I may have a bidding war on my hands.
I have now run "The Rent-Controlled Job" for a group of my Leverage players. Out of the modules that I have written so far, I had a choice between running that one or "The Snake Oil Job". I held back "The Snake Oil Job"; I think that my players should receive fair warning when I am going to run it, because I suspect that it will be a popular scenario. It is about tackling a celebrity quack and his anti-vaccination followers, and this resonates with a lot of my players. I may have people vying to be in the crew for that one. Kali has already notified me of her "dibs"....
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The Rent-Controlled Job proved to be an interesting instalment of the Leverage chronicle, because the players and I got to test some new or previously under-used features of the game, and they were successful.
We had two new players to the chronicle - Matt and Sue Houghton - bringing with them two new members of the Underground Railroad.
Sue was playing Eva Morgan (Hitter), who had in the past been very much a member of the Free Love movement. At some point, she saw that movement's darker side, and she went on to become a social worker, focussing on sex workers and victims of human trafficking. Eva has a caring nature, and tries to use reason and negotiation to get people out of dangerous situations, but when things turn nasty, she can extract people with surprising shows of force.
Matt was playing Charles (Thief) - a limousine driver with manners to go with his impeccable British accent (which in no way means that he is necessarily British). Charles has heard the loose lips of the rich and corrupt in the back of his car on many occasions, and their misdeeds have motivated him to take action.
I get the feeling that Matt has a very good head for picking up rules systems. Charles is very different in style to Cleo Huntington. She's a commodity-moving burglar; he's a getaway driver. A car chase may not be a scenario that will arise often, but I think that Matt pre-empted this; he also equipped Charles with a Talent for shadowing. As a result, he excels at tailing vehicles; this enables Matt to use the character's focus on driving pro-actively rather than just reactively. I've got to say - that's smart character generation, especially for a game that puts more onus on players to initiate scenes.
Among the new features, I was also trying out a "Mark Map" - a small board in the middle of the table, on which I would put post-it notes, setting out the parts of the bad guy's network that the crew had uncovered, as well as listing their assets and allies. This addition seemed to be well-received; it helped players to remember characters' names and relationships, and to see an overview of the Mark's empire.
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The story brought Ed Mason, Joel Hogarth, Cleo Huntington, Eva Morgan and Charles to San Francisco, where an unscrupulous property developer was making life Hell for the residents of a rent-controlled building in the Dogpatch area.
Stanley Pritchard was a businessman well-known for buying up disused or crumbling buildings and then destroying them. This earned him the nickname "Demolition Stan". He could flatten a building, and then sell its empty site to a construction company as a blank canvas for their architectural plans. In a city experiencing as much rapid gentrification as San Francisco, this "strip 'em and flip 'em" approach was making Pritchard a lot of money.
He had bought an entire city block, and most of it consisted of abandoned warehouse and office space, but one building was a residential apartment block with tenants. Pritchard wanted them to leave, but he also did not want to fork out the money to compensate so many tenants by going through the no-fault eviction process. He also could not jack up the rents. As a result, he set about using under-handed tricks and creating awful conditions to force tenants out, using a sleazy property manager called Frank Caviolo as his agent.
The crew learned of his antics from a former resident called Jackie Pierce. She had tried to withhold payment of rent when she held Caviolo responsible for electrical failings and pest problems that started to occur in her apartment. He managed to get her evicted, after a top-flight legal team showed up to support him in court, and squashed her and her lawyer on a technicality: she had not put the withheld rent in an ESCROW account. Eva had then brought Jackie to Cleo so that they could find her temporary shelter using the Railroad's safehouses.
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The players got stuck into the plot. Joel Hogarth starting looking into Stan Pritchard's financial dealings, and learned that he received investment from a police benevolent fund (to which he was also a donor), and that he often sold vacant lots to a developer called Valmont construction. Joel learned that both Valmont and Pritchard's companies would be represented at a technology conference at the Moscone centre, which captured his curiosity.
Meanwhile, Cleo and Eva preferred to get their information by hitting the ground - going door-to-door in the building to talk to the tenants about their situation. They discovered that most of the residents were experiencing pest problems or faulty utilities, most of which started after men dressed in maintenance workers' uniforms came to visit them. The only working bathroom on the ground floor belonged to Viera Solomon, a hulking Samoan mechanic, who could fix the odd breakage and could not be intimidated into letting strangers into his home. Solomon was allowing all his neighbours - including a wheelchair-bound child and his great-aunt - use his facilities after their homes were sabotaged. Inspecting the damage, Ed Mason learned that the tenants' flats had been crudely vandalised; the property manager was claiming that he had called in proper repair services, but the "criminal element" in the neighbourhood kept scaring them away.
Charles decided to tail Jackie's lawyer, Harvey Harper. Harper represented all of the residents, but he was by reputation an ambulance chaser; Charles was concerned that Pritchard's next logical step was to subvert their lawyer. He followed Harper in the evening and did not see anyone approach the lawyer... but he did flush out the two rent-a-goons that were also tailing Harper. Being amateurs, they had to follow the lawyer two cars behind, while Charles - better able to keep his distance - had a bead on them.
