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Let's play some Fiasco


Duck in a Top Hat

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7 members have voted

  1. 1. Would you join in?

    • Yes, to play
    • Yes, but just to watch
      0
  2. 2. Which playsets would you most prefer playing?

    • Main Street - a nice southern town
    • Boomtown - the wild west
    • Suburbia - a suburban community
    • The Ice - McMurdo Station, Antarctica
    • Fiasco High - high school USA
    • Regina's Wedding
    • Vegas
    • Mission to Mercury


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Hi everyone! A friend and I want to play some more Fiasco but our other friends aren't much for roleplaying games anymore. It's a delightful game if you enjoy movies where everything goes hilariously wrong, like Fargo and Burn After Reading. It's played in one-off sessions without a GM, in groups of 3-5. My friend and I know the rules, and Dintiradan has offered to brush up on them, so we could theoretically handle 15 people in 3 separate games with their own rules facilitators. But let's hope we don't have to.

 

So check the game out. If it sounds interesting, give us your responses to the poll so we can get a feel for our potential group. Once enough interested players present themselves, I'll put up an availability calendar so we can schedule our first game. Hopefully we'll be able to get a session going in the next couple weeks. I've never played it online, but I'm guessing a single game will take a bit longer over IM than in person. Maybe 3 hours or so.

 

Every game needs to run based on a premade playset which contains tools for character and story setup. I've included 8 official playsets from Fiasco and The Fiasco Companion in the poll up above, but there are tons of them made by players and if one of those sounds more interesting to you, post it here!

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I'm in, obviously. As for AIM alternatives, I was going to recommend AIM Express, but apparently AOL discontinued it earlier this year. You can still chat one-on-one in-browser at mail.aol.com, but I dunno if you can use chatrooms.

 

AIM, Skype, and Ligrev are all options. We'll be losing people no matter what option we go with, but the benefit of having multiple groups is that different groups can use different software.

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It's been a long time since I used "when is good," so yeah... I know everyone's spread across time zones, so if the slots I suggested are too restrictive, let me know, but pretty much anything I haven't included here would be tough for me to work around.

 

Fill out the calendar if you want to play

 

Games are optimal with 4-5 players and we're going to need 2 groups with our current amount. We could use 1 more person to fill out a round 8 (my friend is in, but he hasn't filled out the poll.) If anyone else is interested, we could use you! We could accept up to 3 more people (giving 10 in all) without having to make a group of 3.

 

(@Dinti: If you're anchored in a different time zone, maybe you should make your own calendar so a separate group can coordinate itself and we play the 2 games maybe at different times? In that case we'd both want to pick a playset beforehand, and I'd love to host The Ice if that's alright.)

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(@Dinti: If you're anchored in a different time zone, maybe you should make your own calendar so a separate group can coordinate itself and we play the 2 games maybe at different times? In that case we'd both want to pick a playset beforehand, and I'd love to host The Ice if that's alright.)
Filled in the calendar, but I can make one of my own if need be. I'm basically available Mondays - Thursdays and Saturdays.

 

As for playset: It's funny, because my reaction when reading The Ice was "wow, this looks extra restrictive and hard to pull off." :p

 

I misread the poll when I first filled it out, assuming I had to check the options I was willing to play, rather than wanted to play (and thus dutifully selected every option). Tried to delete my vote, but it didn't seem to work. Most of the playsets from the companion recommend using extra elements like the alternate tilt/aftermath tables or stunt dice. Obviously not a requirement to use these elements, but my weak preference is to play one of the other three playsets from the first book, at least for our first game.

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Huh, I probably should have re-read The Ice. It's one of the only ones I haven't played successfully which is why I was interested. But in hindsight, a complete failure to pull it off is probably a reason not to try again.

 

Regina's wedding is fantastic. I have the Companion and could send you the additional pages you'd need to do the other 4 sets.

