Tag: playtesting

Laying Bare Identity – Exposure in Turn

This is a post about my current project, Turn, which is a game about shapeshifters in small towns. See more posts about Turn on the Thoughty Turn tag.


There are a number of mechanics I’ve been working with to make Turn the game I want it to be, but one of the most vital components of the game is a mechanic called exposure. Exposure is what happens when a shapeshifter’s identity is made evident to an NPC or the town itself. It is, in essence, more dangerous than any physical damage a shifter could take (which is why damage isn’t really A Thing in Turn), but also potentially very fruitful.

You start off with a character that people know, that people have impressions of. Everyone knows everyone in small towns. When you act unusual? People notice, especially the closer they are to you.

Who are you? Who do people think you are?

Exposure isn’t necessarily bad. There are risks – if the whole town finds out you’re a shapeshifter and doesn’t like you or you’ve hurt someone, admittedly torches and pitchforks may be in your future. However, if someone you love slowly discovers you’re secretly an otter part-time, they might be willing to accept you.

Shifters mark their exposure track when they use their abilities outside of their current form – like when someone who is in human form uses their beast abilities, or when someone in beast form uses their human abilities. Some beasts have flexibility in this, like trash pandas raccoons who can casually escape exposure:

In Plain Sight – You never generate exposure for being seen in beast form if there are no witnesses to your transformation.

…or those who have animal groups (herds, romps, flocks) who can avoid exposure to humans while in animal form – but risk exposure to their group:

Otters have romps!

Each instance of exposure is either marked positive or negative. Each space on the track has room for a + or -, and when the exposure is assigned, the players will mark appropriate to the experience. Eventually, they’ll reach the end of the track, and add up their positives and negatives – and from that, determine the path they’ll take when they resolve the exposure.

If they ignore resolving NPC exposure for too long, it can overflow into the town – gossip is a bitch – and lead to further complications. Every town has themes and bloodlines that interconnect, and events that can be dark, or happy, or simply mysterious. What rumors led to those events? Did someone get hurt because a shifter just didn’t “act right” and someone saw them slip-up? In small towns, deviance is always noticed.

“We don’t talk about that.” – 13 deaths.

The exposure mechanic is really important to the experience in Turn and I’m hoping that, as play happens, it will be as fruitful as I want it to be. Fingers crossed that when it’s revealed to more players, I get a positive result!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Convention Playtester Tips

With Metatopia upcoming, I wanted to talk a little about something I truly enjoy: playtesting.

Metatopia is a convention in New Jersey, USA run by Double Exposure. It is my favorite convention. I get to see a lot of my friends, which is great, and the atmosphere is completely bursting with creativity. I also get to playtest games, most of the time.

What is playtesting?

Playtesting is when a designer or designers gather together people to test out their game by playing it or reading it and talking about it. Typically the latter is referred to as a focus group. There are alpha playtests where the game is in very early stages, betas where it’s in a relatively playable state, and so on. There are also high test playtests, which are really intense, typically made up of experience designers as players, and focused on getting the game to its best state.

Why playtest?

You don’t have to playtest a game. Honestly! You can make a game and put it out there without playtesting it even once. I’ve done this a number of times and there’s nothing wrong with it. However, the reality is that most of the time your games will be far more refined if you playtest them. You get more input, find more of the squeaky wheels to oil, and have different perspectives. It’s useful!

How do you playtest?

There are articles out there that can walk you through playtesting from the designer or game master perspective. What I’m more interested about is how to be a playtester. After all, it’s my favorite part of games.

I am not the strongest roleplayer, nor do I understand probability basically at all. However, I can get the way games work – I can tell when something meshes well with a setting or idea, and I can help people work through what they are trying to say or do. I also can see patterns of behavior caused by mechanics. These are, thankfully, useful to playtesting.

Below I have some suggestions on what to do if you find yourself at a playtesting table. Hope you find them valuable!

  • Listen to the designer and how they describe the game and its genre, setting, and expectations. Don’t talk over them or interject your opinion. Let them set the scene. Let them have some space to share their ideas and their concerns, and ensure they know you are listening (active listening is helpful – here is an additional link with the note that obviously, not all people interact the same and eye contact is not required to be an active listener!). Don’t allow others to step over them if they look like they are uncomfortable about speaking up – speak up for them. A simple “Hey, what were you saying?” in the direction of the designer can make a difference. Keep in mind that steamrolling (people talking over others from perceived authority or privilege) can damage a playtest just as much as the designer just giving up and walking out.
  • Use all of the resources at your disposal. If there are mechanics presented, make excuses to use them in line with what happens in the game or focus group. If there are tools on the table – index cards, tokens, cards, dice – make sure you understand what they are for and make sure you at least try to introduce them to the action.
  • Ask questions. Always ask questions. If you don’t understand something, ask for clarification. If you don’t know what the designer wants from the situation, ask for their guidance. If you want to take an action and you haven’t already been given permission as part of a scene, ask to permission. If you see something missing, ask if it should be there, and if it should, how you can help introduce it, and if not, why not. If you suspect something is going to go against the theme of the game, ask why it’s done that way. Always, always ask questions – don’t assume, no matter how much of an expert you think you are.
  • Show enthusiasm and give positive feedback. Don’t jump around and yell, but do respond with positive feedback if you like something, give clear reasoning behind your reasons for liking what is happening, and so on. Be unafraid to smile and give encouragement to the designer, and ensure that at the end of the session, even if it was a hard one, you thank them for providing the game for playtest. You’re helping them, but there’s no point in playtesters if there’s no game. It’s a symbiotic relationship, for good and ill!
  • Be honest, but kind and respectful. If you think a game sucks, don’t lie and pretend it was great, but don’t be a moldy muffin about it. Use “I” statements if you want to give negative feedback, and feel free to pair them with questions (“I had trouble understanding why we would use a d6 instead of 2d6 for a game Powered by the Apocalypse, could you talk about that a little?” “I felt like I didn’t have a lot of agency in the game because of the strict character roles. Is this a permanent feature of the game, and if so, why?”). You can always tell a designer what you don’t like – after all, playtesting is about making the game better, not pretending it’s perfect. Just be kind.
  • If something goes sideways with the other players, let the designer know either privately or, depending on immediacy, at the table. If something goes badly with the designer or with other players, let con staff wherever you are know as soon as you can. My major highlights here would be bigoted or hateful behavior, harassment, inappropriate content (18+ with under 18 individuals in the playtest, etc.), and so on. If something is truly upsetting, definitely feel free to leave, but make sure you communicate the issues to people who can make efforts to prevent it happening to other people. We can only make improvements if we know about the problems!

