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Anthony Boydell
United Kingdom
Unspecified
Unspecified
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That big ole' bear Carl (and his dining room) played generous host to the usual crowd (6 of us) last night. It was Richard's turn to choose and, to our surprise, he fore-swore his usual genre of thinky, tricky economic games (often coming with a miscalculate-and-you're-dead auction mechanism) in favour of something altogether more loose: Pantheon and Other Roleplaying Games
The premise is that each player takes on a role in a basic story scenario eg. trapped in a research station at the bottom of the sea with an unknown beastie (the one we played), mafia hoods digging up loot etc. You start with some money and a number of one-shot special abilities. The players then role-play the scenario by adding short sentences to the narrative - if anyone takes issue with the sentence, they may challenge and then the money/special tokens (and some dice) are used to resolve the challenge - sometimes the sentence will stand, sometimes its changed (a bit) and sometimes it's canceled altogether.
So, if someone states: '{Tonys character} is hit by the ricochet from {Richards character}s rifle shot and his head is blown clean off', then I'm likely to challenge it! If I win, I can change it to '{Tonys character} is hit by the ricochet from {Richards character}s rifle shot and his HAT is blown clean off' or something.
Play proceeds until all players, bar one, are dead (no money left, no special tokens, dead in the story and its un-challengable) or everyone thinks its reached a natural conclusion. Don't worry - being dead is not necessarily a BAD thing!
End-game scoring involves looking at a couple of pages of general and character-specific events and role-play criteria eg. there might be a scoring category for '{Tonys character} was the first to die = +3 points', or '{Richards character} became hysterical and had to be slapped by another PC = +5 points' etc - you don't know these criteria in advance. The nice touch is that the scenario scoring has lots of genre in-jokes, so a mad scientist character will get lots of points for behaving as such, especially if you can lob in a few movie cliches as well!
Phrasing is very important too - for instance, at one point a player stated that a mis-shot hit my character "right in the middle of her chest (full stop)". On my turn, my sentence was '{My name} looked in horror and relief as {shooters name}s shot narrowly missed her and embedded itself in her pine storage chest' - slippery, but life-saving!
It was a slightly-awkward, but hilarious, session - some players are more comfortable with the role-playing aesthetic than others, so much mirth was gained from a Chief Engineer who displayed no technical knowledge and just stated the bleeding obvious a lot ('Oh, the floor has collapsed', 'That sounds like an explosion' etc). Carl's news reporter turned out to have a robotic leg, the quarterback was controlling the monster(s) remotely and ended up being clawed to death by the ship's cat, the NPC cook and his wife were straight out of John Carpenter's 'The Thing' and I was a medic/scientist who modified my own genetic structure to become a mermaid and swim off to safety (!)
As it turned out, the first-to-die quarterback got the most points for his interaction with the monster(s) and the ship's cat, amongst other things.
With 90 minutes left, we were assured that we could easily fit in Power Grid: Brazil/Spain & Portugal, so two hours later we packed up and departed into the night (I was one money short of building/powering 14 cities and coming 3rd instead of the lowly 5th position I ended up with).
I like the idea of a bit more story-telling in evenings like this - it's my turn to choose in a couple of weeks, so maybe I'll dig out Paranoia?
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