Cartel

These thoughts on Cartel come from just one playthrough of the playtest rules. When the rules finalise I’m likely to play again and try and create a more definitive review.

Stress

I had been intrigued by the concept of Stress. A meter that is always building as you lie, kill and swindle your way through the underworld. Stress can be cleared by self-destructive and counter-productive behaviour. Meaningless violence or sex, drug-taking or drinking yourself happy. All of these things are likely to create new narrative problems for your character.

Interestingly though just indulging yourself clears all your stress so when my character insisted on a intravenous painkillers after being hospitalised for a relatively minor injury she got to clear her Stress for the rest of the game with relatively no consequences.

Another character who was a Sicario had the violence stress relief so whenever they were carrying out their job of hurting people they were also clearing their stress.

No-one really stressed about Stress which was a bit disappointing for me. It feels that you’d need a good MC to make it work as a mechanic.

Playbooks

At one point we had some confusion because some playbooks seemed to have basic and character-specific moves while others didn’t. We presumed this was because some character moves are more involved than others and the basic moves were added to fill the blank space but still; we weren’t sure.

I was also a bit disappointed to see that the playbooks all seemed to work independently. I would have loved to have seen a bit of interplay between them, either positive or negative, in the style of Monsterhearts.

Really it was only the relationships that brought characters together which feels a missed opportunity for a crime game set in a single-city.

Death spiral of ridiculous failure

The downward spiral of the PbtA mechanic fits well with the general conception of the background. Eventually you make a mistake and in trying to fix your mistake you cause as many problems as you solve. In theory what works in Apocalypse World should work in Cartel, virtually unchanged.

However during a long extended run of very bad dice-rolling on my part we I felt the narrative credibility of the game collapsed. I was unlucky but the thing was my character as a result was not really falling deeper into trouble, she was just really bad at her job. Her borderline legal hard stop didn’t just go south, nothing about it worked.

The character was shot and injured (a slight turn of luck) but I felt the operation was so bad that narratively she should have died.

My character is cop but she sucked at doing the things that a cop should be able to do. It is as if a Driver in Apocalypse World jumped in their car and failed to start it. Then when they were on the highway their tire burst and the nut on the hub cap was stuck when they tried to replace the tire.

Part of the importance of playbooks is to make sure that the core of the character is delivered via Character Moves rather than Basic Moves and it felt to me that that really wasn’t working right.

If my character is a Cop then they need to do all the basic stuff to be credible: shake down informants, observe targets and arrest them. Similarly crime bosses need to intimidate their goons and get their share of the take.

This might be an MC thing in terms of what deserves a roll but similarly it feels like a more modern design would have you rolling Advantage for your core activities. If I’m getting an informant to talk, that’s in my character zone. If I’m trying to persuade a colleague not to report some suspicious behaviour my character has been involved in, that’s a roll.