In all, there are a lot of things that playtesters can do to improve a convention playtest and help to get strong results. Sometimes it’s hard because the games can be early in development, or possibly have flawed premises. That sucks, for sure, but we can all work together to make games better, and make our environments better for creating better games and playing better games. If you want to be a part of that, take a chance sometime to participate in a playtest and see if it’s for you. I hope that someday we’ll share a table!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Five or So Questions with Brendan Conway on Masks

Tell me a little about Masks. What has you excited about it?

Masks is my Powered by the Apocalypse game of young supers, figuring out who they are when the world keeps telling them different things. You’ll play a young superhero type person, someone who’s capable already, but not at the peak of their ability. Somebody who’s still learning about who they are, and the world they live in, and trying to figure out where they fit, even as adults and peers are shouting at them constantly, trying to tell them exactly where that is. You’ll be part of a team of others like yourself, who are of course also nothing like yourself, and who are all struggling to find their own places. And you’ll be telling them who they are even as they do the same to you. Oh, yeah, and of course amid all this drama, tons of super-heroic action. Cars flying through the air, ice beams, absurd acrobatics, that kind of thing.

The key mechanical innovation that I’m playing with to get this tone across (and the one that has me most excited) is Labels. Instead of Stats, which are used in most Powered by the Apocalypse games, you have Labels. Stats are sort of objective measures of who you are. If you have a +3 Hard, then you’re a hard guy. If you have -2 Volatile, then you wouldn’t hurt a puppy. Stats are objective measurements of subjective qualities. Labels, on the other hand, are explicitly about how you see yourself. So they fluctuate a lot. As people tell you who you are, their words have impact on your self-image, and your Labels will change. As you decide who you are, your Labels will change. As a result, the things that you’re good at and the things that you’re bad at are never quite set in stone. The consequence of being a young person who doesn’t quite know who they are yet.

Beyond the fact that I’m psyched to explore that game mechanic, and that I’ve had great fun testing it so far, and that I just get a thrill putting pen to paper and writing up more ideas for it…I’m super excited by the potential to create a system that consistently produces stories like ones I love. I am enamored of RPGs that set themselves up as story-engines, capable of consistently producing particular kinds of stories that you might find in movies, books, comics, whatever. For Masks, I wanted to create an engine that could produce stories like those in Young Avengers, Runaways, Avengers Academy, Teen Titans, and certain iterations of the X-Men. In particular, I’ve been watching Young Justice, and every time I think about how Masks could be the system that creates Young Justice style stories at your table, I get chills. That’s what I want — to be able to create my own Young Justice stories with friends. If Masks gets anywhere close to that goal, I’ll be pretty happy.

How do Labels work, mechanically?

The caveat is that they’re still in development, but here’s how the Label mechanics look right now. There are six different Labels: Hero, Danger, Freak, Star, Radical, and Mundane. Each one is ranked just like normal Powered by the Apocalypse stats, from -3 to +3. Each one has a single basic move attached to it, and when you make that move, you’ll roll 2d6 + the appropriate Label. All of this is par for the course in Powered by the Apocalypse games.

The difference comes with the seventh basic move, “Tell someone who they are.” This move has you rolling+Influence, which is the amount of sway your words have over someone, to adjust that person’s Labels. You’ll have a different amount of Influence over each other Mask (PC). So if I’m playing Robin, I might have 0 Influence over Superboy because he doesn’t really have anything staked on my opinions of him. I’ll be rolling+0, then, when I tell Superboy that if he keeps acting the way he has been, he’s going to get someone hurt! I’m telling Superboy that he’s a Danger. If I get a hit, then my words have sunk in, and Superboy’s Danger Label will go up by 1. As a consequence, though, another of Superboy’s Labels will go down by 1. That’ll be Superboy’s player’s choice. If, on the other hand, I tell Superboy that he’s endangering people and heroes don’t do that, then I might actually be telling Superboy that he is not a Hero. In that case, on a hit I can decrease Superboy’s Hero Label by 1, and then Superboy’s player can increase another Label by 1.

That’s the basic idea, but then I’ve got a lot of other accouterments I’m hanging on it. For example, every playbook has six unique moves, one for each Label. When you are at +1 in a particular Label, you’ll get access to that move automatically, but you’ll lose access if you drop below +1 in that Label. As you advance, you’ll gain the opportunity to permanently unlock those moves. Other advancement opportunities include the ability to add +1 to a Label — no, you can’t be guaranteed that it will stay higher, but it means that on the whole, your Labels ecosystem will add up to one point higher than before. I think of that as having developed a stronger sense of self on the whole — you’re still figuring out who you are, but you’re growing in the sense that you are somebody. Another advancement opportunity is the ability to lock your Labels in place at the time you take the advance, to solidify your self-image. You can lock your Hero in at a +3, for instance, ensuring that no one can tell you that you aren’t a Hero anymore — you know that you are. Or, you could lock your Hero in when it’s a -3 — you’re not a Hero, and you never will be, no matter what they tell you.

Tell me a little about the Paragons. How do they work and how do they help shape the game?

Paragons in Masks are folks like Magneto and Xavier. They are NPCs, the big, most important highlighted people in the world of these young Masks. They might be anything from teachers to idols to feared criminals to hated enemies, but one way or another they are critically important to shaping the world that the Masks live in.

At the start of play, you’ll create three Paragons as a group. Each Paragon embodies one Label, denies another Label, and has a particular type. For example, you might wind up with a Paragon who embodies Radical (he thinks he knows how to change the world, himself), denies Danger (he would never harm anyone if he can possibly avoid it), and be of the Teacher type (with the move: Highlight inexperience). The exact details would be up to your group to fill in, with the GM asking questions about the Paragon until you all have a clear idea of that character. In this case, that Paragon might be Professor Charles Xavier.

After making the three Paragons, each Mask picks one to label as the most important to them. The idea here is to have the Masks with strong feelings already toward the iconic characters in their setting, the way that Young Justice characters like Robin, Artemis, and Superboy have strong feelings about Batman, Sportsmaster, and Superman. Or the way that the young X-Men have strong feelings about either Xavier or Magneto. The Paragons would then give the GM the equivalent of Fronts for Masks, as well as giving the GM a means by which to actually affect the Masks’ Labels — if you deeply care what Xavier thinks and then Xavier tells you you aren’t ready to go out there and fight to save lives, you can rest assured it’s going to affect your Labels.

The Paragons are there to be pillars, to be the major forces that you can deny, or accept, or join with, or run from. If young people define themselves in contrast to or similarity with the important people in their lives, then Paragons are those important people.

What is the biggest change, tonally, from other Powered by the Apocalypse games and Masks?

