Busy weekend!  When PAX comes to town, so do friends and long-lost comrades; there are exhibits to see, costumes at which to gape, and dice to buy.  This year added a nice touch: an open gaming table with GMs on hand to run a range of indie RPGs.  I’m rarely in the mood to drop $40 on an RPG I’ve never played, and even if I do, it’s hard to read a book and know instantly how the rules translate into play.  We pretend, sometimes, as gamers, that the gaming experience resides in sourcebooks and tables and charts, but gaming’s really an oral tradition, with books as a fallback.  We draw ideas off games we’ve played in before, we learn the fine art of timing from all those times we’ve sat around a table waiting for the wizard to figure out which spell she’ll cast; we tune our expectations and desires based on stories our friends have told us about their games, what they liked, what they hated.  At the same time, a tabletop RPG at a con like Pax often feels like a waste of time for me, since there’s so much to see and a tabletop session tends to hover around 4 hours.  Fortunately, the open gaming section had two-hour modules available, so I was sold.

The game we played was called Fiasco, and it’s halfway between a structured improv game and a traditional RPG.  A Fiasco game feels like a small-time caper flick–ranging from the Coen Brothers to Quentin Tarantino.  Starting from a suggestive setting, you and your group build a number of characters, their relationships, and their (often contradictory) goals.  Play proceeds by building tight, dramatic scenes in which these characters strive, struggle, sometimes succeed, and more probably fail.  In about two and a half hours, my play group told an interweaving tale of animal smuggling, bombing, and betrayal at a small town zoo run by a shotgun-happy poacher.  We had a wonderful time–no surprise.

What was a surprise, though, was the amount of fun we all had with inter-party conflict.  Generally I steer away from real party conflict in games–partly on principal, and partly because I have personal issues with betrayal, even in games.  That’s part of the reason I don’t play Diplomacy any more.  But in our Fiasco run, the group was invested in the story more than in our particular characters.  One player spent the entire story working on an elaborate double-cross on his partner’s mink-smuggling operation, and we loved it.  When another character turned out to be planning to bomb the zoo my hapless animal-lover had been fighting to defend all session, I was amazed, and impressed, and didn’t feel even a little of that frustration you get when the thief steals half the boss’s loot and doesn’t tell anyone about it.

The Usual Suspects could be a story told in a Fiasco game.  That by itself isn’t such a surprise–you could tell the story of The Usual Suspects in D20 Modern, if you wanted to.  But I feel that a D20 Modern retelling would lead to players frustrated by the final reveal, while the Fiasco retelling would leave players telling tall tales about the game for years.  They’d feel that all of them had been in some way a part of Keyser Soze’s creation; that the scheme, and the resolution, were something they’d done together, rather than a lie they’d been told by a fellow player.

Now, I’m thinking about writing playsets to go with my books…