I didn't realize it, but I'd been holding my breath the last few months. The first arc playtest of Crescendo has been going on and I kept asking myself "Is it going to be any good? At all?" I have a lot of ideas in this game that I was nervous wouldn't work, that would prove to be unrealistic to throw at a table. I mean, if it doesn't work that's fine... okay it wouldn't have been fine. At all. I've written a lot on this game and spent about a year fine-tuning it. And, despite the fact that the first playtest of the first arc had been going really smoothly, I didn't want to believe it. What if it failed at the end? What if the game failed to provide a good conclusion to the first arc it had ever truly run? Well, it didn't fail. There's a lot to improve and work on, but it didn't fail. Crescendo helped create a story filled with nuance and failure, character growth, a fantastical dream-like quality, truly tense plot, and a fitting coda.
Crescendo's mechanics create situations where characters must fail themselves. There are no squeaky clean and awesome characters; everyone does more than a few things they regret. As in, there are prompts generated by the game that tell you, the player, that your character fails himself, and you get to figure out what that looks like. These are profoundly humbling moments, as you have to figure out why and how your character has gone off the rails. But the other factor for the characters feeling human was that their successes could lead to unexpected consequences, in a way that was fair and transparent, but unpredictable. The lack of total control over the plot makes the characters feel much more fragile, limited. Because player control of the world and their characters wasn't total they took more time and care asking "What does my character really want out of this situation?" The mechanical refusal to deal in black and white results made the character's intent just that much more important.
The biggest drive to character change is failure. Because of the omnipresence of failure, as well as character change being based upon the ebb and flow of the mechanics, players are more in a role of directing the character growth. Character growth becomes the subject of the game itself, allowing players to disengage enough to where they can roleplay a character who is not like them. All the mechanics point back to the question "What does the character feel?" So many inputs into the system are subjective that you can't really get a moment where you could say "This is what the character should do." And players really responded to this! With the mechanics disengaging from a simple success/failure dynamic what the character turns into becomes the only thing the player really controls.... and the timing of that is a bit questionable as well.
Crescendo is a game of mythic fantasy. The immortals are alive and well, constantly mucking around with things, influencing the world to their own ends. Without the immortals Crescendo would be a good, if somewhat standard, fantasy game. But the addition of the immortals completely changed things for the players. Visions would just... happen. And completely recontextualize the action. Omens would appear around the players, helping them and showing them to be favored. But by whom? It wasn't entirely clear sometimes. Immortals would use similar omens, and sometimes in ways that confused the players. With the mechanics designed to keep players constantly on their toes, this existential meddling tipped the players into a world they're just certain enough about, but not too certain. There was always a dream-like quality to the story, where nothing was quite as it appeared. And that forced things back to the character, the only thing the players really had a true knowledge of.
But perhaps the biggest surprise to me was the evolution of the plot. Crescendo uses extensive journaling and a mechanic called The Black Swan: everyone at the table opens to a random page of their journal and puts their finger on a random passage; the GM takes these passages and makes up a plot twist, with the emphasis being on making an intersecting narrative which intrudes on the players’ story. With Black Swans the GM becomes less the master of the plot and the interpreter of the signs. You can just sit back, and let the game ebb and flow around you, being just as surprised as the rest of the players at twists and turns. With the knowledge that the plot was not being "handled" by the GM, the game truly let go of the feeling that there was anything for certain. Only one question could possibly matter at that point: what did your character think of the events they had in front of them, right then and there?
Endings are beginnings where you stop. A story should have a strong end, one where the world doesn’t stop but the story does. RPGs usually don’t have ending mechanics, leaving that up to the players to figure out. Given how important endings are I’ve always found this to be a surprising hole in most designs. So I designed The Festival, which is designed to propel the world and PCs forward, while wrapping up the parts of the story that the game considers important: how the PCs and the world changed. This is done in the context of a cultural celebration. Everything has calmed down, and if you think pre-modern folks are just going to sit around and wallow in whatever just happened… well they can’t. May as well have fun! So characters get reputations and traits voted onto them, and then the players play out the scenes where they realize that their characters realized they changed. The setting is then more or less randomly moved forward, with new plot hooks being generated by the table.
And it works beautifully.
The synergy of group discussion and in-story development produced scenes worthy of a true end to the journey the players and their characters had been on. The new plot hooks enveloped us in a feeling of constant motion, a sense that the world was moving on. The players wanted to see what happened next. Their characters had not only changed but were given the opportunity to acknowledge it. If we could never return to this story it ended in a way we could be okay with.
Crescendo still has a ways to go. I'm testing out another first arc as we speak, which has more world building mechanics in it, at the cost of slowing the pacing of the story down, but with more depth. The second arcs won't be starting for a little while. But we ended the first arc deeply satisfied with the arc itself and excited to see where it was going. And I feel more than a bit of relief! Crescendo not only stuck the landing but did it with style.
