What, When and Where: Remember Tomorrow, January 6, Gamma Ray Games
Players: Josh, Jered, Caroline, Leslie

Our intrepid hero, Duke, is in love with the red-hot bombshell Jessica, admiring and stalking her from afar. He's a kidnapper for The Company and she's a receptionist with MegaCorp, but he knows little else about her. Duke hires another kidnapper from The Company to gather more information on his unrequited love in return for doing a mission unpaid. Duke's mission goes south, ending with the accidental death of his abductee (killed by the very machinery his company creates!), and Duke finds himself in trouble with agents from The Company, crooked cops, and Jessica's new lover Rhonda.

Rhonda in particular distresses Duke--she is the one last piece that stands between himself and his one true love. Does Duke kill Jessica's lover and get the girl? Of course he does, and it's only a matter of time before his battered, kidnapped love returns his affections.

This was the first time we tried the 'one rotating PC hack,' and I imagine it went smoother than trying to play with four PCs. It was, however, and incredibly short session (2-2.5 hours). I was admittedly a bit out of it, but it was still a fun play. As far as the system goes, I felt like we could have done a lot more with the story had we been playing Shock. Conflict tended towards physical and there were no real 'on hell no!' or world changing moments.

Mechanically, the Ready, Willing, and Able parameters seemed somewhat ambiguous and forced, as did the conditions, and for some reason, our PC always got what he wanted.

Thanks for a great game, everyone! It was excellent to have some new faces and I hope to see Leslie and Jered gaming again!

I was thinking in hindsight that it probably would have been better to try hacking it when more people had played it before, instead of sticking Josh with both explaining the game from scratch and having to decide how to hack it on the fly. That was my bad. Sorry Josh!

Yep, RT conflicts aren't geared to let you establish game world truths: if you're playing your character and you want to discover that the corporation is really a drug front (establishing it's true as an author, discovering it as a character), and the other player doesn't want that to be true about the corporation, there's no way to do that with the dice. Conflicts can resolve action, but as a protagonist you can't mechanically shape reality the way you would in Shock or Polaris.

Of course that's probably an easy hack too: just add that to the possible scene goals. Instead of "Get something that you want in the fiction, like stealing a load of stim" it's "Make something true in the fiction." Simple to do, but actually a very big conceptual change, and maybe not really a good fit, because the dice you're rolling are character-power (based on your stats), not player-authoring power.