Sword Lesbians Playtest and Thoughts

I've been wanting to run a Thirsty Sword Lesbians game at ConFABulous for over a year now, and I finally took the plunge and signed up to do it: https://confabulous.org/wordpress/gaming/



Image: cover art for TSL: two (presumed) lesbians crossing swords and gazing intently at each other. Color scheme: the lesbian pride flag colors.

For what I hope are obvious reasons, I didn't want the actual convention to be the very first time I tested out my story, my storytelling abilities, or being the game mechanics arbitrator. (As well as all the other stuff a DM has to juggle.) So, I set up a couple of playtest dates.

First, my family--just Shawn, Mason and I around the dining room table--ran a very simple "do I know how to explain this game? How easy is it to create characters or should I have pre-generated ones available? Is my scenario to simple or too complex?" game.

The things I learned in that very fist attempt at running this game is that, first off, my son is an extraordinarily good RPG player, as is my wife. Mason, in particular, though, latched on to a couple of the images that I gave in my world introduction and then, immediately, sparked ideas that had never even occurred to me as options. Going forward, I now have to credit him for what I'm calling "The Drowned Ones." In general, though, this did reassure me that my impulse to explain the world BEFORE character creation was a good one. 

I'm running a homebrew cyberpunk game. Thirsty Sword Lesbians does have a cyberpunk "setting and adventure" option in their core rulebook called Neon City.  I will say that despite this, TSL is not really set-up in a way that slots easily into "What if no swords, but instead Net Runners?" 

TSL is a Powered by the Apocalypse game and so runs on playbooks. So, rather than having a "class," like you might have in D&D, where you basically chose your job, your race, your background, all of which come with a set of skills, you have, instead, an archetype, a personality template. The playbook then gives your archetype various distinct moves, but its intended to be much more open-ended and flexible based on what fits that character's motives, etc. Dave, who is in my regular D&D group (which eventually played this as well), described it as having to build a character from personality up, rather than creating a backstory as an afterthought to paste over a character once its designed. 

So part of what I learned in this initial game is that some of the archetypes/playbooks work better in cyberpunk than others. Some needed almost no scenario-specific tweaking, like The Scoundrel or The Trickster.  But, playbooks like Nature Witch and Spooky Witch, which allow for magic, need to be accounted for and given fun, world-specific things to do. For instance, the Nature Witch has (for some inexplicable reason) a list of trials they need to complete if they want to gain experience points and advance. These are written into the Nature Witch playbook and are considered non-negotiable (the box is already checked, automatically <--a very annoying choice on the game designer's part.) Especially since, "ride a magical beast" is NOT something I've planned for a cyberpunk adventure, you know? Plus, since I'm running a one-shot, some of the other more broad trials seemed unfair, given the time constraints. "Reject a conviction you once held," is lovely if playing an on-going campaign, but is asking a lot of a player who is dipping toes into the game at a con. So, after this first game with my family, I came up with a number of Nature Witch trials that would be not only be easy and fun to check off the list, but would also potentially nudge a player character to explore all of the various sites I'd created/move my plot along faster.

Also, even though TSL is designed as a player-centric, relationship game, I did decide that I need to have a bunch of pre-generated characters available. The process just takes too long? Like, just thinking up names is HARD. I will admit that I had initially resisted of having pre-gen with my family's game because it's so clear that TSL wants the experience of this game to be about relationships and falling in love and whatnot (there is an actual mechanic called FINALLY, A KISS IN A DANGEROUS SITUATION, which grants a +1 going forward) that I feared that having pre-generated characters might rob players of the chance to make someone they could really invest in. 

On the flipside, my family barely left TSL's version of "the tavern" even after three hours of gameplay. So, I mean, there does seem to be such a thing as too much investment in characters, too.

The other thing I learned in this first game is that the fighting mechanics of TSL are just clunky... and oddly punitive. For example, if you roll well on DARING (which is one of two main fighting stats) you can inflict a CONDITION (which is emotional) and do a couple of other moves from a prescribed list (none of which is "inflict physical damage" or, you know, whittle away at someone's life force, as in D&D.)  However, if you roll moderately well, the attacker has the opportunity, automatically, do the same to you. The CONDITIONS simply aren't fun. They're things like Anger, Hopelessness, Guilt, Fear, and Insecurity. You not only get actual mechanical penalties when you mark a Condition, but you also are expected to act out on them, emotionally. I find this kind of... well, the best word is, unfun. When I am feeling less charitable, I would call it controlling in a very icky way. Maybe I'm playing a Scoundrel who is some version of a swashbuckler, do I really want to go around making people feel insecure and then maybe, if I roll poorly, have to break something important to me (<--an actual requirement of the rules) because I was given the Anger condition? NO. I want to be cool and daring (in the traditional sense) and defeat my enemies with a flourish!

