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Actual Play Vignettes: [Geiger Counter] Zombie Zoo

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  1.  # 1
    so, this is take two.
    timeout ate it, i forgot to ctrl+c.
    so there goes an hour and a fucking half.

    sigh.

    this is pretty much a letter to jonathan walton now. time crunch.

    k, so we played GC and it rocked. set in a big city zoo which buys a nice new panda bear who, upon arriving, keels over dead.
    about an hour later, she gets up again.
    cue screaming.

    i've gotta get going so here's my quick response & questions-

    the style sheet idea is very good, a half-finished brainstorm already done.
    also the map to move around on is a nice visual and matters with the advantage dice and the large number of characters,
    i love how it's drawn (and the "Lost" condition is badass.)
    i love how the players choose the conditions their character is saddled with, not the director. awesome.

    we had 3 players, i thought we should play two characters each to not come in under the recommended number of survival dice right off.
    i think that took a lot of extra time. who knows.

    please include some ideas about pacing; we didn't engage the menace almost at all as it was building dice, so we weren't harmed by it.
    only two characters died (of six... sure, four of the mooks died... anyway). thoughts?

    please, more advice about adjudicating what trait and advantage dice are "relevant" to a conflict. we allowed all dice while we opposed the
    menace, but as director i denied a die to one of the players in the only pvp conflict. that player lost, and it left a bad taste in our mouths.

    in that same conflict, the two characters were fighting over a map, which had already been established as an Advantage Die. we went
    to conflict to resolve possession of the map, and by extension the die.
    is this cool? no?

    further, i'd just like to hear more about AD movement in general. like, we had a snowcone vender cart that my animal handler pushed down a hill.
    that was a sweet use of an advantage die. yes. and it obviously didn't come with us, it just stayed there in the scene for us to push at something else next time we go back. awesome.

    that handler also had two other AD: Animal Taser, baby; and I'm Not Gonna Take This [Bullshit]. when she was trampled to death by a zombie elephant,
    (in the animal hospital, with the candlestick) we ruled that the taser wasn't hurt. so someone else could come get it.
    what about the other die, though, the sense of being fed up with this bullshit? could someone else get that, too?
    i just don't like making rules calls in the middle of play (especially in gmless games) so i'd rather more guidance.

    *are AD fixed once they're assigned, ie, could i go back to the Snowcone cart and use the advantage die as the fire extinguisher?
    *and if it's fixed, can it be used up or destroyed (like any object could be?)
    *and if it's picked up by the characters, how can it be transfered from one character to the next? given, taken, posthumously?

    ok, thanks.
    some words around these things could do a lot for our group navigating the power-structure behind
    the game, so that we don't over- or under- power ourselves while making blind rules calls.

    and seriously, thanks for a great time. next i'll serve them B&G.

    ah, and as the credits roll...
    • CommentAuthorJ. Walton
    • CommentTimeOct 24th 2008 edited
     # 2
    Glad your group liked the game, Jackson. Zombie pandas are the best kind.

    In the current beta version of the rules, both PCs and the Menace roll all their dice in every conflict, no matter what traits seem "relevant." I made that change from the alpha specifically so people wouldn't have to make the kind of judgment calls you describe here.

    The pacing issue is something I clearly need to talk about more, as the last two AP reports have shown. Folks are, unsurprisingly, sometimes timid about putting their characters in danger, because they've been trained not to from years of playing horror games like Call of Cthulhu and other things were you try to keep your character alive instead of trying to kill them in a fun fashion. Overall, this remains the most consistent issue that people can encounter when playing the game for the first time.

    Fighting over an advantage die sounds fine to me. Characters fight over things with no mechanical weight at all, though, so I'm not sure whether that would set a precedent, where players in the future would be unwilling to have their characters have a confrontation over something that gave them no mechanical advantage and was therefore "unimportant." As long as folks don't come to see advantage dice as the only thing worth fighting over, I think you're okay here.

    Yeah, fixed advantage dice still need some omph, I think. The snowcone cart sounds brilliant. There's also a lot of fun to be had in destroying or merging locations. One memorable game had a belltower fall down into the rooms below it, making a single room. There probably needs to be a few paragraphs on fun tricks you can do with the map, dice, and character pawns.

    There are some words in the text, I think, about posthumous looting of bodies, where I basically say, if an item has become important to the story (the disk! the antidote! my teddy!) then, by all means, have someone else pick it up. But if it's just a tool that gives a generic advantage, lose it. How many times in these movies is the audience yelling "Just pick up the damn gun!" at the paralyzed characters on the screen? Yeah. This might also solve your "everybody survives" problem. If you keep accumulating dice and don't have many confrontations with the menace and keep teaming up... then, yeah, no shit, you're probably going to destroy it. So one of your tasks, as a player and director, is making sure that most of the characters get good and killed. Better pacing advice will help with that, but some of it is just going against traditional roleplaying instincts and living dangerously or foolishly.

    Ha, you're going to run the Black & Gaunt scenario? Awesome. Let me know how it goes. I playtested it once here and the result was only mediocre, but I'm hoping to play it some more soon.
  3.  # 3
    First of all Jackson: not funny. I worked in a zoo, and I can tell you the threat of an undead animal uprising is no laughing matter. Have you ever been bit by a camel? I have. Now just imagine if that camel had been a zombie. See? Not so funny now is it.