Unfortunately, Charles' plans went awry when he followed the thugs to the street where Harper lived (Matt rolled snake eyes!). He drove by too overtly, spooking them, and they drove off at speed, scraping parked cars, and hitting Charles' car in the process. When the residents of the street came out to see the damage, Charles was left to explain to the police what had happened, because the goons were long gone. Even the explanation got complicated; Harper enthusiastically tried to represent Charles to the officers, and was poorly received.... The crew's wheelman ended up having to spend a few hours downtown until the cops were satisfied that he had not caused any criminal damage.
At least Matt scored some Story Points out of the encounter, and learned that Harper was genuine, if not a popular guy.
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Cleo had more success breaking into Frank Caviolo's apartment. With her thief skills, she effortlessly got into his home, and found a lot of incriminating evidence. She found a ledger that suggested payments to Caviolo from Pritchard, every time he got a resident out for less than the value of a no-fault eviction. She also found two maintenance workers' uniforms, and heard some telling answerphone messages from Pritchard to Caviolo.
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In the scene at the Moscone Centre, Jon felt that his character was in his element. Joel and Ed soon learned that Valmont construction was at the conference to appear alongside the exhibition for Image Pad - a popular online art website that, among its other services, protects and promotes the work of technical artists. The CEO of Image Pad, the meticulous Gloria Goldberg, had a new project - she had worked with a young architect on the design for a "condominium of the future", and Valmont was going to make it a reality for her. This was the prize for which Pritchard was vying; he wanted to demolish the entire block in the Dogpatch of San Francisco so that Valmont would buy his site as the location to provide swish residences for Silicon Valley's tech hipsters.
The players in my Leverage games have seldom used Flashback Actions, but Jon took one during this scene. He retrospectively revealed that Gloria Goldberg had wanted to recruit Joel for her company in the past, and he was - as far as she was concerned - a hot commodity. This enabled him to earn her trust; she felt that she was recruiting him to help market her futuristic condominium to her employees and the people of San Francisco.
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I think that the Twist floored the crew for a moment; it certainly upset the characters. They received a call, notifying them of some kind of commotion at the apartment building. Narcotics police had gone to Solomon's home, and arrested him for drugs that they found in the apartment. Not only that, but they had seized the apartment under the rules of civil asset forfeiture, in the process taking away the only working bathroom on the ground floor.
The residents and the crew both suspected that drugs had been planted while Solomon was at work. Ed Mason had set up a camera outside of the building, and sure enough - when he checked the footage - he saw Caviolo's two rent-a-goons enter the building, and then leave again later in maintenance workers' uniforms.
Harper thought that he could get Solomon off the charges; everyone knew that people were coming in and out of his apartment constantly, and so the police would have a lot of difficulty proving that the drugs were his. However, Harper was aware of a problem with this defence: it could give the police cause to search other apartments, and who knew what they would find then.
To make matters worse, the crew realised that Solomon could not get his apartment back; under the rules of civil asset forfeiture, the owner would have to bring a legal challenge to recover it. All Pritchard had to do was drag his feet on bringing a case; Solomon would be homeless in the meantime. Also, Pritchard could probably rely on the police to return the apartment once he asked for it back... being such a generous benevolent fund donor.
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Ed and Joel had their plan to deal with Pritchard; they planned to use the dirt that they had gathered on Caviolo and Joel's access to convince Gloria Goldberg that Pritchard's site was a problem, and that she should convince Valmont to go with Pritchard's competitor - a Japanese company that had bought and restored waterfront land at Hunter's Point. Joel believed that he could use his influence on the CEO of Image Pad to get the residents of Pritchard's building a place in the futuristic condominium, as part of a good public relations exercise.
What followed was one of the best role-playing moments in the chronicle so far. While Richard and Jon were laying out their characters' plans, I could see that Sue was itching to say something. When she did, it was the verbal wake-up call that the crew's hackers needed to pull them back to reality. I am paraphrasing Eva's reaction, but it was along these lines:
Eva: "We don't need to get these people into the new building - that won't happen for ages! We've got a child in a wheelchair who doesn't have access to a toilet right now! We need to think about where our clients are going to be living next week - tomorrow even! We need social services to put pressure on the owner, and we need the residents to get their compensation payments!"
Eva had a plan that addressed the immediate problems; she wanted Pritchard to think that he could secure the sale to Valmont, but only by treating his tenants properly and paying the no-fault eviction compensation. This was the way to use Gloria Goldberg's influence: to get her to insist on fair treatment for the residents as part of the deal. If the crew also wanted to use their dirt on Caviolo to sink the deal later - fine, but they needed Pritchard to think that he was going to succeed right up until the tenants had received every last penny of compensation.
The crew recognised that her plan was the right one, and I think it provided an intense role-playing moment for Jon, because he realised that Joel had been so focussed on sticking it to Pritchard that he had overlooked the clients in their hour of need. Jon was still reeling a bit from Sue effectively calling him out some time after the game.
