Just ran my first session of the Quickstart last night.
TL;DR – Success! New players; system easy to learn. Devil’s Bargains = great fun. Teamwork mechanic = awesome but clunky with < 3 characters to split the spotlight.
So, in a bit longer form, some highlights from last night’s session:
The Good:
– The setting. Duskwall and the world at large are a fascinating place to play and explore. When I explained to one of my players who the Rail Jack’s were and why they were necessary, he said, “Oh, wow. This setting just got a whole lot cooler.” I haven’t even told him about Leviathan Hunters yet. 😉
– Character Creation. Simple and straightforward, it was pretty easy to explain what everything did in a very short time, and the process doesn’t take long at all.
Teamwork. I like that it gives everyone a chance to share the spotlight, keeping one character from blazing ahead of everyone else and hogging all the glory.
– Devil’s Bargains. They’re a lot of fun, though I need to get better at making them more tempting to this group.
The Problematic:
– Establishing Danger. This is probably my fault, being new to storygames. I felt like I sometimes didn’t do a good enough job of clearly establishing the dangers the characters were facing with their Action rolls. Some of them were obvious, but others of them seemed less like an immediate threat, but I think they were still valid. I’d be interested to know how you veterans do it.
– Teamwork. The mechanic works great, but it can get a little awkward if you have fewer than three players. Since there’s no fluidity in where Point goes after a given character acts, it sometimes falls to one character to be doing nothing but Setup actions for a while, so the other player can solve a specific problem. If you have at least two options for where the spotlight goes after a character acts, this smooths out considerably.
– When to use Effect rolls. Again, this seems like it’s my problem, and not the system’s. I had trouble deciding when they were appropriate, and often waffled for a few seconds. I’ll have to work on this.
If you guys are interested in the play-by-play, here it is:
We had originally planned for three players, but one of them was late getting out of work, and said to start without him. Because of the fluid nature of the game narrative, we figured we would handle creating his character when he got home, and then just drop or Flashback him into the ongoing job.
We started with character creation, which went smoothly. One of the players, Josh McGraw, is a veteran storygamer. I’m a novice, as are the other players. Even so, the character creation process had very few hang-ups (the FAQ and questions answered here helped us with that). We ended up with Frost the Cutter, a former Dockworker turned criminal muscle with a penchant for drink; and Birch the Lurk, an immigrant scout from the Dagger Isles who, for reasons of his own (implied to be related to his worship of the Forgotten Gods), decided he’d be better off in Duskwall.
During the Crew Creation process (also smooth), the players decided that their -1 Status for the Tier 2 Faction was the Lampblacks, which seemed to tie in nicely to the Quickstart setup. We were discussing things like character history, why they formed the crew, etc.–mostly running through the bullet-pointed questions as a way to get the fiction flowing–and I asked them, “So…what did you do to piss off the Lampblacks?”
It turned out that they had very, very recently (within the past 24 hours) managed to snag a score that, unbeknownst to the crew, Baszo Baz and the Lampblacks were eyeing for themselves. So the game started with the crew in their lair, and a forceful, insistent banging on the door.
Merrick, the leader of the crew’s group of Elite Shadows, answered the door to find a gang of Lampblack muscle (denoted by their black armbands) outside–a group of gentlemen who hadn’t heard from their necks in several years. The biggest and meatiest of them addressed them with cold courtesy, and explained that Baszo Baz “requested” the crew’s presence at the Lampblacks’ Headquarters in Crow’s Foot. Not ones to be impolite, Frost and Birch graciously accepted.
They led the group from their lair’s position on the smaller island in Crow’s Foot across the canals of the river (dubbed “The Murk” in the colloquial vernacular) and to the Lampblack HQ, a former-tavern-turned-fortress guarded by more meatheads. The players noticed this preponderance of really strong thugs, and realized that with the recent death of Roric, the Lampblacks and the Red Sashes were gearing up for war.
They were led into Baszo’s study. Baszo was sipping a tumbler of whiskey–with cubes of actual ice–and dismissed the guards before sitting and putting his feet up on the desk. He intimated that he was upset with them for something the characters did, to which the characters expressed surprise.
