Last weekend, my gaming group played Fiasco . It was tremendous fun, obvs.
This week, we got back to our EotE campaign, but I got to wondering how to borrow some of that wonderful "shared narrative plus marginal resource mechanic" goodness into my campaign. (Yes, I know there are a good deal of "Star Wars"-themed Fiasco playsets out there, but I didn't want quite that much chocolate in my peanut butter.) I had a sit-n-think, listened to the latest episode of The Adventure Zone , and it struck me: flashback session.
So, here's what I did.
1) Set an end goal, something the party could conceivably complete in a normal session. The session BEGINS with this completed.
- (In this case, my party needed to get rid of an Inquisitor who had hijacked their ship. I told them it was now 2 weeks in-game since the end of the previous session.)
2) The players need to work together and with the GM to create scenes/encounters that tell the story of HOW this thing got done.
3) Before the session ends, they MUST include the following elements in the story, at least one of which needs to get used in every scene/encounter. The elements can be added at any time by any player (policed by the common sense of the GM and players).
- 2 bonus Proficiency (Yellow) Dice (added as a bonus whole die, not an upgrade)
- 2 bonus Challenge (Red) Dice (added as a bonus whole die, not an upgrade)
- 2 bonus White Destiny Points (spent and gone as soon as they're introduced)
- 2 Critical Hits (personal or vehicle, but always against a PC or PC vehicle)
- 2 maps/locations
- (In my case, I gave my players physical maps of a Star Destroyer hangar bay and of a spy-movie-style laser hallway.)
- 2 NPC tokens
- (In my case, I handed out the AT-ST and Hutt tokens from the Beginner Boxes.)
4) Scenes that need to be played out with rolls or in-game conversation are done so, but try to skip anything that is already a pretty obvious "given" or just wouldn't be fun for your players to see.
- So I made my Inquisitor roll to try to trick the PCs into walking into a trap, and I made the PCs roll to react to this trap, but my players decided the Inquisitor should use her already-established-as-powerful Misdirect to "bamf" out of danger, so I didn't make a roll, nor did I make the sneaky tech-whiz roll her YYYYYG Mechanics check to rig up a rocket sled for stolen loot, but I did make her roll to deceive the Hutt (GG versus RRRP).
5) Pick a sane base difficulty at which all generic rolls will be made, when you do need some chance to help guide the narrative.
- For my group with 600+ earned XP, I went with PPPP and it worked a treat.
6) Everything sticks but there's no micromanaging items. No strain/wound recovery during the session without really good narrative reason (because obviously no one died, since they are there to have the flashback) and any loot acquired gets lost before session's end.
7) Make sure you get the full " how we got here " story by the time your session is over. In the final scene/encounter, make sure you use up any remaining unused story elements.
- My players had 4 hours, but really wanted to get everything wacky in there, so they got it all done in 3.
8) Have a cool reward at the end.
- I ended up not saving my planned reward until the end, because the players had a sweet narrative reason to raid the Hutt's treasure vault, so I put it back on them and gave them the reward (an upgrade to their space station) and told them to explain how/why a Hutt had it in his basement.
9) All other rules function as normal.
- ...which meant my players almost exclusively used their "once per session" Talents/Signature Abilities. Which was awesome.
It sounds more complicated than it is. It's NOT for every session. But we had a good time.
Please feel free to steal this setup for a game sesh, but do come on back here to tell me about it! I'm really curious what to tweak when I surprise my players with this in like 9-12 months.