I'm waiting for people to finish and go home so I can do database stuff - of course a certain comic pops into my head. I am that micro-niche market, my friend!
Huh - it's 7:30pm and someone is ringing the Systems room. I could rush and pick up the phone, but really, I'd only be bringing grief to myself. There's a person on call who is paid to suffer grief, who knows a great deal more than I do -- if it's important enough, they'll call them.
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Read Mike Mignola's Amazing Screw-On Head today. Odd. Very odd. Kind of fun, but I didn't enjoy it as much as Hellboy, possibly because it was very obvious that this was all there was to it.
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The rest of this post is musings on a game system to produce a P.G. Wodehouse experience - this may be of limited interest to most people. :)
There have been other attempts at creating a Wodehousian game - The Drones immediately springs to mind - but playing InSpectres made me wonder whether a game that threw the narrative burden on the players might also work well.
One of the things that I find vaguely unsatisfying about InSpectres is the death-spiral - once you start to lose your cool, it becomes more and more difficult to achieve anything. While there's a certain amount of humour and spotlight time to be derived from spectacular failures, it's not necessarily fun to fail all the time; and using franchise dice feels deprotagonising to me. I think it's an interesting balance mechanism, in that you'll use up your franchise dice if you bite off more than you can chew, so the next challenge you face will be easier to deal with; but the stress rules seem a bit harsher than I really enjoy.
It does feel like a Wodehouse game should have some sort of stress mechanism - indeed, when Aunt Agatha is in the picture Bertie seems to spend half the time boggled, bewildered, or simply cowed. However, once his dreaded Aunt has denounced, declaimed and departed, he doesn't take very long to perk up again - usually as a result of a good idea from Jeeves, or a terrible idea of his own (or one of his friends).
I briefly considered looking at Toon, which I seem to remember had rules for making characters Fall Down, and thus be unable to interact. However, I was thinking that the InSpectres system might work well, with some modifications.
In InSpectres, you generally lose attribute dice if you fail a stress check, distributing the penalty amoung your stats in a way that is appropriate for the situation that caused you to fail. This penalty applies until the end of the mission, when you can spend some of the franchise dice that you won on "holidays" for your staff, effectively healing them. In the variant I was considering, when a Wodehouse character fails a stress test, they add one or more points to their Boggled pool, which substracts that number of dice from every roll they make. However, if they haven't made a stress check this scene, then they (or their allies) can do things to reduce their Boggled pool.
What kind of things? Well, an ill-thought-out and overly complicated plan to solve the problem is an obvious one. Falling in love, joining the Seekers (and stealing a constable's helmet), or deciding to become a Bohemian Poet might be appropriate, too. Some of these things (such as well-intentioned but terrible plans) other players might be able to do for the victim - I may have to think of some sort of reward for doing so, but on the other hand, the spotlight time might be sufficient.
The confessional (where you can foreshadow, mess with time, or give other players attributes) could be brought over pretty much as-is, though it might become translated into "Dear Diary". Some of The Drones' advantages and disadvantages would translate into the InSpectres "Talent", but most would simply be attributes that players would assign each other during Diary sessions. Translating Academic, Athletics, Technology and Contacts into Grey Matter, Vim & Vigour, The Readies and Outer Crust seems straightforward.
I could see giving The Club the same kind of status as the Franchise, but I don't think it really fits - players are unlikely to seriously affect the club's status or resources. Also, the nature of the world is essentially static. I'm going to have to think hard about how the "game" aspect of InSpectres might translate across - what reward will players receive for playing out the attributes assigned to them?
Anyway, there's the outlines of what I was thinking. Feel free to comment, if you feel so inclined.
Posted by svend at October 6, 2004 11:06 AM