I just ran My Life with Joker at Pacificon (Con Quest SF, Avalon, whatever) and Carl Rigney suggested I post the play report here.

Premise: My Life with Master set in Gotham, where the minions serve the Clown Price of Crime, The Joker. As always, the master was made in the image of the players.

Crunchy bits:
Game run: 2 times
Length: 4 hours once, 4.5 hours second run (with breaks in the middle)
Players: 4 both times
Fear: 2
Reason: 3
Each character started with 1 point of love from a connection
Each game featured an innocent (Harvey Dent, then Margarit Marvil, a doctor with a free clinic)

Master bits:
Each group decided the Joker was different. Both agreed he was a brain, but the first wanted a teacher who taught people to do horrible things to each other in the name of chaos, the second created a feeder who thrived off fear. Both were similar but has some nuances. The teacher was more personal, he attacked a single school and tried to make kids shoot each other. The feeder was much more "Animated Series" and has plots to cause havok all over gotham.

Minion bits:
They minions were all assorted freaks, and rejects. Crooked cops, Arkham escapees, fugaties, masochists, and disciples of the Joker. Won't give you the write up, but they felt very at home in gotham. The Less than Human: Can't speak without giggling unless there is a dead person near by caused some amazing results.

Props, story bits:
Being my first time running MLWM I really wanted a solid story that could carry the game if the system didn't. I knew I couldn't prep the story itself at all, but I did everything I could to create Gotham at the table:

• I smiled... a LOT.


• I took pictures of my players and printed them out. Whenever they were violent and deviant I drew their hair green and their lips red with crayon. When they displease the Joker I cut pices off the picture.


• I had an egg timer. The first time it went off a bank exploded right in the middle of whatever scene was going on. The second time it went off Batman showed up and kicked peoples asses (the second time was only used in the Endgame as I as afraid of it dragging on).


• I used an iron on transfer of the Joker to a t-shirt where I filled in the aspect, type, etc and then wore the shirt.


• I died my hair green.


• I wore latex gloves that I kept snapping


• I got intimate with my players, walking around the table, putting my hand on their shoulder, etc.

Play Report:
Both times I ran it this game rocked. My players instantly identified with the Joker as a master.

It fell down somewhat for me mechanically. First, for those will high self loathing and no weariness, they rarely gained weariness and essentially drove towards becoming monsters in their own right (one actually did, a woman named April Fool who dethroned the Joker and became the Clown Princess of Crime). While this was not a horrible outcome, it did make me work VERY hard to present the Joker as more evil than the minions.

Threatening but not killing connections worked very well. In fact, in both games while the players were talking I spent about 10 minutes looking at their connections (and sometimes their MTH/LTH) and thought up a “plot” that would involve threatening as many of the connections as I could while still following the Joker’s aspect, type, need, want and outsider as they defined it.

I think the next iteration will be My Life with Palpatine.

If any one is interested in any of the other details let me know.

Playing with Latex gloves sounds Un-fucking-stoppable. So does everything else you mention here.

I am thoroughly, thoroughly impressed by the prep you put into this.

Posted By: wildduck

If any one is interested in any of the other details let me know.

Yes please.

Posted By: joepubPlaying with Latex gloves sounds Un-fucking-stoppable. So does everything else you mention here.

I am thoroughly, thoroughly impressed by the prep you put into this.

Thank you. I'm a huge fan of props as I find they really direct the game. I enjoy making them, though sometimes my wallet doesn't.

Posted By: TristanAs in "every little detail". How did the minions evolved from the beggining to the Endgame? What sort of characters were more memorable? Did it turned out to be a noticeable catarsis for the players?

Details coming on-line....

As this will get fairly specific, it will not suffice to mash up the two games as I did above, so now I'll break them down one by one.

First Game: Joker the Teacher.
In this game the players really wanted Joker to teach Batman that chaos was a necessity. The if there was to be the Bat, there had to be the Joker, very much in the style of Dark Knight. This presented some challenges for me, as I did not want to reproduce the movie, nor did I suspect my evil machinations could compare to Heath Ledger's performance, but there I was, smiling like a maniac anyway.

The Players:
This was my play test for the convention game, so it consisted of some of my regular players. Alec, Erik, Kevan and Kim. It's worth noting that Erik is a player who generally wants to play the "good guy", someone who sets himself apart from other heroes by fighting for the moral high ground. Kevan doesn't like tragic games, at least not usually. He wants the good guys to win. I was worried about both of these players having a good time, but as you'll see below, the game delivered and both of there play styles worked out just fine.

The Minions:
Riley, an "ex"-con given a job and a new life by the Joker, who broke him out of the joint. Riley was bitter at the system and ready to hurt people, but not those he cared about. LTH: He was a neurotically compulsive liar, he could only tell lies, except after dark. MTH: He also was pro at casing joints and breaking in. He could employ perfect stealth, except when distracted by food. His connections were Denny, the owner of a diner. Riley was played by Kim.

