Hi everybody! Our group has done an initial test of Better Angels, and we're sure we're not doing something right.
Essentially, our GM played Better Angels at Gencon and had a fantastic time. He grabbed the game and ran a simple scenario for us. The core difference between how the game ran for us and what happened at Gencon with someone who knew the system better was that it was really hard for us to get anything done.
With starting characters from the book, our pools were often 4d or below and - unsurprisingly - the whiff factor was high. This is nothing unusual in itself for ORE games, but the normal conceit of "roll only when it's really important" didn't seem to apply to scenarios where the outcomes were different if the power activation roll succeeded or not, for example. So most often, we were rolling for every time we wanted to activate a demonic trick, and a statistically predictable amount of the time, we failed. This lead to a pretty stagnant and repetitive play experience as we tried to accomplish the same goal, such as frightening civilians away from something strategic, in multiple rounds until it worked or we got bored and tried something else.
In comparison, the GM had no such problems during the Gencon game and said it was dynamic, interesting and highly entertaining fun.
What we've taken from this is that we've missed the point somewhere and are somehow Doing It Wrong.
Does anybody have any suggestions?
A stab in the dark is that we need to have the sequence where the demons try to justify an increase in Sinister traits and then the human tries to justify sliding an increase towards the more positive side more often. Since our scenario was basically a "The characters are at a cafe when another supervillain tries to take over the waterfront," we'd thought of it as being one scene since it was one event in a consistent location. Maybe that was wrong.
Alternatively we needed to make better use of advantages?
Anyway, any suggestions would be fantastic, and thanks again for your time.
- The Unshaven
-- Essentially, our GM played Better Angels at Gencon and had a fantastic time. He grabbed the game and ran a simple scenario for us. The core difference between how the game ran for us and what happened at Gencon with someone who knew the system better was that it was really hard for us to get anything done.
With starting characters from the book, our pools were often 4d or below and - unsurprisingly - the whiff factor was high. This is nothing unusual in itself for ORE games, but the normal conceit of "roll only when it's really important" didn't seem to apply to scenarios where the outcomes were different if the power activation roll succeeded or not, for example. So most often, we were rolling for every time we wanted to activate a demonic trick, and a statistically predictable amount of the time, we failed. This lead to a pretty stagnant and repetitive play experience as we tried to accomplish the same goal, such as frightening civilians away from something strategic, in multiple rounds until it worked or we got bored and tried something else.
In comparison, the GM had no such problems during the Gencon game and said it was dynamic, interesting and highly entertaining fun.
What we've taken from this is that we've missed the point somewhere and are somehow Doing It Wrong.
Does anybody have any suggestions?
A stab in the dark is that we need to have the sequence where the demons try to justify an increase in Sinister traits and then the human tries to justify sliding an increase towards the more positive side more often. Since our scenario was basically a "The characters are at a cafe when another supervillain tries to take over the waterfront," we'd thought of it as being one scene since it was one event in a consistent location. Maybe that was wrong.
Alternatively we needed to make better use of advantages?
Anyway, any suggestions would be fantastic, and thanks again for your time.
- The Unshaven
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