#infifate: A Technical Premise

Part I of a series

We played a Fate Core tabletop RPG campaign last year (2016) set in the formative years of a human colony after the destruction of Earth. We embraced concepts of co-creation and a “dinner and a game” experience on a level I thought it might be worth it to write a couple of posts about it as a retrospective.

The campaign was called “ääretön”, word that pretty much translates to “infinite”, but as “infinite” is a way too common word to be used in a social media hashtag, we used #infifate instead (you need to have a hashtag for your game in these modern days), and that’s what I’ll use as a name here to talk about the game in English.

The total length was 9 months (and thus 9 sessions) in total: Character creation, 7 full game sessions and then a “coda” session/debrief. It ran from March to November. I hope to write a number of posts about the things we did, but let’s start with how we started building the game.

Why Would I Run Something Like This

I had been running a Pathfinder campaign that concluded in 2015 and knew I wanted to run a proper scifi game in 2016, as it had been too long since the previous one (I had dabbled in modern-day scifi horror and science fantasy, but not really something that would fit the science fiction bill).

We (me and my fiancée) had had success with making a dinner+game type of an experience with some game sessions before, where a meal was part of the game as sort of a meta-element. In a spur of insanity we thought it might be a great idea to build a whole campaign around the concept.

System-wise, I had been running a Fate Core intro one-shot game (“Fate Core Combat Academy”) to get new players to try out and learn the Fate system. To ease up the learning curve, it was set in the Star Wars universe, which was familiar to all people playing it. Running this one-shot a dozen times left me with a thirst to do something that had a longer arc, and that would be set in a setting that wasn’t straight out of an existing source. It also made me certain that Fate was the system I would want to use.

And one thing that has for the past few years been a huge factor in creating campaigns for me, was to make the commitment-level just right. Usually, my philosophy has been such that the players shouldn’t worry about the game — if they felt like they needed to do something else than come play, they should feel free to do so without any repercussions. With #infifate I wanted the opposite: commitment to the game should be higher than usual, and dropping out or missing sessions, while possible, would require active effort from the player.

Meta-level Groundwork /Never-Ending Questions

About half a year before the intended start of #infifate, I started asking “innocent” questions on my Facebook feed about what sort of commitment/interest we could muster up for a game like this.

The questions were about the things we wanted to do differently with #infifate: If people were willing to play regularly on the weekend or not. Or if we were to make food, would the players be willing to chip in on the ingredients (and how much would they feel was a fair). If people were willing to take on the responsibility as players to find themselves replacements, should they have to miss a game session. In general, gauging the level of interest for a high-commitment game and what would the parameters would be that would work best for it .

After getting the initial responses from these posts (and pondering/debating on them for a while ourselves), we made some decisions: The meal budget, the weekday of sessions (Sunday, we wanted to have time to prep the meals and play the game during the daylight hours), the length of the session (6 hours, a bit longer than the average weekday session of 4 hours we are used to, but still not a silly marathon) and some other details.

But there were some questions we didn’t want to answer ourselves, but figure out with the player group, we next set up a Google Forms questionnaire/sign up form for the potential players, so we could find out a few things about them:

• The level of experience the player had with Fate Core (to see if I needed to run another Fate Core intro game before the campaign or not).
• If they had understood the practical things correctly (wouldn’t want someone to come not realising that it was going to be every month, for 9 months).
• A preference gauge on what they liked: What scale of a game and what sort of a scifi they were looking for. Did they want aliens? Were ray-guns cool? Should it be steampunk or proper space opera scifi? Should it be about a village or a solar system?
• And similarly, what were their thoughts on food: Were there any allergies we should be aware of? Likes and dislikes? How did the players feel about alcohol, tobacco? And if they were comfortable with eating insects?
• And the last step was a scheduling matrix (more about that in a second). Which Sundays in the 9 month period would be ok for the player as game session days?

The sign up form was open for a couple of weeks, while we advertised that the game was actually happening, on the threads that had the initial discussions about the potential campaign, and also independently on my Facebook feed. Total 18 people signed up for the game, and of those, 4 would become the players.

Choosing the Days and the Players

This is where it gets a bit math-nerdy. Our goal was for it to be as fair as possible with our selection process: Anyone who signed up should have a chance to get in, but also, those who had looser schedules and were available better, were going to have a somewhat better chance to get picked.

The sign up form had a section with all the first, second, third and fourth Sundays from March to November lined up, with the known events (mostly blockbuster larps, conventions and the like) noted next to each date. The potential players had marked all the dates that suited them and thus we got a matrix of dates and who could play on them.

Some excel (well, Google Sheets) magic later, we had a list of four Sunday-types: the first Sundays of each month, the second Sundays of each month, etc. And for each player the number of times they could play on that given slot. A number between 0 and 8 (March was excluded as we would just find a day for the character creation outside of the regular slot if necessary) for each slot.

We weighted the scale a bit, to a 0 to 4 scale: if they could make it to 8 games on that day, it was a 4, 7 games was a 2, 6 games a 1, and 5 or less was a 0 (we wanted to have the players in as many games as possible).

We added these numbers up for each Sunday type, getting a number that told us how good in general each of the Sunday of the months was. We lined these numbers up and then randomly rolled on the distribution (the values were within 10% of each other, so there wasn’t that much of a difference, but still, math is fun, so we did it this way) With this method, we ended up with the games being on the fourth Sunday of each month. Then, from the “fourth Sunday” line we randomised four players using the following randomiser: If you had had a 4 (that is, you could make it to 8 games that were on the fourth Sunday), you were given 4 tickets on a draw, if you had 1, you got 1 ticket, a 0 meant you didn’t get a ticket. Then we drew the tickets out of a hat (well, this was done with virtual tickets and hat, no actual headwear was involved).

Every player who had answered had at least a 1 on one of the four possible Sundays, so everyone who answered the survey had a mathematical possibility to get into the game.

The four players who got drawn were P, M, S and J. P and M are regular players of mine, I’ve ran a few games for S and been a co-player with them more often, and J was a new addition to the list of players I’ve ran games for.

With the players confirmed, it was time to start planning the actual experience according to their preferences. I’ll write more about that in the next post, hopefully soon.