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The players put their final plan in motion, which included a very neat ploy from Kali and Matt to deal with the rent-a-goons. Returning to Caviolo's apartment, Cleo bugged his telephone, and so she overheard when the two thugs returned to the building to plant more drugs. When she learned which apartment had been targeted, she slipped in quickly - while the goons were on their way downstairs - and threw the drugs down the laundry chute to Charles' waiting arms.
Rather than waiting for Frank Caviolo to call the police, Charles had tipped them off instead. As the thugs exited the building, they ran into cops, who had already found the narcotics in their car. As the cherry on top of this set-up, the goons had - true to form - donned their maintenance worker disguises before leaving. This meant that they were arrested in their costumes, giving credence to the tenants' reports that crooks dressed as workmen were responsible for the local crimes. This result certainly helped to eliminate some of Pritchard's allies from his "Mark Map", and ultimately free Solomon from any suspicion.
Eva got her social services contacts to expose the horrors taking place in the building, and Joel used their formal protests to suggest a risky proposition to Gloria Goldberg. He advised her to buy Pritchard's building as the cheaper option, but - rather than incurring reputational damage - she could turn the social services controversy into a public relations win - by insisting on a deal that guarantees fair treatment for the tenants. His pitch was a hard sell, especially since Gloria Goldberg practically had an army of lawyers and accountants as her entourage, but Joel managed it.
Meanwhile, Ed Mason was putting together a separate media package of all the dirt that the crew had gathered on Caviolo and Pritchard, so that he could spike Pritchard's deal after he had compensated the residents.
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The players did not win the Wrap-Up action; the dice told an interesting tale, because each die that I rolled for Pritchard represented a surviving part of his network. My roll was narrowly higher than Richard's score, because I got a maximum result on the die that represented Pritchard's top-flight legal team. The "Mark Map" worked well as a clear, visual reminder that this part of the Mark's empire was still operating.
This meant that the tenants got their compensation money and their mistreatment stopped, but Pritchard was not incriminated when Caviolo and his thugs fell, nor was he ruined when the crew tried to sink his deal with Valmont. Gloria Goldberg was pressuring Valmont to withdraw, but Pritchard was threatening to sue for breach of their agreements and promises. In other words, the Mark's shield against liability held up; the story was a legal mess for him and he did not win, but it was not his doom.
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I learned a few more things from this game too.
I think that Mastermind may be the skill set that players are most likely to underestimate. Very few players have jumped at the role of the crew's mastermind, and now Richard has re-written his character to be more hacker than mastermind. However, some of the players found a lot of use for their Mastermind dice during the scenes. One example was when Eva and Cleo went canvassing the neighbourhood: they were not tricking people, but liaising with them and gathering information.
Later in the game, Sue used her Mastermind die again, when she was arranging for social services to intervene. Mastermind covers attempts to get other agencies or organisations to do your bidding - to do what players in World of Darkness LARPs would call "influence actions". Mastermind was not Eva's primary or even her secondary role, but she had "Social Worker" as a Distinction, and she used it to get a powerful bonus on her dice roll, leading to success.
I should add that I was pleased to see crewmembers using their other, less powerful abilities to achieve their goals. Leverage has more possibilities when players don't see their characters as just performing their primary roles. Also, the players did not meta-game; when a player thought of something to do, his or her character usually did it, rather than passing it to the crewmember that had a better ability rating for the task.
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Some of the research that went into this game can be found under the following links:
A narrative of evictions in San Francisco
Rent control in San Francisco
The compensation costs of no-fault evictions
A San Francisco renters' horror story
The ACLU on asset forfeiture abuse...
...and John Oliver on asset forfeiture
Tuesday 27 October 2015
Tuesday 20 October 2015
Leverage Role-Playing - Episode Three: The Debt to Society Job
My research for games of Leverage can be troubling, because sometimes I find myself reading articles or watching documentaries about scandals that show just how unjust society as a whole - not just select individuals - can be. The "Kids for Cash" scandal is a recent example that made me feel deeply angry.
For those unfamiliar with "Kids for Cash", the short version is that two Pennsylvania juvenile court judges - Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan - imposed harsh sentences on juveniles for trivial offences, while receiving money for the construction of a private prison. The number of juveniles being sent to jail was of course bolstering the business case for that private prison. Eventually, an investigation from the FBI and the Philadelphia Juvenile Law Center caught up to them, and they received very long sentences for racketeering and honest services fraud.
The Kids for Cash documentary is an excellent film, because the director - Robert May - did a fine job getting all sides of the story to talk to him openly, including the judges. The most moving and difficult stories are those of the juveniles, some of whom were imprisoned - for long periods - for offences as minor as yelling at an adult, or for mocking a teacher on a MySpace page. The damage done to them in the detention centres more than eclipsed what were, in many of the cases, mere indiscretions.
