The Rig

A Senator and two campaign staffers on their way to an aircraft carrier photo op are forced by a helicopter fuel leak to land on a old oil rig which has been retrofitted for black ops marine genetics experiments. A storm strands them there. Murder and mayhem ensue.

Cast: Sen. Ben Templeton - heroic politician; Dr. Emily Smith - murderous geneticist; Father Simon Rushim - zealous facility chaplain; Loretta Hamil - crazy medium; Beth Haughten - wealthy socialite; Gilroy X - facility commando.

I'd been looking for something to take to a local game shop's beer and pizza night, something that would be relatively easy to pick up and teach, and Geiger Counter looked like it might fit the bill. A lot of the goplaypdx crew were either late or didn't make it but we roped in three people who hadn't played a game like it before and played an abbreviated session. We knew up front that some folks would have to leave early and we were forced to rush some things so I can't say that every aspect of the game got a proper showing. Everyone seemed to enjoy it, though; they all planned to grab it off the website and one of them intends to facilitate it himself some time soon.

I'd recommended in another thread a bullet point teaching aid for people planning to moderate a game for their first time, but in practice I found it pretty easy to flip through the document and cover each of the important points. I had Christian (xenopulse) who'd played it at GoPlayNW to help me along too.

We brainstormed eight goals for our setting and then chose six (one each) from among those and did the same for character concepts. That seemed to work pretty well, although if I were taking this to a con or to a future game night, I would appreciate the opportunity to whittle down the time on this by having five style sheets that had ten goals and ten character concepts already prepared with players picking from among those or making up their own as desired. I'll bet these kinds of movies can be collected into only a handful of boilerplates.

All the new people really warmed to their roles as directors and did a great job. It reminded me of PTA in terms of how quickly people fall into a mode of scene-framing in an RPG if the instructions for it are presented in terms of cinema.

Knowing we were pressed for time, we built up the Menace quickly (for the record: Fast, Strong, Hazardous Environment, Tentacles, Enemy Commandos, Relationship with Scientists, Impervious to Firearms, Flooding), and the pacing definitely suffered for that. We didn't get enough opportunities to develop our characters, so the goal fulfillments felt a little rushed as well.

As a data point, we all died. I had emphasized the core of the game being to try to arrive at a point where most of us died but that one or two of us survived and I don't think we engaged much in those behaviors that reduced character survivability. There was exactly one die-rolling confrontation between characters and we didn't have the Menace attack any main characters until it had five dice. After it peaked at eight dice we immediately succeeded in fulfilling two goals to bring it down to 6 dice and then another in the following scene to bring it to five. Still, it wiped us all out and probably could probably taken out a couple more of us given the chance. We did have a "traitor" that sided with the Menace so that was part of it. I wouldn't choose to restrict the number of Traitors but I could see some this getting pretty ugly if there were even two of them w/o some mitigating mechanical help for prospective survivors.

Highlights:

- a great prelude with blinking monitoring stations and a lush underwater biosphere.
- great camerawork all around with cool descriptions of the storm and water on the lenses.
- the inadequately pinioned helicopter is blown off the helipad and crashes though the plateglass windows of the mess hall below, hanging from cables.
- Father Simon and his "knife-in-a-hollowed-out-bible" ruse.
- the naïve medium Loretta attempts to empathize with the aquatic menace with predictable results.
- the scientist "mother" of the menace scolds her "child" to try to get it to behave.
- moments after promising to leave his wife and make his mistress an honest woman, action-hero Ben inadvertantly torches both her and the menace with highly-oxygenated fire from the tanks in the medical facility.

Our abbreviated and rushed session makes me hesitate to make too many playtester observations, but I would try to answer any questions that come to mind. I did have a good time with this game and hope I can play it again soon. It gave me an opportunity to meet some neat new people and introduce them to a shared-authority gamestyle they weren't familiar with. I own a lot of the IPR catalogue and there are only a few games I would feel so comfortable running for new people so quickly (PTA and Contenders among them). And Geiger Counter was free!

Cool play report!

Posted By: xenopulseI think when I first played it at Go Play NW, I was looking for a deeper something, for lack of a better term. I didn't accept it for what it says that it is: a game where you basically create B-movies. Sci Fi channel stuff. It's awesome fun, but the characters won't be complex. They don't have time to develop before they get eaten, usually.

Geiger Counter works great for that kind of game, but I wouldn't say that's all it can do. Two of the three games we played were moderate to very serious -- but we also took our time which makes it easier to go into depth.

I don't see the need for a traitor condition. We all knew the scientist was a traitor, but the characters didn't :) That allowed us to play more into it, too.

The idea of the traitor/untrustworthy condition is that you take it after you do the thing that clearly shows you are a traitor. You take it when you seal the pressure door to save yourself and leave the others behind -- they get infected (or whatever), you get traitor/untrustworthy.

I think it's totally cool that people new to shared authority games jumped right in and had fun.

