Another Fiasco

On Saturday night, I joined Telecanter and ze bulette for an online game of Fiasco. Both of my fellow players have already posted after-play reports on their respective blogs (here and here), so I'm going to try to avoid covering the same ground.

First off, I'd like to say that it was incredibly cool to game with such upstanding members of our blogging community. Even though I am also not a huge fan of online play, I think it is essential to establish or maintain real gaming contact with our fellow travelers. Face-to-face gaming would be better, but when thousands of miles separate us, I'll happily settle for the virtual.

The game itself was really fun and felt really natural, despite not being able to see Telecanter over video chat. In my previous AP,I mentioned that Fiasco took me out of my comfort zone. This time it still felt vastly different that traditional roleplaying games, but at least I had no shortage of ideas for coming up with scenes. I think the choice of a traditional fantasy playset helped (we chose Dragon Slayers). I also think it helped that there was a lot more back-and-forth between us players as we discussed possible outcomes.

The plot of the game was a hell of a lot less convoluted than my previous game (see Professor Pope's AP), but that may have been the result of only having three players. I also warned us against too many flashbacks and that may have tamped things down quite a bit. We also cut our turns in half due to time constraints.

We had to jury-rig some of the rules of Fiasco to facilitate online play. For those of you planning on playing the game online, you might want to consider the following modifications:

1. Everyone Rolls There Own Setup Dice
In standard Fiasco, four dice are rolled for each player participating and gathered into one giant pile. During setup, each player will go around the table (twice) and select a pair of dice that can be used to choose character relationship details from the playset tables. This works great when all the players are sitting around the same table. When the players are only connected by voice and video chat, it's a little awkward.

To make things easier for us, each player simply rolled 2d6 for each of their two turns during setup. It was slightly more random that what you'd normally get, but I don't feel like it detracted from the game in the slightest. In fact, I think I might even prefer it this way.

2. Resolution Dice Counter
During Act I and Act II, each player takes a couple of turns establishing or resolving scenes. When in comes time to resolve the scene, a die of a certain color is normally removed from a shared pool of dice in the center of the table. Playing virtually, we simply maintained of a counter of the number of black and white dice that had been spoken for. The individual players then maintained their own personal pool of black/white dice in front of them and rolled them during the Tilt and Aftermath stages. It seemed to work very well.