[Getting There in Time] First playtests

[Dan Maruschak]

Getting There in Time is the Doctor Who-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off game I'm developing. I've playtested it for five sessions with my regular Skype group, Michael and Simon. Across the five sessions we did three adventures, the "boogey man" scenario from the PDF, a space-vampire scenario, and a space-mummy scenario. For the first and third scenarios Michael took the Chronomaster role, and we played in a more "put the serial numbers back on" style where he was The Doctor, although the TARDIS exterior was in doric column mode (Michael is a big Doctor Who fan, a few months back he had to miss our game session because he was attending Gallifrey One). In the second adventure Simon played the Chronomaster role in a more filed-off style as The Professor. In the first scenario Simon played the pre-generated character Colonel Huxley and we used the chargen rules to create Companions for the second and third scenarios. I was the GM for all the sessions.

We all had a lot of fun playing the game, and we had a sort of Tom Baker/Matt Smith vibe which is my preferred feel when I watch the show (one of my goals for the game is to have the aesthetic sensibilities of each particular group feed into things like tone - a different group could have easily gone in a darker direction, maybe giving it an Eccleston vibe). Some highlights for me were: during the first scenario, Simon realized in-character what the full implications of the "greater threat" situation were in a way that felt really organic and like I did a good job of communicating what was going on without having to spell everything out. During the second scenario, they confronted the "vampire" and proposed taking him to a planet where it could interact with non-sentient animals instead of humans and we realized that mapped to the "ask someone to do something your way" crux and the "Stop a Grave Threat" hope, so we rolled to see how it would resolve and they talked the bad guy out of doing the evil stuff he was doing. During the third scenario The Doctor was knocked out of spaceship that had just taken off and plummeted to the ground below, something that a human couldn't survive but a Time Lord could by going into a regeneration cycle, which led to using the "When you endure something that a human couldn't" crux.

While the sessions were on-balance a lot of fun there were a few rocky parts. Some of the rough patches I attribute to me not explaining the game well enough before we played combined with expectations they were bringing from other games they've played. For example, when it was Simon's turn to be the lead character in a scene he would tend to jump right into in-character dialog without framing the scene enough for me to understand where he was or what was going on, or he would start describing things he saw or saying what NPCs were saying, which steps on the toes of the GM role a bit -- not insurmountable problems, but just slightly out of alignment with what the game wants (I've tried to clean up some of my instructions in later revisions of the text to get people aligned better). I think there was also a bit of playing the game like it was a roll-for-clues game, or trying to use the hope/risk mechanic to make a more explicitly negotiated stakes game, which made things a bit clunky at times. I'm hoping that a lot of that was just normal learning-a-new-game stuff. There were also a few times where they were clearly telegraphing that they wanted certain things to happen and then playing the scene as essentially "we wait until that happens" that I wasn't sure exactly how to deal with. For example, during the space-vampire adventure they had their characters do a scene where they set up a big net to catch the flying vampire as it swooped past, but in my mind the vampire was obviously hiding inside the buildings of the compound they were in and had no reason to be swooping around. The sort of "OK, we set up our vampire trap, when does it go off? [wait expectantly for the GM]" thing made me feel like I was on-the-spot to make something happen in the scene but the game also tells me to play the situation with integrity, so I didn't feel like it would be right to make the thing they wanted to happen happen. The scene eventually moved on when I said they noticed the vampire sneaking up to the infirmary door and they reacted to that, but that felt kind of cheesy and weaselly to me.

Mechanically, the biggest issue I noticed is the Address a Grave Threat mechanic. Basically, for each prepped backstory/situation detail that the GM isn't able to introduce into the game before the Act 3 transition the Threat stat increases by 1, which feeds into the die roll the players face to resolve the overall story of the episode. The idea is that this gives an incentive for the GM to introduce the stuff they prepped during the game (I think the GM wants a happy ending, too), and an incentive for the players to play in a way that makes it easy for the GM to introduce that content. I think it partially works, since when the players were doing a lot to try to force events in the first scenario rather than playing scenes to interact with the situation it resulted in a very high Threat, which would normally correspond to a somewhat tense and high-stakes third act. Once you're in act 3, there's a mechanic that can let players reduce the Threat by one if they use the Address a Grave Threat hope, which is basically what you'd expect them to do as they build up to the climax. The problem is that the Threat stat feeds into a "roll N d8's and keep the highest" mechanic, and rolling N-1 d8's isn't substantially different from rolling N d8's if N is big enough -- it works fine if the Threat is like 3 or 4, but if the threat is 10 or 11 it doesn't feel like there's any point to addressing the threat before you try to stop it completely because you'd have to address it so many times before it would make a difference. I need to do something to fix that while still also making it feel consequential if the threat is high -- I don't want to completely take the teeth out of a big Threat stat because that would attenuate the incentive. I'm thinking that the solution is probably going to be related to something like having the GM roll extra dice on the Address a Grave Threat roll in exchange for removing more Threat if you win, but I haven't thought of an implementation for that yet that doesn't feel too mechanically fiddly.

