Greg Lawrence
3/3/2020
Prof. Morgen
Fiasco Reflection
The journey Michael, Winslow and I went through during our play-through of Fiasco were interesting in the sense that initially, our background knowledge of the rules was somewhat helpful but we still struggled to set up our game. Our understanding of multiplayer RPG games was different from Fiasco because you really needed to pay close attention to the rulebook. The assignment of characters was awkward yet funny due to myself not really having known my two mates who I was playing with at the time. The characters we derived were ex-lovers and father and son which brought a communal laugh. My character was Russel Cooper, a gambler who was destined for a glorious death. Michael was the character Edward Anderson, who is my ex-lover and the father of Collin Anderson(Winslow). From my first reading of the rulebook, I got the sense the game was set up to engage our creative minds. The fun aspect of the game comes from your decisions on character roles and actions. My group of players consisted of three boys who more or less wanted an action-packed scenario with death and violence. When we decided on the relationship between Collin and I was that we were gamblers, we almost immediately went to have the problem of being in debt to loan sharks who want their money back. This could have come from past experience from other games or just a common interest in this sort of plotline. The aspect of using two different color dice to determine characteristics and relationships between players provided us with a sense of structure we needed to justify our story. The game does a good job of incorporating our imagination within the guidelines of the 134-page rulebook. The story we told was between three players who were father and son with an ex-lover to the father who has a gambling problem with the son(Collin). We started with the dilemma of deciding how to pay back the loan sharks who were threatening to kill us and we came up with a plan for a heist to steal a large quantity of gold. The dice we rolled, made us incorporate a train and a handrail train car. Our minds related this potential storyline to one like a mission from Red Dead Redemption II, which is personally one of my favorite games and involves the robbery of a train. The robbery went successfully due to a white dice being given to me when it was my scene. It was interesting to see our excitement levels rise when the climax of our story came closer when we knew in a way what was going to happen. Throughout the acting of our story, I was laid back in deciding what happened unless when it was my turn to develop a scene. Then I tried to make it interesting with a good setup for the next person’s scene. At the start of setting up the game, I felt sort of overwhelmed by the size of the guide to playing and the fact that I was working with people I haven’t really had a conversation with before. As we set up the game and came together in deciding to incorporate or leave out certain actions/relationships I grew in the sense that my opinions wouldn’t upset the other players or affect the game in a negative way. So in a sense, as I became more comfortable with my fellow players the game became increasingly enjoyable.
