Tony, Christian, John, Hans, and I played a great game of Geiger Counter at Go Play NW yesterday. We were a group of ordinary people trapped in an old military facility on the side of a mountain while an unknown apocalypse occurred outside on January 1st, 2000. Our menace was the facility's artificial intelligence, glitched by the Y2K bug.

In particular, I loved how the game ended. We'd had one PC death up to this point, and all five of the remaining PCs were gathered inside the control room of the nuclear missile silo we'd discovered. Every character except for one (the Soccer Mom) had two Conditions at this point. The crazed Creepy Janitor decided that everything that had gone wrong was the fault of someone outside the complex interfering with their group and he tried to launch the missiles.

All the other PCs, naturally, sided against him, and it came to a conflict. He had three dice. Between the four of them, the others had around 12-15. We rolled. It came out as a tie, 11 to 11. In Geiger Counter, both sides lose ties. So, in one fell swoop, every single character, except for the soccer mom, died. The missiles launched, and the computer congratulated the Soccer Mom (who it called General) on beginning Protocol 3.

Cut to black. Roll credits.

I love this game.

I'd definitely be interested in taking a look at them; whether or not I'll get to play them is uncertain.

I remembered another great scene in the game: Johnzo and Tony had an awesome, subtle little subplot going on throughout the game that culminated in Johnzo's Handyman revealing that his nephew committed suicide while listening to Tony's Televangelist's radio show. Then the Handyman beat him almost to death with a hammer before the Teenager and a machine-gun turreted robot rolled in and finished him off.

This both gave the Handyman a survival die and took away a Menace die by accomplishing the secret goal of "Take Revenge On Someone". Not that it did him any good in the end. Muahahaha.

Sweet. So how did all the characters end up in the same location? That tends to happen in some games, but often it seems to be either through self-preservation (because teaming up against the menace is more effective) or because of some narrative-related goal (like getting the fuck out of here). Was it one of those? Was it clear mid-way through the game that was going to happen?

Also, on a completely unrelated note, what were some of the other locations you had before you all ended up trapped in the missle silo thing?

Finally, is there a picture / scan of the map? I'm always fascinate by what people come up with.

Hans copied the map onto his laptop (he's got one of those swivel-and-draw screens), so he might be able to upload it here.

We all shared in the concept. At first we thought about having a single evil critter, like a military project gone wrong. But once we stumbled on the AI idea, we all agreed on that. It worked out well.

I think that the Televangelist and the Handyman were the main characters. I did a few things with my Teenager, but I didn't have a good handle on her. She was more an action character, who took out a camera and blinded the AI when it tried to roll her over, later hung from a swiveling ceiling gun turret, and so on. I should have made up an 'issue' for my character, because she felt bland when compared to some of the other characters. Her mom (Single Mom) was there, too, and we died together in the nuke bay. Maybe they should have been at odds rather than a happy family.

We started in a cargo bay, had a biodome, a medical unit, tunnels, a command center, and an auxiliary command center (once we naded the first one). We all ended up in the nuke bay because one of our "trailer scenes" was a nuclear silo, and another was "character, clutching blood-spurting neck, lunges for button." Turns out that was the janitor.

Awesome indeed. It's really great that, in most games I've seen, in the end, it always comes down to character vs. character confrontations doing the majority of the group in. The menace provides the outside pressure that makes that happen and gives the ultimate betrayal some tragic teeth ("If only they'd all worked together, most of them probably could have made it out alive!"), but, when it comes down to the wire, it's always a trainwreck of emotions and desires.

Just like it should be.

It was spooky how this game paralleled Montsegur, so everything I said about siege tales and shared GMing over there applies here as well. And I think that Geiger does a faboo job of pushing mutual facestabbing, with the "witness someone die and get their mojo" rule. (I believe this rule is ambivalent about the identiy of the killer, right?)

So when I got my scene on, I started giving characters special relationships with the Menace. The schizo AI started misidentifying people; the Soccer Mom became "The General." Someone else -- we never decided exactly who -- started calling Don the Televangelist's cell phone, flattering his patriotism, asking him to perform loyalty evaluations, and warning him to be on the lookout for subversives (and infecting him with Paranoia, in a nifty and beautiful rules interpretation/hack by Mr. Dowler.)

My favorite bits happened when Tony and Lukas took those bits I invented and started running with them. It is so rewarding when you invent something out of whole cloth and hand it off to someone and they Say Yes and then make it way better than something you could've thought up on your own.

Oh, and here's my guy, for the record.

Al "Alljobs.com" Jopps, played by Newhart's Tom Poston. A fiftyish white guy.

Equipment: Tools

Reason to live: finally has enough Air Miles and enough nerve to go to a gay Club Med;
anticipates his sexual awakening.

Posted By: johnzoand infecting him with Paranoia, in a nifty and beautiful rules interpretation/hack by Mr. Dowler.

Genius!

Yeah, we used little plastic Civil War army men for the same purpose on our map. I don't think we ever decided that a character couldn't be in a scene either. We just stopped to figure out a transition that made sense.

"Infected" is definitely the most fun of all the Conditions. So much so that I had to start restricting it. Otherwise, everyone would just take it from losing to the menace and it would never actually spread person-to-person. I'm glad you folks hacked it in.

Yeah, there needs to be better advice in the text about how to do scene framing. The steps I go through in my head look like this:

- which character has had the fewest scenes so far?
- where were they last seen?
- what were they doing last?
- where are they likely to be now?
- who's with them?
- how do we crank this up a notch or reveal something interesting about the characters, the menace, or the locations?
- that's the scene.

And then I break that up with scenes that don't feature the characters at all, or might feature one or two, but are about 15 seconds long and are usually purely narration from me, the scene Director, with maybe a witty comment from a character or another player stepping in to voice an NPC (there's generally a lot of interplay and "collective GMing" when I run Geiger anyway; I shift back and forth from being a strong, plot-orienting Director to being a free-wheeling, open-to-all-suggestions Director). These micro scenes feature hints of the menace, or NPCs getting killed, or more problems emerging, or what NPCs far away from the action think of all this. That helps with the pacing, I find. It provides ideas for further scenes later and helps everyone recharge.