Hey guys! So I had been thinking about the RPing people have been doing in mafia games and I came to a conclusion... I totally want a game in these forums that focuses more on this. Something where everyone's goal is to play the part of a character and collaborate to tell an interesting story.
Enter Fiasco -- a storytelling RPG inspired by movies where ambitious characters make (often illegal) schemes to get what they want and then watch it fall to pieces (ie Office Space, Burn After Reading, Blood Simple) There's no GM and no preparation ahead of time apart from choosing the playset. It's for 3-5 people, so I may facilitate two games at once if enough people care to play (and assuming that's cool with the mods).
Basic Rundown of All the Rules:
Setup:
We will have a pool of 12-20 dice. The exact number is four per player. Half will be black (representing negative effects) and the rest will be white (representing negative). All the dice will be rolled, with their color ignored for the time being. Players will then take turns taking dice from the pool and spending them to choose elements out of a chart specific to the scenario (called a playset). The playset will have elements that help define the relationships between player characters (ie cousins, lovers, co-workers, partners in crime, etc.). These relationships will further be defined by either a need, an object, or a location. You can see part of a playset in
this screenshot.
The goal for the end of the setup is for each player to have a character that has a relationship defined with two other characters and for everyone to have a pretty good handle on where we're starting in the story.
Act I:
Act I is where the RPing starts to take place. Players will take turns having scenes. When it is your turn to have a scene, you choose to do one of the following:
1) Establish: You choose where the scene takes place and who is in it aside from your character. It can just be your character, it can incorporate other player characters, and you can bring in side characters. Other players can make suggestions, but you have the final say. But in choosing how the scene begins, you give the other players the final choice in whether they think the scene ends well or poorly for your character.
2) Resolve: You will choose whether your character's scene ends well or poorly. But in doing so, you give the other players full control over how the scene begins. They choose how it starts and while you can throw out suggestions, they can agree on something else entirely different.
So once you make your choice, the scene is established by either yourself or the other players. Then the scene begins. You and any players involved take on the roles of your characters and move the story along.
If you chose to establish, then as the scene starts to draw to a close, the other players will quickly deliberate how they think the scene is going and give you a die -- a black one if they think the scene should end poorly for the character or a white one if it ends well. Based on that choice, you and any other players use that to end the scene (you are free to interpret what is a "good" and "bad" ending to a scene for the character).
If you chose to resolve, then as the scene draws to a close, choose either a black or white die and end the scene accordingly.
In act I, whenever you get a die, you wind up giving it to someone else. You don't have to worry about your outcome as far as the game mechanics go. This act is meant to encourage you to establish scenes for your character, get to know what makes them tick even better, and start to set up schemes to get them what they want.
The Tilt:
Once half the dice are distributed, the game moves on into the tilt. A new chart is consulted and everyone rolls their dice, subtracting their black dice total from the white dice total. The people that have the highest positive and lowest negative scores will choose new elements to add to the game. Anyone can use these elements as appropriate in Act II. These elements involve complications that will cause plans to fail and people to panic. Examples include something lighting on fire, something valuable goes missing, or a secret gets revealed.
Act II:
Act II is almost exactly like Act I, with a couple exceptions:
1) Now you will HAVE to keep your dice. This encourages you to choose to resolve and try to get your character as close to their goal as possible. Of course, your fellow players may not make that easy.
2) The elements chosen during the tilt will need to be involved at some point.
The Outcome:
During the outcome, everyone rolls their dice and subtracts black from white. A chart is consulted to give a basic idea of what your ending should be like and then we take turns creating a montage of what happens in the end for our characters. Often the result is either death or mental agony. A lot of the time characters end up one step below where they started. Rarely, a character will come out smelling like roses though usually SOMETHING still goes bad for them.
The closer you are to zero, the better your ending will be. In this sort of story, those who end up getting beat up through the whole thing should expect the same outcome. And those smug jerks can expect to get what's coming to them at the end as well. It's those guys who had to struggle to make things work for them throughout that earn their less than ideal happy ending.
This game is a lot of fun since you are guided to come up with some ridiculous things and there's a lot of free material we can make use of. I have the actual book with the rules and the above is pretty much a brief synopsis. My goal would be to create a fun forum variant using the free material and anyone that ends up enjoying this will hopefully buy the full manual and play with their meatspace friends.
A post below now has the scenarios I'm thinking of using. If you are interested in playing, rank them in the order of your preference and we'll see which we go with. I'll post the full playset once we're ready to get the game going.
Description of how a scene would go:
Player 1's character (Ms. Tate) is a woman stuck in a southern town full of people she deemed idiots. Instead of electing her for mayor, they elected a sexist, gullible, dim-witted man whom she harbors a lot of resentment toward. Now it's reelection time and she's seeking to sabotage him and the rest of the town. For her plan to work though, she needs one of her pawns (player 2's character) to blackmail the mayor for an affair that took place.
P1 chooses to establish the start of the scene. She states she wants her character to meet up with P2's character (Drew) somewhere, but isn't sure where. Another player suggests the local bar. P1 likes the idea and says it'll be at the bar in a quiet corner away from the loud patrons. The scene starts. P2 has Drew come in and sit with Ms Tate. The two have their dialogue. Ms. Tate brings up the subject of blackmail and Drew doesn't seem too sure he wants to go along with it. It seems like a jerky thing to do. Then Ms. Tate manages to argue that Drew could really use the blackmail money and Drew can't really argue against that. Players 3, 4, and 5 end up agreeing that Ms. Tate is well on her way to having Drew wrapped around her finger. They indicate that the scene will end up working favorably for Ms. Tate. Drew and Ms. Tate end the scene accordingly by having Drew agree to be a blackmailer.
YouTube videos of the game being played (more or less correctly?):
SetupPart 1Part 2Links to Bully Pulpit's Fiasco site where it can be purchased to be posted later.