    Posted By: jackson teguthat handler also had two other AD: Animal Taser, baby; and I'm Not Gonna Take This [Bullshit]. when she was trampled to death by a zombie elephant,
    (in the animal hospital, with the candlestick) we ruled that the taser wasn't hurt. so someone else could come get it.
    what about the other die, though, the sense of being fed up with this bullshit? could someone else get that, too?

    It sounds like you might be mixing Advantage Dice and Survival Dice -- the "I'm not gonna take this" sounds like it was probably a survival die. Survival dice get transfered in very specific ways, inspiring other survivors to carry on when they see people get the chop (it's section 3.9 of the beta version).

    Posted By: Jonathan WaltonYeah, fixed advantage dice still need some omph, I think.

    I love the stationary dice, but I think there might be too many stationary vs mobile dice. Coming up with three stationary advantages in every scenario might be too far in the other direction.

    There's also the weird thing that the director places the stationary dice, so in effect says "I say this is the boiler room, and the 2 advantage dice you find here are stationary" which puts the director a lot closer to defining the advantage since they decide the mobile/stationary choice and the location.

    There's always the option of lowering the total starting dice, but letting the definer decide any dice are stationary in exchange for making that set one die larger (so director places 1 die on the table, player calls it stationary so now it's 2 dice).
    •  
      CommentAuthorjackson tegu
    • CommentTimeOct 24th 2008 edited
     # 4
    jesus fuck, i totally did it again, the machine ate my post! why do i hurt myself?

    Ben: aye, your injury makes the humor brighter. smiles to our lips and eyes, you battle hardened handler, you.
    and brother, i had those fcking advantage dice all confused with the trait and survival dice from the first moment they were mentioned.
    we totally had all-trait survival stuff at first, then we were like "wait..."

    both: hmmm. beta version. sounds like that mighta been good to look at. next time, certainly...

    jonathan: what i said a second ago was something like this (erm, in the post that got deleted, i mean):
    when reading (the alpha version, because i'm gonna respond before i read the
    beta so there), i was unsure if the system would put up a big fight and we'd better get our acts together and pile up some dice or we'd get a short
    movie with a bloody ending; or whether the system would facilitate us scooting our characters into harm's way where they'd be satisfyingly
    offed. Or even if, though it said co-operative, we were meant to be trying to off each other and survive somehow; gathering up the survival dice
    like victory medals. it's looking like option 2, now.

    ...because one person's co-operative indie game is the next person's knifing each other with knives. or something.
    so i didn't know what you meant with that word alone. (and as said, i half-read...)

    all of your advice there is totally great. i like the "if it's important to the story, keep it around" sorta thing.
    and the merging of locations sounds fun, too.

    there was some devilishness when we realized that we could be unco-operative and frame each other into scenes that we
    wouldn't want to be in, reminds me of Joe's "Cheap"; like at the end of one scene you could say "i'm heading for the helicopter pad",
    and then next i could say, "yeah, so you're in the sub-basement with a bunch of icky stuff... yeah, this is a new location, no dice. suck it."
    i know that's against the spirit of the game, it was just a funny realization late in the game.

    cool, stoked to read beta.

    AND SAY IT WITH ME... CONTROL AND C. CONTROL AND C.


    ...& we'll see about black and gaunt. my group is picky (in a nice way) and we have less game time than we'd like together.
    and i hadn't updated on the you'd-run-it-and-found-problems thing. but the visual of the pawns changing is just so good that i
    really have to figure out something to do with it.
    and now that i've played a game of GC and gotten an idea about what it's aiming to do... yeah, that seems fun

    how many advantage dice did you end up scattering around then, anyway?
    •  
      CommentAuthorBen Robbins
    • CommentTimeOct 25th 2008 edited
     # 5
    [spawned another thread to talk about ideas for perishable advantage dice]
  6.  # 6
    Re pacing, I think something that really deserves a big underline in the text is that your conditions are how you gauge pacing, more so than the menace dice.

    If you look at a character and they have 2 conditions and you frame them in a scene with the menace, there is a very high chance that character is going to die (ties hurt both sides), so dramatize accordingly.

    On the other hand if a character has less than 2 conditions there is no way they can die in the scene. From a story point of view they are guaranteed to make another appearance (if you want).

    To put it another way, the menace living or dying is far less central to the story than the characters living or dying. We the audience don't really care if the menace is destroyed or just chases the characters away, we want to know what happens to the people.
    • CommentAuthorJ. Walton
    • CommentTimeOct 28th 2008
     # 7
    Posted By: Ben RobbinsTo put it another way, the menace living or dying is far less central to the story than the characters living or dying. We the audience don't really care if the menace is destroyed or just chases the characters away, we want to know what happens to the people.


    Yeah, this should be in bold on the first page, probably. The menace is the crucible against which we find out 1) who these people really are, and 2) how they live and die.

    The central tension in Geiger, for me, as the game's designer, is that the game's mechanics only imperfectly model this process of discovery and survival or death. In that respect, Geiger is trying to be more of a "lead with the fiction" game. Following the mechanics will point you in the direction of the really important stuff, but there's some danger in mistaking the pointing finger for the moon, y'know? But, yeah, knowing when a confrontation is likely to end in a character's death (and when it isn't) is critical to understanding how the mechanics interact with pacing and other player-determined aspects.

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