This has been a tough season for sustained play. For this EABA game, we have managed eight sessions in six months, and it kills me to see my claim in the prior post that we’d managed to recover regular play, which obviously we did not. (Previous posts: Apoc western, Radioactive grit)

I categorized this post with “Trouble during play,” so here’s what I mean. In listening through, you’ll perceive when players were sidelined almost for whole sessions, especially Arvid playing Bob. I thought for a while about how and why this could happen. Partly it’s due to all the on-again off-again play, as we struggled to establish a full-table learning curve for the system, which is quite important in this case. Through the recordings, it’s evident, over and over again, that we learned X-Y-Z in a given session, but the lag resulted in retaining only X for later play. There’s also a system feature which contributed, or which we permitted to contribute, which I’ll try to describe below.

All that said, this experience also demonstrates distinct virtues: the incredible buy-in and appreciation for the situation, including one another’s characters. In this, it’s very similar to the Dark Sun game, such that the players’ active understanding of the content, during play, is literally my anchor to stay invested and to be surprised at my own inspirations.

Toward understanding that feature, I wish I could present this game with visual recording as well as audio, because so much is communicated non-verbally or contextually in those terms. Often, the audio preserves only someone’s spoken response to someone else’s expression or gestures; also, with visual, you can appreciate looking up something in the text and get a much better idea of what it was like to play, whereas that’s just dead time in audio, and editing produces false notions of instant rules-applications, deceptively smooth dialogue, or magical expertise.

Some features of the system have fallen under critique, which ordinarily I’d have assessed as either quirks which entail or shape play in some understandable way, or problems. Given my poor learning curve, I’m not ready to take a position about them.

• Resolution seems really easy, especially in adopting the labeling for results and skills, which don’t seem to match well. having a skill at all is “Inept,” and +1d6 is “Amateur,” but given either of these and an “Average” attribute, one will be busting out “Hard” and “Formidable” results all the time, and given any of the many ways to boost dice, “”Incredible” and “Heroic” are likely.
• Damage is surprisingly ineffective; it’s pretty clear that this is where one has to spend Fate in order to accomplish much, and without focusing on group learning, it’s hard to remember to do that.

Arguably I might simply have been incompetent at placing the difficulties. At the first session, it seemed like environment, fatigue, and similar things would play harder into events, setting up penalty buffers against the relatively easy success targets, and maybe I should have applied such things more as we went along, simply because the people live in a hard place and are often hot and thirsty.

Session 7

In this session, I had not updated the Now page for a while, so I didn’t really think outside of the immediate conflicts which had been stalled in place for months of real time.

However, some things had moved on which the players were not going to be denied, first among them Henry’s discovery of something really important in the bombed-out wastelands. Also, Dyson posted this map just the week before we played, which was like a gift from above. I’m not exaggerating in saying that it energized my preparation as well as the table experience for all of us, as you’ll hear in the recording.

Given the publication date and my ongoing contact with Greg Porter during that time, it’s easy to see and track the influence of Sorcerer on the timing and IIEE in this game. Everyone rolls at once, then the order is set by the results, then we play through with various responses like dodging.

The big difference is that the system uses target numbers, so that unlike Sorcerer, you do know whether an action was successful upon rolling. In Sorcerer, you have to play through all the way in order to know what happens with each action; in EABA, it’s very easy to get distracted by resolution per action and for the order to be distorted into whoever happens to be talking, forgetting to have everyone roll first before addressing resolution at all. I don’t think we managed to fold actions into the round sequence until the latest session; typically we kept getting pulled out of it and into non-timed play, especially when activites were occurring across separate locations.

We’re all also a bit surprised at how non-lethal the damage was. The system is hyper-focused on pinpoint bonus accumulation, but these dice apply only to resolution, and damage is rolled independently. Horace’s first shot at the soldier didn’t actually kill the guy, due to a crap damage roll, which made no sense considering it was supposed be a “Superhuman” result. I’ve looked all through the rules to see how better results factor into better damage, but either I’m totally missing it or it’s not there.

As for big hits, at first glance, they seem not very effective either, only resulting in very few dice penalties, but I am now more positive about this feature, because the Stunning rules and the penalties’ effect on the next round do work out. People don’t drop dead from what appears to be a maximum gunshot wound … but then they go down in the next moment.

To go back to the comparison with Sorcerer, I struggled a bit with the tension between comparison rolls and target numbers.

• Sorcerer only uses the former, and including both (as in the White Wolf games) creates a numbers-concept quagmire. I can’t tell the difference between default defense, which is embedded in the use of dice by itself, vs. some kind of active or responsive defense.
• Defense in EABA seems a lot easier, as you spend minor actions to get a full defense rather than giving up stated actions; but sometimes exactly what you roll to defend, or rather your target, is difficult to discern. For some attacks the defender rolls against the attacker’s result, and for others, they roll against a target based on the attacker’s attribute. I’m not yet following the reasoning for it and we almost certainly mixed them up more than once.

Session 8

At this point, I decided we needed a procedural reboot, and at yet another “one person can’t make it” session, we set up some training content and practiced EABA. I recorded it, although it’s not very exciting listening, but I can provide it if anyone wants.

The point is that it worked. The difference is incredible. Rapid action, proactive motion, high-impact characterization, constant response, much better relation of table-talk to diegesis, awareness of events …

My part counts too: this time, I actually did the work on the information that everyone was playing in, thought about Dewey’s priorities some more, remembered how important Jesh’s influence on the townsfolk became in early play, and especially considered 700SATAN ™ as a character, confronted by the override represented by the satellite network and its long-dormant national security protocols, which is also sort of a character although I only played it via difficulty levels.

In this session, you can see some of the damage and consequences work. Given the cumulative difficulties, Horace’s targeted leg shot on Dewey was far more effective toward what he wanted to accomplish than his earlier shots at the soldiers.

We had a chance to assess the aim option at the end of Part 2 and beginning of Part 3, during Horace’ second shot at Dewey, specifically if one aims and shoots in the same moment. As Filip observed, it’s a question of whether the reduction in difficulty is worth losing the die (for multiple actions), especially given Horace’s excellent dice due to the Focus skill + the Larger Than Life trait. In this case it definitely was not, but in circumstances where the difficulty is racked really high due to a target’s movement and range, it might be. His next shot, initially targeting Dewey’s gun, shows how that still didn’t “math out” well, because difficulty was +8 for a target that small, and aiming would only bring it down to +7. He did a smarter thing and shifted to the more general target of Dewey’s arm, bringing the difficulty penalty to +4.

At first I thought aiming was simply ineffective, but then I realized that the rules cover the wide range between smooth-bore muskets and high-tech modern sniping, and the guns in this game are decidedly toward the low end of that scale, such that the comparatively good pistol Horace was using had Accuracy of only 1. I guess it only makes sense to say that 1830s-equivalent pistols simply aren’t about aiming.

So, at the time of this writing, we’re moving into the fate of Dawnford, partly resolved in that now we know the militarized disease-release pods have been activated only in uninhabited areas deep in already-ruined wastes … but not yet resolved at all in terms of folk and any hope of decency or survival in the long term. I especially like the fact that Horace may have cut a Gordian knot by simply initiating gunfire with Dewey … but doing so only deals with Dewey, not with the social tangle of soldiers, prejudice, religion, and fear.

And finished!

Here’s session 9