Tough question! I don’t think that, tonally speaking, the Powered by the Apocalypse games can be easily lumped together. If I had to answer on the whole, the biggest thing I’d call out is the difference in one of the fundamental principles for Masks. While I still see Masks as a “Play to find out” kind of game, I also keep rephrasing it in my head as “Play to find out who the Masks are”. Less of a focus on events and actions, per se — more of a focus on identity and personality. To answer a bit better though, I need to call out some of those games individually.

Monsterhearts is a wonderful game about being a teenager where adolescence is depicted through the lens of being a monster, and it pretty much says whatever I could think to say about adolescence from that perspective. Masks is about being a teenager or a young adult, but with much more focus on figuring out who the heck you are and how the voices of everybody around you can affect you. So beyond just the obvious horror versus superhero fiction difference, I see the difference being between your internal struggle with yourself and with control and understanding and growing up, and your external struggle to hear what other people are telling you about yourself and internalize that helpfully and healthily, without losing yourself to other people’s opinions. Or something.

Dungeon World is a wonderful game about fantasy fiction, particularly of the D&D vein. It pretty much does what Masks tries to do in functioning as an engine that will consistently produce stories of a particular variety. A key difference, though, is that I’m working to make sure that Masks has a heavily emotional component, something that produces what I have heard experts describe as “the feels”. I don’t think that DW is really all that worried about producing said “feels” in the same way, but that’s appropriate to the type of fiction that DW is designed to emulate. DW is very heavily focused on action and awesome and cinematic coolness, while Masks is trying to have some of that action, along with its scenes of people yelling at each other while tears slide down their faces.

Apocalypse World is a wonderful game about scarcity and violence and human struggle and right and wrong. Perhaps the most important tonal difference here is about the badassitude of characters. In AW, you’re the baddest asses around. You’re really, really great at what you do, and NPCs are chumps. Chumps with guns, sure, but in general no NPC is ever really your equal. In Masks, though, you’re young supers. You have enormous amounts of potential, and you can still do some pretty awesome things, but it’s an explicit element of the game that you’re not there yet. You’re Robin, not Batman. Someday, you’ll be in the big leagues if that’s what you want (though who knows what side you’ll be on), but right now? You’re still learning.

There are a couple of supers Powered by the Apocalypse games that I can think of — Worlds in Peril is one of the most prominent examples, having just finished a successful Kickstarter. I haven’t really delved deeply into Worlds in Peril‘s rules, so I don’t know for sure how exactly it works, but my impression of it is that it’s focusing on superheroes generally, with a tone that reminds me more of the Avengers movie, or superhero comics in general. Masks is designed to delve deeply into a particular style of superhero story, not into superhero stories in general, so that alone is a substantial divide. I’m also noticing that Worlds in Peril has mechanics that are meant to reflect the physics of superhero stories, while Masks has mechanics that all feed into the fundamental idea of Labels and figuring out who you actually are. Of course, all that’s a very superficial analysis.

Another superhuman Powered by the Apocalypse game is Mutanthearts, which last I’d heard was being worked on by some great people, and which I had the pleasure of playtesting. It deals with similar setting ideas to Masks, focusing on young mutants, and the issues facing them. It was great! I think that this is one of those interesting cases where Masks and Mutanthearts may be playing in very similar sandboxes, but they’re not doing the exact same thing, and that means that they’re elucidating different ideas about the genre. Mutanthearts, from my perspective at least, is way more about being a mutant and telling X-Men stories in all their glory, and it’s GREAT at that. Masks is much more about just plain being a young super person, dealing with growing up and becoming a full adult super person. That has some X-Men elements in it, but not every X-Men story would fit Masks. Mutanthearts‘ focus on the drama of being a mutant teenager aims it at a different tonal target than Masks, so really what I’m saying is that if both games ever fully exist you should buy both.

Do you have a timeline for Masks, and if so, when can we expect to see it out in the wild?

Right now, I think I have a very strong core for Masks, a set of ideas and baseline rules that are solid. But I think I have a lot of additional work to do, along with a lot of playtesting, before I feel comfortable bringing it to a finished form. My goal, my hope of all hopes, would be that a year from now, I can put together a Kickstarter to make it a real thing. But in the mean time, I’ll be playtesting it and working on it and talking about it.

But, y’know, it helps to have people asking me about when it will exist. Because then I feel more obligated to make that actually happen, and think about things like timelines.

How do you decide what projects to design?

How do you choose what projects to design?
That’s a toughie. I could say something trite like “the designs choose me!” because it’s kind of true. If I have an idea, I try to take it to execution. I might put stuff on the backburner but I always try to work on things periodically, keep old projects in mind, and take notes. Google Drive is a huge tool for this. I have loads of unfinished ideas lurking in a folder on Google Drive where I will take notes and log ideas.
Here are the major things I think of, honestly, when it comes to deciding whether I proceed with a project.
Do I have ideas for it?
If I don’t have ideas for a project, there’s no point in working on it. If I’m in a rut, I can dig at it, but often that just keeps me digging deeper instead of finding my way out. There’s a lot to be said for having inspiration and enthusiasm for a project, and without those things, it’s just toiling, and I don’t design to toil. I design to create things people will enjoy, and if I don’t enjoy making it, it’s not my best work.
Now, it’s one thing to design something that is hard or tedious, but I’m talking complete lack of interest. If you ask me to design something based on politics (like bureaucracy) or something with strict history guidelines, I probably will have a lot more trouble and enjoy it a lot less unless it’s something I find fascinating.
Do I have an audience for it?
I have loads of ideas just hanging out and waiting to see if there is someone who wants to play it. With Girls’ Slumber Party WOO! I am anxious because it’s kind of a niche game. I have ideas and enthusiasm for it, but I don’t know whether there’s a big enough audience to sell it, which is why it may end up being a free release once it’s done. One of the keys with having an audience is having playtesters, and we all know that having playtesters is a struggle for designers. If you can’t playtest a design, you put yourself at risk of having design flaws. Yeah, it can be done, but I’d rather find obvious design flaws before I put my games in the hands of people who paid for it. This is why development for Clash and Tabletop Blockbuster have taken as long as they have – we playtest, we find flaws, redesign, and playtest again. Rinse, repeat.
Is there interest in it?
It’s one thing to have an audience. Having an audience means there are people out there in the demographic and with preferences that means your game might appeal to them. Having interest is a whole ‘nother deal. Interest means that there are individuals or groups out there that receive your pitch and say “YES. Let’s DO this.” You don’t want to be putting something out there and have people bored to tears or uninterested because you didn’t design it to appeal, or because there’s just not interest in what you’re selling. You want people picking up what you put down, right?
Can it make money?
This sounds shallow, but frankly, I like getting paid for my work. To put it in perspective, I was not going to sell Clash. I was going to print it out and give it out for free. Then a few IGDN members went “Oh, no no no!” and gave me what-for about it. They showed interest in the game (see the last question), and gave me reasons for why it was a money-making possibility. Subsequently, I invested tons of time and some of my own money in getting it to ashcan state over six months, including taking it to cons, paying for scenarios to be written, etc. I still think free products are great, but I also think that models like Patreon are appropriate for people making “free” games because I think it’s fair to pay people for their efforts. As much as it would be great to just create and be free of societal expectations of financial responsibilities, we still live in a world where living – just living – costs money. Design work isn’t magical. You still have to eat while you’re designing, and keep the internet and power on. When I’m working on design, I’m not working at my day job or doing freelance writing, but I’m still using power and burning calories. Something’s gotta pay for that. This doesn’t mean that I’ll never release something for free, it just means that I’ll try to create products that can pay me back for the work I do.

