Hell. Also yes. I'm in.

I'm in....and back, I guess.

I'm also interested. Does everybody have to have a copy of the rules?

Sweet, and no, I don't think it's a very rules kind of game (in play, I mean. The mechanics are stronger when building the setup and framing/establishing/resolving scenes). Fiasco doesn't even have a GM (although Reagan and I do have the rules and we'll help keep track of any mechanical bits). I've read the rules and watched that Tabletop game; Reagan's played it before (he also said he's in). I'll try to summarize what I think are the salient mechanics, though:

The Setup
First we'll choose a Playset, which is like a pregenerated bunch of needs, relationships, objects, and locations. It's like your prop box and motives all rolled together, flavored to suit a particular time and place. You know that adage about creativity being easier when it's given some restrictions? The playset provides those restrictions to help focus and bolster creativity.

Then we get 2d6 per player, half white, half black. This part is easy because it's the internet. We roll 'em all at once and we choose items from the playset based on those d6 results, one person picking one item at a time. At the end of it each player will have a relationship with the players to his metaphorical right and left, and there'll be some interesting needs, objects, and locations. Hopefully if we've done this part right, character ideas should more or less present themselves. Like, you might want a relationship of "Crime" between you and me, so you assign one of the setup dice to that relationship. Then maybe on Dave's turn, he sets one of the dice to "Arsonist and arson-obsessed vigilante", fleshing out our crime Relationship. Maybe then that sparks an idea in my head about a sheriff's deputy who's setting the fires to cover up his drug dealing. Maybe that ties into a relationship with another player, and so on and so forth. Just let the ideas spew forth.

Act I
In "Act I", we all take turns posting scenes. When it's your turn, you can choose to Establish the scene (you get to set the scene and the characters participating) but then everyone else can Resolve the scene (we get to decide if it'll end well for your character or poorly), or you can have everyone else Establish (be prepared to be thrust into high weirdness or immediate conflict) and then you Resolve. If it ends well, you get a white die and assign it to any other player. If it ends... not so well, you assign a black die to any other player. Act I continues until half the d6s are used up. This basically means everyone gets 2 scenes in Act I. Make them count.

Intermission
We'll take an OOC break for a few posts here to recenter the game and discuss events. This may not be strictly necessary - it's advised in face-to-face play, but we might not need it in PbP format.

Act II
Act II introduces the Tilt - some event or object that throws everything into a death spiral. It's more dice and charts, don't worry about it right now. I haven't internalized the Tilt rules yet.

Anyways, Act II proceeds like Act I, except in Act II when you get a black or white die at a scene's end, you KEEP the die. Why is that important?

Aftermath
When all the dice are handed out, we hit the Aftermath. Some characters might be dead, some stories might not feel wrapped up yet. Now's our chance to conclude everything. You take the dice you've "earned" over the course of the game and roll them. Subtract the lower total from the higher total. 2d6 black and 1d6 white might end up with black 8 - white 5, for a total of black 3. You then take things to an Aftermath chart, and the closer your total is to zero, the worse off you are. Therefore, if you want your dude to survive or even come out ahead, you don't want an even mix of dice.

But then that's how these movies go, isn't it? Willie in Bad Santa gets shot by the cops, but he lives and avoids jail. The Dude loses his car and his friend Donnie. Steve Buscemi, meet wood chipper.

The Important Thing
The simplest part of it, and the most common, is that when it is your turn you may:
1. Establish your scene, but you don't get to Resolve it.
or
2. Let everyone else Establish, but then you may Resolve your scene.

We've got enough people for a game, at any rate. We'll give it a shot and see how it goes.

I suppose we could talk about playset choice too. My tastes run towards contemporary crime, and I've got a lot of Justified, Southern Bastards, and Breaking Bad on my brain right now. The playsets that interest me the most are:

Flyover, News Channel 6, Touring Rock Band, and the Southern Town one in the main book. I like these because I feel like it's easy to play over-the-top badasses in weird settings in normal RPGs, but Fiasco can scratch that "just a dude making bad decisions in a normal place" itch, and it's meant to be a short trip.

I'm in!

Admiral Duck Sauce wrote:

Then we get 2d6 per player, half white, half black.

I suggest that, at least for the first one of these we run, once we are ready to move on to Act 1 we dispose of half the dice. This makes the game go faster, and might be a bit easier both for those new to Fiasco, as well as figuring out how to run it PbP.

Admiral Duck Sauce wrote:

We roll 'em all at once and we choose items from the playset based on those d6 results, one person picking one item at a time. At the end of it each player will have a relationship with the players to his metaphorical right and left, and there'll be some interesting needs, objects, and locations. Hopefully if we've done this part right, character ideas should more or less present themselves. Like, you might want a relationship of "Crime" between you and me, so you assign one of the setup dice to that relationship. Then maybe on Dave's turn, he sets one of the dice to "Arsonist and arson-obsessed vigilante", fleshing out our crime Relationship.