At this point, I decided to press the players for more information about the job they’d pulled that pissed off the Lampblacks. Birch deferred to Frost, who explained that there was a book of mysterious arcane knowledge in the house of Kurt Skyhold, a Skovlander delegate to Duskwall. They were put up to the job by Amancio, the group’s close contact and friend, who assured them that Skyhold was out of town and that he had a buyer all lined up for the book.
This caught my attention, and I decided that this was just too good to gloss over. I asked, “How did you steal it, generally speaking–out of the five, which plan did you use?” They said they would have used Infiltration. “Great. What was your entry point?” A third floor window, a respectable but manageable jumping distance from an adjacent building (they knew about this due to their Fine Building Plans crew upgrade). “Sounds good.” I described the scene on the street: the three-story house, the moon filtering through the ever-present clouds that were just a little thinner that night, the electroplasmic streetlamps buzzing in the upscale Whitecrown district.
Then I said, “So…who’s on point?”
It was Birch. He decided to use Prowl to get to the target window. He took a Devil’s Bargain that the noise of running down the rooftop would wake up the individual sleeping inside. He got a 1-3 result, and ended up getting a critical success on a Finesse roll to resist the danger (falling and becoming injured). Zero stress, but he caught himself at the second story, so they had to improvise from there.
The scene passed to Frost, who used Command to tell the Shadows to help Birch get down safely, setting Birch up for another roll to get down, which he did successfully. They went with Plan B, which was entering the house through the back door, on the kitchen.
Frost again set up Birch to Secure their entry into the house, and Birch had a little trouble due to a custom, aftermarket lock (six segments) that had been installed after the building plans were filed with the city. It was a Controlled situation, because they were quiet and at the back of the house, and he rolled a couple of 4-5 results, so he never had to face a Danger, but it took him a couple of tries to make his way through the Clock.
Once inside, Frost (who kept getting the spotlight when the group needed to be subtle, which is far from his strong suit) again set up Birch to lead the group in Prowling up the stairs–easy day. Frost opened the unlocked (and thereby immediately suspicious to the players) study where the book was kept, and found the delegate’s security measure: two Skovlan Hunting Cats, domesticated big cats with coarse black fur and weird spiny protrusions out of their shoulders and tails. The cats were awake and aware of everyone, so Frost decided that it was time for Murder. He led the group into violence, and they got a Critical Success. They burned through the clock in one roll and murtilated the book’s guardians.
That done, they picked up the book…and an alarm klaxon started blaring. The bluecoats would undoubtedly be mobilized, so they needed to get going–and quick. Fortunately, Birch had left his Fine Climbing Gear attached to the side of the building (he had legitimately done this in the course of play, no Flashback needed), so they used that as an escape route and made it safely down. Birch accepted a Devil’s Bargain to do it, though, and now the Bluecoats were right at the end of the street. The pressure was on.
Frost decided to lead them through another gate and into the alley behind the house, rather than onto the street to face the Bluecoats. He kicked open the gate with a single blow, but due to a Devil’s bargain sustained a small, two-segment twisted ankle.
At this point, our third player arrived, and we helped him quickly create Helles, the Skovlander Hound, who had been on overwatch the whole time from a nearby building with his Fine Long Rifle. Seeing the commotion and realizing that it was time to leave, he had made his way down and caught up with the group in the alley just as Frost kicked out the gate. Helles consorted with the Elite Shadows (I believe we misused Consort here, but we were running short on time so I opted to just roll with it) and, assisted by Birch, pried up the sewer grate. Helles rejected the Devil’s Bargain to have the sewer pipe be close to full (which I offered mostly because it would have been funny), so it was relatively empty and they made their escape with the book.
We called it there. Next time, we’ll recap and go through the Advancement and Downtime as the crew rests up from the score, then Flash Forward again to the conversation with Baszo, and proceed with the Quickstart scenario. We’ll also retcon Helles into the action at the Lampblack HQ.