Schizonauts: Actual Play by Way of Chat Log

Rob: No worries. How went Schizonauts testing?

me: Kinda fantastic.

Endgame is improved but not fixed.

My players had huge, huge buy-in.

Oh, and remember the story from GenCon, about the girl and guy, where the guy didn’t game, and the guy out-RP’ed her playing Jimmy Hoffa when they were demoing DRYH?

She was at my table.

Small freaking world.

Rob: laughs

me: Anyway, yeah, the guy I picked to be the starter (I semi-GMed it, basically facilitating and knowing the rules) was fantastic.

His agent had some nasty backhistory that came out real early on — wife who poisoned herself and may have killed one of the gatekeepers for Palace

And then we switch to his thief

with the memory trigger “I shot her dog.”

Rob: Oh geez

me: And it’s TOTALLY a hilarious/dark Pulp Fiction moment

Rob: That rocks

me: Yeah.

It set the tone and made the game fantastic from there on out

We had a tight schedule, 3.5 hours

Because Rachel (the girl) had to go at 10

But we got character creation, one full round of Flashback (so everyone had only one card, one bleed), then full endgame, then final resolution with EVERYONE doing identity crisis

Rob: Oh man

me: Came out three agents to one… the funny thing is:

The guy who had the agent card but went into identity crisis — my starter — did his Who Am I conflict and won narration

And chose to be thief

It was hot

Because he had this FAT STACK of coins on thief

Rob: Dizzam

me: So everyone else went through crisis and for whatever reason came out agent

And just barely beat his stack

8 to 5 i think

Oh, and with everyone dead

(I said “you can shoot people but they can’t die until Final Resolution”, btw. Worked out reasonably well, but felt a little strained after the bullets started flying early in Endgame)

(So I may need to upgrade to a prohibition on PC-on-PC lethal violence until Final Res)

Rob: nods

me: I think at least one player lost narration on Who Am I

So that was great

And I think one player won both narrator and judge on it, and I used my new rule of “you have to give one of those away if you win both” in this running of it, so had to give up narrator or judge on Who Am I…

… and gave away narrator

And I’m all HELLS YES

Rob: Oh, that’s a nice rule.

me: Yes.

Oh best of all

You give it away to a contributor, never your direct opposition

So we had at least one conflict in the game where this happened

Actor invites visitor. Visitor wins both.  Visitor gives away narrator to a contributor.  Actor has scene decided by two different people that AREN’T HIM.

That’s kind of exactly what I want to see happen on occasion, and it’s part of why the narrator/judge split really excites me.

Regardless of where Schizonauts heads, I feel like that’s a mechanic I want to port the hell out of.

Rob: Indeed

It also proves soemthing I like

That peopel don’t need to tell their own stories allt he time

me: (btw, I’m probably going to post this section of the chat somewhere, since I don’t figure I’m going to find time for a full writeup of AP)

Yep. In fact Schizonauts is founded on the idea that it’s better when they don’t.

Which is why the “you can’t have both” rule.

Rob: Ayup

me: Which on retrospect is so obvious to my design goals that I don’t know why it wasn’t in there to start.

Rob: Like you need more proof of th eutility of actual play?

me: Oh, I’ve known that the only way Schizo gets to publication is by me running several of these things, minimum.

I just hope it becomes a game that other people can run without having a problem. It’s very rules-dense, hard to explain in text in a way that gets across that it’s actually pretty straightforward on-the-ground.

Hell, I’m coming to realize that this is essentially my shtick

Rob: Yep

me: Stuff that looks a lot more complicated than it actually is (cf DRYH)

Rob: Well, it’s all about “Hey, this thing worked awesomely. Now to actually describe how it happened.” and it’s a lot like trying to teach drawing from a book

me: Yeah.

okay, time to take this over to Headquarters Unicron and post.