This was my second time playing Fiasco; Jason Morningstar's game-in-progress that I describe as "Coen Brothers: the RPG". My last time was in North Carolina last month and it was a hoot.

So I brought the game to the Bay Area crowd. And after some difficult early scenes (which happened the last time as well), things really kicked off.

You can read all of the content in the first two posts, or skip to my last post to read what we liked and did not like about the game.

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SETUP:

Players (the positions will give you a sense of where we sat at the table compared to the cards between us):
SW: Chris Bennett (Leonard; Animal entertainer)
NW: Karen Twelves (Hannah; Asst to Dean Whitaker, Roger's rival)
NE: Robert Earley-Clark (Roger Hutchings; Health Inspector)
SE: Chris Peterson (Ching Li; Entertainer


Cards (the cards are placed in-between pairs of players sitting next to each other, instead of in front of each character):
West: (Between Chris B and Karen)
-Romance: Former spouses
-Weapon: Leopard

North: (Karen and Robert)
-Relationship: Community: Appointed officials
-Need: To get respect
-Location: Working Class Neighborhood

East: (Robert and Chris P.)
-Relationship: Community: Radicals
-Need: To get even: With American and what it has turned you into

South: (Chris P. and Chris B.)
-Relationship: Work: Current co-workers
-Location: Chinatown: Bing Ching Union Gambling Hall


SCORE:

Scene 1: Hannah arrives home to her empty tenement only to find that Roger is helping a repo guy to remove her furniture. We also find out that this was in revenge for Hannah getting Leonard's leopard (Sylvia) put in the zoo. A fight ensues and Hannah convinces the pair to leave her grandmother's couch and take something else. As they leave, Hannah removed a pouch of diamonds from inside of the couch and hides them behind her medicine cabinet next to her gun.

2: Meeting at the gambling hall, the radical Roger is trying to convince Ching Li to go on strike against the hall. But really he wants to find out when
their payroll gets taken to the bank so he can rob the place. Ching Li lies and tells him "Tuesday". We also find out that there is an older Chinese woman
(Mrs. Chin) who runs the gambling hall. Leonard is also there with his monkeys (the alternative animal act), but he doesn't hear about the robbery.

3. Leonard meets with Roger to scheme on getting Sylvia out of the zoo. They success and now Leonard has his star attraction back.

4. Hannah convinces Dean Whitaker that they need to close down the Bing Ching for health violations. Roger walks by the office and overhears the conversation, finding out the bust is going to happen on...Tuesday!

5. Hannah gets a hold of some of Rogers papers, proving that he has been taking illegal payments.

6. Roger and Leonard meet at Hannah's apartment when she isn't there to make plans to take down the gambling hall together. Leonard leaves Sylvia in the bathroom for the time being.

7. Ching Li files a complaint at City Hall that there are other "private" shows going on underneath the backstage area. Roger overhears this conversation as well.

8. Leonard is at the hall, looking for a place to stash his monkeys before their next act. He convinces another entertainer named Lilu to show him the secret entrance to the tunnel under the backstage, which is being used as a highway for slave trading. Chinese girls brought into the US as "entertainers" are being traded for white prostitutes.

9. Hannah comes home, hears the leopard in her bathroom, and calls the White Palace Theatre, where Leonard *said* that he worked.

Players chose to define the scene 8 times, and the outcome only once (I did it just to experiment with the mechanic).

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After we divided up and rolled the dice, we had additional information on each card:

West: (Between Chris B and Karen)
-Romance: Former spouses
-Weapon: Leopard
(Score: Rage: they are coming with blood in their eyes!)

North: (Karen and Robert)
-Relationship: Community: Appointed officials
-Need: To get respect
-Location: Working Class Neighborhood
(Score: Someone dies and it's your fault!)

East: (Robert and Chris P.)
-Relationship: Community: Radicals
-Need: To get even: With American and what it has turned you into
(Score: Arrival: an unwelcome newcomer)

South: (Chris P. and Chris B.)
-Relationship: Work: Current co-workers
-Location: Chinatown: Bing Ching Union Gambling Hall
(Score: Cross paths)

PLAYTEST NOTES:

What We Liked:
-The shared links between the characters.
-The way the characters were made at the beginning.
-The montages at the end.
-The three act structure.
-The implied characters were a big hit.
-Digging deeper into some starting elements on the cards and leaving others open for interpretation.
-The plot always seemed to be moving forward. I think this was key.
-It was easy to put your character into difficult situations.
-Random elements were cool.