The judges appear in the film and are given space to tell their side of the story as they wanted. Ciavarella appeared tearful, and his family talk about the way that the investigating bodies conspired against him. Conahan chose to appear meditative, sitting on a beach and staring out into the distance. However, they both utterly failed to come across as sympathetic. Some of their sentences left horrible mental scars on young people, and led to at least one suicide, but all of their tears were for themselves. The juxtaposition is horrible between the mercilessness with which the judges treated inexperienced juveniles, and the sympathy that they sought for themselves, despite having far less of an excuse for breaking the law.
Yet the most vile thing about the "Kids for Cash" scandal is that Ciavarella's draconian sentencing practices were fine with the general public in Pennsylvania - until his financial misdeeds were revealed. The parents of his victims were horrified, and the Philadelphia Juvenile Law Center were hot on his case; they had been following his trials, and noticed that he was getting an exceptionally high number of parents to waive the right to an attorney, and then handing out harsh sentences, sometimes in trials that lasted for less than two minutes. Most citizens in the state, however, thought he was doing a great job.
The staff at the Philadelphia Juvenile Law Center commented on this problem. After Columbine, people did not want the authorities to take any chances with young offenders, and this led to support for more "zero tolerance" approaches to children. How messed up is that? Support for guns in the United States is so strong that, after a gun massacre, gun control remained a very difficult thing to achieve, but the authorities could crack down on the children! That was being "tough on crime", so citizens were okay with it.
Ciaverella claimed that the scandal is mis-titled, because he never literally exchanged kids for cash. This might even be true, because he can point to the fact that he was giving juveniles harsh sentences before he was receiving funds (which he failed to declare to the public or the IRS). What bothers me intensely is that, if he had never accepted money, he could have carried on handing out disproportionate and life-ruining sentences to young people for the rest of his career, and only the parents of his victims and the Philadelphia Juvenile Law Center would have been speaking out against him. In other words, he could have gotten away with atrocities, if he had not failed to declare money.
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The Debt to Society Job was difficult to write, because it touched on the issue of people not caring when justice is being abused in the middle of polite society. For this game, I pitched a crew from the Underground Railroad against a mayor, who was running a mayor's court in Erie County, Ohio. For information about the abuses in these courts, The Outskirts of Hope - an ACLU article - has the goods. Basically, debtors' prison should not be occurring; it violates the US Constitution and the Ohio State constitution. A person can be imprisoned for refusing to pay a debt, but means-testing is mandatory to ensure that people are not being incarcerated for being unable to pay. In these mayor's courts, that compulsory step is being skipped. A lot.
Poor people in small-town areas of Ohio are being trapped in a cycle of being put on payment plans to address a fine, falling behind and being imprisoned. Incarceration then causes them to lose their jobs, letting them fall further behind, especially once court costs get added to their debts. Sadly, none of this is part of the game's fictional narrative. The fictional part is the group of neo-pulp outlaw heroes swinging in to save the day and bring down the mayor.
For this game, I had an entirely new crew of characters appear in Ohio to help a debtor called Belinda, who was afraid that she was about to be thrown back into jail for falling behind on her payments. The crewmembers were as follows:
Andy was Theodore Camberley III (the Mastermind) - a financial planner who used to arrange money transfers and overseas investments for big corporations... until he realised just how much he was involved in capital flight and tax evasion, and that he was on the wrong side.
Dom was Herb Wolfson (the Thief) - an activist and anarchist with a talent for using stealth and sabotage against Wall Street. Very much the kind of person to say that "property is theft, man", he was mostly spending his time on petty acts and demonstrations, until the Railroad tried to convince him that his talents were better utilised elsewhere.
Katrina was Audrey Freeman, a.k.a. "Rain" (the Hitter) - a blue-haired Aikido expert and self-professed "maniac pixie dream girl". We asked Katrina whether she meant "manic pixie dream girl". Turns out the answer is no. A corporation took away her dojo, leaving her with a highly-developed desire for revenge against big money.
Elle was Angel Cross (the Grifter) - a bubbly former congressional aide, who went to Washington to make well-intentioned changes. Once she saw the extent of the lies and fiscal influence in politics, she realised that helping senators and representatives was not going to build a better America. Then, the Railroad convinced her that her skills would be useful elsewhere.
Adrian was Martin Archer (the Hacker) - a corporate drone by day, but an open-source creator and conspiracy-chasing hacker by night. Archer spent his working hours protecting his employers from cyber-attacks, until his own delving into their systems showed him that he had been protecting information that should not be secret,
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The players learned that the mayor of Milan, Ohio - who was running the mayor's court - was up for re-election, and so they were drawn to getting involved in the politics to ensure that he lost to his challenger. This was a tall order; the mayor was a local man and a fifteen-year incumbent, whereas his challenger was Dalton Furlow, a Republican from out of town, who had fallen out of favour when his run at the State Legislature ended in a scandal ten years ago. He had run on a platform of family values, but then his affair with his secretary came to light.
