Most role-playing games are about players playing characters who are heroes doing heroic acts.  Even if they are not doing heroic things, these characters are generally somewhat extraordinary and are often, at worst, anti-heroes.  This only makes sense as stories about ordinary people doing ordinary things are, almost by definition, boring.  Nonetheless there are hundreds of slice-of-life style movies which prove that even ordinary people can get involved in extraordinary or at least extraordinarily interesting stories.

Fiasco is designed to tell these types of stories in a role-playing game format.  Because the characters in these stories are less important than the situations they find themselves in, Fiasco revolves entirely around the relationships between characters rather than those characters’ abilities.  In fact, players don’t create characters until after these relationships are established.  Each character has a relationship with the character of the player to his left and to his right and a character’s personality and abilities are defined more by these relationships than anything else.  Character creation boils down to giving a name and a descriptive phrase that fits the personality suggested by these relationships to the character.  In fact, having a character concept in mind before these relationships are established is pointless.

These relationships are defined by the group through a rather ingenious method.  Each Fiasco game begins with the group (or perhaps the person who happens to have one available) selecting a play set.  These play sets are short descriptions of the sort of scenario the players can expect or the theme and genre that the game should be.  It also includes a “movie night” section which suggest movies that the play set emulates.  Fiasco makes no bones about the fact that the game is inspired by dark farce movies and this is a prime example of that dynamic. Read the rest of this entry »