players: Natalie, Alex, Ed, Ben

I don’t think I’d pitch Becoming again, but much love to everyone for taking this for a spin and making good fiction:

Alex takes the laurels for most convincing Russian accent. We had nothing on him. More Ivan!

Ed scores for making a planet of armadillo-people seem a lot nicer than humanity. And for slaughtering half our crew in the hold.

And Natalie gets props for stoically fighting and then completely embracing her Texan urges. And for enduring being the beleaguered hero for nine scenes.

Yee-ha, buckaroo!

I wish there was more to say about Becoming! I had fun, but the game was bad and should feel bad. Let's never speak of it again, although if I had to slowly descend into Texan madness I can't think of better pardners.

Apparently it was unspeakably bad, but can anybody give me a sentence or two about why? I got it as a free throw-in pdf with Durance a while back, and it sounds like I shouldn't bother figuring out how it works?

I think the simplest summary is that the protagonist is mechanically pretty passive. You mostly just try to endure your mission.

I didn't HATE Becoming as much as other folks did, although part of that might be because I was A) an antagonist and B) super lucky with my dice rolls, so that I was consistently winning scenes and making bad crap happen. Which is great! But it's definitely not my number one favorite game forever; to be honest if I were to give it a point of comparison I would say it's a lot like Shooting the Moon, in that it's a game that encourages competition and relies on really specific dice mechanics which create really swingy results that don't necessarily foster the narrative.

In fact, it's a LOT like Shooting the Moon, in that I think I'd like to use it's game generation rules as-is to set things up, then play a completely different game. Or at least something that pares down the mechanics a huge, huge amount. Huh.

Because I liked the "single protagonist v. three abstract forces" setup, but it could have worked just as well if, say, each scene was freely generated by the players and always ended with one of the protagonists attributes being turned. No dice, no BS. MAAAYBE some back and forth deal-making, as in Polaris, or a minor push-your-luck kind of roll. But none of these huge dice pools.