Living Legend
First Post
So I spent a large part of Gencon last weekend at Games on Demand trying new indie games. My favorite one was Fiasco, which I actually got to play with the game designer himself, Jason Morningstar. He is a very cool guy and, as the prose in the rule book suggests, very witty and humerous.
Fiasco was the most fun I’ve had roleplaying in a long time. The basic description of the game is that your playing characters in a Coen brothers movie and making the script up together as you go along. The story is supposed to be crazy, R rated, and not go well for most of the people involved, but still be very fun and hilarious. It’s designed to be played in a couple hours with a different story and characers each time you play. There is no GM and no prep time, yet the game feels very deep as you play.
Here is the break down of the second game I was in. I don’t have the rulebook, (my friend bought a copy of it), but this should be enough to give you an idea of how the rules work.
I sat down with 4 other people, three of whom knew each other. You start out by choosing a Playset, which will give you some basic tools to build a scenario. We chose one called “somewhere in the midwest”. There were several playsets in the book and a bunch more online, and they ran the gamut from an office setting to time travel to dragon slayers. So you could do pretty much any kind of story you wanted.
You create the scenario by choosing some things that define each character and how they are connected to other characters. The playset gives you flavored options for these. Everyone goes around the table and chooses some of these, then you sit back and see what you’ve got and decided as a group what the basic situation is.
Ours was: I was a meth dealer in a small town, the girl sitting next to me was part of the civil air patrol and she flew in my drugs, and two of the other guys played brothers that were my cousins who helped my in the family business. The girl’s character had a need to “get even with Marcy Lowell” so we all decided it would be fun if Marcy was the mom of the two brothers, and she had seen too much and was becoming a problem.
The game provides you with a lot of great building blocks for this, from basic things you could do anything with like “relationship: coworkers” to very detailed and inspiring things like “object: a love letter written in broken spanish”. Between the number of options you have and how open to interpretation they are, you could create hudreds of different stories out of one playset alone.
So game play goes with each person creating a scene on their turn. You treat the scenario you have created like a movie and just say “next, I think this would happen” and then briefly play that out. This could involve heavy roleplay or minimal, depending on the groups style of play. Our first few scenes involved my drug dealer telling his cousins that supply was low because the girl flying in the stuff was spooked by someone who had spotted her. They had agreed that this person would need to be dealt with. Of course at this point only the girl knows that this person is actually their mom.
From there the story basically told itself. The scenes all lined up very well and it was amazing how little effort it took several strangers to make a story that was so interconnected in such a short amount of time.
The goal here is only to tell an interesting story and have fun doing so, so just like a coen brothers movie, it’s often the best when things go terribly wrong. My favorite couple of scenes was when three different stories all came crashing together and everything went terribly for my character.
The cousins had set up a meeting to establish a new drug line with some bikers, who also had been protecting their mom since someone had been snooping around here place, which was my characters drug supplier friend. Right before this meeting that supplier friend had informed me the person who had seen here was actually my aunt. So at this drug meeting my character lied through his teeth and said that there was a gang from a town over trying to move on our turf, and the cousins should go shoot them up, and the biker guy should come with me so he can try a special batch of meth as a preview of what was to come. I laced the batch with drano so the biker died, then hottailed it over to my aunts place to burn her house down with her in it.
Afterwards I went back to my place to stash the bikers body, my girlfriend shows up (who is actually also seeing my cousin, remember that love letter in broken spanish?), she snorts some of the bad meth as I’m trying to distract her from the body I’m hiding and getting rid of my burned up clothes.
Then it all comes together when the cousin’s walk in after seeing their mom’s house in flames as I’m trying to revive the girl both of us are seeing, and their biker friend half hanging out of a garbage can, and me looking like I just got caught in a fire. So I made up some line about grabbing a first aid kit for the girl and ran out the back door.
Needless to say it turned out badly for my character. The cousins caught up with me and shot my knees out, but man was it fun, and it only took an hour and half to do it all in, with no prep time, and only one of us had played the game before.
I highly recommend this game to anyone who likes to roleplay. If that level of craziness isn’t your thing, or if any of this offended you, the game is supposed to mirror an R rated movie, which it states up front, but I’m sure you could reign it in pretty easily. There are some mechanics to it, which I didn’t really mention, but it is very minimal and serves only to help you decide how each character fairs at the end of the story. It has become our go to game for those nights when everyone has had a long week and you just want to have a few drinks and have fun.
