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Message: <blockquote data-quote="overgeeked" data-source="post: 8425102" data-attributes="member: 86653">It's a really slick game. Fantastic really. One tagline is "powerful ambition & poor impulse control". You're playing a Coen brothers film, basically. But you need a group you can trust. Like a lot. It's very narrative heavy. There's no skills or stats. No task resolution. Conflict resolution is handled by playing through scenes. The short version is you: 1) pick a setting; 2) roll for connections and build a relationship web between the characters; 3) everyone takes turns being in the spotlight until the game resolves after so many scenes. That's a gross oversimplification of a really elegant game, but it's the only bit that's relevant.Everyone takes turns being in the spotlight. You do that with scenes. When it's your turn, the scene is about your character. You get to pick whether you establish the scene or resolve the scene. If you establish, the table resolves; if you resolve, the table establishes. Establish meaning you decide the who, what, where, when, and why of the scene. Flashbacks, flashforwards, everyone's there naked in a sauna or everyone's bundled up tight in the back of a freezer truck bound for Alaska...as long as the scene is about the spotlight character. Resolve meaning decide how the scene ends in a positive or negative for the spotlight character. Very much a shared-authority, high-trust game. Sounds like an absolute dream on paper...unless you play with "that guy." And we did.The trouble is there's no conflict resolution for what happens within scenes...except for this: "To be perfectly clear, you don’t set stakes as such (although it’s OK to say what you want), you don’t roll the die to determine an outcome, and the only limits on your description are those imposed by your friends on a social level − if they balk, figure it out together as players, with you (the player whose character is in the spotlight) having the final say."So whoever is in the spotlight controls the scene, basically. Push comes to shove, the entire table disagrees...doesn't matter. The rules are clear: the spotlight player has the final say. They have carte blanche. So when the spotlight player decides their character is going to hack bits off of other players' characters...despite the entire rest of the table objecting...that's that. The other characters are now missing limbs. Period. That was the first spotlight scene for that player. The second went about the same...before we stopped. Mid game. Booted the guy and never played Fiasco again.Yes, that absolutely was an example of bad faith play. But it's also perfectly within the rules. So I'm not interested in shared authority. Gimme a good, old-fashioned Referee/GM/DM any day. This was years ago, when the game was new. Thinking back, there's a lot of things we could have done. Put in a house rule about a table veto, now we know about things like X cards (which they did in 2E), so could use that...but I'm not into RPGs with lots of tchotchkes. I was over the moon about that game. It's perfectly in my wheelhouse of interests and I still use it as an idea generator. But I'm over the idea of shared authority, especially anything to the level of spotlight = DM.</blockquote>

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