A Dark And Quiet Room

Okay. So I have just a couple of minutes to scrawl this down. But if I don’t do it now, I’ll forget and never do it.

I taught Versus mode over lunch today. My fellow player has been around RPGs but he isn’t really a gamer. However, he left me a comment on my blog indicating his desire to give it a whirl. So we did.

We ended up playing with a loose turn structure so that he could get a feel for how the game works, which went well. And boy did we have a lot of fun.

In this corner, Thomas Paine (played by Jeremy).

In this corner, George Washington (played by Seth).

The issue: censorship.

The actual issue text:

“In New England farms, the People consider censorship. Supporters teach correspondence after detractors replace an arms cache!”

Now, oddly enough, I just realized that I completely reversed this in my head when we played. “Supporter” meant “favored freedom of the press”. Oh well. It worked out anyways.

I suggested that the issue was that there were still Tories doing nasty Tory things who were being rounded up. But the new government was suppressing the publication of texts describing the rounding up of these Tories. Need to protect the security of the nation and all that. (Any correlation to modern-day events is purely in your head. Really.)

So Thomas Paine stood to speak against the suppression and George Washington argued for it.

Without replicating the entirety of play, let’s just say that things quickly went from bad to worse for Paine. He tried to implicate Washington as a Tory sympathizer, even producing photographic evidence of secret meetings between Washington and the Tories. But Congress wasn’t paying any attention, and Washington just ran roughshod over Paine. At one point, Jeremy was locked out of cards after I had a significant base of cards on my own side of the table, so I romped all over him. Washington had Paine thrown out of Congress and kicked him when no one was looking. Then he led the troops out to round up the remaining Tories. Capitalizing on this, he launched a campaign for President, which he won in a landslide. Then he had Paine imprisoned for the win.

In the final analysis, Paine wrote his memoirs, but he quickly realized that no one would read them. So, when he was finally released from jail, he retired to the obscurity of private life. Washington, who was by then the Emperor of the United States, made sure that the few copies of Paine’s memoirs were suppressed. Bad for security, you know.

And all this, even with the slower card play, in about 45 minutes.

So, yay!

Playtest comments are at the Forge, but I thought that I’d share here, too.

So, given that the “More” does indeed hide the rest of the text from the RSS feed, I can now ask my question. This involves the use of a PG-13 term (at least, that would be my rating for it), so I’m putting it below the fold.

But it is a serious question.

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I’m curious how the “More” works. In particular, I’m curious if the text below the “More” shows up in an RSS feed or not. My documentation claims that it does, but I’d like to see it for myself.

So I’m going to find out!

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