Game Review: “Fiasco” (2nd Ed.)

Widely, and properly, lauded for RP improv and fun scenarios … but not always a hit.

Our regular Friday night D&D game needed a couple of fill-ins while a chunk of the folk were out of town. So, after last week’s Killer Ratings game, I thought we finally try Fiasco.

It didn’t work out great for us, but I think that was more on us than on the game. So let’s take a look.

The Game

Fiasco is a key — and one of the oldest — player in the “RPG as Improv with Light Rule Structure” games. It’s designed to give us the opportunity to play ordinary people with big ambitions and weak impulse control getting themselves into trouble and ending up in a likely very bad place … but with plenty of dark humor along the way. As many people have put it, it’s like playing a Coen Bros. movie in the time it would take to watch one.

The newest incarnation of the game has replaced stacks of dice and lookup tables with “engine” card sets, which seems to work well. You start out with a set of “playset” cards which are used to (a) establish the general parameters of the setting (a suburban town, a shopping mall, a D&D village), and (b) start building the relationships between the player’s characters. These include some key locations, maybe some objects, and definitely some needs that will drive things forward.

Once relationship et al. cards have been played down, you have a conversation around the table about what they all really mean. That Family Member relationship, is that biological, or adopted, or ritual? That Bully and Victim card — which person is which? Who’s actually jonesing for the WW2 pistol, and why? Start fleshing out those relationships to get things started — but allow for some discovery during the game, too. I wouldn’t necessary suggest keeping secrets (others can’t play to your story if you have it hidden), but new facets of the relationships, characters, and situation should come up during play.

Once the setting and players have been established, then we get two Acts of two spotlight Scenes per player each (so each character will end up in a spotlight Scene four times during the game, plus playing a supporting role in other Scenes). In a spotlight Scene, a player can either Establish the Scene (declare who’s there besides themselves, what’s the setting, and what are they trying to get out of it), or Resolve the scene (take a Scene devised by the other players involving their character, and determine as it goes along if it’s going to have a Positive or Negative Outcome). Scenes should last a few minutes, draw from the story set so far and the relationship elements on the board, and go from there.

Between the two Acts there is a Tilt, which brings in some new elements to make a hopefully already shaky outcome explode even more spectacularly.

At the end of Act Two, each player, based on the Outcome cards they have collected, get an Aftermath card of lesser or greater disaster, and narrates whatever happened to their character, short- or long-term.

The three playsets that come in the box (or at least my virtual box) are:

Poppleton Mall (fun and drama and maybe drug dealing and Satanism at a local shopping mall)
Tales from Suburbia (fun and drama in the burbs, with still more drug dealing and crime and infidelity simmering beneath the BBQ-friendly surface)
Dragonslayers (post-D&D quest adventurers back at the tavern, eyeing that gold they just picked up).

Playsets are not a one-and-done. Depending on the characters, the cards that come out, and the mix and imagination of the players, a given playset could be used many times — though not as an ongoing campaign, mind you (rarely, I sense, is there enough of the setting or the characters left standing after a game to make that viable).

The rules themselves are relatively simple, but was a little difficult to get a good feel for how the game actually worked without actually watching some play videos. Three I recommend:

The game also comes with a “Let’s Not” safety card, in case action starts going down directions that make any player a bit too uncomfortable.

Players are definitely urged to lean into the dark humor and risk-taking and ignoring of possibly bad consequences to decisions being made. While the story may be about the characters competing with each other (even ones that are allies), the game itself seems to almost be the players vs. the characters — trying to get folk into trouble, not in a mean way to other players, but in a way that would make a good film.

(The film model is useful in framing scenes, too. A scene should not be, “Bob goes to the store to buy milk,” because that’s boring. “Bill goes to the store to buy milk he’s gonna see Susan and decide to confront her about Pat” is a lot more interesting, and has the stakes built into it.)

Fiasco is deservedly famous for its groundbreaking use of the players and their character interactions to drive the story. It’s GMless, though “The Person with the Game” will probably need to help explain it and guide players through the first time.

Definitely something you should consider for your gaming group if you’ve not already, and if it’s a group that loves the RP part of RPGs.

The home page for the game can be found here, but it’s available in a lot of places, including as a VTT implementation on Roll20 …

Roll20 Implementation — Fiasco for VTT

The core game (with the three playsets mentioned above) runs $20 in the Roll20 Marketplace. Expansion sets of eight additional playsets are available for $35 (there is a Starter Bundle with a total of 11 playsets for $33).