I think it was mostly bad luck on die rolls. There was one attack by the Menace on a character that was alone, but she had a mobile Advantage die and was in her lab where she had two static Advantage dice. We were otherwise all together throughout. We were in the area with three static Advantage dice when the 8-dice Menace attacked, but our traitor rolled with the Menace and she had a Survivor die and an extra Advantage die so the three of us remaining were looking at 12 dice. Even with all those dice, the Menace only managed an 11, but we with all our dice only managed a 10, I think. All the characters dying didn't lessen my enjoyment any, (nor others as far as I could tell). Just wanted to report the data point. :)

I don't see that there's anything in the mechanics that encourages fun campy B-movies preferentially over "good" survival horror or something more serious like Saving Private Ryan or Black Hawk Down. You've got a nice core mechanic of steadily increasing and then diminishing opposition. Everything else is going to be provided by the direction of the text and then the whims of the people playing. Beer + Pizza + first time Geiger Counter players + people playing with each other for the first time is usually going to generate the kind of fun we had.

As long as it was kept simple I might like to see some kind of mechanic where you had to make some kind of roll to achieve your Goal satisfactorily (not something that would give you a condition if you failed), rather than just achieve it narratively. Once you had that in place, you would have the option of adding a mechanic where a player got a bonus by working on their Goal in the first half of the movie as the Menace was building. "Working on" might be defined as having a scene that foreshadowed/put their goals front and center. The effect might be more character-driven scenes over characters running away and looking for guns or cattle-prods, etc.
Not sure there. Just spit-balling.

Maybe something as simple as providing an option where in some games you decide as a group that in THIS game the 3 mobile dice are defined as Survival dice that are associated with the characters Goals in some way, rather than being Advantage dice.

I don't know. If you think about a "good" survival horror movie like Alien, it's more about direction, acting, camera work, pacing, and script than in-depth character moments that make it "good." We don't really know or learn much about any of the characters in that movie, not even Ripley; it's just that the dialogue and special effects aren't cheesy.

Some time when we know we have a four hour window and mostly players who have played before, I'd be curious to come up with a style sheet for something like Saving Private Ryan.

Yeah. If you wanted that to work differently there'd some mechanical benefit to bumping heads via Confrontation early. The only benefit I could see would be if the group decided that the PCs were fighting over an Advantage die, and even then the advantage is just to the winner. Maybe Conditions gained in PC vs PC Confrontations shouldn't count against their 3-strikes you're out? That would remove at least some of the disincentive from player Confrontations.

One of the reasons I love FATE so much is the implicit "dials" on it that you can tune according to what you're using it for. Maybe there could be a default mode for GC, and then some optional rules in the back along with what kind of sub-genres of horror movies they help create. 'Course then you've got to test those options for performance...

I know the Menace had 5 dice in the final Confrontation in the command center, but I thought it had 8 the scene before in the medical facility where the 3 static Advantage dice were? Ah well, too much beer with my horror movie perhaps... :)

Posted By: nemomemeIfyou wanted that to work differently there'd some mechanical benefit to bumping heads via Confrontation early.

After thinking on it, if I was going to do that, I'd tie it into your "goal fulfillment scenes" idea earlier. I'd have characters compete for accomplishing steps on their goal "ladder" (keeping it to three steps for consistency's sake) in each scene, and give them a bonus die once they've fulfilled their goal. That's a pretty easy optional rule, I guess.

Sure, I can do all kinds of things without going to dice, in any game :) But I can't advocate for my character effectively if we've got a chase scene with me and the bounty hunter, if we're just supposed to agree on how that turns out.

Posted By: nemomemeIf you think about a "good" survival horror movie like Alien, it's more about direction, acting, camera work, pacing, and script than in-depth character moments that make it "good." We don't really know or learn much about any of the characters in that movie, not even Ripley; it's just that the dialogue and special effects aren't cheesy.

I definitely agree. I think what makes a "good" movie is likely to be non-mechanical, so I want to give really good suggestions on how to create one, but I don't think I'll be able to really make it part of the rules.

Posted By: nemomemeMaybe Conditions gained in PC vs PC Confrontations shouldn't count against their 3-strikes you're out?

Hmm, the only problem there is not being able to have main characters be responsible for each other's deaths and that's, like, half the fun :)

Posted By: xenopulseI can't advocate for my character effectively

Christian, this comment really stuck out at me and something that might be potentially problematic for Geiger Counter. Personally, I find it really hard to both be an advocate for my character's goals in the fiction and also ultimately do what's best for the entire game, including throwing my own character under a bus. That's why I added the "Push the Red Button" section at the end that attempts to explicitly say: "You're not your character's advocate. You are more like the actor responsible for playing them in the movie. You're trying to give the best performance you can possibly give for that character, but you're not trying to change what's 'supposed' to happen to your character, to make them succeed or survive."

Honestly, in a game of Geiger, I can totally see Johns and Riddick's players sitting next to each other and constantly giving each other shit, without having there be a real confrontation, because they both are sharing in the process of creating this rivalry and agree on how things are going to work out. Once they stop agreeing or think one of them should really be at a disadvantage or suffer, then they start calling for Confrontations, rolling dice, and giving each other Conditions.