Fiasco is a GM-less storytelling game by Jason Morningstar about tragi-comical crimes gone terribly wrong. Coen Brothers: The RPG, basically. It’s a single session game that requires zero prep, so very low barrier-to-entry aside of reading the rules.
I love this game. As with most of Morningstar’s games, the rules are straightforward, elegant and robust. Play centers on a playset. The four included in the book are a nice southern town, a town in the wild west, a suburb and McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Each playset comes with a set of relationships, needs, objects and locations.
Unlike most games, characters aren’t defined by anything intrinsic, like stats, but rather by their relationships with others. The components of the playset are used to define your relationships with the people sitting at either side of you (for example, you and the player to your left might be boss/employee and share a need to get even with someone – it falls to the two of you to work out how those details shake out between you).
Play is broken into two acts, which each character getting to be the focus of two scenes in each. The active player gets to either establish the scene (picking who is there and why) or resolve it (determining the result of a scene) but not both. Scenes are ended by choosing a die – white for positive resolution, black for negative – and passing it to the next player. There are no mechanics for conflict resolution – everything is determined collaboratively. In between the two acts is the tilt, a randomly determined twist that must be worked into Act Two’s scenes.
The number of dice of each color you’ve accumulated during the game determines how things turn out for your character, as revealed in the (again, collaborative) aftermath.
It’s hard to talk about Fiasco in terms of anything other than its rules because it is a fine-tuned possibility engine. The system makes it possible for you to do absolutely anything – be it violent, silly or bizarre. It’s the best sort of RPG – one where the only limits are your imagination (and, perhaps, your appetite for comedic cruelty).
