Running Hot megagame report - Part 2
Welcome back to part 2 of Jon Searle’s Running Hot megagame report. We rejoin Jon as he focuses more on his own misdeeds at the height of the game. Later there are some of his thoughts on the game itself and the online format. In case you missed it, check out part 1 here.
Right now though, Jon is having a conversation with the corp he’s been secretly blackmailing up until this point…
On the way out of our turn six run I talked briefly to the Gordon security player, saying that if they could get us Case’s amber we would stop and play nice. I could also tell them who had the blackmail evidence on their founder, Gordon Fyfe. Actually this might have been an anonymous note. Either way the message got through, and a short while later I found myself having the most productive chat of my game.
I met the Gordon CEO and Security players in our box office. We negotiated in detail, and settled on the following:
If Gordon could deliver Case’s amber to the Facers we would cease all hostilities towards them, and begin a working relationship instead.
I would convince my fellow Facers to hold off on attacking Gordon on turn seven. If they didn’t deliver on turn eight we’d be back with a vengeance. I pointed out that the Runner Shop had recently started selling AK-47s and heavy explosives, and that I had creds to burn.
As a sweetener, I would fulfil Gordon’s job posting by telling them who had the blackmail material that threatened them.
On the first point: I said that runner and Corps coming together was truly the form of coalescing that Case would have wanted. The Gordon players observed a studious silence in response. On that last bullet point: no, I absolutely did not tell them that I was the one blackmailing them. I did however tell them that GEE had the blackmail evidence (technically true). In the moment I forgot that I’d sent a copy to AN. Gordon paid the seven credits and we parted ways. So I have an evil streak, sue me.
I relayed the deal to the Facers, who agreed to it.
I then bounced over to the Cinema’s Concessions area to talk to Scorer again. Scorer had seen Wicker being cosy with someone in Augmented Nucleotech. This again. I said fair enough, I’ll look into it. However Wicker was our most valuable asset, so I doubted I would take any action. The suspicious thing about him was that he wasn’t useless.
My notes for turn seven start with the line “hitting GEE because Next feels like it” and progress to “lost track of turn structure again, which is good” (it meant I was engaged and busy). We weren’t hitting GEE to test out Wicker’s loyalties- I think Next wanted a non-Gordon target after my deal and chose at random. A deciding factor may have been that the Corps made more facilities during the game, which meant we looked at the list of targets and immediately lunged for this one:
Because of course we would take the first bait we saw. Other new facilities included Apples, Oranges, Figgy Pudding, Crumpets, Wizardwheeze, and Corporate 2HD4k.
I was really an observer on this run. Still I had enough to be getting on with. I admitted to myself that it would be kind of cool to bust Wicker as a mole in the middle of a run, and reached out to Plot Control once more:
The response confirmed what I was already feeling:
I resolved to do nothing about it right then and told Next that Wicker was clean. We could have a purge later. I may have given another speech on Case’s name being an anagram of ‘coalescing’.
Turn eight came all too fast. Scorer was in the lobby asking for help inciting revolution. Next was more on board with it than I was, probably wanting to follow through on their declaration of war on the Corp council. I was more interested in getting what I wanted from Gordon. Then Scorer said that they were going to use their charisma stats to get the populace all riled up which settled it- mine was garbage. I’d turn up if I had the time.
I’d decided not to run this turn as there was far too much going on (in my book this is a classic sign of the late stages of a good megagame). I pinged a reminder message to the Gordon CEO:
I headed over to their HQ to see if they were free. When I got there I saw they were talking to Patrick, so I let myself into the boardroom to wait with their Security player.
I assumed that Patrick was talking to the CEO about Case’s amber. Apparently not:
The CEO joined us, unscathed, saying that he had the amber but that I would have to promise upfront that the Facers would have to take on one very important mission. I sighed inwardly at the complication. I knew I’d say yes to whatever this was, the CEO was basically holding the Facer’s holy grail. I’d launch us on a suicide mission for that. I asked what he wanted. He said we were to destroy the blackmail evidence GEE had on Fyfe Gordon.
I still can’t figure out if this was lucky, unlucky, poetic justice, or what. This was the same blackmail evidence I’d been leaning on for most of the game, and by an indirect route it had brought me exactly what I wanted. I knew that the threat to Gordon Corporation was real, because I’d engineered it. I had no idea if Augmented Nucleotech were also using the material, and couldn’t tell the Gordon players without significant risk to myself and, moreover, the amber. We might be chasing this forever.
I accepted and said we’d hit GEE for free. Mostly I wanted to get away from the conversation, but by now we were flush both from backhanders and Gordon’s own money.