Does the design concept work?
I’ve written down some really silly design ideas. Some I saved, some I deleted. The thing is, if your design concept is flawed – like bad math or too much complexity or too much simplicity – there’s no point in pursuing the design as is. You either need to redesign or dump it. And there’s nothing wrong with dumping a design! Generally when I dump a design I put it in a Google Drive folder just in case I want to pull it out and pull ideas from it at a later date – I’ve saved every revision of Clash, every draft of Tabletop Blockbuster rules, and a bunch of other stuff.
Do I have time for it? OR Will I make time for it?
I’m super busy. I work and go to school and have this blog, plus I do freelance writing and design. So, stuff I’m working on personally has to have a lot of value for me. I have to either have free time, or make time. And whether I make time really depends on whether I like the product.
Do I like what I’m working on?

Some stuff this is a quick and easy “Yup!” like Girls’ Slumber Party WOO! Some of it is harder, like certain aspects of Tabletop Blockbuster (like GM rules, which were quickly handed over to John, my partner-in-crime). While designing is something I have found passion for, I still need to like the stuff I’m doing. This is different than having ideas; this is more an emotional investment. I need to want to pour my soul into what I’m doing.
In the end, it’s about whether I like the project and whether I feel like it’s worth investing in.
What helps you decide what projects to focus on?

Design Brunches and Collaborative Creation

Some of you may be aware that my local gaming community hosts semi-regular game design brunches. We basically get together on a Sunday and chat about game design, and everyone brings a problem with them if they have it, and we’ll discuss things, do rapid playtesting, try out designs, bring prototypes, and all of that. I’ve discussed them before, but I want to delve a little more into some of the stuff I find valuable.

The first thing is that we have a wide variety of experience levels, backgrounds, and types of expertise in the group. I, for example, am mostly a writer and player (aside from now designing), with experience playing more traditional games as well as story games. Stras is an ace playtester, a designer, and has tons of experience with trad and story games alike. He also has a lot of technical knowledge and baseline design knowledge that I don’t have. John, on the other hand, is our graphics genius, and is a really good designer, with traditional experience and the same level of story games experience as me – however, both he and Stras have GM’d WAY more than me. Paul is a designer (the only one paid-published of us, I think) and writer, with a ton of trad experience and story game experience, and one of his biggest points of value (imo) is that he plays with games that most of us have not or don’t anymore (like GURPs and Gumshoe). Marc is almost exclusively traditional/OSR, and has a great mind for math, and is a designer who does most of his own writing. Rachel is mostly a player, but offers a unique perspective, is a great storyteller, and provides us with a good sounding board. Jeff and Heather both have traditional and story game experience, and both offer a good player perspective. Nick, who just started coming, is a really fantastic designer and writer with a lot of experience developing his own games.

I don’t think I’m forgetting anyone! I hope not.  

Reading that, I think most people can see how we’d have a huge variety of input and different perspectives at every brunch, even if some people can’t make it. We also have a good group that gets along pretty well.

It’s awesome. It allows us a lot of opportunities to find flaws in design, or just redirect design that seems to be going away from its purpose. We also can focus on a variety of things: writing, graphics, technique, development, and prototyping.

This week, we playtested Nick’s Medical Bay 3 creation, evaluated Tabletop Blockbuster playsheets, discussed Stras’s Calamity Engine (super excited about that) and looked at his art inspiration for another project he’s working on, and had a long discussion about scenarios for Clash. All in a few hours! (We also talked about Patreons, Creative Commons, power dynamics in the indie RPG industry, and gatekeeping.)

The conversation about Clash was really interesting for me. One of my first scenarios is based on Romeo and Juliet and written by Stras, and I am planning on doing a couple more in the main book with some as stretch goals if/when we crowdfund. I have some great creators in mind and a few already signed up. I am hoping to make this a successful product, and I think scenarios are essential to doing that.

Anyway, one of the coolest things about this is that with all of this variety in input, we have managed to create things by collaborating. Clash would not be where it is without the input of the group, nor would Tabletop Blockbuster. I know that we have put a lot of input into Stras’s Hexes and Eights (which you should check out, btw). We also often run into solving problems for each other – I’ve written monsters for Marc’s Paramount, while John has created character sheets, free-to-use dice icons, and other such things for the group. The others have contributed so many things, it’s impossible to list them all.

We’ve had some shakeups in people’s availability so we might have to start working around an occasional design dinner but I am hoping we can keep this up. I think it’s really valuable.

Do you discuss design with your group? Do you have any regular get-togethers?

Do you find you design better alone, or with outside input?

Five or So Questions with Sage LaTorra on Black Stars Rise and More

I got to interview Sage LaTorra about his current projects, like Black Stars Rise!

Tell me about Black Stars Rise and your other current projects. What are you excited about?

Black Stars Rise is a game I’m working on with Adam that draws on X-Files, the comics of Jeff Lemire, and certain parts of the Cthulhu mythos, especially True Detective. I actually started working on it last year but had some trouble explaining the type of game I was going for. Then True Detective came along and now it’s easy to use that as a touchstone.

What’s exciting there is mostly how we’re messing with moves and relationships. It still uses a lot of Apocalypse World move elements, but how you get those moves, and how they change during play, is considerably different. We’re also exploring some really cool ideas for covering the normal parts of life, though those are still in design.

Also with Adam, I’m working on Inglorious, our Dungeon World war supplement. For me the most exciting bit there is how we’re approaching mass combat rules. I think most battle rules for RPGs are heavily influenced by adversarial tabletop wargames, things like Warhammer 40k. We’re drawing on the adjudicated, anything-can-be-attempted war games that were popular training military commanders, in the vein of Verdy du Vernois. Instead of swapping to a more cut-and-dried balanced war game our mass combat system is about judgement and information.

