Thursday, March 3, 2011 @ Gamma Ray Games
Who played: Ben, Feiya, Robert, and Fred

We played a hacked version of Remember Tomorrow (more on that later) in a relatively standard cyberpunk setting where one of the central technologies was the invention of Sensory Input Records, a.k.a. "Skins". These are recorded experiences of all sensory input - what someone was feeling, seeing, hearing, etc. (but not what they were thinking). Skins have become a valued commodity, both as an illicit trade and as important documentation for officials.

Starting characters
Marko Lobe: An underground dealer in illicit skins (everything from thrillrides to sex) who is seeking his dead ex-wife's final recorded skin.
Arvo Bartok: A model employee at the Censorship Board (CB) who is leaking government-censored skins to the media with the ultimate goal of uncovering the truth behind a presidential assassination.

Starting factions:
The Censorship Board (CB): An arm of the government that seeks to control the traffic of illicit skins and to protect security-sensitive skins in its archives. Poor funding is affecting the quality of security in the building.
Phoenix Down (PD): A slick, organized crime syndicate that runs underground skin clubs/lounges where people go to tap into the illegal skins.

Other characters and factions were introduced in gameplay:

Introduced characters:
Lola "V": A freelance hacker with no clear allegiances who we meet when she is working for Phoenix Down to insert subliminal ads into their skins. She wants to be a better-known hacker than her father, James "II"
Jerry "Gooey" [I forgot the last name]: Sticky-fingered thug working for both the CB and Phoenix Down.
Kain: A professional criminal contractor. Prefers to work alone, and always gets the job done.

Introduced factions:
Veritas: A rogue media organization of young punks working to subvert the government and corporations through publication of sensitive material and hacking operations. Always on the move.

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I will do my best to make a concise recap of the scenes. I may have some things mixed up as I started to lose track of things near the end of the night.

Marko is working to sell skins to Phoenix Down, who are beginning to notice a decline in the quality of his work. When a promise for skins of extreme racecar experiences falls through, he is beaten and left on his own with his name discredited. Gooey tries to squeeze the last of Marko's money from him with a found skin from his ex-wife; Marko lacks the will to shoot Gooey for it and ends up a destitute failure in the gutters.

Arvo is quietly playing the part at the CB, working to befriend security and swipe copies of whatever skins he can get his hands on. When the CB decides to investigate the losses, Arvo works to plant the blame on Gooey, who, unbeknownst to him, is the nephew of the CB's director. Arvo uses his higher security clearance to swipe the highest-security stuff he can to leak it to Veritas. He makes a deal with them to get them into the archives to swap the super-classified gov't skins. The heist turns anarchic with some Veritas members destroying and setting fire to the archives, but Arvo and the core members of Veritas escape and give Arvo a new identity before releasing the bombshell leaks.

Lola, who doesn't know exactly what it is that she's been putting into Phoenix Down's skins, sets up a meeting to drop off her materials. She realizes it is an ambush to abduct her and manages to escape. She finds PD material and posts it all over the net, gaining hacker cred amongst her peers. Veritas tries to contact her for more information on PD, and Lola takes it as an opportunity to flex her hacker muscles by successfully backtracing and exposing their location. At a meeting with her friends at a coffeeshop, she realizes almost everyone she knows is part of Veritas and that many of them have been taken away. Thoroughly ashamed and regretful, she decides to join and aid their tech/hacker operations.

Some threads that we didn't really wrap up:
Kain was the contractor who attempted to abduct Lola at the meetup. He blames PD for jumping the gun and blowing the operation. He had his own reasons for getting to Lola, as he has been desperately trying to find her father, James II. When Kain gets a bit too gruff with PD, he finds himself roughed up and tortured for not revealing what he knows about Lola.

Gooey is looking to get rich, plain and simple. He is a PD thug in the Censorship Board, and is also stealing skins (but for a much less noble purpose than Arvo's). When he's exposed he gets chewed out by his uncle and promises to deliver him the downfall of Phoenix Down.

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The latest incarnation of Ben & Josh's hack worked great. Here are the main changes. Ben, please chime in case I jumbled some things up. Actually, I think it'd be great to summarize this in a separate post or document.

• Just create two characters and two factions to start.
  
• The only stats are Ready, Willing, and Able. The same rules as the book are used for them. No PCons, NCons, weapons, brands, or cyberware are explicitly mentioned. For example, Lola had mace when she went to the meeting. It was just part of the fiction, she didn't need to be "Armed" or acquire it somehow.
  
• There was one roll near the end of the scene. Players roll three dice and match to R/W/A or Influence as in the rules. Options are to increase your stats, decrease faction influence, or check off a R/W/A goal (if appropriate). Edge dice are gained by winning a face-off as a Faction.
  
• We had a tie roll, but I forgot how we handled it. Ben?
  

Potential adjustments:

• We talked about restricting the option to un-tick a player's R/W/A to keep the story moving forward.
  
• Factions quickly became very powerful. Without Character PCons or NCons to adjust, they had a lot of leeway to really mess up characters.
  

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I think this hack really saved the game. Compared to the text, there was much less time getting bogged down in crunchy mechanics and more focus on moving the story forward and quickly resolving conflicts. There aren't any number-of-rounds restraints on the character, so we couldn't wrap up stories as quickly as we were introducing new threads. It seems tough to wrap it up in one session without narrowing the focus of the world. I think half the fun was coming up with all of the characters and factions and dropping them into the world, even if it did become a challenge to mentally account for all of the story threads. They all added color to the game. It'd still be fun to do a second session, though.

