Fluid the First

We used my new Fluid rules for the first time for last night's Firefly campaign session. As might be expected, results were mixed. On the positive side, the rules did what they were supposed to do, which was result in a very free-flowing story and simple conflict resolution. A lot happened in the session, though the effect was somewhat mitigated by the players being unfamiliar with the rules and therefore not 100% sure what they could and couldn't do. A couple of the players took the ball and ran with it, adding new NPCs and places, as I'd hoped. Others weren't as comfortable, and played more conservatively. No surprise there, since some of them hadn't played anything like this before. I found it particularly interesting that two of the players who'd never done anything like it before were the ones who did the most with it.

On the negative side, the card-based resolution got some mixed reviews. Several players suggested that having multiples of a card could outweigh a single higher card, as in poker. All of the players agreed that true poker-style hands were unlikely to work, since it's not unusual for someone in a conflict to have a three or four card hand. Strictly speaking, it seems to me as though that doesn't have to be a problem; it'd be easy to have the rule be that flushes and straights don't become available unless you have at least five cards (though that makes having five cards significantly better than having four). We agreed that we'll allow pairs, three-of-a-kind, and four-of-a-kind (in that order) to be better than a single ace during the next session and see how that works.

My original idea of having players not re-shuffle, but use one deck of standard playing cards for each character all of the way through to the end, didn't go over well. The idea was that all players would, in effect, have the same amount of good/bad cards in the long run, though there would be luck in the timing of when those cards came up. Most of the players felt that it was impractical to keep the same deck split between used/unused cards between sessions, and they'd prefer to just restart with each new session.

We also used "hero points" or "karma", or whatever you want to call it (I'll probably use "plot points"), which means that each player had a small pool of points they could use to get a re-draw, and a player could be rewarded with more points for contributing something especially fun. This got almost no use during this session, but that was largely because the players were drawing well and just not losing a lot of conflicts, so I'll want to continue some form of this for a while before abandoning the idea. I wanted to enable players to give each other points (like Prime Time Adventures' "fan mail"), rather than relying on the GM to do all of the rewarding for good play, and we worked out an arrangement we'll try in the next session. There will be more points available to the players than I'd originally intended, but they will be less powerful, enabling the player to gain more cards or value from the cards he has rather than a re-draw. I personally favor more cards, as I like the uncertainty involved in a player not knowing for sure whether or not another card will help. One of the other players (that's you, Nate) would prefer to be able to spend points and know that the result will help him, because he cared enough about this particular conflict to spend the resources on it. I can see both sides of it, as you'd hate to spend five hard-earned points only to get a poor draw on every card and have it mean nothing. But I like the drama of knowing that you have to beat the NPC's king with an ace or some kind of pair, and not knowing for sure whether or not you'll get it. It might be best to experiment with both versions and see what works best.

I wasn't surprised that we ended up talking about story structure after the session, since the system was specifically set up to enable the players to set up their own (or not), though I was surprised by some of the nature of that conversation. Strictly speaking, there was no less structure in this session than in most RPGs, but some of the players expressed concern that sessions with this system would be a little too free form, since you have no way to know what elements any given player might try to introduce (there is a mechanism that prevents them from adding anything they want, but I digress). I'm considering the idea of having a "spotlight character" for each session (or the spotlight might follow the player to a reasonable stopping point of some kind, transcending sessions), giving one particular character more control temporarily, and the others would go into each session knowing that they're either going to direct it or support someone else's direction. One of my original concerns before the game had been that everybody would want to pull the story in their personal direction. Then I realized that that might be okay, since that pull could generate drama, as long as the conflict didn't get personal and out-of-game. A larger problem would be if nobody wanted to take the lead, since there's not much that could be done to resolve that problem, but I think it'd be a rare group that would be quite that passive.

One question that emerged was "why not just play Prime Time Adventures?", especially since we're modeling the campaign after a TV show and I'm borrowing several concepts from PTA anyway. The answer is that I don't want to be restricted to PTA's structure. The actual model is intended to be a mosaic novel, not a TV show.

I'm also borrowing a lot from Sorcerer, so why not just use the Sorcerer system as it exists? That's a better question, because in spite of the use of cards, Sorcerer is more of an influence than PTA, especially in character generation. Still, Fluid uses cards instead of dice, uses a "hero point" system to allow those results to be modified, gives players much of the control over scene framing and narration, and adds more modifiers to the characters' functionality in conflicts. It's probably too much of a stretch to call it a Sorcerer variant, and I'm reluctant to give up some of those additional elements just so I can call it a variant.

There was very little combat (the only fight lasted a grand total of two rounds!), so we didn't get to test that aspect of the game as much as I would've liked. Also, we only got into one situation where multiple characters wished to act at the same time, and that turned out to be a moot point as things actually played out, so that still needs testing as well.

We agreed that the result was sufficiently successful that we'll try it again for the next session or two, with a few changes. I expect the next time to be better, since we'll all have a better handle on what to expect and how things will work. We ended the session by agreeing on how we'll start the next time, enabling everyone to show up prepared with some context-appropriate ideas, which should make a huge difference.