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Fiasco AP

Started by StormBringer, November 26, 2010, 01:28:51 PM

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Jason Morningstar

Stormbringer, of course BWA's character lived happily ever after at the expense of the other characters. That's what happens in the fiction the game models much of the time, that's what happens in Fiasco. I know you aren't seeing this, maybe because you really want Fiasco to be a different game, but there it is.

QuoteWhy isn't it being promoted as 'the best laid plans of mice and men always go awry', since that is clearly the type of play that is supported?
Did you read any of the marketing quotes you used a few posts ago? You must have, right? That's ... exactly how I promote it. I wrote those words, all of them.
Check out Fiasco, "Best RPG" Origins Award nominee, Diana Jones Award and Ennie Judge\'s Spotlight Award winner. As seen on Tabletop!

"Understanding the enemy is important. And no, none of his designs are any fucking good." - Abyssal Maw

StormBringer

Quote from: Jason Morningstar;422848Stormbringer, of course BWA's character lived happily ever after at the expense of the other characters. That's what happens in the fiction the game models much of the time, that's what happens in Fiasco. I know you aren't seeing this, maybe because you really want Fiasco to be a different game, but there it is.

Did you read any of the marketing quotes you used a few posts ago? You must have, right? That's ... exactly how I promote it. I wrote those words, all of them.
Ok, so...

Quote from: meThe sole game play element that can be derived from Fiasco is that your plans will fail. Period. I mean, it is in the title.
Quote from: youThis is demonstrably, objectively wrong. Did you know there's a free preview of Fiasco available
...which is it?  Are the players supposed to fail, or are they supposed to succeed?  Is BWA's success an anomaly, or is it routine, and there are just no other play reports showing that?

I guess what I am trying to figure out is where I am saying "So, the game revolves around the failure of the players", but then you and others come along and say "No, no, the game revolves around the failure of the players!" as though that is a contradiction of some kind.  In other words, why is it that you are agreeing with my assessment, but then thinking that you have successfully argued against it?

So, a direct question, then:  Are the players supposed to fail or not?
If you read the above post, you owe me $20 for tutoring fees

\'Let them call me rebel, and welcome, I have no concern for it, but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul.\'
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\'Everything doesn\'t need

Tommy Brownell

Quote from: StormBringer;422834You absolutely need this to be a role-playing game to continue the coat-tail ride into anyone at all knowing it exists.

No offense intended, Stormbringer, as I like you and all...but comments like this smack of Abyssal Maw's "4e is mainstream and everyone else is nothing" kind of talk.

Disclaimer: I have no other dog in this fight...I've been watching this thread as it devolves, like seemingly every other thread on this site, into a trainwreck about labels and ideologies and other such silliness. I own Fiasco, I've skimmed it, haven't yet played it, would like to try it out someday, don't really care if it's an RPG or not as long as it turns out to be fun. If not, I expect Jason Morningstar to fall on his sword and never make games again.
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Jason Morningstar

Quote from: Tommy Brownell;422913I own Fiasco, I've skimmed it, haven't yet played it, would like to try it out someday, don't really care if it's an RPG or not as long as it turns out to be fun. If not, I expect Jason Morningstar to fall on his sword and never make games again.
Totally fair. Keep me posted.
Check out Fiasco, "Best RPG" Origins Award nominee, Diana Jones Award and Ennie Judge\'s Spotlight Award winner. As seen on Tabletop!

"Understanding the enemy is important. And no, none of his designs are any fucking good." - Abyssal Maw

Jason Morningstar

Quote from: StormBringer;422886So, a direct question, then:  Are the players supposed to fail or not?
The players are supposed to play the game. A story emerges*, typically about some stupid ideas at the intersection of greed, fear and lust. Things go haywire and in the end you find out what happens to each of the characters. Some of them will probably crash and burn, others will end up back where they started, one or two might actually profit from the disaster. Sometimes everybody has a terrible outcome (the dice are stacked against you), but it's very common (by design) for at least one character to come out of it in great shape.

If you approached the game and said "Let's all try our best to have positive, successful outcomes" you'd be working against the game's theme and mechanical procedures, and it probably wouldn't be any fun and somebody would end up with their dude locked in the trunk of a Camaro in the Sonora desert anyway. But somebody else would have a dude that got rich from the drug deal that happened in that Camaro, and somebody else would be glad to be alive and working at Hardees again.

So to say players are "supposed to fail" is only sort of accurate - they are supposed to listen to each other and work together to tell a fun story, knowing that the game will help them toward a disaster whether they want it or not. The outcome of that disaster is interesting, and there's a tactical component to die handling to help characters you like do well and characters you hate do poorly.

I don't know what else to say - please go read some AP, read some reviews (The review by Linnaeus linked from my site is really good and comprehensive), go read the preview. Check out a playset, which will show you the game's genre vocabulary and illustrate how situations are built. If you are genuinely curious about the game, maybe we can set up a session via Skype or something.

*Sorry about that
Check out Fiasco, "Best RPG" Origins Award nominee, Diana Jones Award and Ennie Judge\'s Spotlight Award winner. As seen on Tabletop!

"Understanding the enemy is important. And no, none of his designs are any fucking good." - Abyssal Maw

Insufficient Metal

Quote from: Jason Morningstar;422931knowing that the game will help them toward a disaster whether they want it or not.

Of course, why anyone would play Fiasco and try to avoid the fiasco is kind of a mystery to me...

Tommy Brownell

Quote from: Insufficient Metal;422934Of course, why anyone would play Fiasco and try to avoid the fiasco is kind of a mystery to me...

Because it's funny when everyone else fails and you go whistling into the sunset? =)
The Most Unread Blog on the Internet.  Ever. - My RPG, Comic and Video Game reviews and articles.

