Man, there's a lot to love about Annalise.

The active-player / story-guide thing is a pretty traditional player / GM breakdown - the player gets to feel immersed on their turn and the story-guide gets to do some old-schoolish GMing, which feels comfortable. Maybe that's trad gamer brain damage talking, but I like it.

Claims: this is awesome. As audience, I'm totally involved, listening to narration details and seizing upon them. And it did encourage recurring motifs - for example, we had - unnatural cold, vodka, shadows. And when I was narrating I was consciously adding details for others to claim if they so desired.

When to go to the dice is very clear, and once we'd done a few conflicts we started getting pretty quick at it. It feels like recent games have been moving away from otherkindish/shockish orthogonal good stuff + bad stuff but I still really like it - when the bad stuff doesn't happen, I don't feel like it was a waste of time to define - I feel like that risk or danger was part of the fiction. "Whew."

Secrets - although they didn't come up in play much for us I thought they were really cool, as a way of taking our characters in a direction we didn't anticipate, kind of like "Play it as it lies" character rolling in D&D or Gamma World. I was gay, and so I was overly protective of one of my male friends; Cy killed a man, so he narrated himself having a gun.

Some questionable stuff:

We didn't know what to do about PvP. When it came up we all agreed that our characters could be treated as the story guide's NPCs when we were involved in Moments - a couple of us had Consequences that were *We get in a fight / get angry with the active player.* Even though it meant we lost control of our characters for a bit.

Just start playing, after only defining a vulnerability. I'm reminded of what JM said in Fiasco, about how you should bring your situation into focus before you start play, otherwise it'll be directionless & dull. But this seemed to work pretty well - our introductions were pretty short and to the point, and our play felt like the first act of a movie, where we're still learning who the characters are and what's going on. And it was still fun - the conflict system is just fun all by itself.

There's very little pushing us to move the story forward, except advice.

And its fatal flaw, for me:

It's not a one-shot. After three & a half hours of play we felt like we were about halfway done. I realize this is As Designed but I pretty much only play pickup games.

We went present day, Detroit - we were all workers at the GM plant and union members.

Our scenes:
1) Vinnie gets busted by the cops.
2) Uncle Bruno doesn't want to help Vinnie but is forced to by his wife, so he bails Vinnie out.
3) Vitaly takes Vinnie's shift at work. (earlier)
4) Vinnie's house is a mess - they go to Uncle Bruno's to get a tarp and Greta invites Vinnie to spend the night and Uncle Bruno gets pissed.
5) Uncle Bruno follows co-workers into the "crack house" which is actually the lair of the vampire, realizes something spooky is going on, and escapes with Sanchez but leaves Danny.
6) Vitaly followed the same co-workers, but snuck in the back, and has a conversation with the vampire - turns out the vampire is from Siberia also, which hits Vitaly's vulnerability (he only gets along with russians)
We prematurely thought it would be a good idea to switch to Act 3 here:
7) Uncle Bruno is freaking out about the crack house so Vinnie goes to check it out and meets the vampire and finds Danny, dead and drained, and the vampire's ancient Siberian treasure. The vampire asks Vinnie to do something stupid which hits Vinnie's vulnerability (crippling lack of foresight.)

Maybe it could be hacked for a one-shot...something like:
* Setting is always present day and vampire is always "classic vampire" so you don't have to spend a lot of time discussing setting & genre details. (I think part of the reason Fiasco plays fast is because it's usually present day and you don't spend time working out "and there's these islands floating in space and a tribe of minotaurs lives in the forest"...) You pick a city and you're good to go.
* Start the players with 7 coins to split between secret & vulnerability instead of 13.
* Only allow one Moment per scene.
* Only have 2 PC's - with 3 or 4 players, the third and fourth player are always storyguides. (Like we do with Polaris. This effectively turns it into a GM'd game...)
* Have a stricter act structure:
= Introductions
= First round of Foundations: you must hint at the Vampire.
= Second round of Foundations: you must establish a relationship with the Vampire.
By the end of this you'll have 2 and only 2 satellite traits, one on vulnerability and one on secret...which doesn't make a lot of sense with the game economy - you'd be incented to spend all your core trait on your one satellite trait. Maybe the satellite trait is just a detail that further defines your core trait, but you don't actually get to invest any coins in it, much like in Smallville how you add a sentence of description to your relationships and values. You still need to be able to flip those traits though, I'm not sure how that would work mechanically.
= Two rounds of Confrontation. If you haven't given in by the end of two rounds, you "win".
= Epilogues.
* The story guide is instructed to play antagonism hard - try to exhaust the active player's resources. (And now there's no conflict-of-interest because the story guide doesn't have his own PC he wants to protect.)