I took the amber and ran back to the Valentine Cinema. There I met Wicker, Vampire, and Con, and told them everything. Next was off taking part in the revolution. I said we should put Case’s amber on display in the box office. Then I ran off to the Business Times (I’d long ago observed that Th3 Undergr0und was only running negative stories about us) and told them that culture had won, the DNA of Case Aniclog was back home where it belonged, and that this was a true coalescing.
And there, with perfect timing, the game ended.
Most of my megagame narratives end on a low: being pursued across jurisdictions, forming governments in exile, stalemates. In Running Hot the Facers thrived. Certainly a lot more people were talking about Case. We weren’t the most notorious gang, but we hadn’t been briefed to pursue that. We ended wealthy- I think we came in above average. We had also secured a solid working relationship with the one Corp that had the most reason to hate us. Though I predict my actions would have been uncovered a few months after the game and Ghost would have met with a very nasty accident.
In the wider game, the big threat would be if those pesky Corps decided to plot world domination. I was always aware that I had no idea what was really going on at the macroscopic level. In the debrief it became clear that the Corps had been remarkably reserved (for megagamers). They had listened to the warnings from Pactial in the US and tried not to rock the boat too much, whilst still making real progress. The representative players of the UK government sounded (I think) happy to carefully continue the Proctarion experiment. Unfortunately, possibly because the Corps were so careful, the leaders of the revolution admitted it had been more of a riot in the debrief.
Support for the revolution was decidedly lacking. I’m in no position to complain though. I was doing a deal in the Cinema’s parking lot at the time and forgot to show up.
But all of this was insignificant: we Facers had a piece of amber, containing a mosquito, inside of which was DNA of one Case Aniclog.
I’m sure it wasn’t a fake or anything.
Post-game notes
Running Hot was good. Doubly good in the megagame starved wreck that is 2020. Big praise to all the Control team who helped run it, especially Ed Silverstone as plot control, and of course a truly massive congratulations to Patrick as the designer. If I get the chance I will absolutely play this one again.
Here are some other things I learned in the debrief:
The Facers didn’t have a mole, but Wicker was a normal person who joined by accident and got in too deep to leave.
Scorer from the Gruffsters had been the main source of the rumours about the Facers, which blindsided me as they’d been so nice to us. I think it was a briefing thing.
Gordon kept trying to buy the Business Times but never succeeded. BT was, perhaps unsurprisingly, on the take.
There was a super-soldier plot line I still don’t understand.
The assassination attempt on the Gordon CEO was performed by the Dancers, for reasons I still don’t understand.
Someone blew up a whole research facility, for reasons I still don’t understand.
Gordon didn’t have Case’s amber at the start, but procured it as a way of making the Facers behave.
The initial lead on Case’s amber did indeed come from the Augmented Nucleotech team, though I’ve no idea how they found out about it.
The G33Ks attempted to ascend to become digital entities but their attempt was co-opted by MCM; they became digital bureaucrats instead. They seemed very chipper about it.
Lasty, late into the debrief and post-game chat I learned, in front of thirty people, that Case Aniclog was first and foremost an anagram of not ‘coalescing’ but ‘Nicolas Cage’. Everyone in the game seemed to have known this apart from me. People were posting Nicolas Cage images and GIFs in the chat. At one point, when making my threat of putting people into wickermen made of film reel, I’d even said ‘like in that movie about them, the Wickerman one, the one with the ‘BEEEES’ guy’.
I am not a smart man.
Under the hood of Running Hot
I’m going to take a look at Running Hot as a megagame and the online format. It won’t be possible to fully separate the two, so this may bounce around a little. Standard disclaimers apply: this is my opinion, and I’m probably biased because I really enjoyed the game. I am however typing this a couple of weeks after the game ran because I procrastinate like hell to allow for reflection. If anything seems harsh: it’s intended as constructive commentary. I absolutely think small changes would go a long way.
The biggest problem, for me, was time. Over an eight-turn game the Facers had four runs cut off due to time on the action phase. Two things fed into this. First was ‘dead’ time waiting for someone to come and moderate the facility. Second was the repeated manual action of finding and copy-pasting from spreadsheets into Discord. I suspect that if the game was run in-person neither of these would have occurred (though naturally an in-person format would have its own problems). I know Patrick increased the time in the Action phase, and made lenient rulings that we could finish runs that were nearly done. However these were temporary fixes in response to problems caused by a format newer to megagames. I’m sure with time this will lessen.
Also, on the run mechanics: from the middle of the game everyone was sufficiently used to running that only the Corp security player and the run leader were needed; the rest of us felt surplus. The decisions that we all fed in to at the start of the game had become routine. Really this would suggest that we should hit more facilities in smaller groups.
