‘hood: First Face-to-Face playtest
I finally got a chance to try out my urban inner city hack at Indiecon, though we only had 4 hours, so some processes were a bit rushed.
The four players looked through the playbooks available and all found a character type they wanted to play:
Ratboy, the Thief: typical scrawny teenage tearaway and nephew to…
Buzzkill Bill, the Fallen: a seriously bent copper taking a cut from whatever took place, he was also a casual customer of…
Nursey, the Feelgood: a small-time dealer with a penchant for parties, she also helped out…
Echo, the Blur: a face in the crowd who tended to fade into the background when not being directly observed.
Starting with a midnight arson attack at the local community centre, the stakes got raised when a reward was offered for information leading to an arrest; with the cops on every street asking questions, Ratboy and Echo tried hard to use their contacts and legwork to find the culprit and restore peace, but Bill knew he had to make sure it wasn’t a resident who got arrested, in case he lost the trust of the ‘hood. Meanwhile, Nursey realised she had blown her stash on a party, so had to go cap in hand to her own supplier, forgetting that she still owed him 2 Dough for the last batch (in other words, a couple of failed rolls in a row meant that she had her livelihood threatened and was taking heat).
It was a good satisfying session, with a slow burn that built up to the point where Bill was trying to get rid of the badly injured arsonist without leading his own force back to him, while Ratboy and Nursey had to cut and run on attempt to frame her supplier for the arson, leaving Nursey in the sight’s of a much bigger criminal…
There will be a few changes to the hack soon, most notably to the rules for heat and experience: I want to kick those up a notch and make them flow faster, to encourage players to take bigger risks for greater rewards.