There will be spoilers for Friends At The Table’s season 2 three-part finale! I’ll be analyzing the finale from a game perspective, and touch a bit on the effect on narrative!
First off, I love Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands. I played a few sessions of that sometime around the start of lockdown last year, and it was fun as hell. One of the other players mentioned that FATT used it for one of their finales, and that’s what cemented COUNTER/weight as something I would eventually check out (I might also listen to Road to PARTIZAN and PARTIZAN someday, we’ll see). I started C/w awhile after that, but because I was listening in 10-20 minute bursts during commutes, it was hard to keep track of everything. I picked it up again more recently, starting at where I left off around ep10 and marathoning to the end.
Also, bias on display: I’m obsessed with Sokrates.
Anyways, as for the breakdown of the finale game from the perspectives as a Game and as a Story:
MF0: Firebrands is one of many great games that draws system inspiration from The King Is Dead, a GMless conversation-based roundtable game with guided minigames to help direct the flow of the roleplay. The base game has its own setting from the Mobile Frame Zero wargame, and focuses on the character-level and faction-background and history for 3 very different factions. Without getting into specifics, there is one faction for local rebels/revolutionaries, one for landed aristocrats, and one for colonizing capitalists. These tropes easily map onto various characters and factions within COUNTER/weight, and so it was likely easy to adapt the faction prompts for the various player characters and their factions used for the finale.
The biggest adjustment, besides reflavoring the setting and factions, was Austin adding “political points” and “crisis points,” which the rest of the FATT crew agreed to assign after each minigame to the respective player, if they had met certain thematic/narrative qualifications during that game. If the scene involved preparing for the Rigour threat, a crisis point was assigned. If the scene increased a player character’s power or faction influence, a political point was assigned. If neither of those things happened, no points were assigned. This added element gameified the stakes of the finale: If player characters focused on preparing for Rigour, they would have more offense against Rigour during the final fight. If they focused on their own faction, said faction would have greater power in the sector after Rigour was defeated… if Rigour was defeated. This gave a concrete, material weight to the choices in scenes and the decisions that player characters made. If they were selfish and focused on their own faction interests, they would possibly secure that faction’s destiny, but that would risk the sector not being prepared for the Rigour threat. Conversely, focusing on the crisis but not one’s own faction would protect the sector, but might leave that faction vulnerable to destruction.
One con of this method is that having more crisis points, because of how the final interlude worked, also meant having to sacrifice more NPCs in order to use them. The way the “Tactical Skirmish” game was heavily modified to fit the Rigour fight shifted the power dynamics of that game heavily. Whereas the base game involves, for example, Player A asking Player B to surrender or else something horrible will befall one of Player A’s characters, the Rigour fight was adjusted so each Crisis Point could only be used to damage Rigour if each player said “No” to “surrender or Rigour kills [npc].”
While the base game asks, “how far are you willing to hurt your friends’ npcs in order to win this game without any other consequences besides those you agree on narratively?” the adjustment for the Rigour fight asks, “are you willing to sacrifice this NPC in order to keep fighting this threat to every NPC and the entire setting this season has been dedicated to?” Because if any player chose not to sacrifice one of the NPCs Austin threatened, they could no longer use any Crisis Points, and were effectively out of the game until the final conclusion.
In my view, there are pros and cons to this game design decision. A pro is that it reflects and represents the weight of sacrifice to fight against Rigour, the divine embodiment of capitalism. It is a cold, harsh reflection of beloved characters having to throw themselves into a meat grinder to stop a threat. A con is that it can feel narratively unsatisfying to have character death be decided by simply “does this character die or not?” as opposed to other methods, such as leaving things up to dice rolls, or scenes played out by the “Meeting Sword to Sword” game, where the action unfolds before the decision for a character to be killed is made.
The Rigour fight could have been adjusted further to add a little more nuance to the decisions to sacrifice characters or not, rather than frontloading the decision before playing out the death scenes.
Other possibilities besides the one by one, each player takes a turn sacrificing to the meat grinder:
The battle is laid out per faction, with Austin describing one battle per Crisis Point. Each player Whispers to Austin which NPCs will fight to the death and utilize that Crisis Point. The Whisper means that the players who go last don’t get to “cheat” by assuming the players who went first sacrificed enough.
The battles could also have used more influence from games like A Chase or Meeting Sword to Sword and played out action and choices turn by turn, with some decisions leading to a use of a Crisis Point, effectively hurting Rigour, others leading to the death of an NPC, and others perhaps leading to both.
Even still, the game as played facilitated some amazing scenes, such as Lazer Ted’s starry death, Aria choosing love and a life with her girlfriend over securing Weight, Orth watching the Kingdom Come and AuDy fall, and Cass’ long, long day. The Crisis Point/Political Point system and final, secret decisions lended a sense of true sacrifice to Art’s choice with Cass, and a heroic, bittersweet tragedy that stretches beyond the second season.
FATT’s willingness to experiment and weave different game systems together to form stories results in some truly unique tales with very different energy, opportunities, and pacing. It’s no wonder they’re indie game devs’ darlings lol. These experiments are fantastic on their own, and also provide a great example for listeners such as me to figure out which pieces might work for my own campaign purposes, and which perhaps I would change.
(There’s a lot of inspiration to be drawn both for APs and homegames from the method of campaign-building that FATT uses as a truly collaborative experience that allows multiple systems to lend their story potential, and players to build the world as much as the GM, which also gives much more freedom to the GM to not have to carry so much.)
That’s enough of that! I might post some more stuff analyzing other parts of COUNTER/weight eventually.
Always Gold Birb 