Yes, this was the game in which players found themselves rooting for a Republican.... This initially caused some misgivings, but they learned that he was now married to his secretary and had been for nine years. They also learned that he was a moderate Republican - a protege of John McCain - and had not been a lawyer. So, the crew knew that he could not and likely would not run a mayor's court in the way that the incumbent was doing.
The crew certainly liked that Furlow was a believer in campaign finance reform. From Archer's fact finding and Camberley's grasp of numbers and finance, they soon learned that the mayor's campaign for re-election was receiving support from the same private prison to which he was sending debtors. However, the mayor and the corporation had made the right moves to avoid a "debtors for cash" scandal. The mayor never directly received or touched the money. It was filtered through a non-profit into a Political Action Committee, enabling the mayor's cousin to spend it on campaigning and political tactics. Even though the mayor, his cousin and the correctional company were avoiding any public declaration of the prison's fiscal support, none of them were doing anything illegal.
The private prison's corporate owners certainly appreciated the mayor's support. Their Lake Erie facility had suffered blows to its reputation in recent inspections. They had been forced to dismiss their catering company, after maggots were found in prisoners' food. Also, being a prison, its financial success depended on attendance numbers: the more prisoners, the better.
As a former congressional aide and a skilled grifter, Angel easily got herself a place among the staff for Furlow's relatively-impoverished campaign, bringing with her campaign money. Ted Camberley still has copious funds of his own from his career in finance, and easily created a PAC for Furlow.
Meanwhile, the other party members launched their own campaigns of sabotage against the offices of both the non-profit and the PAC that were supplying the mayor. They soon learned that the non-profit was just a shell for funnelling money to the PAC, but the PAC's offices were highly-protected.
This did not stop them from getting access; Herb let his straggly pet dog Bakunin into the building, and tricked the security guards into thinking that the animal was setting off alarms. This caused them to call their technical support, but Archer had re-routed the call to himself. This got him invited into the building's security station, where he created an opening for Rain to enter the PAC's open-plan office. There, she planted a USB device - one of Archer's potent inventions - on the PAC's networked computers, effectively giving him access to the whole system. She also copied their files and, before leaving, performed enough sabotage of office equipment to slow down the PAC's operations.
With the PAC's files, the crew quickly learned which influential people in the village were the biggest threats to the mayor's re-election - which ones had their own ideas for the local council and wanted new blood in the mayoral seat. Armed with this information, they set out to win more support for Furlow, and Rain also passed lots of information about the mayor's dodgy financial backers to a young documentary-maker.
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I had to admit that I was having trouble generating drama at times during the game. Part of the reason for this was because the players had an almost-ridiculous run of luck in the first couple of hours of play. They were winning at just about everything that they attempted. At one point, Dom pointed out that dice had been rolled about twenty times, and the players had yet to have a single die come up with a 1. Of course, once he said that, Murphy's law started to catch up with him.
The mayor never became an effective threat to the crew. Strangely, a side plot produced a much greater threat than anything the mayor did. When the crew learned that Belinda's boyfriend had borrowed money from a dangerous loan shark to clear her debts to the court, Herb Wolfson decided to go looking for said shark. This local underworld figure was Clay Kirkwood - who had learned that he could easily fly under a village sheriff's radar while quietly running all of the loans and drugs trade in the area.
Herb went asking for information about Kirkwood too openly, and he was snatched off the street and taken to a meeting with the local crime boss. Herb tried to convince Kirkwood that he needed a loan, but Kirkwood had already come to view him as a problem. He promised that he would leave some money for Herb behind a bar, but when Herb went to collect it, he was tricked into picking up a bag containing drugs. The police then arrived, and Herb found that he had been set up. He managed to escape (and Angel later used her extensive range of costumes to disguise him), but he was effectively framed as a drug dealer.
I may actually have to re-write the character of Clay Kirkwood. I had originally written him to be a minor bad guy for a side plot; not too clever but a little dangerous. However, because of the way that the dice fell in play, he covered his back deftly and did a complete number on one of the crew. Now Dom has a lasting feature on Herb's character sheet to reflect what Kirkwood did to him. Perhaps I should re-write Kirkwood as a Foil - the Leverage game's concept of a recurring antagonist that might show up in other stories - like James Sterling (Mark Sheppard) in the television series.
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Elle was pro-active in using Angel's Idealist Talent on other characters. It gives her a bonus when convincing others to do the right thing, and it was very effective for bringing people together to oppose the mayor. It also provided one of the more interesting complications of the game. Elle passed a test to persuade Furlow to do the right thing, but in the process rolled a 1. So, the opposing candidate was prepared to take a stand against corrupt campaign financing, to such an extent that he returned the crew's money and politely refused to work with Angel. He had looked into her PAC and got an inkling of just how dark Ted Camberley's dark money was! This took away some of Furlow's power, but I think it actually made the crew like him more....
