Recently, our class got together to finish our existing sessions of the Fiasco Role Playing Game that we had started the week prior. The Fiasco RPG System is designed with the intent of creating chaos for the players to react to and incorporate into their stories. In this session, rather than creating characters once again, we began by performing our “Tilt” The Tilt involves using the dice that have yet to handed out to other players in order to select new Elements to add to the story, using the similar method of defining a category before establishing the more specific meaning behind that Element. Once these twists have been added, we then moved on to Act Two, where we continued to tell our characters’ stories by acting out scenes while including the twists that had been determined in the Tilt. Once we had given out all of our dice, we then moved onto the Aftermath, where we each used our dice to determine how well our character’s story ended and told these stories one die at a time. 

For this second half of our Fiasco session, I personally think the most difficult aspect was trying to incorporate the Elements that we discovered in our Tilt into our existing story. Our Tilt involved two Elements, a stranger arriving to settle a score and someone developing a conscience. Before we could even begin to act out our scenes, we tried to think about ways that we could include those elements moving forward, such as by having our stranger be connected to more than one of our players, and by allowing one of existing characters to gain a conscience and using that to prompt a character arc. While I believe we were able to resolve our tilts very well, it was still likely the most difficult part of this session, and attempting to involve those elements without planning ahead like we had likely would have resulted in the whole story falling apart. 

As for the session itself, it was decided that our rival lemonade salesmen would be presented with a new issue: an employee from the company that made their lemonade stands arriving to reclaim a stand that was not paid for (A stranger arriving to settle a score), which introduced a new issue for both the innocent party and the guilty party. However, while this was being settled the “wizard” from the previous session gained a conscience and attempted to reform themselves into a businessman. Once all of the other plot points had progressed however, the estranged relatives finally settled their scores as one of them attempted to murder the other, and the sound of sirens gathered the remaining characters. The Aftermath then set the background for these characters futures, with the attempted murder landing one relative in jail while the other made a full recovery, one of the lemonade salesman running away with a EMT adn the other losing the spark that made them enjoy the business, and the “wizard” turned businessman reverting back to their “wizardly” ways. 

However, what more is there to learn from Fiasco that we haven’t learned already. Personally, I think the potential difficulty of incorporating the Tilt might contain an insight into leadership as a whole, as was how we were able to mitigate the difficulty of it. A leader needs to be able to account for unexpected setbacks as they attempt to lead their team to their goal, and to plan for a way to get around those setbacks and account for them. Similarly, our group needed to be able to plan how to include our Tilt Elements in our story, even though we didn’t know what they would be until our Tilt happened. As such, I personally think that our planning session not only allowed us to mitigate the harm the Tilt could cause to our story, but was also an example of how you might be able to use planning to be a more effective leader when faced with the unexpected.

Not long ago, our class got together to play sessions of the Fiasco Role Playing Game over a course of two weeks. Fiasco is an RPG System designed with the intent of creating chaos and allowing players to create the most disastrous situations they can. In this game, players use the color coded dice they have been given to help create their characters and determine the outcomes of scenes that they perform, all so that they can work together to create an interesting story where everything falls apart around their characters. It is worth noting that these dice rolls do not determine what the characters will be, but rather aspects of the character, such as their relationships with other characters (each player is actually required to establish at least one relationship with another character), what their goals are, and perhaps even key aspects of the world that all of the players can interact with, like important objects and locations. The players can then use all of these aspects to act out two scenes each in Act 1, developing their characters and creating conflict between their characters. Players can either establish a scene and act it out themselves, waiting for another player to give them either a positive or negative die to determine how it ends, or choose a positive or negative outcome and allow the other players to establish a scene for them to finish. For my personal group, this was the extent of our first session of Fiasco, as we ran out of time just as we finished our Act 1. 

As for our session itself, once we had established our characters and our setting, a commercial district in the middle of a suburban town, it was time for us to start acting out our scenes. Personally, I believe that this was the most difficult part of the game for our group, at least initially. With nothing to go off of besides our characters goals and relationships. With that in mind, I tried my best to establish our first scene based upon my character, Eddy McFarlain, and his rival’s (another player) competing lemonade stands, and tried to use that pre-established conflict to help begin our story. As we continued to create scenes and get a feel for our characters, this process became much easier, leading to scenes where two estranged relatives fight with each other as passive aggressively as they possibly could, and a rival lemonade stand employs a “wizard” to sabotage their competition by graffitiing their cart. However, the initial starting point was very noticeably slower to start than any other scene that followed it. 

While the beginning of our session may have been the most difficult part of our session, I believe that this also shows just how Fiasco might relate to leadership as a whole. In our game of Fiasco, we had difficulty beginning our scenes because we weren’t sure where our story was going at that point. Personally, I believe that this could represent the vision that a leader needs of their goal in order to successfully lead their team. If the leader is unsure of what their own goals are, they will likely have a very hard time actually guiding their team towards a common goal. During the course of their project, the goal might become clearer, and therefore easier for the leader to guide their team toward. However, it would be preferable for the leader to know exactly what their goal is from the beginning, so that the “warm up” period could be skipped entirely. 

However, an insight into leadership is not the only important note that I believe I can take from this, as it may also contain an insight into myself. First though, I need to more completely describe the character that I was playing as in this session, Edward “Eddy” McFarlain. Eddy is an aspiring lemonade salesman that has been down on his luck recently, as his rival across the street has managed to do far more business than him. His goals, based upon the result of the earlier rolls, were to Get Rich using a living will, and to vaguely Get Even. He also has a The Past, fast friends relationship with one of the other characters, and a Work, business rivals relationship with another (his lemonade stand rival). However, despite all of these opportunities to create conflict himself, perhaps by instigating his rival or using his friend in some way, I ended up playing Eddy as a fairly honorable, if failing, businessman, and someone that tries to be a good friend. I personally think that this aspect reflects the most on me, as I try my best to be a helpful, caring friend, and to help out whenever I’m able. In this way, I believe that my own personal values ended up being visible in Eddy, as a character that tried to avoid dirty tactics in a system that is expressly designed for them.