The desire to play Durance combined with the relative paucity of veteran players resulted in a 4-way first timer game of Durance played on the fly via flipping through the rule book and Making It Work. The players were Noelle, Sam, Megan, and Diego.

The Planet: We made our prison home on the lovely planet of New Eden, which had a habitable atmosphere, a stable Geology, and the climate of Southern California. Unfortunately, there was next to no water and everything living on the planet was incredibly toxic or trying to kill us, but you can't have everything, right?

The Populace: We were motivated, had order well-established, and an idea of justice. Unfortunately, our unique drive was for Freedom, which indicated that a fair portion of society was less than happy with our well-oiled machine.

Our Notables:

Zeus the Dimber Damer (Diego): A former ruthless CEO who was chafing at the idea of being under anyone's authority other than his own.

T-Beam (Sam): A Bolter who tended to solve problems with his fists, and while he was actually quite fine with the idea of murder, theft didn't sit well with him at all.

Telly (Noelle): A Crawler who hated everyone and everything except his dog.

Ed (Megan): A Wrecker: A political prisoner who was rather useless and pretentiously pretended to read Italian.

Mitty (Megan): A Swell, a Xenobiologist who decided she didn't really care if it WAS a prison planet, she was going to discover it for science.

Trina (Noelle): A Marine who just wanted to earn some money to send home to her family.

James (Diego): Another Marine, but with less moral compunctions than Trina.

Ushendi (Sam): An emancipated prisoner who was now a prospector.


The main plot quickly emerged: Zeus wanted to overthrow the government authority. Our main characters likewise emerged: Most of the action seemed centered around Zeus, Mitty, and T-Beam. I'm not certain if this is usual for Durance, but they quickly became our main characters.

The first few scenes were establishing character moments: In the first scene, T-Beam threatened Telly's dog after he saw it stealing food. In the second, Ushandi saw herself being treated for an injury from native wildlife by Mitty, who was far more interested in collecting samples of the venom than in her patient.

The third scene started the main plot with Zeus trying to get Mitty and Trina to agree to assist with his plot to overthrow the government. Mitty agreed to poison all of the high-ranking government officials in exchange for test subjects, and Trina, though she had reservations, also eventually agreed to assist.

From there, the game devolved into double, triple, and quadruple crossing, with Trina and her lover James making plans to bargain information to the government for their safety, the discovery that Ed was a political prisoner because he'd developed and used a mind enslaving chemical on nearby planets, and eventually ending with a tenative alliance between T-Beam and Mitty (complete with bouquets of poisonous, deadly flowers) to administer the drug to Zeus instead of allowing him to get his hands on it.

Time constraints forced us to abandon the game without finishing, with Mitty on the verge of being force-fed the drug and told to cut off her own finger and with Zeus suspecting T-Beam's treachery, but with no clear victor. I like to imagine that Zeus won, but I'm a fan of downer endings.


Thoughts: I definitely think this game could have gone worse, given we'd never played before. I would be interested in people's ideas on how to more successfully integrate all 6 characters, and how to more satisfactorily bring in some oath breaking/dice using. We were far too accommodating a group; there was little to no disagreement on scenes' outcomes, and no oath breaking, though that may have changed if we'd had the time to finish the game. I like the game, but I'm a large fan of playing horrible, horrible people, so that's sort of a given.

Yeah, I think we did a decent job for trying it cold, but we did have a lot of trouble with Zero Conflicts. Perhaps because we weren't quite clear about, or just didn't have a good feel for, the extent of player authority; in that situation I think it's easy to default to more cautious etiquette.

There's a general thing I've noticed about player number: with three players it's easy to drop into a tightly-focused plot where every scene is about the Next Thing, and with four you tend to get more incidental stuff. And I suspect that Durance is meant to be more of a Thousand Interlinked Stories In The Gritty City kind of narrative. Maybe if there was some sort of quota for characters? Maybe not totally evenly spaced, but still requiring scenes for everyone? Hm. And I can't help but notice that, after we'd stacked the deck with low-ranking characters, the three who came to dominate the plot were the three highest-ranked.

The other big problem we had was that there were too many characters without... incommensurate goals, maybe? To get people to break oaths you need handles, things they care about other than the oath. And this was kind of difficult when every character is a Scheming Selfish Loner.

Another another thing: it's harder to maintain the setting than I'd realised. We had a setting with abundant Order and Justice, but the fact that the only character of rank 2 or above was the Dimber Damber put us into a totally different context, one in which the criminal mastermind was really, truly in control of everything. And we never did anything much about the intelligent aliens. Perhaps slightly more work on defining the setting next time?