However, lots of small runs might not have been so easy a fix. Firstly, some runners were far more powerful than others. Secondly, an increase in the number of runners would require more people to operate the runs. I can envision a situation where there are more scheduled runs that Security players and Facility Control combined. Perhaps there was already something in place to deal with this eventuality, I confess I don’t know.
One other point on the run mechanic: success was binary, with nothing for a partial run. In the Netrunner card game the Runner will make a lot of runs so the number of failures will balance out, and many other things can happen to advance your game. In this format where a player is expected to make at best one run a turn for eight turns single failures hurt more. Netrunner is a card game where only one side wins. In my opinion, megagames work best when experiences and success are measured in shades of grey.
Finally on the crunchy stuff: Running Hot was a mechanically complex, if logical, game. The rulebook was good at providing the information required, and the mechanics I interacted with were expressed as ‘things that could be done’ rather than ‘exceptions to the rule’. This helps a lot. I think Patrick had covered the possible situations clearly and well. I’m wondering if some of the points I raise above could be mitigated by simplifying some mechanics, but I won’t speculate further.
Right, that was all very dense. Again: all my thoughts and I loved the game.
Other stuff: Communication, a cornerstone of all megagames, in the online format was a different beast. Finding a person in a list of Discord channels was about as fiddly as picking someone out in a crowd. Sending a direct message to someone to say you wanted to talk was incredibly helpful. It was possible to say ‘let’s talk in the boardroom’, whereas most in-person games don’t have those clearly defined areas. However for an in-person game you’ll have visual and audio clues as to when a conversation is wrapping up, so you can be polite and wait. In Discord, waiting outside a channel you can see two people in, it’s impossible to know if you can butt in to what might be idle gossip or a heavy negotiation.
Still on communication: If you dare do downright dodgy deals, being able to type notes rather than scrawl a hasty message on the back of the nearest game manual is a godsend. I’ve never had good handwriting, and it’s only gotten worse over the years as I live more of my life through tech. Similarly, being able to copy-paste key information is incredibly useful. However, not being able to see body language is a huge loss. I love the way many megagamers communicate with body language: stalling, thinking, acting up.
So communication: some pros and cons as I see them.
Other stuff: the online format itself. The Discord channel structure provides a ‘physical’ setting that can be tweaked on the fly. And there wasn’t the pressure on physical space that comes from trying to cram yet another bit of laminated A3 on to a straining table. Personally I don’t like having Discord in dark mode, and yes Discord brought tech woes which I won’t list here, and yes we all have different levels of tech affinity. Discord, Google Sheets, and Roll20 are free. Having patience as problems arise and are dealt with is also free. Furthermore there was no venue cost, and this was reflected in the ticket price. A Megagame Assembly survey earlier this year suggested that players weren’t much keen on higher prices, and this game was much lower than the UK average. Plus, no travel costs (which are usually so much more than the ticket price) and you get to play in your dressing gown.
At any megagame there will most likely be someone you don’t know. It’s one of the joys of them. However a really big benefit to the online format was that there were people in Running Hot I’d never get to play with otherwise. There was a strong contingent of players from the US and it was great to have a day with them, especially in a year where international travel is so bastard problematic.
Additionally, the ease of changing a user’s Discord handle meant that Patrick was able to adopt a naming convention that included displaying a player’s preferred pronouns.
I see real advantages to the online format. Bits of it were clunky, but it’s new and the game was designed to be run in-person. That Patrick managed to automate as much of it as he did was incredible. There are some strong benefits to be had.
All that said, I really missed the experience of a physical game. I missed seeing people. Earlier in the day I’d seen that the Business Times player had made a prop mic. The most immersion I got was when Next turned their camera on and revealed they’d costumed up. I was in my dressing gown.
As I recall this was Next turning their camera on to deliver Scorer a heartfelt line about not being a Corp stooge. Pretty sure it worked.
Previously I’ve not been convinced that set-dressing and costumes have helped immersion but with Running Hot I missed them, a lot. I really should have made an effort and glued a USB stick to my head. One to remember for next time.
One last one for my immersion- I really didn’t feel like I had a sense of the wider game at all. The press feeds were useful, but really as a body of evidence to refer to. There were no press announcements, and I missed them more than I would have expected. I don’t know what happened in the Council or Research games, and that’s reflected in this writeup.
Once more, with feeling: all of this aimless waffling is my own opinion. I had a great game, and a great day, and I’m very thankful for it. If you’ve made it this far, well done and thanks for reading.
Final note: has anyone come up with terms to differentiate in-person and online megagames? If not, could they please?
What did you think of Jon’s megagame report? Did you play this run of Running Hot? Let us know over in our Facebook group.
If you’d like to see your megagame report appear here, let us know!