Everyone is John
Apr. 12th, 2012 04:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroI was looking through my older posts, and on one, OblvnDrgn had recommended Everyone is John for a one-shot for our group. The premise is simple: John is totally insane, and you play the voices in John’s head, vying with each other for control.
Let me just say right off the bat, this was totally fun, if a little rough around the edges. John got mostly killed (but got better), got arrested a couple of times, freaked out numerous people with impromptu song-and-dance routines, stole and crashed four cars, invented Fish McNuggets and went on Conan O’Brian, and woke up next to a dead hooker with $40 worth of quarters in his pockets. A pretty solid day, really.
I actually made a couple of changes to accommodate my preferred playstyle right off the bat: The official rules have John succeed on unskilled checks only on a 6; I changed that to 5 or 6. I was more fluid on when tests for control happened: Rather than the current voice failing a roll or fulfilling an obsession, I expanded “John getting hurt” to “any sort of shocking or harrowing event”. (This change allowed Ivy to fulfill her obsession with stealing cars, but then also have the chance to fail a driving roll and crash the car; that shocking event swapped control.)
We had four players, and I can’t decide if four players was just right or too few. I think if there were more players, I’d put back the “bid for control with every failed roll” rule, to keep control bouncing around more. It might also be interesting to have a one-time “take control right now” mechanic for each player. (Only one player is in control at a time, which can be an issue if they’re not being entertaining for a long stretch. This is similar to the Baron Munchausen RPG in that sense; each player takes a turn showing off.)
Oh, and as I know pretty much nothing about the geography of Minneapolis, in my game, John was a totally insane man in New York City.
The trouble we ran into was the difference in difficulty between obsessions—Sparticleman’s was too easy, for example (jaywalking), but there was also the issue that Cubby’s (disrupting traffic) was effectively encompassing both Sparticleman and Ivy’s (stealing cars) to a degree. Jethrien and I were discussing this, and came up with the idea of having a random stack of obsessions, rather than letting people choose. Then I hit upon an even better idea: An obsession deck that you work through. Whenever you complete your current obsession, pick a new one. That keeps the game fresh into hour two (the players aren’t trying to do the same thing over and over), keeps things fair (you have an equal chance of drawing an easy or hard obsession) and keeps everyone guessing as to what the other players are trying to do.
I’m also thinking that a larger game might require a clue as to what each player’s obsession is, because you wouldn’t really be able to keep track of what not to let other people do if there were seven other players and changing obsessions. (So the random obsession cards might have “Motor Vehicles” on one side as a clue that everyone can see, and “Steal a car and crash it” as the obsession only the player who picks it gets to see.)
I was fine coming up with random wacky places for John to wake up, but I suspect most people would want a premade list or random table of places, to keep things interesting. I tried to make tenuous connections between where John fell asleep and where he woke up, but it was rarely direct, leaving the implication that there were other voices and they were much more competent than the PCs.
In any case, this requires virtually no prep work (even if we did use obsession cards, they’d take all of five minutes to set up and toss in a hat) and makes for an amusing one-shot. I suspect it’ll make a return engagement.
Let me just say right off the bat, this was totally fun, if a little rough around the edges. John got mostly killed (but got better), got arrested a couple of times, freaked out numerous people with impromptu song-and-dance routines, stole and crashed four cars, invented Fish McNuggets and went on Conan O’Brian, and woke up next to a dead hooker with $40 worth of quarters in his pockets. A pretty solid day, really.
I actually made a couple of changes to accommodate my preferred playstyle right off the bat: The official rules have John succeed on unskilled checks only on a 6; I changed that to 5 or 6. I was more fluid on when tests for control happened: Rather than the current voice failing a roll or fulfilling an obsession, I expanded “John getting hurt” to “any sort of shocking or harrowing event”. (This change allowed Ivy to fulfill her obsession with stealing cars, but then also have the chance to fail a driving roll and crash the car; that shocking event swapped control.)
We had four players, and I can’t decide if four players was just right or too few. I think if there were more players, I’d put back the “bid for control with every failed roll” rule, to keep control bouncing around more. It might also be interesting to have a one-time “take control right now” mechanic for each player. (Only one player is in control at a time, which can be an issue if they’re not being entertaining for a long stretch. This is similar to the Baron Munchausen RPG in that sense; each player takes a turn showing off.)
Oh, and as I know pretty much nothing about the geography of Minneapolis, in my game, John was a totally insane man in New York City.
The trouble we ran into was the difference in difficulty between obsessions—Sparticleman’s was too easy, for example (jaywalking), but there was also the issue that Cubby’s (disrupting traffic) was effectively encompassing both Sparticleman and Ivy’s (stealing cars) to a degree. Jethrien and I were discussing this, and came up with the idea of having a random stack of obsessions, rather than letting people choose. Then I hit upon an even better idea: An obsession deck that you work through. Whenever you complete your current obsession, pick a new one. That keeps the game fresh into hour two (the players aren’t trying to do the same thing over and over), keeps things fair (you have an equal chance of drawing an easy or hard obsession) and keeps everyone guessing as to what the other players are trying to do.
I’m also thinking that a larger game might require a clue as to what each player’s obsession is, because you wouldn’t really be able to keep track of what not to let other people do if there were seven other players and changing obsessions. (So the random obsession cards might have “Motor Vehicles” on one side as a clue that everyone can see, and “Steal a car and crash it” as the obsession only the player who picks it gets to see.)
I was fine coming up with random wacky places for John to wake up, but I suspect most people would want a premade list or random table of places, to keep things interesting. I tried to make tenuous connections between where John fell asleep and where he woke up, but it was rarely direct, leaving the implication that there were other voices and they were much more competent than the PCs.
In any case, this requires virtually no prep work (even if we did use obsession cards, they’d take all of five minutes to set up and toss in a hat) and makes for an amusing one-shot. I suspect it’ll make a return engagement.