Those are the main projects, though there’s a few things that are either earlier or I’m less involved in. Adam has a Mass Effect-styled game in the works that I’ve given some feedback on, but it’s so early I don’t know what direction it will take, or how much I’ll be involved. I also recently played Apocalypse World: Dark Age and immediately wanted to make stuff for it. I have no idea what the future of that is, since Dark Age is so early, but depending on where Vincent goes with it I could see my stuff ending up being a separate game, a supplement, or fodder for Vincent to make his own stuff.

What are the key elements of shows like True Detective and X-Files that you want to show through in Black Stars Rise? What are you doing mechanically to evoke them?

Well first it’s probably worth mentioning that the way the X-Files connection is presented is “it’s like The X-Files, but Mulder and Scully never show up.”

With that in mind, BSR is focusing on people caught up in a mythos that’s beyond them. You might be a detective, sure, or have a weird old book in your library, but you’re not playing an occult investigator (or at least not when you start). You’re a person who’s caught up in a twisting world but you still have the touchstones of a normal life.

The other big element is the mythos. We’re trying to make the game helpful in building your own mythos, like The X-Files black ooze and smoking man, or The King In Yellow. Your characters will see aspects of it, and across multiple characters you as a player will see more of it.

True Detective is a great example of normal people caught up in something bigger and stranger. While they are investigators, they’re homicide detectives, not occult explorers. Then as this case takes over their lives it twists them.

Tell me a little about the website you have for Black Stars Rise. What motivated you to make it and have so much information for free?

Free is good. Right now what we need is play and feedback, and we want that from anyone who’s interested, so why not make it free? Eventually, if we continue to like where the game is headed, there will be versions that aren’t free. But at the moment the best arrangement for everybody is to make it free.

I’m also glad to feel like I’m giving back to gaming as a whole. These ideas are more useful when everyone can use them freely, not just read them for free.

I trust that, if we get to the point where we ask for money, people will help us out and pay. Money does help the game creation cycle going.

What do you think the benefits are to hacking games as opposed to creating your own core system? How far do you think you have to go before it’s no longer a hack – and is Black Stars Rise going to go that far?

Everything’s a hack, or nothing’s a hack, depending on how you define the term “hack” (which probably depends how much you like the word). Play is hacking in a lot of ways.

Personally I tend to call it a hack as long as it still requires another game on hand to play or learn. Once the text is self-sufficient, even if it’s re-explaining things from another game (like we did in Dungeon World) it’s no longer a hack to me.

What do you think makes Black Stars Rise have such a unique experience for those who play it?

I’m not sure any game produces a unique experience. Games are tools, so I think what most games do is make certain experiences easier. It’s possible to, say, do a fast-paced action game in d20, but you’d have to put a lot of work in to get all the rules down to the point where you could actually move at a fast pace.

The thing we’re trying to make easy with Black Stars Rise is playing as a person who’s entire world is shifting around them. To that end, we’re doing a lot of things with hidden information. All the basic moves have a normal version and a number of ‘wounded’ versions. In certain conditions you’ll wound a move, which means flipping it over and revealing the wounded version, which is different than the normal one. Each character may have a different wounded version of each move, so maybe under pressure your character gets shakey and mine gets panicky.

The other bit that’s not quite there yet is that we want to make the everyday routines of life both useful and dangerous. These are the things that keep you grounded, but also the things that can drive you even further away when they go wrong. We haven’t nailed that yet, but I think we’ll have something to show soon.

One thing that I think needs to come out of that is the ability to both play day-to-day and to jump ahead years. True Detective does this wonderfully well, it’s a huge inspiration. We see that these people have normal lives, and see how their priorities between all the things in those lives, plus all the elements of the case they work, play on them.

Thanks, Sage, for a great interview!

Five or So Questions on Piece of Work

I interviewed John LeBoeuf-Little, Kit La Touche, and Austin Bookheimer from Transneptune Games  about their current project, Piece of Work. Piece of Work is a cybernoir game, blending the grit and grim of noir themes with the high-tech punch of cyberpunk.

Tell me a little bit about your current project. What should I be excited about?

(JOHN) So, Piece of Work is set in the near future dystopia, with cyberware and megacorporations. You’ve been pushed out of society by an unjust system where citizenship is predicated on having a job. Now you have a grab-bag of personal problems and almost certainly a grudge against the people who’ve done you wrong. It’s quiet tension punctuated by staccato action. We call it cybernoir.

But enough with the pitch. The game has a ton of things I’m really excited about. We’ve spent an amazing amount of time trying to get the tone just right – cybernoir is surprisingly fragile to maintain, so every mechanic we have is tuned to keep attention on the parts that matter. It’s a pretty sweet mix.

I love the die mechanic particularly. We ask questions at the table about why your character is doing whatever they’re doing. Based on how you’re doing it, for whom you’re doing it, and why you’re doing it, you get better or worse dice. Each game I’ve played, there’s been this wonderful moment when someone picks up the dice and thinks about what’s about to happen and you can basically eat it with a fork because they say “No, damnit, this is about revenge” and everyone gasps. It happens all the time and I love it.

Give me a little more about cybernoir. What kind of play will I find in this genre?

(KIT) So, we start with the familiar near-future dystopia: corporations have become the de-facto powers of the world, everything and everyone is ground under them and their profit motive. (Of course, “near-future” is perhaps a bit optimistic; we keep coming across things we thought we made up for this in the news.) But instead of the usual “they supplant governments”, we decided that governments are a useful tool for them—privatize profit, socialize loss, right? So, that’s where the System comes in: citizenship, and all the benefits and rights that comes with, is contingent on employment, but there’s a cost to having non-citizens around, so a system alarmingly like debt-bondage comes up, where the unemployed are given employment and limited citizenship benefits, but without real choice in what they do.

So that’s the world, right? You are people who’ve fallen off the corporate ladder, and are dangling above the precipice of the System. You’re probably doomed, like Deckard in Blade Runner, to be unable to make the world you want, but maybe you can help get someone else to safety, to salvation, to justice, and in the process, get yourself part-way to redemption.

There’s a kind of beautiful hopelessness baked in—I’ve mentioned Blade Runner, but perhaps it’s worth also comparing it to neo-noir cinema like Chinatown or Romeo is Bleeding. Everyone knows the end of Chinatown, right? “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.” You’re almost certainly gonna be dragged down into the mud and gutter, but you stand a chance of doing something selfless and good before that. You’re in too deep to save yourself.

(JOHN) So all the things Kit mentioned are completely correct, but I thought I’d add that cybernoir is a complex of two other genres – noir and cyberpunk.

