I had great fun with Psi*Run this past Saturday, and was with a wonderful group of players (Mark, Jay, Ryan, and Keerawa, IIRC), couldn't have asked for better. Special thanks to Jay for generously sharing his previous experience with the game. We tried rotating GMs and also using a countdown clock (a countdown timer was on a character's wrist); because of the countdown clock we reduced the number of questions per character down to 3 (from the 4 recommended for a one-shot). Apologies in advance: I'm writing this during down time at work and don't remember the names of everyone's characters, in addition to other important details :) Please feel free to fill in the missing info in the comments section. Mark's character was a teenager, Amy, who had an all-white eye and the ability of precognition; she also had a medic alert bracelet around her wrist with someone else’s name on it – “Julie”. Jay’s character I think was named Mary, and had a key to a locker in her possession. Ryan’s character was good at fixing things, had the power of influencing others with his voice, and was wondering whether he was addicted to his power and who he had hurt with it in the past. Keerawa’s had an unstable mental power that was able to control other people, and also caused long-term damage to them. My character was TJ, a teenage telekinetic.

The opening scene was in a train yard near Chicago, where we crashed in a helicopter. As our amnesiac characters stagger away from the crash, we become aware of another chopper approaching, and we know it’s the chasers. The chasers are a paramilitary group with a golden eagle insignia, and have psychic dogs that can detect our use of psi (and have creepy weird echo-like barks). We manage to steal a train and blast through the gate enclosing it, speeding towards downtown Chicago. We decide to abandon the train under an overpass and sneak into the nearby neighborhood to lose the chasers. TJ (short for "the teenager wearing a T-shirt and jeans") the telekinetic offers to break everybody's fall with his power, so everyone jumps without waiting for the train to slow down much, as he pushes against the ground with his mind.

As we jump, the train flies sideways off the tracks and explodes. TJ manages to smash himself hard into the ground and is injured (I had a disastrous roll! Pushed against the train instead of the ground). But we stagger to our feet and make our way into Chicago. Amy the precog has a vision that we need to meet someone at the Fisherman's Friend restaurant, and we start going there when she has another vision of the paramilitary chasers gunning down kids who get in between them and us. So we decide to figure out what is happening with the locker key Mary (?Jay's character) had on her instead. We try the train station first, but a man in black is waiting as she nears the locker. Keerawa's character tries to use her mental power to have him back off, but it goes wild: people all around drop to the ground with nosebleeds and seizures. And then the chasers show up. Ryan's character uses his voice power to lull them into somnolescence, and we manage to escape.

At the Fisherman's Friend, we encounter the mother of Julie. Julie, who is still missing, turns out to be Amy's friend (it was her medical bracelet Amy had on her wrist). We realize that the evil billionaire Loman  has been keeping some of us captive and experimenting on us. Julie has a powerful psychic power by which she can drain the life force from people and transfer them to someone else. Loman wants to use this power on all of Chicago so he can extend his lifespan; the timer is counting down to when he will force Julie to do this terrible deed. We figure out that Mary's key is to a locker at the airport, and in this locker is a device that can electromagnetically shield the city from Julie's power.

I'm skipping some good stuff (in particular, interesting answers to character questions, like Ryan’s character and his addiction to his power), but our final scene involves everything: the chasers are after us, the TSA is in the way, and all of us use our powers to try to get aboard a special plane (one of Loman' s, I think) to plug the device in and save Chicago from total life drain. Thanks to some great rolling by Ryan, we succeed, and none of us get captured :)

Thoughts:

Rotating GMs every scene (which means basically after every roll is adjudicated) worked just fine, and was a fun way to play. In fact, I think I prefer it to just a single GM, because there’s less pressure on any one person to be responsible for the story and more room to be surprised by what happens.

The countdown timer was good to have in the game, but I wonder whether we need to define when it ends, or just leave it as "when the session nears its end, the timer is also ending". We started with it at 72 hours, and then retconned it to be shorter, as the in-game time from the copter crash to the airport was only a few hours :) The system we used to define the timer was to answer a question about the countdown clock using the normal reveal memory mechanic; the questions were who, what, where, why/how (e.g., what is going to happen when the timer ends, who is behind this, where is it going to happen, etc.). What I liked about the timer is that it was a very useful plot device; once we started answering questions about it, it gave us a direction to go in and a purpose other than just regaining our memories.

Psi*Run really is a challenge to finish in a one-shot session; there’s really no way to get to everyone’s interesting character questions. But my main concern as we played was whether we would actually come up with a coherent story. One dynamic that I observed was that (until we answered a couple of questions about the countdown) we often didn’t know where to go next, other than to avoid the chasers. Part of the problem was that the main mechanic for discovering more about ourselves or what’s going on is the Reveal, and during rolls we would often put the low die on Reveal, since the consequences were far less dire than failing at one of the other categories; however that meant that for quite a while we got no insight into what was going on, and just kind of fumbled around without really knowing where to go. So the house rule that Jay suggested makes a lot of sense to me: IIRC (Jay please correct me) every time someone puts a low die on Reveal the group gets a point/chip, and after a certain number of these the chasers catch up. Also I’m thinking it might be a good idea to require that at least one of the timer’s questions gets answered before any of the character questions do (at least in a one-shot).

Any other thoughts, questions, or observations? I really do think it’s a great game and sure had a lot of fun playing with everyone!

Best Wishes, Manu

Great writeup. I enjoyed reading it!

I agree that the rotating GM is the way to go. I think a brief discussion about what the GM is and is not responsible for would have been beneficial--whenever I was the GM (and I think others felt this as well), I wasn't sure what exactly I had control over or what I was allowed to do.

There is a bit of a power trip (no pun intended) that occurs when someone puts on the GM hat, though, which I think might be a bit problematic. What I mean is, when I'm the GM, I can basically push the story in the direction I want it to go--by introducing new characters, changing the location, or even straight up telling the players some piece of information they just discovered. But this can lead to problems when one player only gets to be GM for a minute or two (because a roll occurs almost immediately into the scene) and another is GM for a long scene. It can feel imbalanced. One possible solution is to have the GM-ship change after each location rather than each roll. This would mean the scene needs to "move on" in order for the narrator to swap.

A second issue I noticed is that it was strange having my own character in the scene when I was GM. I was hesitant to have her do anything important because it seemed like that would be "cheating" or perhaps "double-dipping". Could've just been me though.

Really enjoyed our game. Thanks again for running it!

Great points, Marc! I agree that clear guidelines over what the GM has authority over would help. I know what you mean about some GMs having more time than others, but locations can change rapidly too, so we'd just have the same issue in a different form. And I also downplayed my character when I was GM, but since the GM never rolls maybe it's not that big of a worry? Not sure, though.
Best Wishes, Manu