With 2 PC's, that would be 2 intros, 8 scenes, and 2 epilogues - and the scenes would be shorter because of the 1 moment rule.

What do you think?

I'm going to cross-post on story games.

I enjoyed a lot of the mechanics as well.

Vulnerability and Secret as your defining traits was very cool. I like the idea of your "skills" coming about as a way of compensating for, or hinting at, something. I might have wanted to talk more about what level of wierdness our Secrets could be. But we all ended up with good ones I think.

Split dice between various orthogonal outcomes is solid. Time and Temp is the other game I was thinking that had this mechanic.

I liked the way Claims worked later in the game. I think we were starting to figure out how they work. It was definitely a nice way to keep everyone engaged, give narrators feedback, and establish themes running through the game. One the unnatural cold was claimed, it was going to come back up. I *was* a little bit hesitant to use "evil" claims to help my character. But I think you need to divorce spending points from causing things. It's not that I have some sort of ties to Shadows. It's just mechanics to make sure Shadows keep showing up in the game.

I don't like "infinite claims in the opening scene." It felt like we had a lot of weak claims (TV, Public Transit, and a few others for me) from these scenes sitting around later. But since claim points are the primary resource and you can eventually move them around, there's a perverse incentive to claim almost anything you can from the intro scenes. Maybe make intro scenes just like other scenes with one free claim, maybe two for intro scenes.

I felt like we had a lot of scenes where we didn't take free claims. That's probably just learning, but maybe taking a moment after each scene (when we're doing reserves) and everyone who hasn't taken a free Claim claims something?

There are a few clunky mechanics. Buying traits from reserves should probably just be 1-1, or 2-1. Especially when you can buy as much of a trait as you want 2-1 from your Secret/Vulnerability. It's not like there's any reason that going from 6-7 Gun is more powerful than 2-3.

I wish it had clearer mechanics for story-progression. This is probably a one-shot versus ongoing game thing. Jamie's suggestions seem like good ones. One moment is probably a good idea regardless. Open-ended scenes that drag on until the players are bored, or give one player 5 rolls/traits when another gets only one aren't a good idea. I don't know what a GM can do to try to exhaust the player's resources. I guess spend off their claims heavily. That might make for a boring endgame, especially if the GMs don't have character resources to refresh stuff with. Maybe something like points the player spends go onto a GM's claim?

I almost want to ditch the vampire theme completely. Maybe tighten up the resources to one-shot levels and use this for a Fiasco-like game. Vulnerability+Secret is a good base to build a character from (maybe Strength+Vuln+Secret in a less dark game.)

Specific to our session:
The whole vampire temptation/redemption angle didn't really click for me. I'm not sure if this is because we didn't introduce/hook the vampire early enough, or if it's because we turned into escape horror, or if the characters just weren't quite set up for it.

I definitely felt like I broke character at the end, talking about becoming a hire killer for the Vampire. But I didn't really see any other way the scene could go. Ending with Vinnie begging for his life and getting killed doesn't work. But it felt like we were past trying to escape, and killing the vampire clearly isn't an option. I wish I had a clearer sense of what possible resolutions of the arc are.

I agree with all that, though I think you probably simply shouldn't be allowed to buy traits, because it just prolongs the game...

In hindsight, a better way to go for Vinnie would have been for him to steal the treasure, escape, and later find out it's cursed in some way. There's your crippling lack of foresight for you, and he stays in character. (Sorry, I never did grok that Vinnie had a moral code - he killed a guy, he sold drugs, he drew down on cops, so when he said we should clean out the crack house I thought that was just because he was trying to look good to Uncle Bruno.)

Looking back, I'm not sure what the point of satellite traits is. You only use them to "pay for" conflicts, you can't push conflicts with them (for the bulk of the game at least.) And you get a bunch "free" when you convert from a primary trait. I know the rules change in the later phases, but they seem kind of weak. I'd like to see all the "coins" work the same way. At first, I just assumed you could spend Reserves like any other trait/claim. I'd probably drop spending satellite traits for starting a Moment, and drop the 2-for-1 from a Primary trait at the same time.

I don't think I conveyed my idea for Vinnie well enough up front. It didn't help that I didn't stick to it very well either (and killing a guy kind of changed it too.) I was going more for insecure and wanting to be seen as a hotshot operator. But basically, he just wanted his uncle to be proud of him for something. But, obviously, those attempts usually fail and require his uncle to bail him out.