But who cares what I think? I’m the designer, course I’m going to like my own product. What do my playtesters think? When I asked here’s what they told me:
Zac
Why play this game
Character development. It is easy to create a living, breathing, real character. The slower pace of play really gives you time to think about your character’s actions and motivation. In fact the game demands that you do. And when things go wrong (and they will), the system gives you the time to work through how this character manages and rationalizes the events that take place resulting in a character that is far more believable and inhabitable because their decisions make sense and their motivations make sense. At least to you. There are plenty of opportunities for the GM or other players to challenge your decisions and at the end of a story arc what the other players think of you actually matters. I also enjoyed the lack of a party system. While the game is a cooperative storytelling experience, I didn’t need to worry about how my character’s growth and actions would affect the party (or split it). Also, no one else needs to feel pressured to take actions to keep the party together after my guy decides to go do his thing. While I think the party mechanic has its place in many games, particularly the combat oriented, I think many times it can also hinder your growth if an emotional revelation means the group is understaffed for an owlbear encounter.
Martha
The first thing that jumps out about Crescendo is the rules don’t get in the way of gameplay. So much of RPG time is spent trying to ‘outgame the game’ (think peasant rail gun). A lot of it is you vs the GM; who can make the story work better for them. Crescendo is a collaboration between players and GM, which takes the competition out of the picture, and focuses characters and the moderator on making a good story and a good experience. Story and content is key, and the rules take a back seat. They are there to facilitate only and they aim to not be part of the problem. This is perfect for me, because I despise the dynamics between players and the GM in traditional games. I want to create a great story with them, instead of fighting for my own way every step.
Throughout this play test the rules were changed a lot, and every single time it was because the rules were somehow blocking story development, they were too visible. Because you aren’t crunching numbers every five seconds, or pulling out power cards at every conflict, it leaves things open for creativity and collaboration in a way that mainstream RPG’s don’t. This is something that games like Trophy do marvelously, and something that is relatively hard to achieve. Unlike some other games I have played this game isn’t ‘rules light’ it’s ‘rules invisible’, which gives it the support structure of a traditional game, but all the flexibility and creativity of a game like Trophy. While Crescendo mirrors some concepts from games like Burning Wheel, they are combined with original concepts, and reworked themes from different games that work in a pretty great symmetry.
Almost all stats and numbers are developed outside the actual game, and you have to pay attention to at most one number of your own, and help from others, that’s it. To top it off, the black swan mechanic helps develop the story in a completely random fashion (which is very realistic) but still pulls from the past sessions and lore to make it relevant and somewhat consistent. You know that something is going to happen, but you know that inevitably it will happen in line with the rest of the story. It makes for some pretty great plot developments.
The last thing I would like to mention about the mechanics is the journaling. Everyone has a different style of journaling, and often they write it in the voice of their character. This makes read throughs and black swans very interesting, because you’ll catch a line or a story from a different character’s perspective, and it makes you question how that interaction actually went down. This coupled with the vision mechanic makes for some very interesting interactions, and developments.
As to the story itself, it was a lot of fun. You can spend quite a lot of time on a pretty simple scene and still feel like it is full of action, questions, and plot development. Several of our sessions took place over several hours but only really covered a couple of minutes in actual game time, but you didn’t really notice it, and it was still pretty satisfying. There are several different ways to play characters in this game. You can defy your traits and drives and constantly be putting yourself into confusing circumstances, or you can play them up and call upon a whole new set of crises. My character in particular stayed super true to her ideals and self and ended up in a place that she really didn’t want to be, even though she did everything just about perfect for her traits. On the other hand, another character really played with his traits, and ended up getting exactly what he wanted. But I could absolutely see it working the other way around, making for a bunch of story possibilities in the future.
Altogether this was a very satisfying and productive play test and I’m looking forward to more!
Bryan
Crescendo Review.
How would I describe a game like Crescendo? In short it is fun unique form of table top RPG that I have not seen the likes of before. It is extremely different from D&D removing the combat heavy focus of gameplay for a game centrally focused on character development. In fact, the game the heavily reminds me of Burning Wheel, another game that the Nathan has GMed, and that I have had the pleasure to play with him. However, I think personally that Crescendo improves upon Burning Wheel. For instance, the belief and instincts mechanic on Burning Wheel can feel a bit overwhelming, while the drive system of Crescendo is stream-lined and far more manageable. Another thing that has jumped up at me, is dice rolling system. Instead of rolling a standard D20 for everything like in D&D, this game has you rolling different types of dice depending on your stats. (BTW the highest dice I have rolled in this game is a D12)
The Story of Crescendo has been a blast. While Nathan at times tries a more hands off approach to storytelling, allowing for more player input then some other GMs would, He still manages to weave together an epic that keeps players coming back. One of my personal favorite moments in the game so far has been when Roisto, one of the PCs threw the Captain of the Dragonslayers overboard while the palming the Shard of Typhon (BLOGGER’S NOTE: The Shard of Typhon is a Macguffin that can bring back Typhon, the king of monsters, radically changing the world) over to him. The result led to complete chaos where we realized we may have just doomed everyone. Of course, this wouldn’t have been possible without one Crescendos most central features, The Black Swan. This concept of reading our own personal journal experience, (which is another thing that make this game unique; taking notes of what your character is doing has an actual gameplay mechanic to it) makes the twist feel more appreciative since the player actively contribute to it.
To sum up, Crescendo is a game that I highly recommend to anyone wanting to try something new. It forces you to take your character seriously and you’ll be surprised what kind of changes your character and yourself will go through
Thank you to three of you. Crescendo is a much stronger game because of your generosity with your time!
If you want to see where Crescendo is at now click here to join the Discord and get access to the alpha version!
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