The game came to a conclusion with Furlow's election victory. Those influential figures in the village supported him, and they made sure that documentary footage about the mayor's financial backers was broadcast to all of the voters. This enabled the mayor to be toppled, and Furlow ceased to run a mayor's court, instead referring traffic and ordinance fines to the more conventional magistrates' courts. The crew also managed to settle the debt that Belinda's boyfriend had to Kirkwood, although this was because Ted Camberley used the PAC money that Furlow returned to pay the debt.
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I was not as happy with this game as I was with The Sideways Job, partly because I did not really feel in the right place to portray characters myself. I felt like I had a bad time trying to give colour to the game at times, but that may be a matter of perspective.
Nonetheless, I think that I learned a couple of useful lessons from the game:
1) I should have a mechanism for building to a climax. The Leverage rulebook advises the storyteller to figure out what the "pressure" is in each game. In my home-made modules, I write down what the pressure is, but what I need is a gauge - almost like the "doom track" in Arkham Horror games. This would help the players to estimate how many minutes are left until midnight - how close they are to the Wrap-up Montage. Such a gauge would not necessarily be a bad thing; it could represent the pressure that the player characters are putting on the bad guy.
In The Debt to Society Job, I had difficulty figuring out at what point we were ready to cut to the climax, and something to guide me in that regard would be useful.
2) I should have something to help players to create scenes. Leverage is a somewhat unusual game, because it encourages players to be pro-active, rather than responsive to problems that the story-teller creates. The Mark won't necessarily come to you; the players must think of creative ways to take the fight to him and his supporters.
This can seem great, but some players are better at being devious on the fly than others. Also, when characters have cool powers, their players may become too focussed on how to get those powers into the game, even though they may have lots of other means at their disposal to take action.
Perhaps "user stories" would be a useful solution. I have been using these at work, because they are helpful as means for lay people to set out to IT people what they need from a system. They work well because they take input, which could include complaints and queries, and they help staff to express their business requirements in a constructive way: "I want to do X, so that Y will be achieved".
So, when players are trying to come up with scenes in which their characters are taking action, encouraging them think along these lines may help to get the ball rolling. I could even provide lots of examples of what actions can be taken with the game's skills as further guidance. Games can be challenging when some of the onus to introduce plot elements falls on the players.
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Some of the research that went into this game can be found under the following links:
The Outskirts of Hope
The "Kids for Cash" scandal
Maggots in private prison food
John McCain on Campaign Financing
PACs have to disclose their donors. Non-profits don't.
The Kids for Cash documentary is an excellent film, because the director - Robert May - did a fine job getting all sides of the story to talk to him openly, including the judges. The most moving and difficult stories are those of the juveniles, some of whom were imprisoned - for long periods - for offences as minor as yelling at an adult, or for mocking a teacher on a MySpace page. The damage done to them in the detention centres more than eclipsed what were, in many of the cases, mere indiscretions.
The judges appear in the film and are given space to tell their side of the story as they wanted. Ciavarella appeared tearful, and his family talk about the way that the investigating bodies conspired against him. Conahan chose to appear meditative, sitting on a beach and staring out into the distance. However, they both utterly failed to come across as sympathetic. Some of their sentences left horrible mental scars on young people, and led to at least one suicide, but all of their tears were for themselves. The juxtaposition is horrible between the mercilessness with which the judges treated inexperienced juveniles, and the sympathy that they sought for themselves, despite having far less of an excuse for breaking the law.
Yet the most vile thing about the "Kids for Cash" scandal is that Ciavarella's draconian sentencing practices were fine with the general public in Pennsylvania - until his financial misdeeds were revealed. The parents of his victims were horrified, and the Philadelphia Juvenile Law Center were hot on his case; they had been following his trials, and noticed that he was getting an exceptionally high number of parents to waive the right to an attorney, and then handing out harsh sentences, sometimes in trials that lasted for less than two minutes. Most citizens in the state, however, thought he was doing a great job.
The staff at the Philadelphia Juvenile Law Center commented on this problem. After Columbine, people did not want the authorities to take any chances with young offenders, and this led to support for more "zero tolerance" approaches to children. How messed up is that? Support for guns in the United States is so strong that, after a gun massacre, gun control remained a very difficult thing to achieve, but the authorities could crack down on the children! That was being "tough on crime", so citizens were okay with it.
Ciaverella claimed that the scandal is mis-titled, because he never literally exchanged kids for cash. This might even be true, because he can point to the fact that he was giving juveniles harsh sentences before he was receiving funds (which he failed to declare to the public or the IRS). What bothers me intensely is that, if he had never accepted money, he could have carried on handing out disproportionate and life-ruining sentences to young people for the rest of his career, and only the parents of his victims and the Philadelphia Juvenile Law Center would have been speaking out against him. In other words, he could have gotten away with atrocities, if he had not failed to declare money.
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The Debt to Society Job was difficult to write, because it touched on the issue of people not caring when justice is being abused in the middle of polite society. For this game, I pitched a crew from the Underground Railroad against a mayor, who was running a mayor's court in Erie County, Ohio. For information about the abuses in these courts, The Outskirts of Hope - an ACLU article - has the goods. Basically, debtors' prison should not be occurring; it violates the US Constitution and the Ohio State constitution. A person can be imprisoned for refusing to pay a debt, but means-testing is mandatory to ensure that people are not being incarcerated for being unable to pay. In these mayor's courts, that compulsory step is being skipped. A lot.