As a card deck game, the Roll20 implementation should work well. It comes packaged with play mats (on the map level) for three, four, and five players (thought the spacing on the five player mat was pretty uneven).

You also get a deck for each playset, and then separate decks for Positive Outcome, Negative Outcome, and Aftermath cards.

The (tabletop-based) game rules get loaded into the Compendium (a manual step you have to take to include it), and there are some stub handouts in the Journal as an outline for differences in Roll20. Most of these have to do with the card-playing mechanics of the VTT. If you’ve not done card decks in Roll20, do some practicing beforehand to see how dealing, viewing, playing, and clearing cards actually works.

Fiasco Roll20 Journal — It’s not you, Fiasco. It’s me.

I actually wasn’t wowed by the rules breakout — Roll20’s compendium is not always easy to use, and their organization is not great — so I ended up copying the (limited rules) over into the Journal, broken out more logically (to me), cross-referenced, and basically supporting all the information I got from the rules and from watching gameplay videos. Took me a couple of hours, so not a huge hill to climb there for GMs who want to do similarly.

Within the bounds of Roll20’s cardplay mechanics, the game worked well. Those mechanics are sometimes a bit awkward, and limitations on what Players vs GMs can do meant I got a suggestion from a friend that I make everyone a GM. I didn’t (because I thought that would make for more potential mechanics chaos), and it didn’t bite us — but, then, we didn’t actually get a full game completed, so it may have been more of a problem later.

One element that a VTT lends itself to is scribbling notes on the board itself — character names, info about them, discovered motivations, what the cards mean in this context, etc. I highly encourage the practice.

I would also add a recommendation, if playing on a VTT, that if you don’t use video normally you find a way to do so for Fiasco. So much of the game is bound up in personal interaction that the additional “data channel” of facial expressions and the like are even more important. It can also help see if people are quiet because they are nodding off, not engaged, or just unsure what to say.

How did it go for us?

Not … as well as I would have liked. Here’s a capture of the tabletop when we got as far as we’d gotten.

One problem we had was that the game just ran too long. We took close to 3 hours to get to the end of Act One, which became problematic for our East Coast player. While I would expect (and was warned) that the game could run longer than usual the first time out, that seemed excessive. But I’m unsure that’s actually the game’s fault.

Did I talk too much, going through rules? Maybe.
The players struggled a bit with the whole Scenes mechanic: coming up with a scene idea in the first place, limiting (or not) the other players involved, identifying what they wanted (in a meaningful fashion). People tended to come up with mechanical scene ideas (“I want to get everyone together for dinner”) rather than the emotional stakes (“My family never ate together, and if I can just get my friends around the table it will all be great.”). (Again, framed another way, is the Scene worth a scene in a movie?)
Some Scenes ran on too long. If the goal is really a few minutes each, we had some that were several.
We had a bit of difficulty determining Positive vs Negative Outcomes, especially when a player was doing the Resolving, and went in wanting that result.
I have a sense that, even though we threw around a lot of great relationship ideas, we didn’t necessarily have a sufficient grounding in them by the time we started play, so that some of those encounters and ideas never paid off, and others got changed at the last moment.
We play on Friday nights, and that’s always a rough call — end of a long week and, again, one player off two time zones deeper into the night. that might have lowered the energy level for a game that really encourages energy.
Our group is mostly introverted and, to a large degree, conflict-averse. Not so pathologically that a game like Fiasco — which desires big characters and getting ourselves and each other into trouble — is impossible, but it is a bit more of a lift.

We played the Dragonslayers playset. I thought that would work well as we were doing this in lieu of D&D, but in retrospect I wonder if it added one more layer of worldbuilding that we needed to struggle through.

Ultimately, we ended up with a D&D party that was actually an offshoot of an evil cult, with a goal to raise an army of the undead for the edgelord type I was playing (we were an offshoot because, obviously, the cult didn’t want just any Tom, Dick, or Grimdar to be raising armies of the undead). I was supported in that goal (kind of?) by the cult’s recruiter/cheerleader (who had an unrequited love for me), an eager young hero recently joined to the cult, and a sorcerer and his apprentice and their one-charge-left staff of resurrection. So some real possibilities there.

And that said, we did come up with some good bits — flashbacks, and a dream sequence, all of which had some interesting elements to them. One player also made a good move and framed a scene, not as our sitting down to dinner, or doing a dress rehearsal for the forbidden ritual after dinner, but our post-dress rehearsal review around the table — which allowed us just to vamp ideas about what happened and our reaction to them.