What We Disliked:
-One of the players wanted to roll the dice more during the game.
-Not enough Aftermath outcomes; both pairs got the same element, which was a bummer.
-Seems like the Aftermaths are either horrible outcomes or great things. Maybe some shades of gray?
-It's tough to do parallel scenes as the plot is constantly moving forward.
-The game doesn't seem to support flashbacks, which could be interesting.
-Once you have had a scene, you have to wait awhile until your next scene. And by then there may have been some things defines to have happened to your character.
-NPCs can start to take too much power in the game. The rules barely mention NPCs, and it would be good to give clear direction that the characters should be the real stars in the game.
-The rules should state to keep away from scenes where two NPCs are in conflict.

Questions/Suggestions:
-Can you define a scene that doesn't have a character in it?
-Someone wants to be able to flick dice over to the relationship out of his reach because they thought that was interesting at the time.
-What if you moved the dice over to a relationship and then rolled all of them at the end?

Conclusion: the game has really improved with Jason's changes from version 1.4 to 1.7, and I look forward to playtesting it again! There are still some issues with the outcomes and the dice mechanic, but the Aftermath has been tightened up quite a bit. In both games I have played in, there has been an obvious tipping point (during The Tilt) which has starting the story on a downward spiral. Which makes for great collaborative storytelling.

Oh yeah, and there was some weirdness from scenes that didn't end in conflict, mainly in the wway it meant that the player whose turn it was didn't get any die for that scene.

How can you go wrong with a Weaponized leopard?

Actually, some minor silliness aside, it played fairly serious IMO, which pretty much matches with most rpgs I've played. I think total playtime was around 4 hours or so.

Posted By: komradebobI think total playtime was around 4 hours or so.

Yes, I forgot to note that we played a total of four hours, and spent some time debriefing afterward. About half of it was setup and The Score. Then we took a lunch break and played The Tilt and The Aftermath.

Posted By: Jason MorningstarI'll add some verbiage about what constitutes a good scene - basically you want to keep hammering on protagonist relationships as hard as you can, with Needs as flags.

I think the Needs were the weakest part of the game for me. In that we as players were not necessarily pushing the Needs as they were not necessarily matching up with what happened at the table. I agree that some more definition would help here.

I also wanted to note that I moderated the setup slightly incorrectly. I thought that each pair was supposed to have a well-defined relationship before moving to the Needs, Locations, etc. So our content ended up more relationship-heavy than it normally would.

I would echo Robert's comments about the relatively serious tone. The "Chinese/White Slavery" sideline was strange. But the leopard was the element that really threw things into the weird. In a good way.

It's easy to play this game, because every time I got into a stressful game situation I thought about what I would do if I had much more passion than good sense. And then I acted on it.

You guys also played with 18 dice, it looks like. You had an extra detail floating around, anyway.

I'm not sure that your way of setting up the situation is necessarily bad, although it isn't how I do it. For me it's more fun to have these loose relationships, and details informing them, and then ask "what are the connections?"

Posted By: Jason MorningstarYou guys also played with 18 dice, it looks like. You had an extra detail floating around, anyway.

We played with 16 dice. Any errors came from me typing up what I saw on the cards:)

We ended up with more scenes because not all of them ended in conflicts.

Posted By: komradebobAlso, weirdly, this is yet another SG that I'd like to see come in a "placemat" format.

I've toyed with landscape 17x11" for other projects but never followed through. Maybe a downloadable play aid?

I'd like to see what your vision for such a thing would be. Even a pencil sketch would be instructive - what needs to be on there, and what doesn't? Is it a one-time thing that replaces the index cards? Does it include all the rules? Does it include all the tables to play a specific set?

Hey guys, one more procedural question - how weird was the "last die" thing? When you're creating the situation, the last die is predetermined and not a choice. It happens again at the end of the Tilt. Is that loss of choice a problem? It feels vaguely unsatisfying to me.

One solution would be to say that the last remaining die is wild and can be any number.