A Dark And Quiet Room

(This playtest account was cross-posted to the Forge.)

We playtested Dirty Secrets again on Monday. (Our regularly scheduled playtest on Thursday night was cancelled, due to sick children.) In this session, we finally got around to resolving a Crime, which is probably the major system of the game that hasn’t received any real testing yet. This gives me the opportunity to elaborate on how this works.

The Crime Grid

One of the goals of Dirty Secrets is preserving the essential mystery about the key Crimes that have occurred during the course of the game. This is an attempt to preserve the shock and surprise of reading a detective novel when the Reveal finally happens. At first, I was keeping track of Facts which incriminated various Characters and whatnot, but then I discarded all of this in favor of a different system.

Let’s face it. The average detective novel is ridiculously convoluted, and rarely are they set up as a whodunit. Rather, the shock of the Reveal is usually not because of the logical direction of the evidence, but rather because of the relational context in which it occurred.

To this end, I came upon the following system for Crime resolution. At the beginning of the game, there are a certain number of Crime sheets (similar to Character sheets) available for use during the game. One of them has to be a Murder. In addition, there is a Crime grid set in the middle of the table. This is either a 3×3, a 3×6, or a 6×6 grid, depending on the length of game that the players want. At the beginning of the game, a counter is randomly placed on the Crime Grid. After each Investigation scene, whoever won the scene’s conflict gets to move the counter a certain number of spaces in a straight line, based on the intensity of the conflict. The player then gets to write down a Character name in the space where the counter ends up. The counter has to be moved across all empty spaces. If this isn’t possible, then the player tries to resolve a Crime. He selects one of the available Crimes and then rolls two dice, which will give Grid coordinates. This is where the counter ends up. If the space is blank, the Crime goes unresolved for now, and the player writes a name in the space where the counter ended up. Otherwise, the Character whose name is in the space is the perpetrator of the Crime. The players then use the currently established facts to justify this outcome.

As the Grid fills up, it gets harder and harder to move the counter legally, thus forcing an eventual resolution of all Crimes in play. Once all Crimes have been created and resolved, the game ends.

Currently, we are playing with a 6×6 Grid. This seems to be working fairly well, although it definitely produces a “novel-length” game. We’re about five sessions into this story, and we’re just finally resolving our first Crime. The next time through, I’m definitely going to need to try with a smaller Grid and see what happens. I’d like this game to be able to be used for a quick, pick-up game. Five sessions isn’t exactly a pick-up game (he noted dryly).

In play, it all worked out rather nicely. The investigator (Robert George) was breaking into the house of his client’s probation officer (Courtney Jackson) to see if she had stolen his client’s address book. (This was the Crime that started everything off.) Crystal had been angling for this scene for a while, so she had maneuvered the counter into a corner of the Grid to make it easier to trigger a Crime resolution. She also pushed in the scene conflict, thus forcing the counter to move two spaces instead of one. The conflict, by the way, was getting past the large German shepherd that was guarding Courtney’s house. Eventually, George was triumphant, allowing him to enter and search the house for the book. Crystal then narrated finding the book and ended the scene. Because of the location of the counter, Crystal was able to trigger a Crime resolution. She selected the theft of the book and rolled. Oddly enough, the counter landed on a space with the name “Courtney Jackson”. So, officially, by the rules of the game, Courtney had indeed stolen the book. Otherwise, we would have had to justify how the book had ended up in Courtney’s house.

Of course, we had established the importance of this address book earlier, since Robert’s client (Debbie Sandberg) was a major drug dealer at one point before being caught and going to jail. According to Debbie, Courtney is running a drug ring out of the Probation Office and wanted the contact information in Debbie’s address book so that she could expand her network of contacts. Although, now that I think about it, I wonder if it has anything to do with the large shipment of cocaine that went missing just after Debbie was thrown in jail….

Anyways, the point is that it was very easy to justify why Courtney had stolen the book.

So, at least for the first time out of the gate, the Crime Grid seems to be working. A good thing, too, because this is the system that I’ve probably been the most nervous about. It’s a tricky thing to balance player authorship and GMful play on this side with a desire to create complete audience surprise on the other side. I think that I’ve managed to do it, but this is a system that will need a lot of testing.

Division of Authority

In a previous post, I said:

However, last night, I realized that I also need to be looking for the techniques that we apply during gameplay. After all, the three of us have gamed together for quite some time, and there are a variety of techniques that we apply without really thinking about it. If the success of the game relies, even in part, on these techniques, then I need to be sure that I know about it so that I can communicate them in the rules manuscript. I’m not just testing the rules; I need to observe the emergent behavior that the rules produce and be able to explain to a stranger how to produce similar effects.

One major area that has turned up has to do with the division of narration authority. Who gets the final say on what? We had an extensive discussion about this in the wake of our last playtest. This was really helpful, because it finally helped me put words to what I’ve meant the game to do. Essentially, the game relies on a balance of two factors.

The first factor is an explicit assigning of narration authority to certain players. The investigator player has final say over the status and actions of the investigator. The current opposing player has final say over everything else. However, there is a Challenge rule, which states that any narration by any player may be overridden by the unanimous consent of the other players. In other words, if the rest of the group doesn’t like what you’ve said, then they can veto it. (Hat tip: Spione and Universalis) So, at any given time, it should be clear who has the authority to say “Yea” or “Nay”.

The second factor, though, is what I am currently calling “friendly trespass”. What I mean by this is that any player should feel free to narrate anything, even if it wanders onto someone else’s territory. In fact, all narration should be almost a free-for-all of ideas and suggestions being pitched out by all players. Of necessity, this will result in someone entering into an area that is controlled by someone else. But that’s okay; it’s “friendly trespass”. Of course, it should be understood that the appropriate person can say, “No, I have a better idea” and overrule your idea.

In other words, the game plays as a free-for-all, with an explicit authority structure to fall back on when necessary.

So, for example, during the German shepherd conflict, Crystal wanted Robert to have a flashback to pitching for his Little League team when he was growing up. This was to justify Robert’s being able to hit the dog with a chunk of concrete. This was within her authority, since she is the investigator player for our game. However, Gabrielle and I weren’t buying. We accepted Robert’s throwing the concrete; we just didn’t think that Robert was enough of a team player to have been a baseball player, and we didn’t think that it was really an appropriate time for a flashback anyways. Thus, the rest of the table vetoed a portion of Crystal’s narration.

This requires a functional game group, but I’m finding that it works quite well in play.

My Research Scenes Are Awful

And now, an appeal for ideas. Dirty Secrets has several scene types to encompass several broad types of action. One scene type is the “Research scene”. This is when the investigator goes poking around a crime scene or in records of some kind to find out some raw information. From a structural perspective, the point is to introduce some new facts to give the investigator some direction when he is stalled out. Here’s my dilemma. I don’t want a research scene to allow for a massive data dump. There needs to be some constraint. On the other hand, it doesn’t really make any sense to use the standard conflict system for a research scene. Trust me; we’ve tried. So I need a simple research system.

What I currently have is this: the investigator describes the actions that he is taking to research and lays out the sort of information that he is looking for. The opposing player then makes up 1d6 facts for the investigator, based on the investigator’s narration.

This works okay, but it feels boring. Any ideas on improving this?

What Now?

The next step is to finish the current story that we’re playing through. After that, I figure that I’ll write up a basic playtest draft, both to gather my scattered thoughts and to allow others to take the game for a spin. At that point, I’ll probably solicit for some blind playtesters and do some more testing myself.

I’m feeling pretty good, actually. The game feels like it is coming together well.