A Dark And Quiet Room

Guess what guess what guess what!?!?!! The comments RSS feed on the Meta page actually works now! So now you can subscribe to all my comments, or you can subscribe to comments on a particular post by clicking on the “Comments” link and finding the RSS feed at the bottom.

Now I am happy that Bill upgraded. Hooray!

This was cross-posted to the Forge, where there has already been some feedback.

I got to playtest Dirty Secrets at Forge Midwest on Saturday. My partners in crime were Paul Czege, Matt Wilson, John Stavropoulos, and Tod Olson. We ran a small Grid, which took about 90 minutes to play.

I’d love to give a detailed account of the story that we created but, between a bit of fatigue on my part and, honestly, the convoluted events that occurred, I’m not sure that I could remember all the bits fitting into each other. We ended up with a retired pediatrician who was still doing some fertility treatments on the sly, working with a DEA agent who was moonlighting as a photographer for blackmail purposes or somesuch thing. Along the way, this agent photographed Samantha York with Mr. Lena, husband of the client that brought our intrepid investigator into the case. Of course, since the agent was only photographing clients of this fertility doctor, that meant that Samantha was actually trying to get pregnant by Mr. Lena. Mrs. Lena was blackmailing Samantha, probably with these photographs (we forgot to establish how this played out), so Samantha murdered the agent to stop the photographs from being taken.

Honestly, it made sense at the time. Well, somewhat. There were a lot of details flying around.

THINGS I LEARNED

First, I want to thank my fellow players. The experience of teaching the game was quite helpful to me, especially in figuring out how to run an effective demo of Dirty Secrets. For example, in the future, I’ll probably not play in the game and act as a tutor and facilitator for the game. Also, I’ll probably poll the table to determine experience with the genre and give the role of investigator player to one of those folks. Tod did a fine job as investigator, but I could tell that he was feeling the pressure to perform within a genre that he didn’t know well. If I had made Matt the investigator, he might have been more comfortable, given his greater familiarity with the genre.

I also learned the necessity of communicating the ability for the entire group to participate in any given sequence. This is a problem with any “round robin” style of game, as Paul pointed out, and, although the rules explicitly state that anyone may say anything, this isn’t necessarily something that a given group of players will pick up on. I think that a demo facilitator would have to do almost GM duty, looking for the signs of someone desiring to interject something and coaxing it forth. Also, in a discussion with my gaming group at home, Crystal suggested adding a term: Adviser. So now, in a given Chapter, there’s an Authority, an Investigator, and some Advisers. In that way, the game reminds the players that they should feel free to advise the Authority and Investigator. I think that this is a good change.

I also discovered the real power of shared geography as a shared communication tool. Since our play group was from all over the place, we set our story in New York City, given that we had a New Yorker with us. However, this meant that we were not able to exercise the ability to establish scene locations effectively. After all, I don’t know New York, beyond the existence of multiple boroughs. I found this lack to have hurt us somewhat, which was a bit surprising to me. I had thought that the setting of “your town, last week” was a nifty bonus to the game, but I’m coming to see that it actually allows for more powerful play. Weird, but true.

RULES CHANGES AND TWEAKS

As a result of this game, I’m tweaking the number of Characters in a given game. Because we had five players, we used up our allotment of Character cards during setup. I think that this hurt the game, because there was no room to expand the web of characters during play. Under the new rules, we would have had two extra Characters to work with, which would have been a good thing.

Also, I think that Research needs just a little bit of massaging. The concept works great, but those “sexual/romantic” relationships still keep complicating things for me.

Finally, I got a bunch of good feedback from the playtesters. Hopefully I didn’t come off as too defensive as we were discussing the issues. However, even some of the suggestions that I rejected were helpful, since they reflected previous stages in my design of the game. Often I could say, “Yes, I had thought about that but it won’t work for this reason.” I found it to be somewhat validating.

There were also the name suggestions for the Crime Grid counter. Right now, the Witness is where I’m leaning, but the Observer also has possibilities.

Also, someone (either John or Paul) noted that it would be an easy matter to introduce handicapping for players into the game, simply by adjusting how many dice each player receives. This is an excellent idea that I intend to explore further.

And, finally, John offered to do a blind playtest with his group, which I really appreciated.

So, in all, I thought that it was a successful playtest. I enjoyed myself and I think that the game will be stronger because of it.

Thanks, guys!

When I first saw this video, it was strangely haunting. And then, yesterday, it made me think of Bliss Stage.

So, there. Two links for the price of one!