As it was, we pulled the plug at the end of Act One, due to time and no immediate opportunity to finish the game over the weekend. Players did indicate they could see how this all (raising an army of the dead on behalf of one of the players) was going to play out very poorly for all concerned. So that was something.

Definitely want to try it again, though, maybe with one of the other playsets. With the holiday season coming up, we may get the opportunity.

Game Review: “Killer Ratings”

A fun one-shot, high-improv, collaborational “ghost hunters” reality show simulation

So here’s a combo review, description, and run-through of Killer Ratings, a game by Ken Lowery.

The Outline

Players (and, to a degree, the GM) are members of a third-rate ghost hunting “reality” show, desperate for ratings salvation before they get canceled, which they figure they can get through finding the holy grail of such shows: solid proof of life after death. Luck for them, they’re going to get that proof. Unlucky for them, they might get first-hand experience in the “death” part of it …

Here’s the official IndieGoGo description:

KILLER RATINGS is a one-shot, zero-prep, rules-light tabletop roleplaying game for 3 to 5 players and a Director. The players are the cast and crew of a terrible paranormal investigation show on the verge of cancellation. The good news is you’ve secured the rights to film the season finale in “the most haunted location in America.” The bad news is the place is actually really haunted, and you may well be completely boned.

As loud, campy reality TV stars, your gift for melodrama will be all you need to wake the dead – and may well be your key to survival once the haunting goes sideways. If it doesn’t get you killed first.

In short, you play some of the worst people on earth as they blithely walk into one of the worst places on earth, and most of you won’t survive. But however it shakes out, it should make for great TV.

Killer Ratings is highly narrative and RP-driven. There are die rolls, but those mechanics are way in the background — important, but infrequent until the very end.

Instead, the group as a whole “builds” a haunted setting, inventing clues and set pieces (“Features”) that slowly, collaboratively begin to tell a story about What Happened Here and How To Summon the Ghost. At the end, of course, they realize the horrible mistake they’ve made, and flee for their lives, as the Ghost tries to take them.

The Gameplay

I started an X-Card style safety talk at the beginning of the game, which I’ve never done with any other game I’ve run — largely because some of the play-throughs I’ve watched/listened to have leaned into the horror. We never got near that point, I think.

The game rules call for figuring out the characters, first, but I decided to start with the show and the haunt/setting first, as that would provide some context for the players to be built in.

The rules have nice guidelines for coming up with a fun show title, and then I drew from the players further details (Where do viewers go to see this show? Why have ratings been so bad?). We ended up with Fiend Highway, a show on its third, faltering season on History Channel … but it’s History Channel 3, which most cable packages don’t cover.

The rules also have suggestions to collaboratively develop the setting and triggering event of the haunt — in our case, a College, the site of a Forbidden Ritual. With further discussion, the players decided that rumors on the internet told a sorority house on the campus of Holy Ghost College (originally a Lutheran-sponsored school in the middle of nowhere in the Midwest), where the sisters had tried to summon the ghost of their Founding President, in order to find where a treasure had been hidden in the place. No big deal, except one of the sorority sisters had vanished, and the survivors — who had been cleared of the place as a possible crime scene — had told conflicting tales about what happened to her, all of which seemed to be innocent …

Then I had the (four) players come up with characters within one of the five preset roles in the game — the Face (the star of the reality show), the Camera Person, the Face’s Buddy (co-star / rival / enabler), the Academic, or the Charlatan.

That netted us a Face who was an enthusiastic True Believer in a car salesman sort of manner; a gruff veteran Camera Person quietly bemused by the things they ran across; an Academic who was kicked out of the academy for pursuing fringe science about the afterlife; and a Charlatan Elvira-esque psychic, complete with deep cleavage.

(Some of this didn’t precisely align with the roll descriptions, but as it’s all just guidelines for RP, who cares?)

All characters have two attributes: Provoke (ability/willingness to stir things up, including the Haunt) and Survive (hit points, essentially). You get a total of 5, and need a minimum of 1 in each, so that means 4/1 or 3/2 in one combo or another.

The GM was Bob, the Director, out in the van keeping the recording gear running and chatting over the remote communications gear. My role there was to prompt people to find or describe information they were coming up with, provoke some conversations or reactions, and make occasional references to fiascos during earlier episodes.

After an initial arrival, description of the outside of the ΓΟΣΤ sorority house, some RP-establishing discussion with the Assistant Deputy Dean of Students who was, unapproving, there to meet them, the team went in …

Going Room to Room

Each room (and the game comes with suggestions as to what rooms one might find in a given setting) is named and initially described by the GM, complete with creepy vibe and unusual features (the game also has suggestions for these, broken apart between Act 1, the unsettling stuff, and Act 2, the actively freaky but not quite yet unbelievable bits).