Much of old film noir is about proper ‘society’ and with the protagonists not really fitting that mold. Often, something has changed them to make them outsiders – they were falsely accused of a crime, or got mixed up with the wrong crowd, or they couldn’t let something go. They’re filled with iconic personalities, and everything is connected somehow.

In cyberpunk, there’s the disaffected oppressed, striving in spite of a massive, uncaring, inhuman world that sees humanity as a product to be commoditized.

In cybernoir, you get an interesting blend of these two – the characters are people who no longer fit into society because of these very noir reasons who are then exploited by the system for the benefit of those in power. They have very noir sensibilities – for them, everything is personal. But they also have very futuristic abilities – cybernetics and other advanced technologies.

What went into designing the die mechanic? How does it work?

(JOHN) Oi. We’ve been tweaking the die mechanic for a long time. It started out as a cool mechanical toy – roll three dice and take the best two. Each die was always intended to be scaled up or down independently, using any of the standard sizes (up to d12). Each of the dice represents a different thing – your character’s motive, what gear you’re using, and for whom you’re acting. But it didn’t used to be so cleanly delineated.

I forget who first suggested that there be a die for your character’s Motive, but it fit perfectly. You get a better die for motives that are more noir. If you’re doing it for money, you only get a d4. If you’re just in a hard spot and you have to roll anyway, that’s a d6. If you’re acting to get respect, that’s a d8. If you’re doing it out of passion – love or hate – you get a d10. And finally, there’s a motive that particularly drives your character based on its perspective, so you might get d12 when you’re trying to find out The Truth or you might get it when you’re trying to Clear Your Name.

In our earlier playtests, the other two dice were Gear and Cyberware. But it was pretty clunky. We tried a bunch of things – rules for gear breaking, ways of making cyberware more distinct from gear… what we finally came up with was that two dice dedicated to Things was a die too many. This was kind of a frustrating time for PoW; I’m pretty sure this was after Kit had returned from Metatopia, and at the time, the game kind of looked like a cyberpunk heartbreaker with a vaguely interesting die-mechanic. It was a misguided mess.

We had one of our famous kitchen conversations where it came out that I really wanted three specific stories for Piece of Work – noir and cyberpunk, but with an undercurrent of hope. I wanted players to eventually get charged about the world and to at least try to do something to make it better. And that wasn’t being reflected at all in the dice. That galvanized the third die as a kind of activism die – we call it Scope in the game. You get better dice for acting on a bigger scale – if you’re acting just for yourself that’s just a d6, but if you’re helping a friend that’s a d8. If you’re helping someone who’s innocent, that’s a d10. If you’re trying to save the downtrodden in general, that’s a d12.

Oh, and I guess I should talk about the other side of the roll – where you compare your result to something. We’ve had a few false starts with that as well; originally it was entirely set by the GM, then it was set by the GM but depending on circumstances might be increased or decreased, and sometimes if you had gear it might go up or down… anyway. What we have now is that you ask yourself questions about the situation and based on the answers, the target goes up or down in fixed amounts. Questions are a design theme that permeate through most of the game. In this case, it’s questions like “Is it dangerous?” or “Do you have back-up?”

The result of all this is when you want to break into a file cabinet for records about where the corporation moved your family after they fired you and you have a kick-ass lock pick set you scored while growing up, you get to roll better dice than if you just want to boost some intel in order to sell it for cash. And if it’s immediately dangerous or requires a light touch, then you need those better dice.

What’s your favorite scene you’ve played out in playtest, and how do you think it’s unique to Piece of Work?

(JOHN) There’s a bunch of really good ones. I think there was a great moment where our ex-assassin clone ended up wanting to get some information out of her friend’s father, but her Professions were shaped pretty narrowly – she was mostly a killer. So to get the information required her to beat up this old man, because she didn’t know how to be any other way. It was a very emotionally charged scene.

Another one that was really good was a scene at the end of a session mid-way through one of our playtests. The previous session the heroes had done a raid on a corporate research facility. They’d found out some uncomfortable truths and spent the whole session trying to damage control fallout from crises, but it didn’t really work out. The last scene was them in a safe house, staring at a pile of cash they’d ‘liberated’, drinking scotch, and saying nothing to each other, because things had just gotten that messy.

What’s up next after Piece of Work?

(KIT) OK, so I am really excited here. First, “Transneptune Games” is really a loose collective, so we’re all working on things at the same time—John’s spearheading Piece of Work, while Austin’s working on a few different things, including his own take on cybernoir, where everyone plays facets of the main character’s memory of an event, and you reconstruct things, in a world where memory is editable and pluggable.

But what I’m working on is maybe our next most far along thing. It’s called Et in Aradia Ego, and it’s a game about young people carving a space for themselves in the manner-bound world of Jane Austen, in a game of manners, madness, and magic. You’re not perfect demur well-mannered people, and you’ve caught the attention of a fairy who wants to help you get what it thinks you want, all to its own ends.

This time period and topic are really interesting to me. It’s easy and tempting and wrong for modern readers to see it as a very proper and laced-up period, but it was in so many ways acutely modern: you’ve got Romanticism and Byron, proto-free-love utopians like William Blake seeing ecstatic visions of magical beings, awesome feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft, and the birth of modern scifi from her daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. On top of this, the King is mad (and, worse, German!), and mumblings about Republicanism rear their head. That’s without even getting into the fact that the country is at war with Bonaparte, but, just like recent US wars, doing its utmost to ignore that on the homefront.

So, there are a number of things I like about this period—it’s really unstable, uncertain which way to grow, torn between the poles of the Enlightenment and Romanticism—and adding in a “helpful” fairy who’s really trying to abduct you for its own amusement just heightens it.

The game focuses heavily on relationships, and asks you to make a lot of judgment calls about how interactions went, while building up dice from every interaction towards a moment-of-truth roll. At least, that’s how it is now—it’s been through many incarnations, and might take some more before it’s ready.

Thanks to John, Kit, and Austin for a great interview!

Five or So Questions with Jessica Hammer

DO YOU WANT TO LEARN FROM THE HAMMER? Well, I did, so here’s an interview.


Tell me about your current projects. What’s got you excited?

As a professor of game design, I wear a lot of hats. I’m a game designer, a game scholar, a game researcher, and a game educator. So I’ll tell you about the project I’m most excited about in each of those areas. Of course, they also overlap and relate.

As a game designer, I’m most excited about the space horror larp I’m writing with my long-term creative (and life!) partner, Chris Hall. We’re exploring how constraining communication can produce both intimacy and conflict between players. Specifically, we’re looking at creating rules around when people are allowed to speak, and how they can speak differently in different situations. Outer space is the perfect narrative backdrop – in space no one can hear you scream! Plus, designing a space story integrates one of our other goals, which is innovating with technology in larp. Since I’m in a computer science department, I’ve got access to some really interesting technical resources that will help us achieve our creative goals. We’re still in the early design phase, but it’s already looking super interesting!

