Remember Tomorrow Session 1 Review

Last night me and the MGG played our first session of the new cyberpunk "GM-less" game called Remember Tomorrow.  The game is created by Gregor Hutton, who is a fairly well known indie RPG designer and previously known to me for his really fun space bug killing(like the Starship Troopers movie) RPG called 3:16.  I enjoyed 3:16 when I played it way back at the start of MGG, would actually enjoy playing it again sometime.

As I said Remember Tomorrow is a cyberpunk game.  If that doesn't mean anything to you then think of the movie Blade Runner.  If that doesn't mean anything to you then I'm sorry, your life must suck.  Go watch that movie right now.  Stop reading and go watch it.

Have you corrected that sin against your own humanity?  Good.

Remember Tomorrow is also a "Gm-less" game, as in there is no set gamemaster, everyone gets to play.  That is a little bit of a misnomer in this one, because it really comes across as almost more of a "player-less" game (that observation was made by John, and after considering it I agree) because what you really end up doing with the bulk of your effort in this game is trading off the GM chair.

The basic structure of the game involves going around the table and taking turns framing and narrating scenes.  When your turn comes up you have three options for scene type:  Introduction, Deal, Face Off.  The only time you don't have access to all three options is during the first two rounds of scenes, when each player introduces the PC and the Faction that they created during setup, using, you guessed it, Introduction Scenes.

Character and Faction creation are simple and quick.  They have to be, because you can and will be creating more of each on the fly as you play the game.  You pick or roll randomly for various components of your character, and quickly assemble them all into a short but succinct picture of a PC.  To create a PC you do the following steps:
1.  Pick a Name/Handle (lists are provided and they are in sets of 10 if you just want to roll.)
2.  Roll/Pick an Identity:  You're looking at things like Activist, Dealer, Tech, Hacker, etc.  Purely color and fluff here.
3.  Roll/Pick a Motivation:  Envy, Greed, Freedom, Respect and the like.  No mechanical weight to these, but they do have a large fictional weight.  Your goal and drive in the game will be heavily tied to it.
4.  Gear:  Roll or pick 3 pieces of fun cyberpunk gear, like flying cars, needler guns, artificial limbs, etc.  Once again this is going to be fluff and color.
5.  Parameters Ready/Willing/Able:  These are your "stats" for this game, they describe how Ready, Willing, and Able you are to pursue and accomplish your goal.  They will be rated on a scale of 1-9 and you basically roll d10s and try to get at or under these scores to get successes.  You get 12 points to split between the three, none can start higher than 8 and lower than 2 is probably dangerous.
6.  Conditions:  You get one Positive Condition (Angry, Connected, Prepared, etc) and one Negative (Confused, Dying, Lost, Hunted, etc).  These flavor your RP and end up being a currency that both you and your opponents spend to affect outcomes.
7.  Goal:  Finally pick a goal.  No option to roll randomly for this sadly :)  Look at your Identity, Motivation, Conditions, all that and let it influence your decision when coming up with a goal.

Making a Faction is pretty much the same sort of thing.  You pick a Type(like Identity), Conditions, Motivation, and Influence (like Parameters but just one and starts at 4).

I rolled randomly for pretty much everything I possibly could, except Parameters, Goal, and first name.  I ended up with the following character:

Elias Yamamoto, Activist.  Motivation: Survival, Ready 5, Willing 4, Able 3, PCondition: Angry, NCondition: Dying, Gear: VTOL, Flechette Gun, Knowledge Skillsoft, Goal:  Get my consciousness transferred into a synth body.

And Faction:  Orange Micro, Pharma Corp.  Motivation: Revenge, Influence: 4, PCondition: Enthused, NConditon: Coerced

John created an Arms Dealer named Connor Wu and the Green Dragon Triad faction.  Emily made Vitoria Chen, a VR entertainment cube dealer and the Doki Doki Gang(a professional group of contract killers), and Josh came up with Leonard Spencer, an antiques dealer, and the Kleinen Pharmaceuticals faction.

We all started off in various places across the world, me and Josh somewhere in Europe, Emily and John over in Asia around Hong Kong.  I had a bit of trouble keeping together track of all the details of the four different stories that were all happening at once; so I'm not going to go into much detail as to what happened in the actual play.