That then gives the players the opportunity to interact with the room, the show, and each other: seeking camera time, establishing Features themselves, wondering aloud about what they are seeing, theorizing for the viewers, acting out any drama they feel inclined to, etc.

In so doing they are not only fleshing out their characters and the show, but beginning to build a more detailed story around the haunt — what actually happened, and why.

At the end of each room (whenever it feels like a proper amount of discovery and activity has taken place, the GM calls for a Provoke roll, to see how much each character may have provoked the Haunt into manifesting. Rolling 1d6 below or at the character’s Provoke level means a Provocation has happened. As GM, I kept track of those, comparing them to a value suggested by the rules …

And then it’s on to the next room, as described by the GM. The same sorts of activities occur, with the GM leaning into spookiness that seems to tie into the theories of the players (or the GM, if need be) as to what is going on. Once the total of end-of-room Provocations reaches the “secret” number, then the Act is over. Have the Face give us a sing-out to commercial …

After Act 1, the GM coordinates a brief discussion about (a) how the character interplay is working, (b) what the characters think is going on, and then (c) what would punch up the drama.

Act 2 works just like Act 1, only the suggested Features and Vibes are ramped up and creepier — going from weird stains on the ceiling to blood dripping off the walls. Not a bingo sufficient to make it a day, but enough to further guide the tale (i.e., inspire the players to do so), build a mood, and, once enough Provokes have again been scored, have an unmistakable supernatural occurrence. Sing out to commercials, leading to Act 3.

Between acts this time, the players finalize their theory as to what is actually going on, and where and how they are going to act to cause the Ghost/Haunt to fully manifest. That is, of course, their goal, even if we, the GM and Players, know that is a terrible idea.

In our case, the understanding of the Haunt had morphed over many rooms. There was still a focus on the spirit of the founder of the sorority, Agatha Spenser-Reede. The Face kept commenting on how poorly the place was being kept up, the strange smells, the unwashed dishes, narratively trying to provoke the Haunt. But between me and the players, we also started building a tale of a sorority gone wrong, of bad behavior and debauchery and worse. In the end, the players “realized” that the effort by the sorority girls that fateful night was to lay the spirit an angry Agatha to rest, not to summon her up. So clearly they need to find the orgy room / sex gym as the site where Agatha would be most likely to be summoned up.

Bear in mind that it’s the players who eventually put that jigsaw puzzle together. I amplified their ideas as they came up, sometimes tried to give a little extra spin in a sympathetic direction (e.g., some mysteriously marked DVDs hidden in the TV room), etc. But I was quite happy what they found, even if it veered off from my original idea.

(So Agatha was a big freak about being physically and morally clean. The idea that the current generation of sisters maybe were not, and that the haunting was all about features of filth and sin and blood, all fit together quite neatly.)

My original thought was that they were going to go to the President’s Room (so marked with a plaque), which doors they’d seen Agatha slamming shut, to find that as the place where the sorority “forbidden ritual” ceremony had been held. Instead, they found the “Workout Room,” which looked just like you’d expect, except with various supernatural trappings, indications of strange brackets and hooks and places where things could be mounted, and a shattered mirror by the dance bar behind which was a broken video camera (where the girls had been photographing either their own pornos or creating blackmail videos for fun and profit).

Blood flowing down the mirror, corner of the eye figures humping on the floor, weird distortions in the room — yup, that was the place.

The Face tried to be the center of the final provocation but suddenly started missing his rolls. The Academic was the one who tried/said something that triggered …

… well, the giant, spectral, decayed-and-filth-ridden remains of Agatha Spenser-Reede, rising up out of the floor and chastising them as NAUGHTY GIRLS WHO MUST BE PUNISHED! And the characters suddenly realize how pear-shaped this has gotten.

Act 4 is the flight from the Haunt, retracing their steps. This time they are rolling 1d6 plus their Provoke, the high score being the one who gets attacked by the Ghost. There are mechanisms to simply take it (lose Survive), or redirect it to someone else (by sacrificing a Provoke), or just (once a game) negating it. On analysis, it’s not a particularly onerous setup, but it is designed for backbiting or selfish characters to screw with each other while fleeing for their lives.

This act goes fast — run back to the previous room, only to find out that the spooky effects from the way in are now cranked up to 12. The running washing machines that seemed to be filled with soap and blood before? They’re now vomiting soap and blood all over the room, as the Hair Drying seats that were clearly non-operational are now bellowing flame and howling like the damned.

