The game was Fiasco, and the playset was "All the Damn Time," and, well, let's not bury the lede here: it was a struggle.

That isn't to say it was a terrible time, far from it. But was a situation which, to me, didn't quite work. And that's worth considering a bit.

(And maybe I'm talking out of turn here, and everyone else thought it was the bees' knees, and that's fine! Apologies if I put words in mouths where they don't belong.)

The players: Me, Drew, Sam, and Rachael (for whom this was her first game of Fiasco).

The characters, Samantha Howard. All of us. That's the conceit of the playset... Sam Howard (a man in the playset, but we rendered her into Samantha) can travel through time but only to places and times where she already is. That is to say, she can only time travel to different points in her own life. So she was here at 14, 21, 27, and 47 each with different concerns and ideals.

Sammi at 14 wanted to, uh, steal a gorilla to impress her best friend Abby Wright.

Sam at 21 just got kissed by Abby at a party, and is kind of freaking out about it.

Sam at 27 is married to Ron, has twin toddlers, and wonders how life could have been different if she hadn't balked and ran when Abby kissed her.

Samantha at 47 has been scarred in a laboratory accident, and wants to undo that by any means possible.

And then we were off, bopping through time, messing with one another, and in one memorable instance, killing a gorilla.

Eventually, Sammi-14 got to jump start a relationship with Abby, which eventually went sour. Sam-21 got to take advantage of an ontological paradox to collect lots of research without doing any actual work. Sam-27 got twisted around and trapped in some wibbly-wobbly time thing, and Samantha-47 went slowly mad as more and more memories poured into her head as her younger iterations kept messing with time.

So.

It was alright.

Okay, I'm having some trouble expressing why I thought this game didn't quite work, and I'm totally happy to hear the other players if they have thoughts. It's not a veil issue, or a collapse of the underlying system or anything like that. I think we all did a fine job of being Sam Howard, but somehow the messing about with time just... it wasn't as effectively engaging as Fiasco, in my experience, tends to be.

I think part of the problem is that that we spent the first round of scenes meeting one another. Even though we obviously knew one another (or at least the older Sams knew the younger ones), we were still spending a lot of time on these initial interactions... the first jump through time, the first encounter with the oldest Sam, things like that. It gave us precious little to play off of. One piece of advice I got from Ben ages ago was to treat relationships as things which already exist, not as things which we are going to create in play; not only does "knowing each other" give more creative possibilities than "meeting each other," but meeting one another turns the relationship from a starting point to a goal which is hamstringing us.

That also meant that these early scenes were lacking in clear direction... when we're meeting instead of scheming, well, not much happens. The black and white dice can feel a bit arbitrary when scenes are about folks chatting up one another instead of doing something. That isn't to say that every one needed us to hotwire a car while taking fire, but that might have been useful.

As for the playset itself, while it was definitely interesting, I don't think it helped with those problems. Perhaps it was just our set of needs/objects/locations, but beyond Abby Wright, there was very little to deal with that you might call an "outside" force. In most Fiascos that's not necessarily a problem... after all, characters but up against one another easily enough... but this is a situation in which we have every reason to work together across the board... after all, things that benefit younger Sams carry forward, after all. Now, we did end up working at cross purposes, but that was something we had to work to do.

Any maybe that's the central issue... this was a Fiasco that required a lot of work. We had a what felt to me like a long setup, and setup stuff carried into the game, and the game paused often for discussions of how time travel works (more on that in a bit), and the Aftermath was... well, the playset itself suggests that the aftermath is especially wiggly, and at that point a lot of the energy had left the group.

Finally, there's the time travel element itself. Now, Fiasco is a game that tends to go pretty well, in my experience, when you roll with the punches and don't worry overmuch about the logic of a situation. Which is fine and dandy... but doesn't really mix well with time travel. The playset doesn't give very much guidance for how things work, and though we spent time talking about it, I still don't have the most solid grip on how time travel operated for Sam. And I lucked out... as the youngest iteration, I didn't have to deal with changing memories or anything like that. I will freely admit that I am a guy who, when things are in doubt, defaults to saying "More rules! Nail these things down MORE PRECISELY!", which is not everybody's cup of tea, but I DO think that I would have been happier with a little more guidance on the quantum mechanics of it all.

Anyway, obviously this is coming out as extremely critical, so let me modulate that down a bit; I thought we all did good work. Props to Drew for being the 47-year-old Sam with a Plan, which was what eventually gave us some direction (as she tried to engineer the death of Abby Wright). And props to, uh, Sam (the real person), for a number of things but especially a fantastic scene in which she goes back in time to convince Abby to keep a watchful eye on that troublemaker, 14-year-old Sam... it was one of the instances where playing with time was fulfilling on all its promises. And mega-props to Rachael, both for diving into the business headfirst, even though this was an especially complicated scenario, and for being the one who had to deal with the worst of the shifts in time (including coming home to her twins, Freddy and Teddy, to find out they're now named Fingal and Thadeos). And yeah, when things did flow, I had a lot of fun... this was a playset that let me start a scene in the middle of a scene which already happened, and which let me collude with an older version of myself to frame a park ranger for killing a gorilla, which is... one of the strangest things I've ever said.

It was just... those were fun moments mixed in with a game that was, for me at least, more of a struggle to get into that I am used to Fiasco being. What do other folks have to say about that?

I think this was a pretty good summery of what broke down with this play set. Its a cool sounding idea in theory, but it would require a lot of work (and thus lose a lot of the benefit that Fiasco provides) to create a truly compelling, interesting story rather than one where everyone goes "parts of this were cool but overall I have no idea what just happened".

The crux of the issue really is the time travel. Time travel can work in story games when it is "We're people from 2014 who go back to 1970!" Then you just have an out of place character, but other than that no real limits to the story you can tell. But when you start worrying about timelines and changing ones own past things start to break down, fast. There is a limit to the complexity a story game can really have, otherwise everyone gets lost in staying on the same page and if you spend more time remembering whats going on rather than continuing the story it won't be a great time.

Sure, there were interesting things that happened during this game, due in part to time travel being cool and all that. As you said, when things did flow it was pretty fun. It just didn't flow that much, and was generally too much work for a game of Fiasco.

Could I see a group of people going in with the right approach (clearly define how time travel works, consistently talk after scenes about what the result of that scene was, have clear motivations for the characters that withstand timeline changes (one issue we ran into was that at the start a big motivation for Sam 3 was wondering what life would've been like if she chose Abby over Ron, but then timelines changed and that wasn't an issue anymore and suddenly Sam 3 was motiveless)...) having a really cool experience with this play set? Sure. But I could also see it still going poorly. Ultimately the time travel ideas explored in this play set are neat and potentially could be worked into a really cool story game, they just don't really work great with Fiasco.

Yeah. Basically there are two kinds of time-travel stories - the ones in which time travel is mostly an excuse to deposit some strangers into a strange land, and the ones wherein clever fuckery with the precise mechanics of time-travel is a major plot-point. All the Damn Time is obviously meant to be in the latter camp, and that's the difficult one. The one where you need to diagram out your plot on a piece of paper and shuffle note-cards around as you write. The one that absolutely shouldn't work in extemporaneous storytelling.

So, yes, we needed a lot more structured guidance from the outset, I think, and the playset doesn't really want to commit to that.