Players: Jamie, Johnzo, sev
(we played this on 4/19.)

Deep in the hacker underground, Ian needs assistance for his city-wide guerrilla art project. He's got two enthusiastic helpers in Andrew and Abel, who are vying for his attention (but he's mostly too wrapped up in his art, or perhaps too stoned, to notice).

Andrew's an impoverished hipster who's landed back in his mother's house, dating a girl who's way more into him than vice-versa, and who's gotten away with breaking the law at least once. Over the course of the game his girlfriend innocently interferes with his hacking, and his amorous intentions toward Ian (in his awesome steam-tunnel-hideout) are thwarted by his very own record collection.

Abel's a gorgeous, unfashionable dialysis patient who's been convicted of a crime he didn't commit, and who's wearing a wire for the FBI. We discover that the FBI has wired him to try to catch Ian, so Abel builds a Faraday cage so he and Ian can toke up and talk all night without fear that the feds are going to listen in.

Working together, the two suitors fight off an irate rival hacking gang (in which Andrew sacrifices his "flies under the radar" trait, painting a big target on himself) and hang under a bridge doing some tricky bits of re-wiring city property (in which Abel sacrifices his lucky hat, revealing his unfortunate bald spot).

Ian's big art project fails -- they push the button and nothing happens. While Abel convinces Ian to leave the country with him, Ian always suspects Abel sabotaged the project. Ian's plans to change the system from the outside never see fruition. Andrew had discovered Abel's wire but keeps it a secret -- poignantly, still keeps it after Abel and Ian run away together.

This was the most 'pvp' StM game I've played yet. even while Andrew and Abel were generally collaborating in the fiction, it was fun to watch the suitor players smirk at each other as they added ever-more-complicating traits to each others' lists. For me, this drove home that the dice are all about the players competing for control of the narrative -- even if the characters never compete at all.

sev, thank you for writing this up!

I felt we were starting to get the hang of playing conflicts about halfway through.

Although at first we sort of pre-playing the conflicts:

"I'm going to use my hacker trait to send a bogus e-mail that sends my girlfriend elsewhere." (takes 2 dice), and so on, and then we rolled and had to decide what really happened and what didn't.

We later just introduced narrative.
"My lucky hat falls off." (takes 2 dice) "I overclock my laptop to hack the system." (takes 2 dice)

That felt better to me.