[RPG] Thrilling Tales of the Midnight Society #6

[stevekenson]

The Malay Coins

Arthur Beaumont, newspaper publisher and business associate of Max Cain, arranges to meet the Midnighters at the Society’s 52nd Ave. mansion so Lilith Gunn might evaluate something he acquired on a recent trip to the Orient. Beaumont is attacked outside the mansion by a gang of Chinese thugs, and the heroes fight them off. In Beaumont’s valise are three antique silver coins, apparently Chinese in style, but matching no known minting of Asian coinage. They trace the man who hired the thugs to a Chinese tea shop in Riverside and make overtures to find out who is interested in the coins.

Beaumont regains consciousness in the hospital, but cannot provide much additional information: he bought the coins from an antiquities dealer in Shanghai, who himself acquired them from a junk dealer, neither apparently aware of their true value. He doesn’t know who would want the coins badly enough to attack him to get them.

A note arrives at the Midnight Society Mansion, setting up a meeting that night at Riverside Park. There the heroes encounter Li-Ming Tzin and Malo, her hulking bodyguard. Li-Ming tries to negotiate for the coins, but when the Midnighters become obstinate, she sics Malo on them and uses a cable-gun to ascend to an airship that arrives overhead. Several more martial arts goons drop from the airship as it flees with Li-Ming on board. St. George takes Malo in a bloody martial arts fight, while Max and Skyler pursue the airship. An attempt to tether the airship to a dockside crane (and a compel of Max’s “Narrow Escape” aspect) results in the crane collapsing and Skyler having to break off pursuit to rescue his friend, damaging his jetpack in the process.

The airship receeds into the distance and the mysterious Li-Ming Tzin has escaped... for now. But the trail of the mysterious coins points to Shanghai.

Note: Thanks to Hero Games’ The Malay Coins for inspiration.

Game Play: Starting with this game session, we decided to cut the characters’ total aspects back from ten to five. With our relatively short (2-3 hour) game sessions, it quickly became clear some aspects were popular, getting tagged and compelled more often, while others languished, some never coming up at all. Since players were really reaching towards the end of the character creation process anyway, it seemed like a good idea to make the characters a bit more focused by paring back the aspects. Coincidentally, this now matches up with the reduced pool of Fate Points they start with (5 and 5).

This session also instituted a limited advancement scheme: occasionally, characters get an “advancement point,” which players can use to either acquire a new stunt or improve a skill, but they have to preserve the pyramid of skills, so to add to the higher ranks, they first need to pick up a new Average skill to “widen” the “base” of the pyramid, then move up to Good, and so forth. We’ll see how this works out.

Comments

[rob-donoghue.livejournal.com]

I think you've hit on something curious about aspects that occasionally niggles at my mind, which is that the more comfortable someone gets with their character, the fewer aspects they really feel they need to capture what's essential about their character. The image in my mind is that each aspect wears a groove when its used, and after a while, the deep grooves create the important shape.

Someday I'm going to fiddle with an option that trades off potency with flexibility, and make the mechanical payout of aspects an inverse to the number of them. This also is a nod back to some stuff we did early on with very few, very potent aspects which eventually got replaced with less potent but more ubiquitous ones. If I could put both options back on the table, that would kind of rock.

[xomec.livejournal.com]

Agreed. Aspects, it seems to me, point up the human limitation of being able to keep only so many things in mind at once. There is a definite tendency to favor certain aspects over others that gives them greater "weight" over time.

Variants that would be interesting to play around with include a small number of "fixed" aspects and a greater ability to apply temporary aspects to a character (e.g., "My character has the 'Furious With Dr. Sin' aspect for this scene"), which go away when they're no longer needed (but in some cases have the potential to "stick" and become permanent). Also a scheme wherein you can only activate an aspect a limited number of times, forcing players to cycle through all their characters' aspects during play (as was the case in Fate 2.0, I believe).

A trade-off of potency for flexibility (or applicability) would be interesting to play around with, although defining that flexibility can be tough.

[codrus.livejournal.com]

I'm a strong believer that 10 aspects is too many, and that 5 is a much more workable number -- I've chatted about that in some of my SOTC-related posts, and we observed it during play. Chris never took a 10th aspect in our Seattle SOTC game, and I'd wager most of us never used more than about half of them on a regular basis.

Starting at 5 aspects also gives room to grow. I can't imagine going from 10 aspects to 20 aspects, but I can imagine starting at 5 and building up to 10. For a heroic game, I'd change the ratio of aspects:stunts from 2:1 to 1:1.

I think the reduced pool can work, but I think it really requires more GM or player generated compels. Compels seemed pretty rare in our game except as afterthoughts, but you really need to keep feeding the fate point engine.

[drivingblind.livejournal.com]

Yeah. And since fate points are the real limiter, I like to decouple fate points from number of aspects, and go for a sort of, "Pick one to two aspects per phase" thing, letting folks right-size to taste.

As Steve's noticing, fate point supply needs to be somewhat tied to session length, I think. I need to look into how we're intending to address that in DFRPG.

[codrus.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it is the same problem that 3e and 4e have. If you only do one fight per day, daily powers are extremely effective in 4e, and mages are hugely effective in 3e. If you only have one major fight in SOTC, then buckets of fate points are dished out, particularly if the players perceive this is the 'end game'. There's a tendency to go for 3 or 4 fate points to outright bypass the stress track and go right for a consequence. I've done that as a PC.

If you go a long time between refreshes, then the restoration of fate points definitely needs to be upped or players rapidly get down to 1-2 fate points and *stop/freeze*. They stop taking actions or take incredibly conservative actions.

One thought I'd thrown out in my blog was using 4e's concept of milestones as refreshes. I expanded on it with the idea that a 'milestone' could happen even in the middle of the fight. In other words, the villain finishes his longwinded speech, you know that he's going to destroy London with his heat ray, so it...is...ON. "As you pull yourself out of the wreckage, Dr. Doom looks down at you and laughs maniacally as his armored gauntlets charge up with a harsh white light. Refresh your fate points".

I wouldn't do this for every game session -- sometimes you want the PCs battered and bloodied in that final fight scene. But having significant refresh milestones for longer games is a definite asset.

I think some sort of refresh milestone would have a basis in the books. Harry always seems bruised and battered, but for the next major scene, he's still got a major can of whoopass to draw on...usually after something really bad has happened to him. Sometimes, I think he just refreshes his pool when he gets knocked unconscious. I suppose that could just be considered a really powerful compel. I'd bounced around a concept of each character having one 'primary' aspect that was their defining characteristic. Both compels and tagging are stronger on that aspec. So maybe if the GM compels that primary aspect, you don't get 1 fate point, but a full refresh. Alternatively, rather than making it a characteristic of the aspect, you make it a characteristic of the compel. "This is a super-compel against your Skywalker Family aspect. If you accept the compel, you'll get a full refresh but will attack Darth Vader, otherwise you spend all your remaining fate points." Yeah, that's a huge hammer for the GM that could be abused, but it also offers character-specific milestones which is nice.

Anyway, just brainstorming... :)

[drivingblind.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I'm toying around with a model of "quarter refreshes" and "half refreshes" in Fate, at least, where folks might start out with 1/4th or 1/2 of their full Fate Point complement, with fraction-sized refreshes occurring at certain milestones, rather than getting the full 10 outright, unless you're settling in for a 5 or 6 hour session or something.