Fixing Fiasco

The second edition of Fiasco is in progress but to my amazement the second edition is not really addressing any of the issues with the rules but is fixing up explanations and superficial concerns.

Fiasco is a classic but for me it is a poorly designed game with a bunch of potential bear traps for inexperienced players. To make the game enjoyable you need to have some metagame experience and this article is an attempt to share some of my ideas on how to make Fiasco work.

The cold start

Fiasco has a great initial worldbuilding experience where the players collaboratively create elements of the game which helps demonstrate their expectations and aspirations for the game ahead.

Then suddenly they are told to start framing scenes and start improvising an entertaining story. It is often a brutal experience and I’ve seen many players stall and fail to create a good first scene.

If you have a few bad initial scenes then you often have a bad game because this is a game with a fixed number of scenes and if you are trying to recover from a rough start and create enough of a platform for a meaningful story you rarely have time to dwell or expand on any part of the story you find interesting.

My fix for this is quite simple; on your first scene frame a scene with the player on your left (clockwise) that explores a question you have about the relationship between the characters as a player. The objective for the scene can simply be to answer that question.

Here are some ideas of what you can explore about a relationship:

• How did this relationship start?
• If positive then how does the relationship manifest itself?
  • If friends, what do they do together?
  • If lovers, is their relationship public or clandestine?
• If negative then what are the characters doing to escape it?
  • If rivals, how are they trying to outdo one another?
  • If enemies, when or how did the hostility start?
  • If blackmail, how did the blackmailer acquire their leverage?