Lets say Adam is on Dave's left, and on Adam's turn, he chooses the broad category "Crime" for their relationship. Now its my turn. Instead of choosing an item that ties to me specivically, I have the option of further defining Adam and Dave's relationship. I grab a dice and flesh out that "Crime" relationship, choosing "Dealer and Junkie".

Admiral Duck Sauce wrote:

In "Act I", we all take turns posting scenes. When it's your turn, you can choose to Establish the scene (you get to set the scene and the characters participating) but then everyone else can Resolve the scene (we get to decide if it'll end well for your character or poorly), or you can have everyone else Establish (be prepared to be thrust into high weirdness or immediate conflict) and then you Resolve. If it ends well, you get a white die and assign it to any other player. If it ends... not so well, you assign a black die to any other player. Act I continues until half the d6s are used up. This basically means everyone gets 2 scenes in Act I. Make them count."

At the table, the way you do this is, at some point in the scene, someone silently chooses a dice from the pool and places it in front of the player who's scene it is (If I chose to set the scene, anyone else can choose the die; if I chose to resolve, I choose the die. Based on the color of that dice, you then resolve the scene appropriately.

Admiral Duck Sauce wrote:

Act II introduces the Tilt - some event or object that throws everything into a death spiral. It's more dice and charts, don't worry about it right now. I haven't internalized the Tilt rules yet.

The tilt is pretty simple. Each player rolls the dice they have in front of them, subtracting the black totals from the white totals. The person with the highest white total chooses a broad category off the tilt table. One person looks the table over and looks at the pips on the dice in front of him. Lets say he has 3, 4, 4, and 1. He checks the broad categories, and sees that those numbers correspond to three different categories: Tragedy, Mayhem, and Failure. He chooses Failure. The second player then, has 1, 2, 6, 1 on his dice. He looks at the corresponding entries for the sub-categories under mayhem. His choices are: A stupid plan, executed to perfection, You thought it was taken care of but it wasn't, and Fear leads to a fateful decision. Dave (the second player) chooses Fear leads to a fateful decision. We talk about what that means, and decide that Adam's drug dealer is threatening to kill him if he doesn't pay up. Paranoid and desperate, Dave hires the idiots at the local pizzeria to take care of it. The capture Adam's boss and take him back to the pizzariea, where they chop him up and cook him down in the stone oven. Now the cartel guys are in town, bringing the heat down on everyone!

Here's a good cheatsheet: [url="file://area51/users/reagant/Games/Worldspinner/facilitating_fiasco.pdf"][/url]

That sounds fine to me, I'll defer to your experience. As far as start times go, I figure let's pick a playset (there are other listed on http://www.bullypulpitgames.com/wiki/index.php?title=Fiasco_Playsets) this week and next week we'll start with the Setup phase.

Everything I'm reading advises Fiasco works best with 3-5 people. I figure we could take one more player, if there's interest, and maaaybe one more after that, but I'd drop out except as a facilitator to handle the dice and mechanical details.

I've played Touring Rock Band and Southern Town, and both are great. Ice Station Zero, from the core book is really rad too - its like The Thing but at McMurdo Station. Other's that would be fun: Saturday Night '78, Camp Death, and Lucky Strike (the latter is one of Morningstar's favorites). I've been wating to give Transatlantic a spin too.

I'm pretty set against anything too historical, at least to start. I feel like my lack of knowledge will make it harder to come up with good quirky things. I could do Saturday Night '78 or Camp Death, but Lucky Strike and Transatlantic don't speak to me as much as the others so far.

Southern Town sounds good to me.
I would prefer classic gangster or heist noir, set no later than the 50's, but things like Fargo, Reservoir Dogs, Way of the Gun, etc all work for me.

I've created a shared Google Drive folder to keep our files in one place, so we can refer to them as we go along through the game. We can use the phantom table to track dice and cards, and I have the Southern Town playset uploaded there to view/use.

MikeS wrote:

Southern Town sounds good to me.
I would prefer classic gangster or heist noir, set no later than the 50's, but things like Fargo, Reservoir Dogs, Way of the Gun, etc all work for me.

Fargo, Reservoir Dogs, and Way of the Gun is where our particular Venn diagrams overlap for sure, Mike. I'm down for Main Street (I apparently incorrectly referred to it earlier as Southern Town, my apologies). That playset looks like it could support anything from Jack Reacher to Pineapple Express.

Dave, Robert, any problems with using that Main Street playset Reagan's linked to in the Drive folder? Keeping in mind we won't be using everything in those lists of elements, but they're nicely open to interpretation as well.

I've got one more person who would like to join us if there's room.

Well, sure! And what I just realized is really, we've got room for four more people.

We can split into TWO playsets and just do double Fiasco, if you're willing to facilitate a second playset.

Two smaller groups of three might be good to learn the game and how to run it on DRA1, even if we don't find additional players.

I'd love to do two, but I've probably only got the bandwidth for one game at a time.

Oh no, I meant we can split our group of 6+ into 2 separate games of 3-4 players.

I'm down with Main Street

As am I.