You can find part 1 here.
5. Disassemble Engine
Games have a flow, which, when you hit, the game pretty much runs itself. It is extremely satisfying. After examining the interactions of game elements, we single out the most important - the one that sets the pace of sessions, or even campaigns. We focus on how that engine works, how it makes the game move along, and what to do to make it do what you want to do - and how to keep it running clean.
Dice rolls are there, but they don’t really feed into anything, doing their thing and getting out of the way; if anything, Social Cues (and Nicknames) are more of a driver to the game. But even then, where they really make the turntable, is when they flow into the driving engine: the Social Club.
“Collective” Characters are not strange to TTRPGs, as a neat way to justify the characters coming together, pool resources together, provide an ongoing shared context. Most games with such thing, be a crew or shared spaceship, are about leaving that stage; for example, even in BitD, a game where the only real character is the crew, the type of crew serves as context to put jobs and why you are doing them, quickly being abandoned as a place and a person once the game starts rolling, becoming the mechanical abilities of it.
Social Clubs stand out on how it centers play around, not through mechanical1 dominance, but through staging. The game is set on the Social Club, the Social Club is about the characters’ special interest and how they all spend it there — even the staff of the wealthy are not there for work, they share on that interest. While not domineering, while offering mechanical benefits, even as a character as itself, the Social Club does not steal the spotlight — not more than the stage2 would during a play.
And that is how it operates as an engine. You don’t need to actively worry about your character improvement during play — it will happen organically, with you passively getting pocket money, new Social Cues and Nicknames at the end of each session. The rich social life of the characters tracks back to the Social Club: you start with ten members, a location, a rival club and get pushed into starting a challenge. The standing of your club is everything, and you seek to improve it by showing up to social events, defeating your rivals in petty challenges or tournament challenges, seek additional funds. Between characters, you also compete for club privileges, just as use of special facilities and/or prestigious roles within the Club. Every action, every scene, reflects on your character and the Club, but it keeps going back to the Club. You always looking for some patronage, opportunities to show off and other characters to recruit into your polyc… Social Club.
BradThe Social Club sure is in fact the main engine, it is the thing upon which you hang the rest of the game, but I am gonna mention Scene Cues.
Scene Cues are the steering wheel, you use these to point the car towards a thing and make it happen. They closest resemble Powered By The Apocalypse Moves, but you don’t roll them, instead they refresh at the start of the session.
Scene Cues are simply something that your archetype can do, cause a scene and distract everyone, or quickly and deeply connect to any fellow artists? Absolutely, now the GM does get to decide if this is a good or a bad thing, but this forms the witty repartee and punchlines of this comic show.
The other thing that makes this pop is that at first you only gain additional uses, and then when you add Secret Societies you get a new one!
6. Essentials For Session One
So, you got this game, you going to play it, but you don’t have the time to read everything. Or even worse, your have read it and now it is all jumbled together. Here we break down the things that you absolutely want to try to get right and/or hit during your first session, so you get the feeling of what makes this game stand out from similar art.
LucréciaThe game actually expects you to read it if you are facilitating! Shock! Awe!3
It is actually a good idea, because it is written to be read, and not by someone that does not seem to hate that they have to write a book. But of course, let this section act as a reading guide.
Surprisingly late in the book, where you get the way the game works is by Chapter 5: Putting It All Together (pg. 71). If there are six pages someone must have read, it is those.
You can infer most of it from going through character creation and filling the sheets (pg. 34-42). I suggest you go through these together as a group, which should take you around an hour of play.
Despite how central Social Club is for play, if you have not got the time for prep, you cannot go wrong with using the example The Sleuth Society (pg.108) or Best Buds (pg. 111) for your first foray.
BradIt is so rare in our art form to have a game that doesn’t read like stereo instructions, and yet here we are with Flabbergasted! The game expects to be read, and that’s all it asks of you.
Read Chapter 5, and then make sure everyone at the table has done their homework and read it. This is a rarity, but I used one of the pregen clubs (The Sleuth Society) and had a blast, so I fully recommend the others.
7. Playing The Game Wrong
Games are played wrong. Rules will be misunderstood, interactions will be confused, the importance of certain tech disregarded; etc. This is good, and it is good to acknowledge for: you cannot have the designer at your time, and even if they were, they would be just another player - and entitled to play it wrong. After identifying stress points of the game, things that don’t connect that well, we think of the things that are more likely to be (our have been) “played wrong”. What happens when you forget a line in page 273 clearly saying this is impossible?