As a game scholar, I’m most excited about a book chapter I’m writing on technologically-mediated role-playing games. Playing online makes some things harder, and some things easier – and different technologies create different opportunities and challenges. I’m covering everything from old-school MUDs to Hangout play; I’m hoping this will be the definitive reference on the state of online role-playing, and a challenge to game researchers to take this subfield more seriously.

As a game researcher, I’m excited about collecting data on how larpers are already using technology. I’m looking at how players, larp writers, and game organizers use digital tools to be more successful in their various roles. Right now I’m just collecting a broad swath of data to get a sense of what practices are out there, but in the long run I think this information can tell us something about, for example, what kinds of creative and pragmatic problems larpers are trying to solve.

Finally, as a game educator, I’m very excited about a series of workshops I’m developing on playtesting. Playtesting is an important skill for any game designer, but there aren’t a lot of great ways to learn it. I’ve broken playtesting down into a series of core skills, and I’m creating exercises that designers can use to practice each skill individually. I’m also working with new game designers to see what kinds of materials and supports help them playtest most effectively. Right now the workshops are just for my students at CMU, but eventually I’ll be sharing them with a larger audience – hopefully as soon as this fall. I think they’ll be helpful to a lot of people in the game design community.


Playtesting is a really big deal! What suggestions do you have for people new to playtesting?

The number one thing I tell my students is “Step back and shut up.” It’s incredibly hard to watch people play your game without intervening. As a designer, you know the kind of fun that you want them to have! You can show them exactly what to do! But you don’t come in the game box, so your job is to act like you’re not there. Unfortunately, if players know you’re there, they’ll often ask for your input or otherwise tempt you to get involved. One thing you can do is practice a canned response to players trying to interact with you. I like phrases like, “That’s a great question. I’ll make a note of it.” It lets them know you’ve heard their concern, but it encourages them to focus on the game rather than on you.

The other important lesson for people new to playtesting is to be careful about your data. Your own observations are only moderately trustworthy; it’s easy to see what you’re looking for instead of what’s there. If you can videotape the session and watch it a couple of days later, that will often help you get some critical distance. You can also make a checklist or other worksheet for yourself. If you have to write it down, you’re less likely to fool yourself! As for player feedback, asking people for their opinion is surprisingly tricky. Many people will tell you what they think you want to hear. Others will try to solve the game’s problems without being able to articulate those problems effectively. You want to develop the skill of deep listening. Deep listening lets you understand what prompted the player to say what they did. That way you can respond to their in-game experience without letting yourself be overly influenced by specific design suggestions (which are often not that helpful).

Of course, in a few months my suggestions will be “Learn about playtesting from my workshops and materials!”


What do you think technology can do for us in tabletop and LARP that it isn’t already doing?

That’s a great question, but it’s one I’m quite deliberately not going to answer. I don’t think we understand what technology is already doing for tabletop and larp particularly well, so I don’t think we can effectively see the possibilities. That’s part of why I’m gathering the data I’m gathering.

That said, I’m especially interested in ways technology can make it easier for people to learn new games. Reading game rules is an ineffective way to learn for most people. For example, what if your phone prompted you with relevant portions of the rules as they came up during play? Making games more learnable is going to be a huge part of broadening the audience for role-playing games, so I think this is both an interesting and important question.


As a professor, do you think that the game design industry is growing and developing? For either yes or no, why?
In my first two months on the job, I’ve already had the chance to work with some brilliant, visionary students whose ideas could reshape the face of games. The question is whether they’ll get the community and institutional support they’ll need to have a larger impact. I hope they do – and I’m providing it where I can.


What is your biggest goal right now for games?

I want to democratize game-making, especially for people who don’t think of themselves as “gamers” per se. I think there are lots of voices and perspectives that don’t get respected in the game world. The more people we include, the richer the language of games becomes – and that’s something I very much want to see.


What’s up next for you after these exciting projects?

Right now I’m working on putting together my research agenda for the next five years. It looks like I’ll be examining how games can change the relationships between players, both in terms of strengthening close ties and giving people access to different social networks. Figuring out some interesting questions in that space is really fun – I love playing with ideas! I’ll be teaching a game design class in the fall, which I’m very much looking forward to. And I’m hoping to start working with my first graduate students in September, which I expect to be both inspiring and fun. I have a lot to look forward to!

Thanks Jessica! For those interested, Jessica also has a Patreon for her book reviews, which are top-notch!

Five or So Questions with Stras Acimovic on Playtesting

I got to interview Stras Acimovic, Ace Playtester, and get some great suggestions on playtesting as a designer and a player!

Tell me a little about your tabletop background. What got you into gaming?

I think it was the old Milton Bradley copy of Hero Quest. Hero Quest is an old 1980s board game, played on a board representing rooms divided up into a dungeon, with one player acting as the GM and the rest playing barbarians, elves, dwarves and wizards. We played through all the adventures, and since everyone was still psyched, I just kept making up more. I spent many evenings getting grumbled at by parents who had no idea why we were cooped up playing a board game instead of ‘being outside’.

My first actual tabletop RPG was a 1st edition copy of Warhammer Fantasy RPG (in French of all things) that the brother of a friend of mine at the time had and ran for us. We were thrilled the ‘big kids’ would play with us.

As for my background, I’ve been gaming over two decades doing everything from crunchy traditional games, war games, more recent story games, and larps (boffer, rock-paper-scissors, parlor, nordic). I love trying out new things, and one of my favorite things is bringing back interesting, little-known games to share with my gaming groups at home.

What is the most important thing to remember when playtesting games?

Be generous and play to the spirit of the game! Knowing you’re in a playtest means being willing to go with the flow and make up some mechanics to tide you over on-the-fly. Often I see people try to break a system to ‘test it’ or simply play straight, without looking for ways to engage with the direction of the game. Playtests often only have the skeleton of a system in place. It’s not fully fleshed out, with all the bits polished. Seeing what the whole thing is supposed to look like is sometimes difficult, but do the best you can to try and get to where the game purports to take you, and then see which bits chafe, get in the way, or help you get there and make note of all three for feedback.

Also shorthanding notes during game can be an important playtesting skill to acquire. You’d be surprised how much you forget if you don’t jot down a phrase or word to remember it by.

How can playtesters give the best feedback to designers? What sort of feedback is most useful?

How you feel about something is valid and important. If mechanics frustrate you, or confuse things, this is important to note and often useful to designers in my experience. Similarly important is noting what worked well. Many people forget this step (or don’t notice it because it’s ‘working well’).

