On Meeting Games Where They Are

 

    So this doesn't usually come up, but I'm a huge robot & mecha fan. I was of the generation that grew up with Toonami bringing such delights to USA teens as Gundam Wing and G Gundam right after school, Evangelion in the dead of night on Saturdays on Adult Swim, followed by eventually getting IGPX & Eureka Seven, and even Gurren Lagann managed to make it onto The SciFi Channel's Ani-Mondays in that era (before it became The SyFy Channel, but my hatred for that rebrand can be a rant for another day). When I played WH40K, my army was The Iron Warriors who I ran with as mechanized of a list as I could, with as little flesh showing on the models as possible - same with Warmachine as well, where I ran as many Warjacks as I could in my Cygnar list that honestly probably wanted some support from dudes with guns. While learning to play D&D back in 3.5, once I stumbled on the Warforged in Eberron I never looked back. Once I got to college and could afford an XBOX 360, I invested in the Gundam Dynasty Warrior games and absolutely went to town on some Zakus. What I'm trying to say is, you give me a game about robots or about piloting giant robots, 99% of the time unless the actual way that you interface with the game causes me physical pain, I'm going to play it until either the robots or my brain have rusted away.

POWERED BY THE ASTIRPOCALYPSE

    As I mention from time to time, I have a bookclub with some local pals to help me clear out my backlog. Usually we read stuff from my personal backlog - between bad impulse control at cons/on crowdfunding sites/for Itch bundles, I've got a pretty sizable pile of games to go through and maybe hopefully play. I'd already read Salvage Union with this crew, and we'd talked about Lancer (a game which I have read but have never gotten to table, and which most of that crew have only heard of). At one point, one of my crew mentions they had backed a game and had joined an online campaign of it only to have it crash and burn harder than Zeon's attempt to drop Side 2 onto Jaburo - not only did it fail, but also everything still blew up and made sure nobody was happy. They asked me if I'd be willing to run a game for them and some other friends - they knew I liked mecha, they'd seen my Escaflowne Blu Rays and knew I'd run some other PbtA games recently. I agreed, sight unseen, because hey - it's not like a game like this would cause me to have to do an immense amount of bookkeeping as the GM, right?

    If you've never played the original Apocalypse World, there are a great deal of things which future iterations have largely dropped - namely about setting up narrative pillars of the world. Some things have persisted on and have also changed further on down the evolutionary line into your Blades in the Dark-likes and such, but Armour Astir: Advent pretty fiercely holds onto some of the OG framework for Apocalypse World - because it is, after all, a game about fighting a fascist empire, and even if our modern day fascists appear scattered and incompetent there is always an underlying structure to their actions which dictates what they want and what they hold dear, and that's a thing that needs gamifying for this kind of situation. After a few days of deep reading the book and panicking that I wouldn't have enough things ready to start play, I came to two conclusions - we would use a worldbuilding game to help set a baseline for the world, and I would take some time and watch/listen to some APs to see how other people had played the game to see if I could smooth out some of the things that were giving me trouble.

    Armour Astir is not a game that necessarily concerns itself with how you got to where the present day tensions are. This is very much by design - the author's note on Page 7 tells us that we can do whatever we want - there is an implied setting by way of the art choices and names for game pieces, but ultimately it's up to you and your players to define the world. This is, I think, fine for reasons I'll get to - but lightly problematic for kicking off a campaign. Much of the worldbuilding mechanics in the game are very reactive - intended to decide things in the moment, which is fine for literally everything except all of the parts where you lay the groundwork for your world. The good news is, Armour Astir is a game that implies a magical setting that also has mecha, and that meant I could try out Viditya Voleti's A Land Once Magic, which rules. While we found a lot of good meat to chew on through our session generating the backstory of the world this way, it did mean that before we had even started playing the game we had already deviated from the intended gameplay. Which like...that's fine, right? Right?

FURTHER DIVERGENCE

    When trying to do my research on other folks who had actually run Armour Astir online, results were...pretty scarce. There were a few places that had covered the book as a review, but otherwise? Well...Friends at the Table used it in two episodes of their show, but they already had an established universe they were slotting into and had pretty good ideas of how to map what Armour Astir was offering onto their world. A few other folks had put very small APs, and that's about it.  Heck, even my beloved One Shot hadn't covered the game, and James & Dillin have practically covered everything over the years. What this meant was that I needed to make some choices on exactly how closely I wanted to cleave towards the rules text as written versus importing mechanics from other, similar games whose mechanics I understood better/felt fit what the system was "going for." After all, I'd already decided to use ALOM to build the baseline of the world, right, so what's the harm in grabbing a few of my favorite innovations in the PbtA and post-PbtA sphere? The game itself is structured in multiple phases which jump around from the actual boots-on-the-ground Robot Action (called Sorties, which pair with B-Plots if you have folks NOT in a mech at the time), then Downtime once the Robot Fun Is Done, and then you've got the Conflict Turn which checks in on what the bad guys are doing and how the world changes - why, that sounds an awful lot like what Carved from Brindlewood games do, right? And this game is riddled with clocks to track progress of good and bad guy schemes - sure, Blades does that, but haven't The Wildsea and Slugblaster both made cool innovations on the use of clocks in dynamic narrative scenes? Wouldn't it be cool if I just-

