A Penny for My Thoughts
Aug. 24th, 2009 11:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
featherynscaleOne of the other things that made this weekend brilliant was that I got a chance to play one of our shiny new Filthy Hippie Games at Games Night on Friday. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
triadruid, ruisseau, popefelix and I spent the evening at A Penny for My Thoughts, and it was wildly entertaining.
A Penny for My Thoughts is a non-competitive, diceless storytelling game. In it, each player is a patient undergoing a radical experimental treatment for severe retrograde amnesia. This is actually a lot more fun than it sounds. Anyway, the shtick is that you have all been given a drug called Mnemosyne, and this drug allows you to see into the other people's minds, and help them recover their memories.
You begin by writing down "memory triggers", which are random words that suggest some sort of sensory experience. Each player will, at three points during the game, draw a memory trigger, and everyone together will build a memory for that person around that trigger. My character's triggers in this game were "a thunderstorm crashing overhead", "the feeling of falling from a height", and "the smell of pumpkin pie baking". Each of these was used to create a scene that went to make up my story.
When it is your turn, you draw a trigger, and each of the other players asks you a question about it. Here's the kicker: when you are the active player (called the Traveler), you can only say "Yes, and..." to the questions, and then add some other sort of detail to the answer. So, when I drew the thunderstorm trigger, one of the first questions I was asked was "Are you a storm-chaser?". I said, "Yes, and I was running towards the truck with an armload of instruments." This more or less sealed my fate for the game, as I developed over the course of the evening into a thrill-seeking meteorologist who had been struck by lightning and come back for more.
The questions and your answers set the scene for your story. From there, the Traveler begins to tell their story, except that they are unable to talk about their own important actions. When the Traveler reaches an important decision point, they have to ask for help. The other players give them options of what happened next, and the Traveler chooses the one they like best, and goes on with the story from there.
Each player gets three turns as the Traveler, after which they have a pretty coherent character story, and they are asked if this is a life they want to remember. Our group was all pretty happy with their remembered "lives" at the end: I was the daredevil storm-chaser (I lost my memory when our truck was struck by lightning),ruisseau was a popular classical pianist who lived a very daytime drama sort of life (she lost her memory by being struck by a semi - she had wandered dazedly into traffic after hitting a pedestrian who turned out to be her estranged father), triadruid was an arsonist who had killed his abusive father on purpose, and his beautiful young sister more-or-less on accident (he lost his memory after being stabbed in an epic standoff with the police and popefelix's character), and popefelix was a knife-thrower in the circus whose beautiful young girlfriend had been killed by her psycho brother (he lost his memory after being shot in the head by triadruid's character).
The game is amazingly simple to learn and play. You use pennies as tokens: you gain a penny by offering another player an option that they choose to take in their story, and then you pay the pennies out to the other players on your turn when you make choices. The pennies also serve to keep track of who has the next turn, which improves the flow of the game because people can't back off from taking their turn.
The only real complaint I have about the game is that it doesn't end as strongly as I would like. There's a big dramatic moment when a Traveler tells about the trauma that caused the memory loss, which is great, but when all players have had that moment, there's not a solid finish. I don't know how to fix that. It turned out in practice to not be as disappointing as I feared it would be, but it's still kind of a let-down. Maybe next time we will do a "what will you do now?" round at the end.
popefelix chafed a bit under the restriction of keeping the game in the "real world". At the beginning of the game, you get a document called "Facts and Reassurances" that gives you some basic rules about the world, and the default assumption is that you are in a world very much like the one we live in. There are some variant F&R's included in the book, including one for a sort of Arkham Horror world and one for a secret agent game, but popefelix wanted to try starting without any Facts and Reassurances, and let the world evolve naturally. We'll probably try that at some point, too. I suspect that what will actually happen in that case is that the person who asks the first question will largely determine the shape of the world. There's probably nothing wrong with that, though. We'll see how it works.
I'd also like to try this as a character-building exercise for a more "traditional" role-playing game. I think that the mechanics, stripped of the psychiatric setting, would be brilliant for creating interesting back-story. Any game is better if the characters have some richness to them.