In fact, it's clear, in many ways, that the TSL devs just don't want you to fight.  They have since made expanded fighting moves, which I haven't looked into yet, but, seriously WTF.

In general, I find that a lot of the playbooks in TSL are designed in a way to make what you might like about playing a particular type of character uncomfortable and unfun. Like a Beast, which is archetypically a werewolf or something similar, is penalized when they transform. They're required by the playbook (again, it's automatically checked) to confront the damage they do when in a rage. Which, again, okay, yes, maybe in a long running campaign that's worth exploring, but the title Thirsty Sword Lesbians sounds like a game where you are just supposed to have fun and be a bit over the top. Soul searching every single time you wolf-out (or have a berserker rage) is kind of only fun, if that's what you know you've signed up for. 

So, one of the other things I did after this initial game was write up a list of warnings for players. Like, play Beast if you like playing barbarians or werewolves or body-modded mechs or whatever, but be warned that part of the game mechanics does this weird thing to you. I also made explicit in that list that for the purposes of the one shot, those mechanics can be avoided if the player isn't into them! I will support people who want to lean into the soul searching, but also those who don't want to. I play to read over this a bit at the start of the game, but also just hand out a printed sheet with that info on it as part of handing out the playbooks. 

We'll see how well that works. 

Armed with all of this, I made a very short "Players Handbook" which I gave to my regular Wednesday night D&D group in advance of running the one-shot a second time. I also came to the first session (and yeah, like all one-shots, this one just refuses to be done in one) with a pile of pre-generated characters and several of them got picked up and seemed to be embraced and enjoyed by the players. One of the mechanics I was able to write into the pre-generated characters was this other odd, somewhat clunky thing called STRINGS. Strings are supposed to be imagined as "heart strings" and, among other things, you can spend them in order to get an NPC to do what you want, etc., etc. When I generated a set of characters, I made sure to give them a string on at least one NPC so that I could also streamline some of my storytelling? Like, the opening scene is at a internet cat cafe and there is a barista there and by giving a string on this NPC, I can drop in a bit of information that this player might already know about the business, the person, etc. I have to write all this up on their character sheet, but TSL has form-fillable PDFs which you can get without the art. Without the art taking up a huge amount of space, there's lots of room for a GM to write extra stuff.  This worked out particularly well as one of the players at my D&D group picked up the Trickster character who l decided has a string on literally everyone... by chance the person who picked this up is our usual GM, and so I basically had a co-story teller.

I mean, in PbtA games the players are way more co-story tellers than they are in a lot of other traditional systems, but I could really rope the Trickster in to all the scenes because I could feed them information the already knew by virtue of having a String.

So, that was useful to learn.

I will say that after all my complaints of this system, I have to take a second to note that my mostly cis, straight D&D group embraced Thirsty Sword Lesbians with GUSTO. They immediately understood this was a go big or go home kind of game, played their characters larger than life (biggest kudos to my Scoundrel, who rolled with having "one in every port" with wild abandon) and leaned into the emotional/role-playing parts in very surprising and unexpected ways. I did not actually expect such heavy use of Emotional Support (<--yes, an actual mechanic) to get used so often and so WELL.

I honestly was not expecting a group of tried and true 5e folks to be as DOWN with the loosey-goosey-ness of TSL. Our rules guy (who happened to be playing the Scoundrel) and the player who played the Nature Witch were really great at helping me figure out was to flip some of the clunkiness of the rules to storytelling advantages. And, I mean, honestly, we had an absolute BLAST playing this, despite all of its flaws. 

It was a delight to run this game with them--and, in fact, they not only requested a part two (even though I managed to lead them by the nose to a possible conclusion after four hours), they now want a promise of a part three whenever they need/want a break from our regularly scheduled 5e.  

With the D&D group, I learned some practical things, like how to organize my notes better, and as I say above, some better ways to utilize certain mechanics. Steph (the Nature Witch in this game), in particular, gave me the advice that even though the rules say "answer the question" the GM does have the discretion to answer via body language, facial expressions or other more subtle clues, rather than just spoiling some plot point (which admittedly I was knowingly doing in the first session of the one-shot because I really wanted to get them to The End--which, of course, we never did.) But, this did remind me that even if people are signing up for a one-shot at a con, most experienced players are aware that they might not get to the thrilling conclusion. I can also just be explicit at the start of the game and note that while this game CAN be finished in one, four hour session, in many ways, if we're doing it right, it won't be--since the game is supposed to be about the players role-playing and having feelings and relationships and just generally having fun. The plot, in many ways, is secondary to that, and that's how it's SUPPOSED to be.

Steph even made fan art of her character. Just to be clear this is art she'd found and colored--she was a little disappointed not to be able to find more body positive options, but... at any rate, I was so... chuffed? Like, it's so cool that this group so willingly embraced the whole concept.


Steph's Nature Witch, Michaela.