Yeah, you really want fairly proactive Needs. There's probably never going to be a playset with 100% great Needs, just because I've tried to write them myself and Needs are a lot harder than they sound, but it's generally a good idea to go for things where the poor impulse control can drive the game.
What kind of Playsets have you come up with?
So far, I've done one for a post-apocalyptic version of Fawlty Towers (that was early on and probably needs a bit of work) and one built around the Dark Eldar from 40K, which went pretty well in its one test so far.
Nice. I'm working on one set in Nottingham during an archery tournament the Sheriff has set to ensnare Robin Hood, and one set in a law office buzzing with rumours of a hostile takeover.
I've also been thinking it would be fun to do a Cluedo/Poirot backstabbing-aristos-in-an-Edwardian-stately-home playset, with the option to run the "soft tilt" from the Companion book to make it a more genteel PG Wodehouse/Oscar Wilde farce (though a sudden transition between the two would be hilarious — "My bally interfering maiden aunt was insisting I marry that awful Grantham girl... so I bludgeoned her to death in the library with a candlestick.")
edited 14th Oct '16 7:35:00 PM by johnnye
That would be hilarious.
Edit: I'm actually working on another idea at the moment: doing stuff like the Living Dead "playset" (which is more like an ongoing Tilt than anything else) for cosmic and Gothic horror. I had a game scheduled for Halloween but the GM isn't going to be up to it, so I'm thinking injecting a horror-comedy Fiasco game might be the way to go.
edited 15th Oct '16 12:07:16 PM by CountDorku
I've seen it on the Youtubes, and there's another Lovecraft-themed one in Inaussprechlichen Klutzen. (Additionally, Transatlantic appears to be somewhat Lovecraftian, at least to the extent that two out of two games using Transatlantic I've watched on those same Youtubes have involved an Elder God at some stage.)
In this case, though, they're add-ons to inject some elements of the appropriate kind of horror to a preexisting playset, much like how the Living Dead one - which I'm stealing wholesale - works (basically, stunt dice that add extra Tilt-style elements). Meaning you could have the waterlogged dead of the Titanic swarming the deck of the Leviathan in Transatlantic, London gangsters encountering a vampire, or Regina's family attempting to prevent her wedding because the groom is a Deep One hybrid.
Manna Hotel strikes me as a good one for that.
Would a custom Tilt table work for that kind of thing? "Someone has been working to summon an Elder God, and it looks like they just succeeded"; "That person you've been trying to bed has a different bodily fluid in mind"...
It could work, but the semi-Tilt version means it can come into play earlier and more often, while the regular Tilt elements are still able to add a ton of chaos.
Edit: My current "interesting horror opportunities" lineup is The Ice, Boomtown, Manna Hotel, Regina's Wedding, and Transatlantic. I figure each one offers some reasonably interesting horror scenarios - an ocean liner turned around because the destination city is simply no longer there, Regina being seduced by a vampire at her own wedding, a Wild West zombie apocalypse, a serial killer on the loose at McMurdo Sound...
edited 16th Oct '16 3:51:51 AM by CountDorku
I was immediately thinking The Thing when I read The Ice playset. And I suppose if you add zombies you've got Dead Of Winter — or combine zombies and Humanoid Abominations and you've got the Wall.
Following a random encounter with "Thriller" I'm wondering if Saturday Night '78 might be an amusing option to throw in.
(Yes, technically "Thriller" is from 1982. Close enough.)
edited 21st Oct '16 12:54:35 PM by CountDorku
Halloween Special went reasonably well, despite a few interruptions and one of the players having a bit of the ol' firewater between him and being able to make sense of anything that happened. We ended up with Manna Hotel using a Gothic horror add-on, and the resultant disaster included surprisingly little identical twin shenaniganery, some friends with benefits ending up stuck in handcuffs thanks to the immortal phrase "fuck, I can't find the key", a werewolf, multiple people trying and failing to forge deals with the Devil (who was cosplaying as the King in Yellow on grounds of creepy), and my character effectively opening the game by being buried alive, although the fact that he was alive didn't become a fact until a later die roll.
Haha, sounds awesome 
Still haven't been able to get everyone together for the second half of our Salem game, not even for Halloween...
Had another occasion special with a Christmas one I wrote up about Christmas after the Bomb dropped. Only a couple of players, but it went reasonably well, culminating in a disaster involving an obsessed vigilante, a serial killer throwing a Christmas dinner for his henchmen, a backfiring shotgun, and a packet of Christmas crackers that had been secretly rigged with explosive bullets.
Hey guys, I just got a copy of this. Really excited to try it with some IRL friends, but might not have time during the chances we get to meet together. Anyone have any interest in trying to do this online somehow?
Fiasco really rewards IRC or VoIP (Skype, Discord) over play-by-post, because the conversation is such an important part of the experience and PBP is super slow. I wouldn't object, exactly, but since I live in Australia I'm pretty out of sync with when people in other countries are likely to be available.
edited 2nd Jan '17 10:30:02 AM by CountDorku
Yeah, it seems that way looking through it...hm, we do have a Discord server...maybe I'll bring it up next time I'm on there.
I'm going to describe a problem I have with this game and think out loud about solutions, and if anyone knows of any preexisting solutions or has some ideas, buzz in!
So I bring this game to a party with people I think would enjoy it. And I describe the idea and one of the things I like about it is the way the same game can be applied to any scenario you could think of.
And people have ideas about that kind of thing. And I would LOVE to be able to brainstorm a scenario everyone is excited about, roll up needs and relationships etc, and start playing. Unfortunately, unless you have an appropriate playset to hand, designing one from scratch takes at least an hour and sucks the fun out of jumping straight into a game, and people who haven't played aren't necessarily going to understand what makes, say, a good relationship to include.
So what would be good is if you had GENERIC relationships/objects/locations tables, more similar to the abstract suggestions in the Tilt table ("something you love is on fire"), that you can roll up and then decide on the fly what it means in context;
The above should work fine for Needs and Relationships, which are generally pretty universal. Objects and Locations could be brainstormed based on generic categories;
What premade playsets are great for is giving people ideas and defining a genre, but the kind of imaginative people who make great Fiasco players often don't need any help with that part. The premade sets could still give them inspiration, but I'd really love a good quick, organic system for getting a game off the ground straight from concept. This is meant to be improv, after all.
So with Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus out, I had the realisation that Zim is actually a perfect Fiasco character: he's cunning enough to form surprisingly intricate plans, stupid enough that they usually fail, he has a couple of well-defined relationships, and everything he does ends in misery and horror!
Hey, first time creating a thread but there doesn't seem to be one for Fiasco.
I hosted a game for the first time last night, using the Salem playset from the website. I wasn't convinced it was the best playset for a starter game, but people were enthusiastic about it. Everyone really enjoyed the Setup, which went on for way longer than the book suggests, but when we got to playing I found that the scenes were taking a long time, were more colour than action, and we had trouble deciding how they had resolved. We wound up having to call a halt at the end of Act One because it was late and we were tired (to be continued another day). We still had a lot of fun roleplaying, the issue was more that the game mechanics don't make a lot of sense for more sedate, character-driven scenarios (and why should they,. that's not what they're designed for).
I think the problem was none of the characters having a really urgent, driving Need; there were two in play, but they weren't specific and there was nothing to really set a pace. Anyone have any similar observations/advice?
edited 12th Oct '16 9:42:55 AM by johnnye