New Playtest of High Strung

After making some adjustments in the Hope mechanic, we tried a second playtest of _High Strung_. This time the players decided to operate out of LA, and play older musicians 'getting the band back together'.

The Band was _Trouble in Paradise_, which had broken up due to creative differences. The band consisted of Jazzy - the female lead singer and keyboard player, Gaz - the male bass player, Cody - the male guitarist, and Maddy - the female drummer. All the members of the group sang to some extent - a feature of its songs were the fine group harmonies. The breakup had occurred between Gaz and Cody. Gaz always spoke in the the third person - "The Gaz doesn't like country music", while Cody despised this habit. Jazzy and Maddy had roped Gaz and Cody into one more shot at the big time, against their better judgement.

Nobody in the band had achieved any success while the band was broken up, so they grudgingly gave in. Nasty cards were used profligately, especially between Cody and Gaz. For example, Cody stole tubes from Gaz's amp, and replaced them with old tubes from his amp; while Gaz introduced Cody to a girl - Gaz's sister - who he thought Cody would hate, but it backfired when she became Cody's S.O.

While the band was broken up, their agent had died - choked to death on someone else's vomit - so they had to find a new agent. They finally settled on one, and she got the band a gig at a metro club. The band practiced and premiered a new song written by Jazzy, "Good Girls Do", to go along with their old songs. The band did well, drawing a fair crowd and putting on a good show, and the song was well received, but not wildly popular.

They ground through another period between gigs, having made enough Hope to get through, though Cody was getting dangerously low. Being older they had a smaller reserve than kids, though their Hope ablated away slower as well. Their next gig, also at a metro club - clubs are ranked as local, metro, regional, and national in order of importance - went very well, and more importantly, their second new song: "Live For The Moment", by Cody, was premiered to great appreciation. This gave an upswell of Hope to the band, and they decided to record it as a demo.

After some unbelievably good rolls in the studio, and a possibly troubling bit in the rules - a small thing, but something I didn't think of, whether PCs could use their promotion skills for demo songs, which may require a small adjustment to the Demo Release Table - the song was released as a demo, made the local playlists on the radio, and garnered the band a one album deal with a local record company, Hollywood records. This bumped up the band from "Struggling" status to "Aspiring", gaining them an extra die when getting gigs.

We left it there, and will revisit the band next week.