Ran the first session today with a full crew (one of each of the base archetypes). The crew is based out of a tavern/theatre, and call themselves the Gaffers. They have a sort of low-level connection with the Red Sashes (mostly as friends of friends) but agreed to help Bazso Baz out to score points on that side of the conflict. He had heard the Red Sashes were building up a war chest to hire mercenaries led by Ulf Ironborn, and needed someone not connected to his group to take care of it.
My group really wanted to fight the rules on the planning. They could (and have) planned for days. Finally I wrestled them into going with it.
The group’s plan was to take in some counterfeit coin (a prop from the theater) and swap it out for the real stuff, angering Ulf and destroying the bargain. But they kicked it off as an Arcane plan, letting the Whisper call on her friend the possessor ghost to take over the guard at the Sashes’ back gate to let them in.
I set up the Red Sashes Temple with the following clocks: guards-8 (I figure manpower is their thing), ward-4, lock-6.
I think my big misstep here was not mixing things up. I had it in my head that the wards were at the vault door, so they progressed through all the guards first instead of interspersing them with other things. We had the possession, a Prowl to get up on top of the internal walls to avoid a patrol, a Deceive to steal uniforms and get past some guys inside, and lastly some Mayhem to eliminate the guards at the vault.
There was some rockiness on the early rolls, where we wound up with the Action roll, an Effect roll, and another Effect roll to resist the danger. Rolling Effect twice seemed to be confusing for my players. There was also a perception of a high failure rate, which may have been my fault at establishing danger—I should have gone more orthogonal to the players goal of getting past the guards but I was having trouble coming up with dangers that were not “you get spotted”.
Anyway, the coin switch was made, and several things were stolen to cover up the break-in, and the Gaffers beat feet after implicating the Fog Hounds in the crime. We didn’t get a chance to do downtime or entanglements.
Also there seemed to be a decent amount a poor rolling. Especially by the lurk (me) I don’t think I ever rolled a 6 at all. And I remember someone rolling three dice and getting 1,1,2.
I think from the players side you could take more advantage of flashbacks, and also whenever I say something is risky you should be thinking of ways to change the situation so it is controlled.
So like this would be totally legit: you’ve just grabbed the disguises and are heading in and we flashback to Santore getting one of the Red Sashes drunk and talking about his fellows. So he’s able to do one of those “hey Marv, look, Mylena said the vault door was having problems so we have to go down and check it out. Hey, how’s your son? Stan told me he was sick.” And since he’s not only wearing the right uniform but he knows people, that puts him in a better position to fool the guy.
Ah ha so that is how that works, I was wondering. We never argued with you on the level of risk we just accepted it. how much stress would the above scenario cost?
You can also always just ask the GM. “Hey, I don’t really want to roll risky here, is there anything I can do to make the situation controlled?”
Soft vs Hard moves. Soft moves are clocks, hard moves are instant fictional change. So if ‘you get spotted’ is a danger, you can soften that up a bit by making a six clock for the guards that says ‘Alarmed’. And when folks fail fill in segments for every stress on the danger they didn’t spend. So they manage to squeek by for a bit before things go to poop.
I’m super thrilled to see this writeup here ^_^
Yeah we should have done more setup too, I think.
Actually is sounds like we should not have done more planning. We could have done the pre planning and planning as flashbacks.
John has it – the idea is to get into the action as quickly as possible. You should literally have the outline of a plan which falls into one of the categories, the detail to kick it off, and then go. “We’re going to sneak into the Dimmer Sisters’ manor. How? Through the secret sewer entrance. OK, go.”
You probably want a few Gather Info rolls and the clocks you’re facing on the board before you ‘go’ but yes.