In our case, Paul, the Face and True Believer, actually sacrificed himself (took a hit from the Ghost with only 1 Survival to his name) in order to make sure that the video taken would get to the public. Everyone else managed to make it out, in time for a final wrap session for the episode, where memorials for Paul and descriptions of What We Learned Today were had, including a final pre-videoed sign-off for the episode by the late, great, Paul Peterson was run, with cheesy “IN MEMORIAM, 1990-2022” text video-overlaid atop it.

Curtain, and applause.

Good game. The mechanics worked well. There is more than enough call for the GM to improvise a constantly shifting set of next steps and story elements, while letting the players drive the plot. And it clearly would play differently with different characters and settings. Fun times.

Playing with Roll20

Killer Rating is not sold as a Roll20/VTT game, and, if necessary, it needn’t be. Everything can be Theater of the Mind, the GM can scribble notes to one side, rolling can be trust-based, and everyone could be just talking by telephone, if need be. Indeed, the trial game I found there was no sort of VTT use involved.

That said, it occured to me that in a real game, you’d have public notes. You’d have a way of easily seeing people’s Provoke and Score, identities, and, of course, clues and rooms.

So even though it is a “zero prep” game, I spent a bunch of time to prep a (reusable) Roll20 tabletop, essentially to be used as a whiteboard. I had Provoke and Survive tokens. I had room outlines — not for maps, but for notes.

Killer Ratings 2022-10-14 — Screen cap of the Roll20 board I made, with notes.

I also moved a bunch of tables and rules outlines from the rulebook to Roll20 journal entries. That made it a lot easier to juggle things and present them to players. And as people rolled for the initial setup or for various Provokes, having the die rolls up in the chat was handy (not for trust, but just for being able to reference them). I also pulled in some graphics for “And now a word from our sponsor” and “We are having technical difficulties, please stand by.”

(And I spent a few hours posting lots of “Ghost Hunter” memes to the game Discussion Board in Roll20, to set the tone and/or amuse.)

I don’t know if the players thought it was necessary, but it worked pretty well for me. Anyone could add notes to the tabletop, though only one player did (as color commentary on the way out).

What would I do differently?

I thought the game went pretty well, and I had players both telling me they were getting the wiggins at times, and that they had a good time, so I take them at their word.

There are only a couple of things I might frame or nudge a bit differently on the next go-around (which I think will happen).

First, the game really leans, for fun, on the rivalry and backstabbing of the party. “Terrible people,” the rules say. My son noted that this wasn’t necessarily the best group for that — we are all pretty consciously nice to each other (and are, in fact, nice people). There was minimal elbowing for camera time, verbal sniping, or rerouting ghost attacks in the finale (and the one that there was was (1) for a Higher Cause, and (2) blocked by the Face, who had previously sacrificed himself during an attack and so was allowed to do so).

So I would probably try to instruct the players to be a bit more aggressive — all in the name of hilarity (and to make soft provocation by the GM easier).

Second, I probably didn’t rein in Features (clues) found by the players quite enough. They were introducing supernatural elements too early. That weakened the reveal at the end of Act 1, and even a bit for Act 2. Not a huge problem, but I’d likely lay out, as I suggest people spotlight things, appropriate levels of weird. (That may be my CDO working, though.)

Oh, and I (and they) also forgot about poor Carolyne Merrill, the sorority sister whose disappearance made this a cause célèbre. She may have been killed by the first manifestation of Agatha (probably for spilling blood all over the originally-expensive rug in the President’s suite), or she might have been possessed by Agatha and used as her anchor here in the world. In either case, RIP.

And that’s a wrap

A fun one-off, “zero prep” game. I strongly suspect it would be a very different beast, even with the same players. I really loved that the players drove a lot of the narrative elements of the game, including “Aha! That’s what’s going on here!” It’s not a matter of the GM trying to get them to guess the pre-written story, but adapting to the story as it evolves. We came out with something better than I would have thought of.

We ran about 3.5 hours, with a bio break during one of the commercials. We could have moved faster than that, if I’d pushed the accelerator — one of the big purposes of the GM here is to keep the pace going forward at a reasonable clip — but I think it was pretty okay except for the player who was two timezones later.

Overall, a good time, and I’m ready to go back for more.

Killer Ratings is by Ken Lowery at Bannerless Games, and is available at $10 for PDFs, or $20 with a hardcopy thrown in. It comes with a lighter-tone (and lighter-weight) variation called TargMarg, about people sneaking drinks into an open-all-night Super Target and having drunken shenanigans.