Tag: 15 minutes

GM: None
Players: Sean, Travis, and Chrissy
System: 15 Minutes

This is a little late, but I think the notes are still good.

We got together to try and give the system a complete run through, but only got through the pitch and character creation.

Pitch

We opted for a boy band, specifically a young boy band (pre-teen to early teen), and decided these were the stable of characters to pick from: The baby boy, the bad boy, the pretty boy, and the ethnically different boy. There may have been one other. Chrissy opted for the baby, I took the bad and Travis went with ethnically different (although it was a ways into character creation until we realized he was probably Chinese).

Character Creation

We got through all four of our “When I was…” building blocks and “I did it all for…”, which is essentially all of character creation. We ended with just under our cap on groups (20 groups max, I think we had somewhere around 16).

Observations.

1. The Pitch feels perfect. Nearly identical to the PTA pitch session with the added benefit of enforcing that a cast is created during the pitch rather than during character creation. This is a pretty “rules-light” portion of the game, but it seems to work great every time.
2. The one thing I would add to the Pitch is the Fame scale. Since how big we’re going to get has a lot to do with how epic the game will be, I think that is something that should at least be discussed in the pitch, and then possibly mechanically formalized during play.
3. The character creation “when I was ___” section still feels a little stifling to me. I have two thoughts.
   1. There isn’t any reason these formative times need to be at the same time in the character’s lives, they are just things that form the character, not his or her connection to the group.
   2. It is hard to break up the pre-fame lives into four distinct events for young characters. In our game the baby was 10 and it was really hard for me to fathom four major things happening to someone before being ten (despite having a 4 and a 7 year old myself and seeing how major things are happening to them all the time).
4. Item 3.2 above is partially ameliorated by Travis’s clarification that the events have nothing to do with what got you famous, they are just meaningful events that form you (by giving you traits) and your likely support groups (by creating cred and haters).
5. Another thought would be to try different numbers.  I’d like to see how three events plays out and see if it leaves the characters to barren or sufficianty developed.
6. Because the game has this dichotomy of how the character changes vs. how they are perceived I think the character sheet would benefit from being divided. My inspiration comes from the way texts look on iphones:
   
   I’m thinking personal effects on the left and appearance on the right. Also, I like light blue and pink for the bubbles, but maybe I’m just too much a fan of pink. This would help me differentiate between what parts of our characters are in the public eye and what part is personal.
7. Three feels like a good number to play this game. I don’t doubt it would work with more, but three is a sweet spot for me compared to two.
8. There is a definite meta-game you can play during character creation.  I, for instance kept trying to get “popular” kids as my cred group so I’d have a nice pool with them.  We haven’t discussed this but can you have a group both as cred and as haters?  We should probably test this play to see if it breaks when we use them.
9. We’ve been talking about created the cred/hater groups during the pitch and I’d like to try this.  In our game we got some groups that didn’t really fit with my concept of who would be important to a boy band, so I’m inclined to say let’s make the list up while we’re all collaborating and before people are getting stuck with a choice.

15 Minutes is a game that Travis and I are developing together. It’s a game about what people do to become famous. Mostly he thinks of the ideas and then I act as a sounding board and first run play-tester. It might be more accurate to call me an editor, but my damn name is going on the cover.

To keep up with our development as it happens, check out the wiki: http://fifteenminutes.pbworks.com/

Notes from the August 26th Play-test:

We didn’t have long to work, so we really only covered two topics. Wagers and the escalation of fame.

Regarding escalation of fame:

This is a pacing mechanic, but how much do we throttle it. My goal is for the overall level of fame to be changing frequently, but thinking back now, maybe not always up. Maybe if nobody makes their roll, it should go down. The characters are starting to loose their stardom and need to do something to get the public’s eye again. We settled that the person with the least cred would get to have the first personal scene and thus the first opportunity to raise the bar for everyone else. This seems like a nice bit of balancing. Also, we agreed that that the fame rating can only go up once per round of scenes, but again, I’m not sure how I feel about that. What if it went up (and down) all the time?

Travis mentioned that the fame difficulty is inverted between the private scenes and the public ones. Thus early on it is easy to forge relationships but hard to stand out in the public eye. As the game progresses these flip-flop. I like that A LOT.

Regarding Wagers:

We’re still on the fence about this and I’m starting to feel like we might be putting in wagers because they feel like a “oh this is so cool” mechanic and not because they actually add to the game. I mean, yeah, celebrities take chances all the time, but is brining in perks and/or haters not enough of a representation of this?

Assuming we do use wagers we were having some uncertainty of how it it would actually work. Remove cred dice (the most valuable kind) to gain what? Narrative Control? Other kinds of dice after the roll? Yeah, I want to talk this again. I think there is something here, but it isn’t groking with me like the other dice mechanics are.