Connor Wu spent time trying to track down his estranged brother, while dealing with the Green Dragon Triad trying to pull him back in.  Vitoria Chen was dealing having been financially cuckolded by her ex and trying to get out from under her dad's influence; though the forceful offer from the GD Triad was not the way she wanted to do it.  Leonard Spencer was constantly going out the fire escape to get away from IRS agents, Triad thugs, and the like; while working for Kleinen to acquire some sort of giant Faberge egg that supposedly had a deadly virus sample hidden within it.  Oh and Elias hired the Doki Doki Gang to try and take out the leader of the anti-android Church of One Life, as well as spending time looking for a place with the equipment for the consciousness transfer.

Back to looking at the framework of the game.  As I said before when your turn comes up you are basically stepping into the GM chair to one degree or another, its called being the Controller in game terms.  Your three options if you remember were Introduction, Deal, and Face-Off scenes.  An Introduction scene is exactly what it sounds like, you introduce a new character or faction.

Your first two rounds of scenes will all be these, introducing each players initial PC and Faction.  Then as you play if you want to bring a new PC or Faction into play, just whip one up real quick (nice to have a good stack of blank sheets available for this) and then run an Intro scene for it.  After narrating the intro, you make an unopposed roll (all rolls are 3d10 by default) and then compare the die results to your Parameters or Influence to see how many successes you get.  You then spend the successes 1 for 1 to get various improvements like increasing a Parameter, adding a PCon or removing a NCon.

A Deal scene lets your Held PC make a deal with a Faction.  I just realized I didn't address Held PCs yet.  Basically each player gets to hold on to a single PC as their exclusive character that only they can use, but one can change the PC you have Held with other PCs that are out in the middle if one wants to.  All non-Held PCs are in the middle and usable by anyone.  In a Deal scene you pick 1 Faction in the middle and narrate a scene where you negotiate a deal that advantages both your PC and the Faction.  The Faction gets an automatic +1 Influence bump, and the PC gets an unopposed roll to try and get successes to spend on improvements.

The main meat of the game are going to be Face-Off scenes, at least that is the intention.  In a Face Off scene you pick either your Held PC or one of the common PCs or Factions and then go after someone else's Held PC.  You narrate the scene, and then when you come to a point of conflict you each state a scene goal and make an opposed roll.  The side with the most successes wins and gets their scene goal for free, and then gets to spend their margin of success (difference in successes between the Winner and Loser) on improvements, similar to the other two scenes.  The big difference is that here in a Face Off is the only place you can spend a success to get a Tick or check on one of your Parameters.  Accomplishing your goal requires a Tick on each of your Parameters btw, showing that your totally Ready, Willing, and Able to carry out your goal.  Also, if you lose this roll off, and want to still hamper your opponent, you have the option of removing one of their NCons to reduce their margin of success by one.

The other side of the currency in the game are the PCons, which can be spent before a roll to add an auto-success, or after for a re-roll.

Now I know there has been a lot here, and the post is long already, but I'm going to finish off with a few of my thoughts and impressions about the game so far:

Pros:
- Love the ability to have random character creation
- The wording and language of the game really seems to work well for it and its genre and theme
- It is a tight, clean well designed game
- You feel like your almost always improving your character and driving forward
- Core mechanics are easy to figure out and prepping is a simple process
- Seems to do a good job of handling the disparate stories that end up connecting later style

Cons:
- Not a big fan of the Cross mechanic.  Which I forgot to mention, but its basically if you roll a double or triple on the dice then the next person's scene has to incorporate something from yours.  Its meant to integrate the stories, but it comes across forced and can be annoying
- Keeping track of four different stories, or three other peoples stories while planning my own, was very difficult.  And driving someone else's story via Face-Off scenes is very important, so you HAVE to know what is going on.
- I feel a strong disparity between the natural desire to drive your goal forward, and the place where your power is vested in the mechanics.  Basically you have the ability to drive other's stories forward, but your own mostly has to wait on others to drive it.  This was very hard for me to get totally.
- Standard issue with highly narrative games, if you take full control of a scene things can get a bit masturbatory, but if you hand off control of NPCs the other people may feel self-conscious that they don't know the NPC or know where you want to go, or may just "mess things up" if your view.  Another hard thing for me to deal with.
- It can be hard to frame scenes in other's stories without stopping game flow for a meta-explanation of where they see their story going, and what they are doing with it so far.

Overall you have to really pay attention to the other stories, get invested in the other characters, be thinking of what you can do to drive their story home; and pretty much just be reactive with your own story and character.  All of that is very counter intuitive to me.  It definitely feels more like what one would be doing in the GM chair instead of the player chair, and getting into that mind set was a bit beyond me for the first session.  But I really like the design and aesthetic here, and we will be playing again next week.  So hopefully I can grok it this time and come at it with a better attitude and understanding.

Remember Tomorrow Review Part 2