Contenders Fighty-Monsters hack

Just finished playing a session of Contenders, Joe Prince's game of down-on-their-luck prizefighters, with Daniel and Nate. After they had agreed to play the game at all, I asked them if they were interested in testing my idea for a pokemon/my-pet-monster inspired setting. They agreed to that as well.

There's a couple of 'system' changes that are simple enough: The out-of-ring stats become connected to the "kid" half of the character, and the in-ring traits belong to the monster. Monsters are created by naming an animal, one or two principal colors, and one distinct unusual feature. They are not played by their creator, but by the player to that person's right. They resemble younger siblings in character, looking to the kid as a guide to making their way and how to interact with things, being generally trusting and sometimes questioning. They should learn from whatever they see done. Their player should use this to highlight the moral weight of the characters actions.

Part of my ultimate goal for the design is to make it approachable and encouraging to kids, an opportunity for younger and older players to safely confront moral issues and tell the kind of happy/depressing stories that Contenders enables. However, since I was playing with "adults" this time, I asked them if they wanted to leave the table open to the bad stuff. We decided the game would be set in the more-or-less real world, in Prague.

I played Robert, a young Midwesterner with a penchant for dinosaurs, and a very sick mommy. His monster is Pyrosaur, a lime raptor with fire-breath. Daniel played Pyrosaur, and Calvin, a tempermental Bostonian trying to save his parish church with the help of Mickey, a black-and-red-feathered wyvern. Mickey was played by Nate, along with Tatiana, an orphan whose blue-black leopard Princess had freed from her horrific state-run orphanage, and who is now fighting for the money to be able to live with all her friends in a big house and be safe for ever and ever.

We'd only played six scenes, culminating in one fight, before we had to stop for the night (the game was called on account of Game 2 in the NBA Finals, which I can hear down the hall as I write this). Fun stuff, but obviously too little to go on for a fully informed opinion, either about Contenders or my mod. So far though, the only hitch I've noticed is what I assumed would happen in a game with only three people: character overload. The two promotion scenes were the worst offenders, as we had the spotlight player's kid, his monster, the challenged kid, his monster and the promoter. Hard to keep straight. Four players would have been a lot better, I think. But the innocence of the kids and the sheer physicality and inadvertent deadlines of the monsters made for some fun story meat. Twelve and fourteen-year-olds finding (and failing!) work in the Czech underworld was a lot less ridiculous than I was worried it would seem. The game gives them a mission and a reason to be going into that underworld, after all.

Robert failed his first job for a mobster named Dmitri, learning to dislike and mistrust cops, then cleverly stole some drugs, "to make up for the last time," giving him the money his parents need to stay in the hospice they've moved into. Calvin had a much more violent mistake in his also-botched first job for local Irish-boy-done "good" Samuel when Mickey broke a storefront too enthusiastically, fatally cutting a worker with flying glass, then taking Sam's goon's head off when the guy tried to stop them from fleeing the scene. Tatiana went straight for the meat with the aforementioned bout, getting an impressive debut victory in a filthy underground circuit run by a mysterious man named Olaf, against the emigre Johann and his feelthy monkey Makek.

I'm very much looking forward to continuing things on Wednesday. I think that I'll start with giving Pyrosaur some endurance training, and then Calvin and Mickey will fight semi-verteran Jiro and his chainsaw-mantis Yoshi in Olaf's pit.

I can't wait till I get to narrate a fight! That looked like fun. I'm really pleased that Daniel and Nate enjoyed it.