Some thoughts on two games I have played so far this week: Technoir and Misspent Youth.

Technoir is a pretty cool game. It sets out to tell a hardboiled noir story in a cyberpunk future. Its principal mechanic involves giving and receiving Adjectives (or tags, if you will) which help drive the emergent mystery forward. I found the adjective mechanic to be terrific in a social context – it made forming relationships feel very dynamic and provided plenty of plot hooks. It was much less useful in a combat context, however. Fortunately, the game emphasizes the former. There is, apparently, a lot of interesting stuff going on in the backend, but I have yet to read the full rule book. Daniel Lewis , who ran our game, can speak more to that (and has, in a previous post).

I’m really loving Misspent Youth. We had our first session of actual play yesterday (last week’s session was world and character creation). The game has a 7-scene structure that is highly specific in terms of what you need to accomplish in each scene. While that structure may be a turnoff to some (and, in fact, it took me a second to get used to it), within each individual scene freeform RP is the name of the game. At a certain point, the Authority cuts in with the Struggle for that scene. You play out the Struggle (using a quick and compelling system vaguely reminiscent of craps), do some bookkeeping, and then move on to the next scene. We’re still very early in our story, but the thing I grew to really love is the game’s emphasis on freeform chatter. The players were getting more and more used to it as the session went on, such that by the time the later scenes rolled around, it was like watching a little play or improv. They began to inhabit the characters, and that’s a good thing.

Thanks to Daniel Lewis Rob Ferguson Ferrell Riley Daniel Fowler !