainly is, and with his chief henchman, Raleigh). The characters emerge from the Town Hall with rifles, now men on the inside of the power structure they are trying to bring down.

As for the mechanical changes to the game, one which was implemented and tried out in this session was removing the existing first level of consequences. Now, there are only three levels of consequences, making it easier to have a more powerful mechanical change to stem from a conflict. Broadly speaking, we agreed that this worked in an ideal fashion and that the evolution of consequences from our first session (and taking into account all the immensely valuable advice and feedback from other playtesters) had worked really well and that this iteration seemed to be an ideal fit.

A major change that stemmed from the post-game discussion related to hidden agendas. Prior to this discussion, agendas could be rated at 5, 9 or 19, meaning that you got to bring them into that number of conflicts before they had to be resolved (they gave different amounts of dice depending on the rating). After much discussion, thought and graph drawing we concluded that the ideal rating should be 3, 5 or 9, coupled with further advice on the use of agendas as a pacing mechanism in the game. Looking at it, this would appear to be good solution.

Overall, another immensely valuable playtest session and one that seems to indicate that the mechanics are reaching a very workable state. I'm sure that there is still polishing required, but the core seems to be very stable.

As this was the final session of Hot War here in Wellington, I'd like to thank Morgue, Blair and Steve for all the effort they have put in, the time they have spent, the feedback they have given and the wonderful good humour they have shown throughout this playtesting.

Cheers
Malcolm

Posted By: komradebobSuperior officers who order refugees machine-gunned and then turn up again later seems to be a recurring bit of story. We hit on something very similar.

Interesting.

Interesting indeed. The 'callous officer' is a pretty useful standby in a lot of situations. However, it was only during the flashback that we established that he really was a bit of a shit, as opposed to simply being a clueless buffoon.

It was actually the first time that we had a flashback in the game and it worked really well to reinforce the discomfort created by the false cameraderie of Barlow. Sickening twerp that he was. Actually, Blair (one of the players) made the excellent suggestion when he appeared that he and his me would be immaculately turned out and their boat in top shape, in total contrast to everyone else we had ever met in the game, who was worn down, shabby and covered in grime. Worked well.

Cheers
Malc

Maybe that should be part of set-up:

"Which of your characters was involved with killing helpless, panicked people during the war?"