Different Ways to End a Story...

I just finished watching Rocky, the original, and I must say that it made me look different on games. I knew for quite a time that losing is at least as interesting as winning, but after watching this movie, I started to think about different kinds of victories.

There's of course the normal victory. The hero kills the dragon, the heroine conquers the land, the Balrog is dead, the devil has been stopped and no more red dragons will interfere with human affairs.

But there's also the other type of victory, or at least, one of the others. This is the dramatic victory (in contrast with the procedural of the first), the success over personal conflicts. Rocky lost the fight to Apollo, but he doesn't care, or agrees to a rematch. Rocky is only interested in one thing, Adrian. This is, at least to my belief, the more interesting win, the more interesting success. We strive to get a little bit of drama in the middle of everything, so why not in the end?

Another type of success, or of a victory or a win, is the one of getting a great story. In the Cohen Brother's movies, we know from the start that they gonna fail, yet we're still hoping for them, still enjoying the story, still... And Fiasco conveys it damn well, while opening to us a door to a different kind of games and of stories.

There's also the ending that we can see in Saving Private Ryan, where everyone dies at the end, but the goal is achieved. Wouldn't it be more dramatic if, in the last battle of the campaign, the characters will sacrifice themselves to save the world?

I can, of course, continue with this on and on, but I think that you've got the idea. It's important not only to start well, but to finish even better (I think), and giving the ending this amount of thinking and of going over it will surely benefit the game.

So, how about you? How do you finish your games?

"All Kinds of Colors, Big and Small"- A Fiasco Session Recap

Not a too long time ago, I participated in another great game of Fiasco. We had 3 characters: Robert Geldof, a drug dealer, Cob, a man who fell in love with him, and Lisa Melanis (played by me), a desperate woman with desperate needs and tools...

The game started with Lisa looking desperately for a way to earn some money. She meets Cob, and persuades him to get a "wiggle-waggle" for some money, so she'll be able to buy a new dose of drugs. She then continues to meet Robert, who comes to her with a suggestion that she takes. She'll be his lab mouse and he'll give her 20% of cash and some free doses.

Cob, on the other hand, doesn't stay quiet, and comes to the underworld to meet Rob, so he'll be able to expunge the "mistake". He then expresses his affection to Rob, but a bus just passing by prevents Rob  from hearing it.

Back to Lisa's whereabouts, she tries a new drug in her new job, and goes completely high. She then returns to herself, and leaves the place. When she goes out of the house, Cob notices her. Then, in a 3 character scene, Lisa said accidentally that Cob and she were together; despite that, Rob and Cob do succeed in surpassing all difficulties and go on to being together.

Lisa, after leaving the place, calls from the phone, and tries to blackmail Rob, as revenge because of them robbing her house, but her scheme falls short to a trick by Rob. She comes to take the money, but Rob hits her and Cob wounds her with a gunshot, after Rob "accidentally" shot a cop.

When she wakes up, in hospital, they come to visit her. Cob starts to realise what a bad influence Rob is on him, and trashes him. Rob tries to get him to be back together, but he fails. Mad and fearful, he decides to burn the place, as a way to express his broken heart and his still burning love. Cob goes back to Lisa, and they decide to start a new life together. When they smell the fire, they jump out of the window, but don't die. They end up in a different hospital.

Rob finds it hard to cope with what he did. He goes up in rank within the underworld, but decides to put an end to his life, and wakes up in heaven.

Shocked by Lisa's state that escalates to a critical near death state, the now awake Cob is clueless. In the end he kills them both, so they'll live happily ever after in heaven. When they finally get there, Lisa awakes from her dream about all this stuff, and goes back to work.

"Murderous Habits"- a Fiasco Session Recap

Somehow this disappeared from my blog, so I'm uploading it again:

I've participated lately in a great game of Fiasco. We used the Cthulhu playset found in The Unspeakable Oath 21. We had three characters: Robert Geldof (me) who is a little bit crazy teenager, Benjamin Geldof who was Robert's father and lastly Elizabeth Richards who was the family neighbour living next door.

The game started with Elizabeth returning home from work, only to see Robert dissecting her mother's body, tearing out organs and putting them in a bag. Elizabeth's mother abused her as a child, and Elizabeth who is happy for her death says nothing about Robert's actions. She does talk with him about himself, though, and learns his name.

Robert returns home and he's caught red handed by his father. Benjamin is angry, but he's relieved when he's convinced that Robert didn't tell his name to Elizabeth.

Ben tries to protect his son by calling Elizabeth and trying to convince her that her mother is abroad, but he fails. The following day, Liz tells Robert that his father is dead, and he reacts with a strange mixture of extreme happiness and extreme depression, switching between these 2 moods. Liz suggests to him that he'll move to her house, so she'll be able to put an eye on him, and he agrees.

Ben calls Liz, trying to warn her from his son, but she hangs up. Disappointed, he calls the police. Meanwhile, Liz talks with Robert and almost succeeds to get a confession from him, but then takes a break to buy some groceries. She's caught red handed by the police who come to her house and tries to run away. The police catch her and accuse her. Robert then takes his dissection knife and stabs his arm with it. Then, he runs out of the room screaming and blames her for this.

Liz is taken to jail, and he's taken to the hospital. His father comes to visit, a few days later, and blackmails him. Robert, in a panic attack, rushes out of the hospital, while killing a cop in his way out, and returns to his home. When he comes in, his father hands him to the police after pointing a shotgun at him.

When Robert goes to jail, he finishes in the same cell as Elizabeth. There, she tells him the truth: Robert and Elizabeth are a brother and a sister, and Benjamin is only a phony. They start to plot together on how to incriminate Benjamin.

The game then continued to a few trial scenes. In the end, Robert was sent to a psychiatric hospital; Ben became a murderer after all of his unsettling experiences and Liz... She ended the way she started it, in her house, with her dead mother's body on the floor and the bag with the organs.