Cole

Quote from: Insufficient Metal;422934Of course, why anyone would play Fiasco and try to avoid the fiasco is kind of a mystery to me...

Quote from: Tommy Brownell;422936Because it's funny when everyone else fails and you go whistling into the sunset? =)

From a read-over of Fiasco, I get the sense that the fiasco would tend to coalesce around the principle of "I'd rather see you lose than make sure I win."
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Peregrin

SB -- fine I'll stop being stupid. :P

But this thread and the links in the OP have piqued my interest in Fiasco.  I might get a copy and take it for a test drive, since my group has been doing a lot of one shots since everyone's all over the place.  

If I do get around to playing it, I'll post an AP here and some opinions on it.  My long-time group has never played anything indie, let alone a "story-game", let alone GM-less, so we'll see how it goes. :)
"In a way, the Lands of Dream are far more brutal than the worlds of most mainstream games. All of the games set there have a bittersweetness that I find much harder to take than the ridiculous adolescent posturing of so-called \'grittily realistic\' games. So maybe one reason I like them as a setting is because they are far more like the real world: colourful, crazy, full of strange creatures and people, eternal and yet changing, deeply beautiful and sometimes profoundly bitter."

Insufficient Metal

Quote from: Tommy Brownell;422936Because it's funny when everyone else fails and you go whistling into the sunset? =)

Quote from: Cole;422941From a read-over of Fiasco, I get the sense that the fiasco would tend to coalesce around the principle of "I'd rather see you lose than make sure I win."

Totally -- I don't mean one particular character profiting (or not) from the disaster, I mean trying to avoid the disaster itself. I mean, that's where all the fun is.

BWA

Here's a link to an AP of my first Fiasco game, if it is of interest to anyone.

(I was always proud of this AP, since I think it does a good job of describing what happened at the game table, and why the game itself was enjoyable, rather then droning on about boring imaginary stuff, which my APs often do.)
"In the end, my strategy worked. And the strategy was simple: Truth. Bringing the poisons out to the surface, again and again. Never once letting the fucker get away with it, never once letting one of his lies go unchallenged." -- RPGPundit

StormBringer

Quote from: Insufficient Metal;422934Of course, why anyone would play Fiasco and try to avoid the fiasco is kind of a mystery to me...
Because RPGs don't have set outcomes?

I know everyone likes to point to Call of Cthulhu as the 'everyone dies' game, but guess what?  That is only a convention of play.  There is nothing in CoC that says the players will certainly be dead or insane at the end of a session.  It can very much be set up where the characters can have minor or major victories against cults of any size, or even against the Old Ones themselves, if the GM so chooses.

So, while Mr Morningstar continues to (tellingly) dance around the topic, what I am getting from everyone else is that your ability to role-play is moderately to severely restrained by the game itself, in that you are always playing essentially the same character:  "Big ambitions and poor impulse control".  Minor variations, sure, but there is more room to customize two different Fighters in 3.x.

And of course, this almost cloned character will have their plans blow up in their face, spectacularly it is hoped.  Sure, ok, a few might survive, and once in a while one of the players might actually succeed, but we have established that those are anomalies.  The ending condition for Monopoly is the same each time (stressing again that it is a board game), but the winner - or in this case, the losers - aren't determined ahead of time.  You still have to actually play the game to determine who wins and who loses.  But in Fiasco, the expectation is that (pretty much) everyone loses.  So, how is this a game, again?

Which brings us around to the final point.  Why is this touted as a role-playing game?  The adherents even confirm that it has virtually no elements of a game, and unless someone else wants to look up some play reports (I am pretty much done doing the legwork for your arguments) to show the vast range of characters and role-playing available, I don't see much of that, either.
If you read the above post, you owe me $20 for tutoring fees

\'Let them call me rebel, and welcome, I have no concern for it, but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul.\'
- Thomas Paine
\'Everything doesn\'t need

Jason Morningstar

#72
Quote from: StormBringer;422981Because RPGs don't have set outcomes?
Except when they do.
But the point is moot; you know what a roleplaying game is, so the roleplaying games that people play and enjoy that fall outside that arbitrary definition are not roleplaying games. There is also a conspiracy. The motives and attributes you assign to me, someone you've never met and only interacted with on this forum, say much more about you, Stormbringer, than they do about me (they are also wrong, but that's sort of a given).

I can address one more point that would be readily answered if you would bother to read some AP reports - everyone is not playing "the same character" - there's a situation, and every character falls within the gravitational pull of that situation, but their interaction with it is not defined. Some will be stupid grifters, some may be people trying to stop them, others may be collateral damage. It's unusual for every character to be a scheming tool, at least at the beginning of the game - the setup works against that.

Anyway, I feel like I've been pretty direct and straightforward in explaining Fiasco and pointing out the errors in your assumptions. Moving on.

BWA, thanks for posting that AP - it's a good reference, and "A Small Southern Town" is the game's thematic baseline.

Peregrin, I hope you get a chance to play, I hope you enjoy it, and I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts on Fiasco!
Check out Fiasco, "Best RPG" Origins Award nominee, Diana Jones Award and Ennie Judge\'s Spotlight Award winner. As seen on Tabletop!

"Understanding the enemy is important. And no, none of his designs are any fucking good." - Abyssal Maw

Insufficient Metal

Quote from: StormBringer;422981Because RPGs don't have set outcomes?

Nor Fiasco, but again, it's like playing Tomb of Horrors and having your character just sit in his room at the tavern. You could do that, but why?

Anyway, yeah, this is just going in circles now.

Aos

Fiasco, the new 4e.
You are posting in a troll thread.

Metal Earth

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