Overall, I thought this was a fine way to spend 4-5 hours. We'll be playing it again, I'm sure.
triadruid, ruisseau, popefelix and I spent the evening at A Penny for My Thoughts, and it was wildly entertaining.A Penny for My Thoughts is a non-competitive, diceless storytelling game. In it, each player is a patient undergoing a radical experimental treatment for severe retrograde amnesia. This is actually a lot more fun than it sounds. Anyway, the shtick is that you have all been given a drug called Mnemosyne, and this drug allows you to see into the other people's minds, and help them recover their memories.
You begin by writing down "memory triggers", which are random words that suggest some sort of sensory experience. Each player will, at three points during the game, draw a memory trigger, and everyone together will build a memory for that person around that trigger. My character's triggers in this game were "a thunderstorm crashing overhead", "the feeling of falling from a height", and "the smell of pumpkin pie baking". Each of these was used to create a scene that went to make up my story.
When it is your turn, you draw a trigger, and each of the other players asks you a question about it. Here's the kicker: when you are the active player (called the Traveler), you can only say "Yes, and..." to the questions, and then add some other sort of detail to the answer. So, when I drew the thunderstorm trigger, one of the first questions I was asked was "Are you a storm-chaser?". I said, "Yes, and I was running towards the truck with an armload of instruments." This more or less sealed my fate for the game, as I developed over the course of the evening into a thrill-seeking meteorologist who had been struck by lightning and come back for more.
The questions and your answers set the scene for your story. From there, the Traveler begins to tell their story, except that they are unable to talk about their own important actions. When the Traveler reaches an important decision point, they have to ask for help. The other players give them options of what happened next, and the Traveler chooses the one they like best, and goes on with the story from there.
Each player gets three turns as the Traveler, after which they have a pretty coherent character story, and they are asked if this is a life they want to remember. Our group was all pretty happy with their remembered "lives" at the end: I was the daredevil storm-chaser (I lost my memory when our truck was struck by lightning),
ruisseau was a popular classical pianist who lived a very daytime drama sort of life (she lost her memory by being struck by a semi - she had wandered dazedly into traffic after hitting a pedestrian who turned out to be her estranged father), triadruid was an arsonist who had killed his abusive father on purpose, and his beautiful young sister more-or-less on accident (he lost his memory after being stabbed in an epic standoff with the police and popefelix's character), and popefelix was a knife-thrower in the circus whose beautiful young girlfriend had been killed by her psycho brother (he lost his memory after being shot in the head by triadruid's character). The game is amazingly simple to learn and play. You use pennies as tokens: you gain a penny by offering another player an option that they choose to take in their story, and then you pay the pennies out to the other players on your turn when you make choices. The pennies also serve to keep track of who has the next turn, which improves the flow of the game because people can't back off from taking their turn.
The only real complaint I have about the game is that it doesn't end as strongly as I would like. There's a big dramatic moment when a Traveler tells about the trauma that caused the memory loss, which is great, but when all players have had that moment, there's not a solid finish. I don't know how to fix that. It turned out in practice to not be as disappointing as I feared it would be, but it's still kind of a let-down. Maybe next time we will do a "what will you do now?" round at the end.
popefelix chafed a bit under the restriction of keeping the game in the "real world". At the beginning of the game, you get a document called "Facts and Reassurances" that gives you some basic rules about the world, and the default assumption is that you are in a world very much like the one we live in. There are some variant F&R's included in the book, including one for a sort of Arkham Horror world and one for a secret agent game, but popefelix wanted to try starting without any Facts and Reassurances, and let the world evolve naturally. We'll probably try that at some point, too. I suspect that what will actually happen in that case is that the person who asks the first question will largely determine the shape of the world. There's probably nothing wrong with that, though. We'll see how it works. I'd also like to try this as a character-building exercise for a more "traditional" role-playing game. I think that the mechanics, stripped of the psychiatric setting, would be brilliant for creating interesting back-story. Any game is better if the characters have some richness to them.
Overall, I thought this was a fine way to spend 4-5 hours. We'll be playing it again, I'm sure.