RULES AS READ VERSUS RULES AS WRITTEN

    Ultimately, I decided not to add anything in mechanically. I was starting to make choices about a game I hadn't even played yet, and that's unfair to the game AND its creator. Much like adding salt and pepper to your meal before your first bite keeps you from tasting the delicate blend of flavors the chef intended for you, I think it's important to try to meet the game where it is so you can actually see what the game is trying to get you to do. Aside from the ALOM session to help set up our collective baseline for our universe, we took either two or three sessions actually creating characters, the bad guys, and the rebellion that our players found themselves allied with. We basically get through one phase of play per evening, which means it takes us almost a month to get through a full "cycle" of play - which is fine, that's partly due to not having more than like 2-3 hours a night to play and also our collective newness with the system. It has meant that actual revelations about the system's inner workings have come slowly, but as we have played over the last few months they have in fact kept coming. 

    I would say that across the board, the players are certainly good at creating narrative though may not be as practiced with narrative-focused games which has meant there has been a learning curve teaching them exactly how much power they have over the world (both in terms of the magic their characters wield as well as in other phases where they are inhabiting other NPCs). Getting used to combat has been interesting - I think all of us are tactics-pilled when it comes to big robot fightan and so trying to decouple those expectations with the more cinematic combat this game expects has been our biggest pain point: but of course, so many of these stories aren't really about the combat since one well-placed laser kills any number of mooks - outside of fighting mindless beasts (which are not explicitly detailed in the rules but are hinted at), the point is to remember you're fighting people which means doing things like demoralizing them to stop fighting, intimidating them to run away or even convince them to defect are all valid options. 

    The thing that truly stopped us in our tracks, though, is the bookkeeping - both in terms of how much to pre-establish (i.e. the main pillars of the bad guys' organization which it is ostensibly your job to take down) vs. things that come up incidentally (clocks for progress on both the good and bad side of things, tapping and untapping rebellion segments for resources plus keeping up on them to make sure they don't get destroyed unless you want them to, that kind of thing). A lot of this didn't really click until one of our players was absolutely obliterated - hilariously, the same player who wanted us to start playing this game in the first place. Now, they got better, but a character facing death (especially so suddenly and almost casually as a stray laser from a mecha-kaiju intended to destroy their carrier instead got the PC dead center) triggers a lot of rules to come into play and suddenly a lot of the character advancement mechanics that at first just appeared to be roleplaying prompts revealed their true purpose as we handled the cleanup. This then prompted a major party-wide audit of character sheets to make sure that all the various bits and bobs aligned with what we realized their actual functional purpose was.

    There have been chafe points, but they've been rewarding to get through as I do my best to present the game that my friend bought and has wanted to play. As we get a better handle on the structure of gameplay, maybe I'll end up bringing in a few outside ideas to smooth things out, but honestly we're having a good time and I'm content to leave my speculation there.

Or at least I was, until... 

RULES AS INTENDED & UNDEATH OF THE AUTHOR

    I was very surprised to find out that Briar was actively and immediately working on a second edition of the game practically from the moment it was published and in peoples' hands. In reading over their devlog I was surprised and delighted to see a number of choices they were making were right in line with things I myself had been chewing on - how to make Pillars more tangible, adopting the Carved from Brindlewood mystery resolution mechanics over into dealing with the metaplot, building in a lifepath & worldbuilding system, potentially changing combat to be more tactical. That all rules, and not just because those are all things I specifically pointed out as chafe-points - it's because I love when creators look at other convergent evolutionary paths (both Armour Astir and The Between appear to have started development around the same time, with The Between eventually spilling out into Brindlewood Bay and eventually the rest of the Carved from Brindlewood games in the interim) and borrow ideas to grow stronger. 

    What that means, though, is that now we're in kind of a liminal zone - because we have a fully functional book of rules to use, but we also know that the person who wrote those rules is hard at work trying to make those rules something newer and better because they no longer fit their vision of the game - so like...maybe being so precious about adhering to the rules to provide the game experience as intended by the developer isn't so important since the developer themselves is opting to update everything?

    For now, I'm content to let the real game designers do the real game designing and stick to what's in the book for running our game. The rules in the book are as balanced as they need to be, and they do work as intended even if I personally have a little trouble parsing out what that intention is sometimes. But it also means I'm going to take opportunities to pull in my favorite CfB tech like Painting The Scene & maybe doing some Unscene-esque B-Plot scenarios to help learn about NPCs in the rebellion that we otherwise don't get to check in on. Maybe I'll whip ALOM back out to whip up some prompts to help fill in some characters before the PCs run into them. Maybe I'll just do Tarot readings for some of the background characters to see what they've been up to while the party goes off to show the fascists their Burning Finger.

    No matter what I end up doing though, it'll be with the knowledge that rather than enforcing my will on the game system and my players before trying to see what kind of game the game itself wants you to play, I listened to it, I interpreted it, and I'm using the tools I have at my disposal to make sure that the gameplay experience that the game wants us to have and the gameplay experience all of us at the table want to have are harmonized as best as I can.