Anybody else played Fiasco and have some stories?
Fiasco was the most fun I’ve had roleplaying in a long time. The basic description of the game is that your playing characters in a Coen brothers movie and making the script up together as you go along. The story is supposed to be crazy, R rated, and not go well for most of the people involved, but still be very fun and hilarious. It’s designed to be played in a couple hours with a different story and characers each time you play. There is no GM and no prep time, yet the game feels very deep as you play.
Here is the break down of the second game I was in. I don’t have the rulebook, (my friend bought a copy of it), but this should be enough to give you an idea of how the rules work.
I sat down with 4 other people, three of whom knew each other. You start out by choosing a Playset, which will give you some basic tools to build a scenario. We chose one called “somewhere in the midwest”. There were several playsets in the book and a bunch more online, and they ran the gamut from an office setting to time travel to dragon slayers. So you could do pretty much any kind of story you wanted.
You create the scenario by choosing some things that define each character and how they are connected to other characters. The playset gives you flavored options for these. Everyone goes around the table and chooses some of these, then you sit back and see what you’ve got and decided as a group what the basic situation is.
Ours was: I was a meth dealer in a small town, the girl sitting next to me was part of the civil air patrol and she flew in my drugs, and two of the other guys played brothers that were my cousins who helped my in the family business. The girl’s character had a need to “get even with Marcy Lowell” so we all decided it would be fun if Marcy was the mom of the two brothers, and she had seen too much and was becoming a problem.
The game provides you with a lot of great building blocks for this, from basic things you could do anything with like “relationship: coworkers” to very detailed and inspiring things like “object: a love letter written in broken spanish”. Between the number of options you have and how open to interpretation they are, you could create hudreds of different stories out of one playset alone.
So game play goes with each person creating a scene on their turn. You treat the scenario you have created like a movie and just say “next, I think this would happen” and then briefly play that out. This could involve heavy roleplay or minimal, depending on the groups style of play. Our first few scenes involved my drug dealer telling his cousins that supply was low because the girl flying in the stuff was spooked by someone who had spotted her. They had agreed that this person would need to be dealt with. Of course at this point only the girl knows that this person is actually their mom.
From there the story basically told itself. The scenes all lined up very well and it was amazing how little effort it took several strangers to make a story that was so interconnected in such a short amount of time.
The goal here is only to tell an interesting story and have fun doing so, so just like a coen brothers movie, it’s often the best when things go terribly wrong. My favorite couple of scenes was when three different stories all came crashing together and everything went terribly for my character.
The cousins had set up a meeting to establish a new drug line with some bikers, who also had been protecting their mom since someone had been snooping around here place, which was my characters drug supplier friend. Right before this meeting that supplier friend had informed me the person who had seen here was actually my aunt. So at this drug meeting my character lied through his teeth and said that there was a gang from a town over trying to move on our turf, and the cousins should go shoot them up, and the biker guy should come with me so he can try a special batch of meth as a preview of what was to come. I laced the batch with drano so the biker died, then hottailed it over to my aunts place to burn her house down with her in it.
Afterwards I went back to my place to stash the bikers body, my girlfriend shows up (who is actually also seeing my cousin, remember that love letter in broken spanish?), she snorts some of the bad meth as I’m trying to distract her from the body I’m hiding and getting rid of my burned up clothes.
Then it all comes together when the cousin’s walk in after seeing their mom’s house in flames as I’m trying to revive the girl both of us are seeing, and their biker friend half hanging out of a garbage can, and me looking like I just got caught in a fire. So I made up some line about grabbing a first aid kit for the girl and ran out the back door.
Needless to say it turned out badly for my character. The cousins caught up with me and shot my knees out, but man was it fun, and it only took an hour and half to do it all in, with no prep time, and only one of us had played the game before.
I highly recommend this game to anyone who likes to roleplay. If that level of craziness isn’t your thing, or if any of this offended you, the game is supposed to mirror an R rated movie, which it states up front, but I’m sure you could reign it in pretty easily. There are some mechanics to it, which I didn’t really mention, but it is very minimal and serves only to help you decide how each character fairs at the end of the story. It has become our go to game for those nights when everyone has had a long week and you just want to have a few drinks and have fun.
Anybody else played Fiasco and have some stories?