Four people was a good number of players. I could see doing it with three and narrowing the stories down a bit. After Feiya and Robert left, I struggled with how many characters, factions, and options were laid out on the table. Too many choices -- brain freeze. Thanks to Ben for helping to nudge us towards a (partial) ending for at least one of the characters... and also for reminding me that mobsters and criminals shouldn't always be so damn rational in their interactions.

Phew. Lots of fun!

Nice :)

I had a great first time and the best part for me was seeing the things that I came up with be used and become part of the world/story.

Looking forward to the next time that I can come play with you guys! Most likely a Saturday.

Great summary Fred. I had a really good time playing with you guys. It was a lot easier than our previous Remember Tomorrow games -- we've had some good plots before, but it was always more work to get there (players overcoming the rules to make cool stuff, rather than the rules making cool stuff easier). I'm giving the RT Lite hack a thumbs-up so far.

I know we didn't tie up any stories, but I actually really liked the branching / blossoming plot lines. I'm terribly curious to see what would happen next. Does Arvo's new forged identity let him escape the hounds of the Censorship Board? Does Gooey backstab his uncle and rise to the top? What the heck is up with V's dad? Why is Kain after him? Is he really alive? What about the assassination Arvo was exposing? Who whacked him? What were the Phoenix Down subliminals intended to do? So curious!

I had a great first time and the best part for me was seeing the things that I came up with be used and become part of the world/story.

Yeah, that's a big part of the fun of all these story games, throwing your ideas in and watching other people run with them. Phoenix Down was a key antagonist, and we were still playing scenes with V after you left ;) We couldn't resist her tempting plot line! You know if we kept playing someone was going to waltz in as her surprise-I'm-not-dead Dad.

We also got into some nice "with friends like these" moments, using the face-off for indirect attacks from apparent friendlies: the Veritas rebel youth running a guilt trip on V, and then later Veritas "helping" Arvo steal the data, but really mucking the whole thing up by shouting 'power to the people' as they smashed computer banks and set off every alarm in the place. Smooth, kids, real smooth.

Great recap, Fred!

The RT Lite variant is definitely an improvement, but one thing that still strikes me as something of a stumbling block with the game is that as a character you can't initiate a conflict with a faction, only the other way around. This seems unnecessarily restictive, from a narrative standpoint -- I've found it sometimes difficult to figure out a way to drive a character's story forward with the enforced 'indirection' required.

"I've found it sometimes difficult to figure out a way to drive a character's story forward with the enforced 'indirection' required."

We ran into this situation when we played a handful of games a few months back as well. I think you want to focus on driving someone else's story forward, and kind of leave yours dangling in the wind hoping someone else picks it up. It does kind of make the PCs feel passive, though. I tried to get a sense of what my target was going to try next before deciding how the conflict got pushed on them, but it was still tricky.

I see why they chose to do it this way. It does nudge people to "GM" for others over driving their PC forward. And it gaurantees that at least two players are interested in the story being told. By the same token, if a PCs story doesn't hook another player, they can be kind of left out of things. Which isn't so bad once you get used to the idea that you're always one turn away from a new PC and a new story, or a new faction that ties your PCs story into the rest.

The dynamic I liked the most about RT is the sense of the factions using the PCs as pawns to fight proxy wars with each other.

What's the rationale for playing a hacked Remember Tomorrow rather than Shock?
Why not say, "Let's play Shock, but keep it cyberpunk?"

What's the rationale for playing a hacked Remember Tomorrow rather than Shock?
Why not say, "Let's play Shock, but keep it cyberpunk?"

100% different agendas and styles of play. If you made a check-list of Shock and RT side-by-side, I think you'd find they were opposites in most ways.

How RT differs from Shock:
- no world building/high concept, no pre-determined issues
- you're not stuck with your character, you can swap at any time
- no set antagonists/protagonists aka left-hand/right-hand players
- no rigid story timeline (compared to the 3 scenes of Shock), etc.

Once you set the ball in motion, Shock walks through the plots like clockwork, whereas Remember Tomorrow is more unpredictable and can go all sorts of directions.

you can't initiate a conflict with a faction, only the other way around.

It's definitely different from a lot of other games. You're basically trying to interest other people in your character so they'll make conflicts for you to overcome. If no one is interested, you can just make Deals hoping to make the character interesting.

The flip-side is that although you can't check goals with a Deal, you can't get hurt either, so you just become more and more powerful as you raise stats. That can draw other players to put conflicts in your way when they think your character doesn't deserve to live on easy street.

I wouldn't want to play all games this way, but I like it as a change of pace. It does require the players to get into a different mindset: the game fiction is more shared and interactive, not "this is my guy, I'm advancing his story."

Jamie,
I'm not sure how much I'd push for playing RT, but I'll second that it's a very different game from Shock.

The main thing for me is the story structure of Shock. You have your story goal, you have to push towards it, and you have 3 scenes to do it. There's less potential for short color scenes, less potential to save a story goal that you don't quite like, to have your character change their mind/get convinced. It's also way more N stories that one big story. Most RT games I've played have basically come together into one multi-sided story, with characters interacting and crossing over. I miss that in Shock.

In fact, I'd almost be tempted to do the opposite and use the Shock setup with RT-lite rules.