Poor people in small-town areas of Ohio are being trapped in a cycle of being put on payment plans to address a fine, falling behind and being imprisoned. Incarceration then causes them to lose their jobs, letting them fall further behind, especially once court costs get added to their debts. Sadly, none of this is part of the game's fictional narrative. The fictional part is the group of neo-pulp outlaw heroes swinging in to save the day and bring down the mayor.
For this game, I had an entirely new crew of characters appear in Ohio to help a debtor called Belinda, who was afraid that she was about to be thrown back into jail for falling behind on her payments. The crewmembers were as follows:
Andy was Theodore Camberley III (the Mastermind) - a financial planner who used to arrange money transfers and overseas investments for big corporations... until he realised just how much he was involved in capital flight and tax evasion, and that he was on the wrong side.
Dom was Herb Wolfson (the Thief) - an activist and anarchist with a talent for using stealth and sabotage against Wall Street. Very much the kind of person to say that "property is theft, man", he was mostly spending his time on petty acts and demonstrations, until the Railroad tried to convince him that his talents were better utilised elsewhere.
Katrina was Audrey Freeman, a.k.a. "Rain" (the Hitter) - a blue-haired Aikido expert and self-professed "maniac pixie dream girl". We asked Katrina whether she meant "manic pixie dream girl". Turns out the answer is no. A corporation took away her dojo, leaving her with a highly-developed desire for revenge against big money.
Elle was Angel Cross (the Grifter) - a bubbly former congressional aide, who went to Washington to make well-intentioned changes. Once she saw the extent of the lies and fiscal influence in politics, she realised that helping senators and representatives was not going to build a better America. Then, the Railroad convinced her that her skills would be useful elsewhere.
Adrian was Martin Archer (the Hacker) - a corporate drone by day, but an open-source creator and conspiracy-chasing hacker by night. Archer spent his working hours protecting his employers from cyber-attacks, until his own delving into their systems showed him that he had been protecting information that should not be secret,
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The players learned that the mayor of Milan, Ohio - who was running the mayor's court - was up for re-election, and so they were drawn to getting involved in the politics to ensure that he lost to his challenger. This was a tall order; the mayor was a local man and a fifteen-year incumbent, whereas his challenger was Dalton Furlow, a Republican from out of town, who had fallen out of favour when his run at the State Legislature ended in a scandal ten years ago. He had run on a platform of family values, but then his affair with his secretary came to light.
Yes, this was the game in which players found themselves rooting for a Republican.... This initially caused some misgivings, but they learned that he was now married to his secretary and had been for nine years. They also learned that he was a moderate Republican - a protege of John McCain - and had not been a lawyer. So, the crew knew that he could not and likely would not run a mayor's court in the way that the incumbent was doing.
The crew certainly liked that Furlow was a believer in campaign finance reform. From Archer's fact finding and Camberley's grasp of numbers and finance, they soon learned that the mayor's campaign for re-election was receiving support from the same private prison to which he was sending debtors. However, the mayor and the corporation had made the right moves to avoid a "debtors for cash" scandal. The mayor never directly received or touched the money. It was filtered through a non-profit into a Political Action Committee, enabling the mayor's cousin to spend it on campaigning and political tactics. Even though the mayor, his cousin and the correctional company were avoiding any public declaration of the prison's fiscal support, none of them were doing anything illegal.
The private prison's corporate owners certainly appreciated the mayor's support. Their Lake Erie facility had suffered blows to its reputation in recent inspections. They had been forced to dismiss their catering company, after maggots were found in prisoners' food. Also, being a prison, its financial success depended on attendance numbers: the more prisoners, the better.
As a former congressional aide and a skilled grifter, Angel easily got herself a place among the staff for Furlow's relatively-impoverished campaign, bringing with her campaign money. Ted Camberley still has copious funds of his own from his career in finance, and easily created a PAC for Furlow.
Meanwhile, the other party members launched their own campaigns of sabotage against the offices of both the non-profit and the PAC that were supplying the mayor. They soon learned that the non-profit was just a shell for funnelling money to the PAC, but the PAC's offices were highly-protected.
This did not stop them from getting access; Herb let his straggly pet dog Bakunin into the building, and tricked the security guards into thinking that the animal was setting off alarms. This caused them to call their technical support, but Archer had re-routed the call to himself. This got him invited into the building's security station, where he created an opening for Rain to enter the PAC's open-plan office. There, she planted a USB device - one of Archer's potent inventions - on the PAC's networked computers, effectively giving him access to the whole system. She also copied their files and, before leaving, performed enough sabotage of office equipment to slow down the PAC's operations.
With the PAC's files, the crew quickly learned which influential people in the village were the biggest threats to the mayor's re-election - which ones had their own ideas for the local council and wanted new blood in the mayoral seat. Armed with this information, they set out to win more support for Furlow, and Rain also passed lots of information about the mayor's dodgy financial backers to a young documentary-maker.
