Current mood:	crappy
Entry tags:	gaming

Inspectres
So, last night I joined Jerm and Krissi in heading over to Michael's house for some gaming again. Kelly was not going to be able to join us however. So, we would not be playing the Shadows of Yesterday game. Instead, we would be trying out Inspectres, a completely new game to all of us. Jerm also talked about possibly doing a Jedi game based on the Dogs in the Vineyard ruleset.

Honestly, I was rather disparaging of both these options (you can see a little bit of it in my last post). I hadn't looked at Inspectres at all, and the idea of trying out a new game for the first time on a weeknight after we had all been at work just sounded like a bad idea to me. Though as it turned out, Inspectres is so simplistic that I shouldn't have worried. As far as the Jedi game goes…I just wasn't interested in giving the Dogs in the Vineyard ruleset another try.

Still, I'm always happy to spend time with Jerm and Krissi (and I've probably been spending too much time on my own the past couple weeks). So I was hoping it would turn out better than my negative expectations.

We started off the night's gaming with a quick round of Jungle Speed. Jerm and Krissi and most all of our friends love this game, so Jerm wanted to show it to Michael just as something quick and fun. We just played the one game and the spastic nature of Jerm made sure he won. Not sure if Michael liked it or not, but he seemed to.

Then we moved on to Inspectres….Ok, I'd prefer not to tear the game down and grind it in to the dirt. So, i'll try not to pick on every little thing. It wasn't that it was that bad a game, it just seemed completely flat and empty. The system is so simplistic that it might as well be non-existent or maybe just diceless. There are 4 stats: Academics, Athletics, Technology, Contacts. And you make up a Weird Talent that can be anything in the world (we each just chose a former career as I believe Jerm mentioned an example in passing, though it seemed like it could be anything that you think might be useful in the game). And that is it. Oh and there are some bank dice or something like that, but there was no reason whatsoever for us to use them. Hence my lack of memory on what they were called/used for.

I was playing a strong guy that was good with people (former plumber), Krissi was playing an average person (professional student), and Michael was also playing an average person (can't remember his career, accountant maybe). The game started with us getting a call to see some guy at the Department of Transportation. He was calling us in to investigate two people that had gone missing at one of the cities subway stations (oops…forgot to mention that this game is sort of based off the Ghost Busters with an MIB slant). For some time, that station has been having a problem with the lights going out at the same time every night 12:47am and they would stay out for a minute or so. They haven't been able to figure out the cause in the past, but it hadn't been a problem until now….This time two people went missing while the lights were out and we were supposed to find out what happened before the press got wind of it.

We headed straight over to the subway station though it was early afternoon. It was crowded and we weren't really seeing anything. I went and talked to some guy playing the guitar for change, who told me that these two weren't the first disappearances and that it had been happening for years. Krissi went and talked to the ticket booth people and also found out that the lights didn't go out at the same time every night like we had been told, but that it was whenever one particular train passed this station (which only happens once each day).

We then went to the library to look up so background info. We discovered that there had been a bad wreck involving that particular train at that particular platform and that some guy had gone missing shortly after that. Krissi was also able to discover that the platform we went to is not the original platform, that there was another one below it, and that was where the accident actually happened. She even found schematics for it that we could use to find our way down there.

So, we headed back to the subway station and found the door down the stairs. It was locked but I used Athletics to get us past it, describing the lock as completely rusted and falling apart in my hands. Below we found the old platform…and some metallic webbing with caccoons of some sort. I walked right up and broke up a cocoon and then found out from the person inside (one of the two that went missing) that a man with one leg grabbed them off the platform when the lights were out. That's when a ghostly spirit of a one legged man came down out of the darkness. He said he was protecting the people from the hungry train and was going to let them go when it was safe for them. Then Krissi used the system mechanic of the confession which takes you out of character as if you are telling the story in an interview afterwards and lets you say stuff like "It's a good thing I remembered to grab the last rights kit back at the base so that we could send this restless spirit on his way." (which is what Krissi said).

And that was it, the game didn't even last 2 hours including chargen and everything.

The main problem I had with it was that there was no sense of resistance. There was no conflict whatsoever. Each time Jerm had us roll the dice, we always succeeded and we could say whatever the hell we wanted to. I mean, from all I can tell that very first roll when I talked to the guitarist I could have said that he confessed to kidnapping the two people…Would that have ended the story right there? As far as what we saw of the rules in this playtest, yes it would have been because there is nothing that was limiting what we could and could not say. Jerm just told us to tell him what the result was.

This just seems to ask for a very disjointed story as there is no incentive for players to do anything other than push for the quickest ending possible. And whatever the GM had come up with that could have been an interesting story line can be completely derailed with each and every roll of the dice.

I guess what the game needs is a dedicated/quick-thinking GM to deal with situations like that and players that are more interested in creating an interesting story than winning a game (a concept relatively foreign in gaming, at least our gaming). In the situation of me winning that first roll and saying the guitarist confesses, a GM dedicated to a particular plotline could have that be what happens, but the guy is really just a lunatic driven insane by all the time he's spent in the subway and there is still some spirit that we have to find/defeat, or the guitarist is the spirit and he goes incorporeal a moment later to escape us cackling as he grabs another commuter and takes her with him into the station walls, or any of a number of things. See that would create some conflict as the GM is reacting to the descriptions we give of what happens, instead of him just accepting everything we tell him.
In another example, when I broke the lock on the door and said we found stairs leading down, he could have said that they ended in a pile or rubble and then we'd have to be creative to come up with another was to get to the original station. Or how about when Krissi was giving the guy the last rights…maybe the spirit didn't want to go and tried attacking us to stop her. She had only described in her confessional that she had brought the kit and that it was a good thing we had it. So, maybe it turned the spirit solid for us so that we could defeat him.

I don't know, I could come up with a million things in retrospect, but that doesn't help much since we didn't come up with them during the actual game. Actually, that's particularly a problem for me and why I don't think I ever made a good GM. I can be quite creative, yes. But it takes time for me to be creative. I'm just not good at all at doing it on the fly. Its why I choose to be a player and not a game master.

Anyway, I didn't really care for the Inspectres game. I'm not sure if I will ever be able to enjoy a game with that much of the narrative in the control of players. I remember once Jerm told me about some game where there was no GM at all and just everybody made up the narrative, but in that game I seem to remember the other plays would check and balance you. There was a mechanic that allowed for them to act as the resistance to your ideas about the flow of the game. It wasn't just getting whatever you wanted.

The way we played Inspectres it just didn't have that and the game was pretty much a failure in my eyes because of that absence.

Happy Thing:
Its Friday and the weekend is here. 'Nough said.