15 Minutes is a game that Travis and I are developing together. It’s a game about what people do to become famous. Mostly he thinks of the ideas and then I act as a sounding board and first run play-tester. It might be more accurate to call me an editor, but my damn name is going on the cover.

To keep up with our development as it happens, check out the wiki: http://fifteenminutes.pbworks.com/

Notes from the August 25th Play-test.

We tried out a single roll and moneyed the dice to show every possible variation.

Basic mechanic: Roll Dice looking for success that match or beat the current fame rating. Success means you looked good and gain a cred die, failure means you looked bad and gain a hater die. Either way, you are more famous.

Specific mechanics. You always get one cred group to roll for free. Bringing in a hater group makes the scene more volatile, but adds their dice as well. Bringing in a Perk means relying on some vice to help you out, and forcing you to frame the next scene around that vice.

We rolled and saw there was some decent reason to bring in at least the haters, possibly the perks, but at low fame they didn’t seem necessary (plenty of successes without them). We also tested out the “trait” group which allows you to bring in another cred group.

My observations:

1. As noted, perks didn’t seem necessary on the first roll.
2. I don’t like the name perk, it doesn’t fit for me. How does vice sound? It seems like that is what they are. Plus vice dice sounds cool.
3. I like the way perk dice grow (like exhaustion in DRYH) and inform the next scene.
4. There isn’t mechanically any reason why you would want to have a bunch of cred groups at low levels, having one really good cred group does you much better. I think we need a mitigating factor (like forcing you to rotate out groups each scene).
5.  We talked a lot about rewards and had lots of different ideas (merging cred groups, switching cred groups into haters, etc). I think we’ll need to play with this more.
6. I really like the idea that when you exceed the current fame rating, the fame die goes up one, making it harder for everyone else.
7. I’m torn between wanting a successful roll to indicate that you are noticed (which is critical to the game) or liked (which is less so, people get famous from having haters). I’m thinking that it’s better if you are always getting more famous, but if your hater dice exceed your cred dice, that should force another kind of scene, one where the celebrity reshapes themselves (going into rehab, breaking up with band and going solo, joining another political party). After doing that a few dice are lost but the cred/hater equilibrium is re-established. This prevents the failure monkey mentality of “I’ll just fail every roll because my hater dice make me famous too”

15 Minutes is a game that Travis and I are developing together. It’s a game about what people do to become famous. Mostly he thinks of the ideas and then I act as a sounding board and first run play-tester. It might be more accurate to call me an editor, but my damn name is going on the cover.

To keep up with our development as it happens, check out the wiki: http://fifteenminutes.pbworks.com/ 

Here are my notes from the session:

Tried the pitch out today and realized it needs to establish a few more things:

1. Roles for the players to take (the drummer, lead singer, etc vs. the republican, libertarian, vs. the cute boy, bad boy, etc). After roles are established (or if they are intuitive to the setting) players should pick concepts to fill those roles.

2. Associated with setting should also start the factions, whether they be Soccer Moms and Geeks or the Scarlet Crusade, we should have a pretty good foundation for who will be the cred and haters.

Tried out character creation today and found the following:

1. Of the reasons to get famous (and not to get famous) we narrowed it down to this list: Power, Money, Love of the art/cause, and Attention. We’ll keep mining this but I think these will end up with having a fixed list of inspirations.

2. The “When I was” should have a contextual situation applied. I think “When I was in Kindergarten” or “When I was in Law School” is more meaningful than “When I was 5 or 24”. Of course “When I was 21” does have some inherent cultural significance.

3. There is room for a LOT of cred/hater groups. We definitely want to represent them physically somehow (probably with index cards) as well as represent their cred/hater rating (probably with tokens, glass beads, etc). Inspirations for this: High School Drama and Illuminati. Need to figure out a way to handle the geometry so the players can be connected to the same groups.

4. Digging the idea of dynamic character sheet. Defined by the cards, tokens and other physical representations in front of you. Cool because it is a) visible and b) easy to change physically to represent changes in the fiction.

5. Five players with four questions, potentially generating 2 unique groups each mean for a possible 5 x 4 x 2 = 40 EFFING groups. That is TOO many. We’ll have to use some measures to cap this. Fewer questions? Encourage reincorporation of groups? Or just a hard cap?

6. My gut is that players should all go through the same steps of character creation at the same time. So, everyone answers the first question before going onto the next, etc.

Results:

Pitch: A Heavy Metal Rock Band.

Travis:

When I was young, my friends said that some day we would be famous because of: Our heavy metal badassery

When I was 4, I ate sand, even though I knew popular chicks would hate me, but it was worth it because crazy dudes loved me for doing that.

When I was in 3rd grade, I put a bottle rocket in the teachers locker, even though I knew teachers would hate me, but it was worth it because geeksloved me for doing that.

Sean:

When I was young, my friends said that some day we would be famous because: Chicks take clothes off for Heavy Metal