JT, a prosecution lawyer was able to swing any jury with his compelling words, that was until he started seeing them all covered in blood and went insane. Unable to practice his profession and off the rocker himself, JT joined the Joker's cadre. MTH: JT was incredibly persuasive, except to people wearing red (yeah... blood counted too). LTH: JT could not look someone in the eye without holding there hand. An exploit the Joker employed over and over was demanding that JT look at him, of course while not allowing JT to touch him. That was a fun bit of punishment. JT cared about his son, who did not know JT was his father (this ended up being a recurring theme in the games). JT was played by Alec

Donny, was a cop on the take. Still holding his badge he tried t play two lives. Somehow, he still thought even after all his crooked deals he could be redeemed, if only commissioner Gordon, his old partner, would believe in him again. Donny's connections were commissioner Gordon and his ex-wife Kathy. Donny was played by Erik

Tommy, was a beast of a man, committed to Arkham for brutal homicide, he was truly a danger to society. MTH: Tommy could kill anyone, except those who bore him no ill will. LTH: He could not speak, except in pained groans to anyone unless an attractive woman was nearby. Tommy's connections were his psychiatrist and sergeant Ramirez, both attractive women. Tommy was played by Kevan.

There area few bits I’m forgetting, which I’ll fill in once I look back at my notes, but for reference is this the level of detail folks are looking for or would you like a higher level review (highlights, notable challenges, etc)?

Posted By: TristanAs in "every little detail". How did the minions evolved from the beggining to the Endgame? What sort of characters were more memorable? Did it turned out to be a noticeable catarsis for the players?

Let me tell you about my character....

I was Carver in the yet unwritten second game. He could "kill anyone as long as there wasn't a child around" and "had an uncontrollable laugh, except in the presence of someone dead." He was a laughing scissor freak who cut out people's tongues (it helped that I used wildduck's scissors as a prop of my own when necessary).

I had an absolute blast, and wildduck did a fan-fucking-tastic job with the props and GMing. I'll let him talk about how the other characters evolved (and his perspective on mine). I don't feel like my character changed much except at the very end. It was pretty cathartic, mostly for the ultra violence in the middle, but I've played Sabbat, Poison'd, and other games pretty extremely at times and love stepping past the usual boundries of right and proper.

I'll echo the self-loathing concern, in that as a player there was little incentive to be good. Maybe that's normal for MLWM, but it was fun to go gung-ho as an evil minion. We still ended up with a variety of outcomes, so that might be par for the course. When creating the master, the other players tended to favor picking the "right" stats, especially modelling the Dark Knight depicition. I really pushed for Beast and then Feeder so that we could explore something different. I'm really glad we decided on one of those - otherwise we would have had a Brain/Teacher (which I didn't know was what the first group had done).

This is the first time I've played MLWM, but definitely has me wanting to play it again or run it. Either straight or with a setting mod.

Aha. I didn't get a Horror Revealed until the Endgame, and at that point, the focus was on wrapping things up (and trying to set it up so April Fool could take over).

In the first game Horror Revealed did function as such, but in my second run, the characters kept alternating between gaining love and self loathing, so it took quite a while (as Alvin Frewer noted, in the Endgame) for the Horror to be revealed. Some of this is fiddly bits, changing Fear and Reason so that more overtures would generate self-loathing, but I have a strong resistance to trying to "out think" the players and account for their actions with mechanics. More coming this weekend when I have time to dig through all my notes.

Posted By: jhkimOne of the things I tried to do with my character was to link the minion's stories, by forming connections to characters related to the other PCs connections. So I had a connection to my neighbor, the cameraman of April Phule's reporter connection. Also, I connected to I think Carver's ex-lover and mother of his son.

I actually meant to comment on that to you during the game. In most games the players form a "party" in some way or another and so having their interests intersect is advantageous for storytelling. In MLWM there are two reasons not to form a party that I can see. First, the Master will always pull you together, regardless of your personal desires. Second, the game is really told as a round robin style of gaming, where each player frames a scene for their character rather than taking actions as a group. For those reasons I didn't encourage a lot of early connections between the minions but certainly wasn't apposed to you working them in.

How did it work for you? Did you feel like you made meaningful relationships with the other minions via their connections? If not, did this feel stifling or encourage you to reach out more?

Posted By: jhkimI'd be curious to see how things wrapped up in the end of that game.

As it is guaranteed to do, the Joker pushed things too far. He had kidnapped mothers (and daughters) to make poisoned cookies he sent to hospitals. He forced the newscaster to broadcast a threat that Gotham's water supply had been poisoned and the only antidote was in a scarce few cookies at hospitals, psychiatrist’s offices, and free clinics. It was a stretch and much more in the style of the comic books than Dark Knight, but it managed to threaten nearly all of the connections, while fulfilling the Joker's need to feed on fear and chaos.

In the end the Joker commanded April Phule to commit another heinous act. She resisted and looked in the camera (her LTH was she could not speak to people directly, but only though an intermediary) and said "People of Gotham, can you please tell the Joker that his time is over. The last joke is on him." While the rest of the minions were busy setting their affairs in order, April defeated the Joker and dropped him into the poison vats that were being siphoned into Gotham's water supply. There were some other great bits in there as well, but that was the climax.