Writing down context for rules you have to house-rule-on-the-fly can also be important – not just what you encountered, but what was available as tools, and what you decided to go with and why.

A lot of designers can’t be present at your table so well organized and detailed AP reports are some of the only ways they can get feedback. I wish that there was a culture of ‘replays’ outside of japan. In japan many folks record the audio of their game, and transcribe it into a record called a ‘replay’ usually with some commentary. Sometimes what’s reported on in an AP report is summarized and specific details that a designer might catch watching a playtest are overlooked or edited out. Replays tend to be a bit more robust as a medium for communicating such things.

As a designer: remember to include questionnaires with your playtests.

What games have you enjoyed playtesting recently, and why?

I played a number of excellent ones recently, picking just a few is tough. There have been a number of thieving and scoundrel-themed games my groups have been enjoying.

I’ve really been digging Will Hindmarch’s amazing Project: Dark. It’s a Thief (as in The Dark Project) style game that makes characters using a deck-building mechanic with regular decks of playing cards. I’ve always loved playing thieves and scoundrels in RPGs and I’m a huge fan of first-person sneaker games like Dishonored, Thief, Mark of the Ninja and the like. This game really delivers on the tactical plays and stealth action. I got to try it as a player a couple times, and just ran a beta at CONLorado as a GM for the first time. Will’s flair for adding little NPC dialogues (called ‘eavesdrops’) is absolutely awesome, and I’m really excited about the KS for it.

Another game my groups have been excited about is a project by John Harper called Blades in the Dark. Interestingly enough it’s also a thief/roguish game, but this one focuses on building Thieves Guilds and organizations and lifting your group of ne’er-do-wells up the shadowy ladder of criminal prestige in the city while negotiating the dangerous seedy underbelly. It’s been undergoing some heavy revisions lately, but promises to be pretty exciting.

What is the biggest difference between playtesting as a player and playtesting as a designer?

As a player you, of course, hope to have fun despite any Beta-bumps, and provide useful feedback. So you hope for a smooth, fun game that works.

As a designer, a playtest that goes ‘well’ and has no bumps is sometimes the least helpful. Recently I was in a game that had all sorts of problems, but was very helpful to the designer because each issue reinforced a mechanic that was removed or changed recently, and showed exactly what made the game sing when put in place, and crash when removed.

Also, as a designer, sometimes the most useful playtests are the ones where you can just hand your stuff to someone who hasn’t played with you and casually kibitz and listen to how they interpret rules and read the game without inheriting all the shorthands and assumptions you teach when running the game that can get passed on.

Thanks for the questions!

—
Thanks to Stras for the interview! You can check out some of his actual play reports and game design musings at Platonic Solids. 

Clash Playtests at Dreamation

(scheduled post – wrote this late last night. Sorry for the delay!)

I playtested Clash twice at Dreamation!

It was so scary, honestly. I am still learning, slowly, how to playtest and how to facilitate games. This was a huge step for me to run Clash in an environment like this and take feedback.

The first playtest was, I think, successful. I give you my confusing notes!

The story:
Two factions who fight each other lorded over by one occupying power called the Alliance. Players lived in a city that was once two cities, but is now one. There was a freedom fighter, an honest day laborer, a cheesemonger, a transport driver, a bodyguard, and a rogue cop. We had this awesome super mundane conversation between the cheesemonger (me) and the day laborer about how the laborer was working too much and not spending time with family. We also had an interrogation of the driver by the bodyguard. The freedom fighter blew up a bunch of outposts, one side hid a bomb in my cheese, and it was altogether pretty great.

Feedback included:
+ Unique stories.
+ World questions and character questions are effective.
+ Enough NPCs/components that it is clear but not overwhelming.
+ Visual presentation is great.
+ The mundane is possible.
+ Relationships on both sides.
+ Teams are great.
+ Signatures, stakes, and locations interacting is great.
+ Had scenes with this game that player didn’t think would happen in other games.

– Starting scenes (team scenes) are a little weak.
– Scenes sometimes feel disconnected from the World/not enough World interaction.
– High cognitive load at start of session.
– This is a long term game so may need adjustment for cons.
– Compromise is penalizing.
– One player in particular didn’t like the Avoidance mechanic.

A few notes:

Compromise is supposed to be penalizing. You can compromise, which gives you a narrative win, but there is a mechanical penalty because the World doesn’t want peace.
I definitely intend to make adjustments for con vs. long play.
I need to rework the starting scenes or offer better guidelines.
I need to formalize the visual presentation.

The second playtest also went well! More confusing notes to follow.

The story:
The Technocrats party and the Libraritarians (yes, I spelled it right) were preparing for an election. We had a young upstart politician, an agendered honorable representative, two older and kind of crotchety politicians, and two young interns – the eager beaver and the reluctant resume-filler. We had the old politicians agree to run a clean campaign, but then both sides went behind their back and tried to do it dirty. One politician managed to dodge with Avoidance to keep another player from finding incriminating evidence against them, and another won over the media. The eager beaver got hit by a car after a date with the reluctant resume-filler, but the final scene was an adorkable awkward kiss between the two interns.

Feedback included:
+ Very different game from session to session. (One player observed session 1, but played session 2.)
+ Clear and simple, but not predictable.
+ Avoidance is really great. (Called “innovative” and “hot” – made my day.)
+ Compromise is really good.
+ Questions work well.
+ Script Change mechanic (Rewind, Fast Forward) is excellent.
+ Ritual of structure/physical layout is great.
+ World creation went smoothly with no GM or facilitator interference.

– Very quick movement through scenes (we had some really aggressive scene framers, which was both good and bad).
– Not sure what niche is filled with the game.
– Factions have no stats.
– NPCs are sometimes tangential – need more interaction.
– World is not pushing hard enough.

A few notes:

The factions do not have stats, and I don’t think that will change. I do think that Stakes need to come into play more, which they didn’t in this session at all.
In the text, NPCs are tied to players. In this session, I tried not having them tied to players. This was a mistake.
For con games, based on both playtests, I think the format should be two scenes, World table, one scene, epilogue/vignettes. I need to try this out.
I want to look at the World and see if there is something I can do to make it bite more – maybe have it rolled more often.
One problem that came up was how people were handling personal goals. I need to make it clear in the text that personal goals can be solved either player to player, or in narrative scenes where you pay the World, no other methods.
This session reminded me very sharply of why Avoidance is staying a mechanic and why I originally wrote it. It was used brilliantly and to great effect.

Overall I’m pretty happy with the sessions. I think I have some tweaking to do but I think the game is strong, and I got a lot of great feedback.

Yay!