Flying Circus (Part 2)
Flying Circus (Part 2)
Pushing the PbtA framework to its limits and taking to the skies
This is the second part and conclusion to our Flying Circus critical analysis. You can find part one 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.
Ludo This was one of the hardest engines for me to pinpoint and then disassemble. The Energy system would be an obvious candidate, and while it is the ruler of the skies, it is only a sub-engine. No, for the real engine that drives the game, I’m going to have to pick Stress.
Stress in Flying Circus represents, to put it crudely, the cost of action: flying gives you stress — the more difficult your plane is to fly, the more stressful, — fighting on the ground, trusting someone, and hitting specific cultural triggers. The latter will probably be your most common source of stress: the fisher may get stress from flying over the open sea, the student for having their ego hurt or the worker for losing control over what was supposed to be a simple job.
You should want to accumulate stress, because that is the primary driver of character advancement. “But Ludo, this does not seem that different from marking experience on a failure as on orthodox Powered by the Apocalypse and has the same ancestry as a stress system like the one of Blades In the Dark? How can this be an engine?”
Here lies the most important point: stress does nothing for you until your clear it. Accumulate too much stress and you become stressed and cannot grow as a character; keep getting further stress and you will burnout — which makes everything harder and prevents you from flying.
This makes one seek stress relief as much and as immediate as one gain stress — namely, as soon as the plane lands. These stress relief activities are far from a relaxation or lull in the game engine; they only keep raising the stakes, escalating issues and creating new problems: breaking the trust of someone, indulging in a pilgrimage of vices, venting at a poor victim, finding something truly beautiful, seeking solace in the arms of a confident or starting a bar fight Once cleared, stress is converted into experience.
The Stress/Relief engine chugs along, driving the action of characters during scenes and leading to new scenes, laying a path for new adventures and character-driven plots that feed into the jobs system. This constant back-and-forth keeps you flying to new places: you come down from mission stress, so you go wild into town, eventually getting everyone upset or running out of money, so you fly to the next town over, where after a job for some quick cash you obliterate the local booze supply, and then…
If I had to narrow into what makes Flying Circus happen, this would be my choice.
BradIn our playthrough, the stress engine is where our characters became defined. Errol and Dancer’s vices led to some of the most interesting character development I have ever seen and genuinely had this feeling of these larger-than-life college kids on a party bender.
Ludo briefly touched on the idea that most stress will come from your playbook and I just want to revisit that briefly, because it is another incredibly clever trick of game design. This stress is literally just an excuse to learn about your character’s background, to talk about why Flying over the open sea stresses out your fisher.
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 felling of what makes this game stand out from similar art.
LudoYou can get a lot of the game wrong or forget, seriously. The game is pretty accommodating, letting you learn through play it and learn/correct course as you go.
Dogfights are going to be both the most demanding aspect of the first sessions, and one you should experience early on to discover if the game is for you. You don’t need to get into details of guns, ammo, airplanes, ace abilities, etc to get the vibe of Flying Circus. What you need to grasp are the fundamentals of the Energy System.
The Energy system can be broken down into two components: Speed and Altitude.
You can convert Altitude to Speed and vice-versa, but there is always some waste.
Altitude is, for the most part, an Energy reserve: the more you have, the more you can to get Speed. However, altitude is not without cost: you need to be in a plane close enough to the opposition, high altitudes can only be reached by specialized planes, planes have an ideal altitude range, high altitudes have unique environmental hazards such as thinning air and cold, and your Speed caps depending on altitude.
Energy converted to Speed is “Use energy”: Speed allows you to do stuff during dogfights. High Speed is desirable, but puts stress on the engine, applies strong G-forces and makes difficult to hit moving targets. Still, the dogfighting move will eat through your speed — as will any attempt to regain control of a spinning plane.
Energy remains consistent from the beginning to the end of the fight — if you are flying a glider! Your engine is going to let you gain Energy by overcoming limits and getting more Speed — which you may climb to store as Altitude. Of course, this puts a heavy strain on the Engine. Getting that extra Speed can come at the cost of blowing your engine!
The system is extremely sturdy and can take a banging; you can make many mistakes and as long as you still get this vague framework, you will be able to experience what Flying Circus is about in a single session with light prep. If you need to remember something, keep to this short list:
You want to have high Energy, be it Speed or Altitude;
High Speed and Altitude come with penalties;
You need to spend Speed to win fights;
Get too low Altitude and you will crash!
Get too low Speed and your engine will stall!
Energy is hard to regain and you need to conserve it — and efficently use your engine.
As you can see, managing Energy and the state of the Engine is a challenging keystone in having exciting and tense air combat.
BradAs a player, you should go into this confident on your plane, your guns, and your playbook. There are a lot of individual moving parts, so just carefully read it all, be open and flexible, read over the above section and try to memorize it. But above all else, have fun.
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?
Ludo I have made a lot of mistakes and forgot a lot of details about mastering and playing Flying Circus. The careful design of complexity through layered simple elements and redundancy of rules, keeps nudging everything back to its engine; sure it may cause us to spend more money here or there, or have a slightly easier fight, but we have yet to mess up critically. Considering the game we are playing, this is a welcomed surprise.
The game paces itself quite well: you can learn every individual element as it is needed, and get deeper into it as you repeat the same procedure over and over. However, it is quite easy to look at the entire ystem and start to get the cart in front of the flying oxen and try to engage all mechanics and sub-mechanics at the same time. This is going to overburden you for no reason, and was a major obstacle for me to learn the game; I don’t recommend repeating my mistake.
Once you have got the basic, there is a genuine sense of “system mastery” once you get your plane doing what you want it to do; this is its own kind of fun and it can easily lead to a rabbit hole of plane-customization. Just be careful diving in.
The book has a lot of care about subjects, but alas, it cannot teach you a play culture. One should frequently touch base, confirming that nothing has changed since session zero and discussing after each mission. These things are something only you can try, and do not let the good efforts of the book lead you into neglecting the creation of a play culture of consent and comfort.
BradLudo hits all the big notes here, I genuinely have nothing to add.
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.
LudoFlying Circus reminds me much of my feelings looking back at Fellowship. They are two games that more or less at the same design generation, when everything that was assumed to have been possible to do with PbtA had been done, show the potential of heterodox design.
That said, I don’t know how easy it is to design with Flying Circus. It is pretty easy to design for Flying Circus: it is pretty easy to make your own planes with the official plain builder, and there is at the time of writing a collection of planes made by other designers. Recently, there was the first Flying Circus Jam, where talented third party designers have made new playbooks, planes and settings; even I tried my hand at a Vampire playbook.
However, there are so many moving parts that Flying Circus is probably best used as an inspiration for design than something you can hack. For now. The possibility is open: while Flying Circus has no license, its art and text have blanket permission for free-use for creative and commercial use — except if you are a company or it is art or text owned by someone else that is subject to its own terms. I still recommend you contact — and credit — Erika Chappell. This generosity also reminds me of Fellowship’s license, and who knows, if you really love to play with the moving parts of the system, you can make your own hack.
If you do, I will be very impressed and would love to hear about it.
BradIf you ever encounter me in a format other than this, the stone tablets I leave abandoned in Ludo’s home that she transcribes onto the internet for your reading pleasure, you will inevitably hear me joke that “fun is a buzzword.” Beyond what Ludo has said here, what you should steal is that you should build the game you want to play. Flying Circus is a letter of love, and you it oozes joy in that. The game is lovingly crafted, lovingly designed, and a work of art because of these things, so build the game you would find fun, and somewhere, some other person will love it too.