[Diaspora] A very brief play report!

[Kenneth Coble]

Well, my group finally got together again and did a character creation
session and a tiny, sample-sized bit of play.  We had a blast, and my
friend Chris ordered the softcover soon afterward!  I've waited a bit
too long to remember everything, but here's some bullet points:

-Character creation really blew us all away.  I think we all ended up
with fairly different characters than we'd initially thought of
making, and I mean that in the best possible way.  My ex-Belter
transformed into an ex-crime lord, and then transformed again into a
man fleeing from his home system's Mafia-analog with the secret
support of most of the rest of the cluster (and the very interesting
job title of 'Corpse Broker').  Chris's basic 'freedom fighter'
character concept probably stayed the closest to his initial thoughts
(albeit maybe darker - Aspect 'The Promised Land is not for me'), but
had a very interesting knock-on effect on my character, who discovered
a secret talent for both violence and morally grey areas (with the
Aspects of 'Knows where to put a knife' and 'There's wrong, and then
there's /wrong/').  And Tom's naive diplomat developed hidden
strengths as well as a talent for letting others underestimate him
(Sudden Backbone, Routinely Underestimated, Hidden Agenda).  We also
had a nice natural convergence of our characters' overall goals, with
Tom's diplomat from the newly recontacted world in the cluster
throwing in wholeheartedly with Chris's brewing prole/slave rebellion
(see Hidden Agenda, mentioned above), and even my character's
rootlessness after his flight from his homeworld (Adrift) goes a fair
way to explaining why he's going along with the two idealists.
Discussing things afterward, we all felt that by doing character
creation together, and by explicitly having to reference each other,
we got a very nice set of characters as well as some immediate
'metastory' for the campaign.

-Following this, we did a tiny bit of play.  As the owner of the book
I fell into the role of caller, and began a scene where Tom's
envoy/consul/trade delegate-type character got called in to speak with
a functionary in the diplomatic corps to explain his repudiation of a
lucrative contract (as seen in his and Chris's characters origins;
briefly the freedom fighter was prepared to blackmail the diplomat,
but his natural outrage turned him into a true ally).  I barely got
started when Chris pointed out that this was social combat!  So I
threw together a little 4-box zone, remembered (in turn 2) to add a
4-unit timer track, and set the two end zones as 'Tom gets an official
reprimand' and 'Tom's decision gets officially backed.'  We did a few
things right (messing with pass values, the freedom fighter/ex-slave
appearing with damning evidence and a heartwrenching story to throw an
Aspect on the functionary, discovering via RP that the functionary -
who'd initially bristled at the aristocratic Tom's claim of 'we're all
equal' - was at least partially sympathetic to the plight of the
oppressed, etc.  We also did a few things wrong - allowing people to
use the same skill twice in a row, forgetting to assign or try and
place Aspects on the zones we'd delineated, possibly doing our initial
placement of actors incorrectly.  But all in all it worked well, acted
as a good example for all of us (with more traditional RP backgrounds)
as to how to handle social combat in this new and exciting style, and
to top it off, possibly earned our guys an in-game contact/sympathizer
in the diplomatic corps!  There were a few nice compels back and
forth, and we got the Fate chips moving fairly well too, which Chris
and I had discussed as something we both wanted to keep an eye on.

-To follow up, since there was no believable way to get my fugitive
millionaire undertaker involved in that scene, Chris grabbed the book
and ran a tiny combat scene for my guy.  Approached by two mob thugs
in a casino (where my character was making a spectacle of himself by
winning, since he didn't have the C/T skill to realize that the planet
we were on ran on a potlach/reputation economy and that the goal was
to /lose/), we did a bit of snappy banter then one thug grabbed me.
At this Chris drew out a nice map of the casino and we got down to it.
 We had a bit of a hard time figuring out the three pass values and
how to apply them to stuff like 'milling crowds' rather than hard
concepts like a fence or hatch, but all in all things went well.  As
one thug cleared a path through the casino (eroding pass values with
Intimidate to model him bullying the people out of the way), my
character realized that he was probably no match for these two guys.
Rolling his Apex skill of Charm, I flat out bought one thug's loyalty
(if memory serves, we handled this as his Consequence for being
totally taken out by my massive success) and he then decked his
erstwhile partner, hanging a minor consequence on him as well.  While
I was waffling about what to do in a very non-RP, metagamey, 'keep my
PC alive at all costs' manner (yes I am disappointed in mysefl),
Chris slid a chip across the table towards me, compelling my 'Knows
where to put a knife' Aspect.  Cackling wildly, (and realizing that I
still had 'Never squeamish' as an Aspect hanging over my head) I used
my skill swap Stunt to roll my Profession: Corpse Broker as Close
Combat (afterwards we realized that I should probably have Brawling as
a knife fighter - is this correct?) and quickly knelt down as if to
check on the poor thug.  Ramming a knife through his armpit and
nicking the aorta, I shouted something along the lines of 'Call the
medics! This man is dying!' and fled (making a trivial Assets check to
pay off the other goon after the fact).  Again, we probably should
have had some pre-existing Aspects on the zones in the casino, and I'm
not entirely sure we handled the mix of physical combat and social
skills correctly.  But as with the social combat, we had fun!

-There was no time for any of the platoon-scale combat, although
there's certainly been stuff set up to allow that in future sessions.
All in all we had a blast, and are looking forward to another session.
 Another plus, as Chris pointed out, is that the game seems to lend
itself to round-robin 'GM'-ing/calling. As seen, we even switched up
on the fly in the mini-session we had.

So here it is.  Once again, we had a blast, and all three of us are
utterly sold.  Plus you've got a softcover sale from this, as well as
some real interest from both of them in Soft Horizon (which I told
them about in a fragmentary fashion).  I haven't had as much chance to
talk with Tom about it, but Chris and I both said one of the most fun
and strongest moments in the game was when he nudged me out of my very
out-of-game mindset with the timely Compel.  The Aspects/Compels
mechanism is a wonderful way to bring real immediate consequences to
the RP conceits you'd put down on your player sheet; we also both
liked the combat system as a game, with the varied options of moving,
eroding pass values, and tagging Aspects.  At the risk of sounding
like a broken record, you folks have made a great game!  Thanks for
doing so.

Ken Coble