LucréciaThe biggest stress point with Flabbergasted may be the focus on Episodic play, a concession more to the emulation/indie design trends of making everything an “Episode” in a “Season” of a “Series”. There is a very specific game, with specific game decisions where this is the best call.
It does not serve Flabbergasted well, unfortunately. Pacing feels awkward when having to conform to an Episodic assumption; more specifically, comedy suffers a lot, in beats, setups and payoffs, by sticking to an Episodic format AND Episodes being expected to last multiple sessions4.
I recommend you try to find a game pace and framework that works for you; personally, I found that playing for the session and abandoning the pretense of episodes or seasons benefited our ability to pay off from each other — specially comedically.
Flaws are pretty neat ideas for helping to conceptualize a character, but they drop to the wayside during play — most don’t survive characterization past the first session. The culprit? Scene Cues are just too successful, too good at what they do. If you want to keep Flaws relevant, maybe tie them as the seasoning, changing how you do your Scene Cues — working with each other, rather than the mechanical competitors they will otherwise be.
Two game mechanics have a design that can “FeelBad” when trying to pursuit the goals of the game: Lucky Coin and Readies.
Lucky Coin is the arbitrary, standard “narrative currency that you get for good roleplaying”, for all that entails. Considering the issue with Flaws, Lucky Coins could be made easier to fit into the game engine, by having it be a reward when you fail at something due to your Flaw or Dilemma — rather than because you made a funny voice that Kyle enjoyed. However, there is a second issue of FeelBad design: spending a Lucky Coin, only helps you get extra successes heads on a tail flip. Not only it is arbitrary to get them, you may use them and get nothing half of the time; and since you can only have three Lucky Coins, you may save them for a while and then have a 12,5% chance of not getting anything from that stockpile. This decision seems quite redundant/stands out poorly when compared with Nicknames. Nicknames are, essentially, Lucky Coin done right. Each session, you can get a new nickname at the end; this process is collaborative, with everyone being a participant. When you have a Nickname, you can make it apply to a situation to automatically succeed at a check.
Readies are the money your character has ready. It is used to both elevate the Social Club and to pay for bribes; however, it refreshes every session and is based on your archetype, a big gap between extremes. This can lead one of the feel like another player has more narrative control, especially on the long-term shaping of the Social Club, as the gap widens as the campaign progresses. Introducing lower class to Secret Societies ASAP can help bridge this gap by offering them Readies from Secret Society missions.
BradLu hit my pain points as well, I think Lucky Coins should be dropped totally and just focus on Nicknames.
8. What to Steal
Experiencing good art is the most important step in making good art. We look back at the things that worked and did not work about this game, see what we learned for design work, interesting tech and just a general overview of things that we will take from this game and bring into others. Or more honestly: since many of us may not play this game and we have it in our library, this way we can get some use out of it.
LucréciaFlabbergasted is a pretty good example of how to do a comedic game that is still a TTRPG. No small feat.
It also has a quite fit organization, with information easy to find and use, without impairing a more orthodox reading experience. Standing out among these is the default setting of Pecadillo, and the collection of plot hooks that can be easily be deployed as session/episode openers.
One may notice that I don’t have my usual complaint about staying powers of games like this; the contrast between things that assume long-term play (such as Reputation and the Social Club) and that because of bits being tired/fast advancement are unlikely to over play that long5. That is because Flabbergasted is pretty good at working at whatever level of continuity. You can have a pretty satisfying one-shot that in no way leaves you feeling like you missing out, or you can spend the time to improve your Social Club during a lengthy campaign. Secret Societies, I think, are the secret sauce. They come into right in at the moment most games of Flabbergasted will be losing steam, and allow you to explore a new side of your character while also injecting much more money into the Club. This “second wind” for a game fascinates me and I think it can be worth studying.
BradFlabbergasted is a comedy ttrpg that isn’t just one long unfunny bit. That is a rarity in this crazy artform of ours. It is also a perfect storm of a game that actually has a clean and concise layout and a well designed system and setting. Flabbergasted shows that the fundamentals of our art shouldn’t change and simply be honed, and that’s what you should take from it. You can have a fun, stylish and evocative design and table book without sacrificing legibility and fun at the table, and should bring that energy to all of you.
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As most people understand “mechanics”.
On the other hand, considering how many plays and operas I have seen with overshadowing extravagant scenery…
Gasp.
There is a reason why comedies tend to have shorter episodes, and this becomes even more of an issue for comedy in TTRPGs.
The abundance of games made for one-shots that have baffling expectations to be a campaign or the 4-12 sessions half-life of most PbtA games.