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Heh, I picked up the Companion a couple of days ago, so I'm good. And don't get me wrong, all the playsets looks like they have oodles of potential. It's just that I haven't actually played a game yet, so I'm fine with doing something straightforward and saving bells and whistles, even minor ones, for another day. Just me being my usual risk-adverse self... which is probably a bad thing to be when playing an improv-heavy RPG. :p

 

And again, this is a mild preference, so if my gang wants to do something differnt, I'm game.

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After 5 entries in the calendar, here is what we've got to work with. Hopefully 3 hours will be enough for a session over chat.

 

I'd like to suggest these times (Mountain time):

 

Plan A: Saturday October 17, 4:00 PM - 7:00 PM.

Plan B: Saturday October 24, 4:00 PM - 7:00 PM.

 

If the 17th works for most/all of us, we'll plan for that. If anyone hasn't yet filled out the calendar, just let me know if either of those works.

 

EDIT: It's Halloween. What was I thinking? Why don't we try a couple of these more "spooky" playsets? :p

 

Back to the Old House

Camp Death

Salem 1692

Living Dead

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I'm going to suggest we use a Slack channel to plan and run the games. It's just a browser-based chat client with support for multiple channels, DMs, etc. Basically just an IRC with visible message archiving.

 

I've made a channel for it already. The only problem is, channels are invite-only. So if everyone who wants to play can PM me your email addresses, I can get everyone in on it. We can use the channel to plan the 17th in more specific detail.

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Alright, if I've done my math correctly, we're aiming to start our game in around 32 hours and 45 minutes. There's still a good deal of players not in the Slack channel. Send me your emails as soon as you can, so we're all ready and don't have last minute technical issues with the chatroom.

 

This morning I'm going to whip up a custom dice roller in Python along with some Google Doc templates for managing the game alongside the channel. We should also settle on a couple playsets as soon as possible. Regina's Wedding won the popular vote, but I'm thinking it might be a little boring to run two of the same game (although they will of course be radically different). Let's discuss it in the Slack?

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For non-players wondering just what went down Friday, we ended up with two groups of three, both playing the Regina's Wedding playset. Both groups created their own very different setups (I'm assuming the other group doesn't feature two cultists and a drug dealing priest) and completed Act One. But Act Two still waits! How will our stories end? Even we don't know!

 

I've taken the liberty of setting up a new schedule: http://whenisgood.net/fiasco2 If no time works works in the next two weeks, or if no time works for all six players, I can make new ones. But ideally we can play soon, while everything is still fresh in our minds, and together so we can swap stories afterwards.

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Update: There's no time in the next two weeks that works for everyone. For TeamGame1, November 7th, 4:00PM to 9:00PM (Mountain) is the only time that works for all three players. As for TeamGame2, we're still waiting for a response from Nalyd, but in general any time after 3:00PM (Mountain) from Mondays to Thursdays works.

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Thanks to the magic of shoddily written Perl scripts, I've created a log for Team 2's Fiasco session. If your idea of a good wedding involves cultists, gangsters, LSD, and car chases, it's a must read. Intended for mature audiences.

 

The first quarter or so is us semi-randomly creating our characters and the situation they find themselves in. Hopefully it should still be readable even without a copy of the playset, but if you want you can skip ahead to "*ACT ONE, SCENE ONE*" and get right into the action.

 

Team 1, let me know if you want me to create a log file if/when you finish your game.

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  • 2 weeks later...

@Dintiradan: Awesome! Team 1 actually decided not to finish our game because we wrote ourselves into somewhat of a corner. Act One was a good time, but I don't know if the log is worth posting.

 

In other news, my meatspace friends have started playing roleplaying games in a big way, and it's fantastic! :D We've been playing D&D every Sunday for about the past month. One of my other friends stepped up to DM and is doing a wonderful job with it. I also have lots of people interested in playing meatspace Fiasco now! My cup doth overflow.

 

I still might be a willing participant/coordinator for more online roleplay with y'all, though. How much interest is there in throwing a Fiasco encore? I also thought Microscope sounded like the kind of thing that would be great with this group, and I'd totally be willing to buy the book to make that happen.

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