So, Finally managed to get the second game of Henryn viimeinen iso keikka played on Tuesday. I won’t do an actual play report or anything, but there were a few things that really worked quite nicely. I already know that when I’ll run another campaign of it, I’ll do some things differently, but some things would stay the same.

This was the spotlight game of Mikko’s character Johnny Smalls, who is a great conman, an expert womanizer, and 100% on top of his game, always. His aspects (important thingamobs that quite well define what he’s about) were “Stylized image”, “Non-violence” and “Lyonne Ritz – an heiress girlfriend” plus the two that all characters have “Health” and “Primary role”.

When a player is in a situation where he still wants to accomplish something in the scene with his character but he is out of chips (the mechanical way to track how much stuff the character can still do) he can trade in one of these aspects to get more chips. Now, Johnny-boy has been spending the past two games hanging out with a rap-star Puppy D and his crew of gang thugs to get Puppy as a pawn in his schemes. During this session, Johnny ended up with D’s gang on the desert, where the gang was doing drugs, shooting cans and drinking booze. For a while, everything is good, but then the drugs come in. Johnny declines taking any, and a moment later he won’t shoot beer cans with the guys (Johnny has a strict no guns policy). The thugs aren’t happy. I set up a challenge with two parts – “Stay good friends with Puppy D (3 chips)” and “Stay in terms with Puppy D’s crew (2 chips)”.

(I might remember the details wrong, but it went something like this) Mikko has one chip when he actually got to paying things off. He decided to use his Con Artist role to buy off the three chip part of staying friends with Puppy D, but that meant the crew would be left disgruntled. So, Mikko sacrifices Johnny’s “Stylized image”, and Johnny unbuttons his shirt, lowers his Armani pants to a ridiculously low gangsta-position and gets a scarf on his head and some bling-bling and a funny hat… and by lowering Johnny from the standards he’s set for the character, Mikko gets 3 chips, two of which he uses to get the gang-members to accept Johnny even if he doesn’t take their drugs or shoot their guns.

Now, why I think this was very nice test of that part of the system – until Mikko has a moment to take a break, and enough chips to buy the aspect back, it’s gone. This means that for the rest of the session, Johnny was never quite as sharp-looking as he’d like to be. He chose the wrong shoes for the suit, forgot his belt, that sort of stuff. And according to Mikko, when I talked with him after the game, it was something that really hit him bad. Since the aspects are character-defining things, loss of one feels like a loss. A blow to even an insignificant one like “Stylized image” can hurt like a bullet in the upper leg area.

Mikko also lost the “Lyonne Ritz” aspect during the game, to keep the FBI from realizing Johnny’s schemes and keep the secrets for a while longer, by what was probably the most horrible break-up I’ve ever seen or heard of in my life. Matti’s old Russian gentleman mastermind ended the game session as a short-tempered drunk who didn’t care if people got roughhoused around during a gig. Matijas and Maija on the other hand, survived with everything just fine. Such is gambling. When I say I’d do things differently on the second run, I’d make the gig a bit more personal – the fact they’re running other peoples’ errands makes it less about “what I want” and more about “what I have to do”.

But the greatest thing is that we got the damn game session played after 6 weeks of cancelations. Next session coming up maybe in a week, unless something goes wrong again