Last time I said after someone has played D&D I want them to play Call of Cthulhu next, to expand their ideas about what an RPG can be. Well, after that I want them to play Fiasco and discover just how different it can get.
Fiasco is an indy RPG by Jason Morningstar, inspired by films like Fargo where everything goes wrong. It won the Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming in 2011. It's extremely accessible but it challenges so many basic assumptions about RPGs. There's no GM. There's no random conflict resolution. Characters are often deliberately unsympathetic, and are expected to fail, badly, at their goals.
Before we go further, this is based on the first edition! I know that the second edition changes things around considerably by taking all the dice out of the game entirely and replacing them with cards, but since this is the one I own, it's what we're doing.
At the start of the game, players select a playset, which is a series of random tables tied to a particular setting - small-town America, or an Antarctic research station, or many other options. Four playbooks are given in the core book, and there's lots of other options readily available online. Players roll a lot of dice and then use them and the random charts to collaboratively build the relationships between characters and attach a need, object or location to each relationship. They then interpret what this all means. This is an immediate departure from traditional games because characters are never defined on their own terms: they only exist as this a network of relationships.
Play then takes place in two Acts, over a number of scenes between characters. In each scene, the player proposing the scene can either establish the scene - deciding who's in it but leaving its resolution up to the other players - or they can resolve it and decide whether it will end well or poorly for their character, in which case the other players decide the details of the scene. After each scene, that player is awarded a light die if it ended well, or a black die if it ended poorly. In the middle of the game, a Tilt is determined, the introduction of a chaotic element that will derail everyone's plans. In practice this means that the first half of the scenes establish the characters and their relationships, and the characters begin to scheme, then the tilt ruins everything and the second half of the scenes have the characters scrambling to achieve anything. Finally in the Aftermath, the players roll their dice and consult a table to find out how badly their character ends up, and then they narrate a short sequence of vignettes wrapping up their character's (undoubtedly awful) fate.
Character Creation: The first step is picking a Playlist. I chose 'Tales From Suburbia' which is in the core book. Then each player rolls 4 dice into the centre of the table. You take turns assigning a dice and then writing its meaning (defined by the playbook) on an index card situated between players. Everyone ends up with a Relationship with the player to either side of them, and either a Location, Need or Object associated with that Relationship. Since I only want to create one character for this blog, I decided to pre-roll four dice that I got to allocate. The other four I rolled randomly, and I used this to simulate other players making choices that affect my character.
The first relationship I have is Family, and it's a Sibling relationship. We have an Object, and it's an Unsavoury Object - the charred ashes of $100,000. Did I burn that, or did they?
The second relationship I have is Crime - we're Thieves of some sort. We have a Need, to get even with the local drug dealer.
Now I get to define my character. I'm Hank Jones, and I'm a good working-class middle American. My baby sister Mary-Lou has recently come to me for help: she needs $100,000 to pay off the local drug dealer. We've managed to raise the money, but there was an accident and it's gone up in smoke! (Either Mary-Lou was negligent and burned her house down or - even more awful and therefore even better - some thugs came to do some property damage to threaten her, and in the process they unknowingly destroyed all the money I'd saved up. Mary-Lou is freaking out, and I don't have another $100,000, so my friend and I have come up with a brilliant plan for how to make the money - we're going to steal $100,000 from the drug dealer to pay him off with. That'll teach him!
What could possibly go wrong?
Final Thoughts: Fiasco is brilliant. Go play it right now.
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