#gm commentary

The team had extremely mixed luck with the rolls to escape from Karakum - there were three rather effortless successes, and three fairly abyssmal failures. Tank ended up Dying again and Emily dodged the Hunted condition she took straight onto the poor driver, while Qamar turned his missed difficulty into one of the coolest moments of the campaign. The image he conjured up of Henri wired into Josine, his transmitted heartbeat the only thing keeping him alive, sent shivers down my spine. A great example of a statistical hiccup being turned into a real triumph of the fiction.

It's our Utseo player's birthday today (well, yesterday technically, but who's watching the clock?) and to celebrate, here is one of Utseo's most monstrous moves of the campaign, and certainly the most epic rolling we saw in our sessions. With helping dice a-plenty and Versatility used to hit both Street Samurai and Gutter Shogun, he put together a pool of 24 dice, and 15 of them came up hits, well above average. We were all pretty impressed and pleased with that result - then Alex ticked off 'If I May' as the rest of the team emerged from the hulk and, with the re-roll, 22 out of 24 dice were showing hits. There was whooping and cheering, and after that died down there was maths, and it turns out that that there's somewhere around a 4% chance of that occurring, which pretty much made everyone's day.

This giant mecha cyborg thing was the single biggest, baddest, highest difficulty, most hits enemy in the entire campaign, and the ease and swiftness with which the dream team demolished it was frankly awesome! It's one of those great moments in an RPG that you just wish you could convince someone to make into a movie - everyone gets into the hulk by a different entrance, one from above, one from below, and one from either side; they take out its targeting, drop it to one knee, drag it to the ground then rip out the wires connecting its brain to its heart. Brutal! It's always a thrill when the players, characters and dice all seem to want exactly the same thing - in this case to get to Josine and get him out safely no matter what stood in their way.

Refuelled with pizza and back into the action, Doc Qamar got Josine's location in the very first round of rolling and the mood change in the group was palpable! There's nothing like that moment at the end of a campaign when suddenly you realise that victory is within your reach, and this announcement meant that it hit simultaneously for everyone around the table. Determination kicked in and there was a very clear sense that everyone was getting ready to get this done. At this point, the Technocracy needed to be very afraid indeed! The team of six were down just one Edge between them and every single one of them was still rocking a Versatility, which after running nearly all of the missions and unlocking a lot of tags meant over twenty dice for a single action.

Our group is used to high crunch systems and in general I was pleased with how well everyone transitioned over to a system that only used maps and diagrams very loosely, following cues based on landmarks or simple storytelling to understand who was where in relation to everyone else in the scene. I was initially unsure of what it would do to reintroduce tiles and minis to mark people's positions, possibly shifting people back into a more regimented, grid-movement mindset and away from understanding what was going on in a cinematic sense, but having something to help visualise the convoy was actually really cool. It was something a bit different going on at the table, which gave the final scene a little extra spice and actually added to the drama of it, and by the time we got to this point where everyone was on different vehicles, I was extremely glad of the help keeping track of what was going on in the chaos!

We had some pretty atrocious rolling in this scene. As in, worst in campaign rolling. Statistically less than 3% chance rolling. It was a real shame to see the guys who'd done so well up until this point suddenly start to hit rock bottom with the dice, especially when they'd been buying up tags and learning how to use their traits and handing out stunt dice in preparation for this. There was a big divide down the middle of the group between the insanely successful and the really unlucky, made even more obvious with the middle-of-the-roaders mostly contributing their hits towards the overall scene objective and so not getting the same level of immediate feedback on the outcome of their actions as the characters who were actively engaged in the fight. Energy levels were really flagging in some corners of the table, but the day was saved by the well-timed arrival of pre-ordered pizza. There’s no better remedy for a game that’s not going as well as planned than a pause to talk about what’s going on and how to make it better, accompanied by a not-so-healthy dose of carbohydrates and grease.