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I had to admit that I was having trouble generating drama at times during the game. Part of the reason for this was because the players had an almost-ridiculous run of luck in the first couple of hours of play. They were winning at just about everything that they attempted. At one point, Dom pointed out that dice had been rolled about twenty times, and the players had yet to have a single die come up with a 1. Of course, once he said that, Murphy's law started to catch up with him.
The mayor never became an effective threat to the crew. Strangely, a side plot produced a much greater threat than anything the mayor did. When the crew learned that Belinda's boyfriend had borrowed money from a dangerous loan shark to clear her debts to the court, Herb Wolfson decided to go looking for said shark. This local underworld figure was Clay Kirkwood - who had learned that he could easily fly under a village sheriff's radar while quietly running all of the loans and drugs trade in the area.
Herb went asking for information about Kirkwood too openly, and he was snatched off the street and taken to a meeting with the local crime boss. Herb tried to convince Kirkwood that he needed a loan, but Kirkwood had already come to view him as a problem. He promised that he would leave some money for Herb behind a bar, but when Herb went to collect it, he was tricked into picking up a bag containing drugs. The police then arrived, and Herb found that he had been set up. He managed to escape (and Angel later used her extensive range of costumes to disguise him), but he was effectively framed as a drug dealer.
I may actually have to re-write the character of Clay Kirkwood. I had originally written him to be a minor bad guy for a side plot; not too clever but a little dangerous. However, because of the way that the dice fell in play, he covered his back deftly and did a complete number on one of the crew. Now Dom has a lasting feature on Herb's character sheet to reflect what Kirkwood did to him. Perhaps I should re-write Kirkwood as a Foil - the Leverage game's concept of a recurring antagonist that might show up in other stories - like James Sterling (Mark Sheppard) in the television series.
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Elle was pro-active in using Angel's Idealist Talent on other characters. It gives her a bonus when convincing others to do the right thing, and it was very effective for bringing people together to oppose the mayor. It also provided one of the more interesting complications of the game. Elle passed a test to persuade Furlow to do the right thing, but in the process rolled a 1. So, the opposing candidate was prepared to take a stand against corrupt campaign financing, to such an extent that he returned the crew's money and politely refused to work with Angel. He had looked into her PAC and got an inkling of just how dark Ted Camberley's dark money was! This took away some of Furlow's power, but I think it actually made the crew like him more....
The game came to a conclusion with Furlow's election victory. Those influential figures in the village supported him, and they made sure that documentary footage about the mayor's financial backers was broadcast to all of the voters. This enabled the mayor to be toppled, and Furlow ceased to run a mayor's court, instead referring traffic and ordinance fines to the more conventional magistrates' courts. The crew also managed to settle the debt that Belinda's boyfriend had to Kirkwood, although this was because Ted Camberley used the PAC money that Furlow returned to pay the debt.
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I was not as happy with this game as I was with The Sideways Job, partly because I did not really feel in the right place to portray characters myself. I felt like I had a bad time trying to give colour to the game at times, but that may be a matter of perspective.
Nonetheless, I think that I learned a couple of useful lessons from the game:
1) I should have a mechanism for building to a climax. The Leverage rulebook advises the storyteller to figure out what the "pressure" is in each game. In my home-made modules, I write down what the pressure is, but what I need is a gauge - almost like the "doom track" in Arkham Horror games. This would help the players to estimate how many minutes are left until midnight - how close they are to the Wrap-up Montage. Such a gauge would not necessarily be a bad thing; it could represent the pressure that the player characters are putting on the bad guy.
In The Debt to Society Job, I had difficulty figuring out at what point we were ready to cut to the climax, and something to guide me in that regard would be useful.
2) I should have something to help players to create scenes. Leverage is a somewhat unusual game, because it encourages players to be pro-active, rather than responsive to problems that the story-teller creates. The Mark won't necessarily come to you; the players must think of creative ways to take the fight to him and his supporters.
This can seem great, but some players are better at being devious on the fly than others. Also, when characters have cool powers, their players may become too focussed on how to get those powers into the game, even though they may have lots of other means at their disposal to take action.
Perhaps "user stories" would be a useful solution. I have been using these at work, because they are helpful as means for lay people to set out to IT people what they need from a system. They work well because they take input, which could include complaints and queries, and they help staff to express their business requirements in a constructive way: "I want to do X, so that Y will be achieved".
So, when players are trying to come up with scenes in which their characters are taking action, encouraging them think along these lines may help to get the ball rolling. I could even provide lots of examples of what actions can be taken with the game's skills as further guidance. Games can be challenging when some of the onus to introduce plot elements falls on the players.
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Some of the research that went into this game can be found under the following links:
The Outskirts of Hope
The "Kids for Cash" scandal
Maggots in private prison food
John McCain on Campaign Financing
PACs have to disclose their donors. Non-profits don't.
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