You're not doing it wrong, per se. There's just some things the book doesn't make super clear for a first-time group.
In a first game of Better Angels, you've got to really encourage use of advantages like Surprises, Secrets, and Weapons. And the GM has to be generous handing out those bonuses. When that Alchemy roll fails, the Natural Philosopher should have a wrench behind his back. They should be riffling through the trash of any villains they want to fight the night before the battle. In short, characters that want to be effective in early stages of the game need to be sneaky, sniveling little assholes. In turn, this usually leads to more sin, so they get more powerful more quickly.
But Better Angels isn't really a game about success. It's a game about failure, getting tired of failure, cheating to taste success, and in turn setting yourself up for greater failures (the ultimate of which is Hell). A Venture Bros-esque tone worked best for my players. They didn't crit every roll, but when they did fail they had a narrative framework with which to build a reaction to that roll.
Failure is also just another motivation to offer up those MD. Demons should be using repeated whiffs to lure their humans into a sweetly assured success. Sure, the demon gets hurt in the short term, but they don't have to turn on the perfection unless the human promises to do something truly awful for them. If the human ditches out, that's just all the more reason for a demon to turn the powers off at an inopportune time or deny Aspect invokation. A promised atrocity traded for a MD can lead to entire subplots over extended play.
Another thing you can do is start players off with Devilish Devices. There aren't specific rules for it, but one Devilish Device can make even a freshly stated-up character feel like a boss. From what you've described, it sounds like your players were supervillains already at the time. It would make perfect sense that they'd already built some toys.
Finally, a house rule I made is that while I still split character generation between two people, I don't do it as written for brand new players that haven't read the whole book. A lot of the powers have wonky descriptions that don't line up entirely with what their title implies. Doing the Power/Aspect and Power/Aspect split between two people that don't know the system can lead to ineffective power sets like Arrogance/Ineffable Defense (congrats! you're obstinate and unimpressed! super-powers?) or defunds the dice pools to make cool powers work. The way I do char. gen. for players entirely new to the game is that I let the demon pick all the powers and aspects, then I let the human decide how close hell they want to be at the beginning of the game with their dice pools. That allows for some traditional power-gaming without totally unbalancing the game, and it gets people interested enough in the setting and play dynamic that they'll come back for traditional character generation and long-term play.
I hope that helps out. Give it another shot. It really is a great game.
On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 9:24 AM, <cult-of-ore@googlegroups.com> wrote:
Group: http://groups.google.com/group/cult-of-ore/topics
- Better Angels: How Did We Go Wrong? [1 Update]
The Unshaven <KVeale@gmail.com> Nov 16 04:39PM -0800
--
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
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