Category: The Gauntlet: Hail Satan

Despite the weak start (see: my grumpypants post from earlier) my first day at Metatopia was pretty good in the end.

It was basically impossible to stay in a bad mood after playing Brandon Leon-Gambetta’s Pasion de Pasiones, which is a really hilarious telenovela game. In addition to roleplaying the classic telenovela archetypes (the matriarch, the beautiful poor girl, the evil twin, the wise abuela, etc.), the game also has you playing the role of a typical Latino family watching the show as you are playing it out. The reactions of the home viewing audience functions as a sort-of fanmail/XP system, and it was really, really neat. Even in its early stages (we were only the second playtest ever), I can tell Brandon has something really special on his hands, and I can’t wait to see where it goes.

That was followed by a lovely (but too short) dinner with Sarah Richardson, Marissa Kelly, and Joel Sparks. They’re super-cool, and it was fun to get to know them a little better.

And then came the Zombie World playtest with Mark Diaz Truman. OMG, guys, Zombie World is fucking amazing! It’s not even finished and I already want to give Mark my money. Easily the best zombie game (RPG or otherwise) I’ve played in ages. And we have one more session tomorrow (!!!)

Presently reading a Malandros piece Tom McGrenery wrote for Codex, and now all I want to do is play Malandros. Really lovely, evocative stuff…

I will never get tired of seeing new issues of Codex show up on my PDF reader library!

I’m referring to the new edition of Call of Cthulhu as “7E” in today’s show notes, and you can’t stop me.

It’s almost here!

Some Thoughts on The Final Girl

I’ve played two sessions of The Final Girl the last two days, part of our Dia De Los Muertos Halloween series. In the first session, I discovered there are some real headaches you can run into when trying to run FG over Hangouts & Roll20. Namely, using Roll20’s deck of cards feature in the middle of a tense scene. We started out pretty strong, because in the first four scenes, you don’t engage the mechanics at all. We were able to focus on our goofy characters, do some funny/gross/sexy shit (like you do) and were just generally laughing and having a good time.

But as the regular rounds started (Scene 5 onward), I found the energy of the scenes starting to drop pretty dramatically. A major part of the problem was using Roll20’s clunky card feature, but there is also something inherent about the game itself I hadn’t noticed before. Namely, when you stop the scene to go to the mechanics, it can be really disruptive, especially if the kills are taking too long or you’re RP’ing out every card play. By the end, I found the killing part of each scene to be a real drag.

Face-to-face, I never really noticed this problem, because physical playing cards are quicker to deal with, and there is a certain energy you can draw on when you are sitting at a table with someone.

David LaFreniere mentioned a change he incorporated into his online FG games, which is to completely resolve the cardplay before beginning each scene. We decided we would do that for today’s game to see how it went.

It was a fucking revelation.

Today’s game was one of the most perfect, coherent games of The Final Girl I’ve played in a long time. Dealing with the mechanics upfront before each scene was quick and effective. It completely eliminated the problem of Roll20-fiddling sapping the energy of a scene.

Furthermore, and this was my key takeaway from today, I just liked the scene outcomes better. When you begin the scene knowing who has to die, you can more effectively frame it and RP it out. We used the outcome of the cardplay to do like a short outline for the scene (“Ok, the killer goes after Susan, but Johnny helps her out. The killer then targets them all and Johnny and Rob have to die by the end”). It was really great. You would think doing it this way would defeat the tension, but I didn’t feel that way at all. In fact, the scenes were so much more satisfying, I don’t think I can go back to doing it any other way, even when playing face-to-face.

Anyway, feeling really good about FG right now.