The other mechanical problem I noticed is that I think it's too easy for the players to win rolls in the early game, which means they're less likely to have to deal with consequences like Injury or Horror, which means there are less mechanically useful Hopes for them to be angling for in their scenes, which gives them less material for playing out interesting scenes. The straightforward solution to that could be to just boost the number of dice the GM rolls by 1, but I'm not sure if I like boosting that since there's already a mechanic that grows the number of dice the GM rolls and I don't want to push into that "it doesn't matter anymore" area of another "roll N dice, keep highest" probability curve. I also currently have the Injury and Horror stats decrease if they feed into GM die rolls, but I'm probably going to change that so there's more reason for the Address a Previous Setback hope to be used.

My focus for the past few weeks has been concentrated on getting the adventure-prep procedures working (since there's a "mystery" component to the play experience I can't really get the full effect of playtesting in the non-GM role with an adventure I created), but I feel like I'm getting close on those so I'm starting to think more about these in-play issues now, too.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Dan,

My apologies for not replying earlier. It's taking me a little while to wrap my head around the game. I have some basic questions which might or might not be helpful to you, but at least I'll get it a little better.

First, is it play or storyboarding? In other words, how much of the talking at the table is about what to choose, and how much of it is about dealing with it in an in-your-face sense? Your description says to me that you're managing to escape the common problem of the group sitting around and never-playing while they argue about whether X or Y is really a conflict, that is, if they ever got to X or Y in the first place. I'm very interested in what gets everyone into the more positive, organic frame of mind you're describing - in which you recognize that you're at a crux, rather than laboriously constructing one.

Second, given all of our yipyap here about authorities (or whatever I end up calling them) over the last few weeks, I'm interested in how "GM," in this case, is more of a final-arbiter ... or well, authority concerning the everyone-goes tasks of framing scenes and putting stuff in them. My terminology would call that a social/creative leader role, productively separated from the tasks/techniques of the authority distribution. Given how mashed together those things are in most people's experience of play, I can understand why it might take a little reminding or orienting to get people to do it.

There were also a few times where they were clearly telegraphing that they wanted certain things to happen and then playing the scene as essentially "we wait until that happens" that I wasn't sure exactly how to deal with. For example, ...

.

If you're interested, my take from this armchair is that the game lacks a "that ain't working" consequence with jagged animal teeth embedded in it. I've only read your current draft once, so correct me if I'm missing it, but it seems to me as if the game runs on the notion of colorful adversity and thoughtful success, but not on "if you fuck up you suffer greatly" to any degree. I don't have a real recommendation for you because it's likely that this game isn't built toward horrific consequences either for the main characters or for the various people and critters they encounter. I'm thinking, however, of how in the original Star Trek, things didn't always work out - in fact, pretty frequently they didn't. Do you want any touch of that in the game? And given the eras of Who-dom you're interested in facilitating, what degree of such stuff is in there?

All this ties into your concern with the Grave Threat, Injury, and Horror mechanics too - it seems to me as if the Grave Threat is too far-off, making "it" harder but "it" is not right here and right now. I'm wondering whether it'd be good to have things happen in the moment that reflect the consequences of simply not handling things well, but which don't necessarily create a big fail down the road either. It'd seem to me as if Injury and Horror were tailor-made for that, especially the latter, but apparently that's not what's happening.

"I'm wondering whether" is not a common phrase for me, and I'm not using it as a softener, but rather trying to find my way in talking about a game which is, at its heart, purely celebratory and mostly about how to get a heroic and happy ending which isn't already-taped and/or stupid. You know the concept of Mary Sue, right, specifically God Mode Sue? What I'm saying is that the game has the interesting task of validating the awesomeness of the inspirational material without turning toward that particular trope. (Um ... not to irritate any Who-fers, but that's kind of my take on the classic show too ...)

Well, I don't know if any of that worked for you. Let me know.

Best, Ron

[Dan Maruschak]

I'm very interested in what gets everyone into the more positive, organic frame of mind you're describing - in which you recognize that you're at a crux, rather than laboriously constructing one.

I'm definitely aiming to avoid the "what's the conflict?/never actually play the scene" type of problem. I'm hoping that the way I phrased the mechanics in terms of watching for triggers does part of the work -- if the people around the table believe it's important for everyone to be able to do the "yes, I see how the fiction in this scene corresponds to mechanical thing X" operation then there's a spur to actually play out the fiction so they can do that rather than short-handing it by talking in purely abstract storytelling or mechanical terms. Splitting things up into the hope, risk, and crux to give three different fictional things to watch for and phrasing them in semi-amorphous way that's more descriptive than prescriptive is also supposed to contribute, but I'm less confident about that part working well for everybody. The fact that the GM will have a hard time working in their details if there's no actual scene playing out hopefully has an effect, too -- if the players push to jump to the mechanics and resolve scenes immediately then the Threat will end up being high at the 3rd act transition, although that's a feedback mechanism that will only kick in over multiple sessions. I think the way I distributed different authorities also contributes to needing to play out the scene -- since the players can't dictate much about the NPCs it's harder to do the thing where you frame a scene so aggressively that you're already at a conflict, you need to start playing at least a little bit to see what's going on in the world around you and with the NPCs. And hopefully the GM's prep will cause the setting and NPCs to be vivid enough that the players will want to interact with that stuff by actually playing the scenes (I personally have an issue when I GM some games of not caring enough about details or describing the environment, and when I invent NPCs on the fly they usually end up like "he's kind of an average-looking guy... about average height..." which can contribute to really flat scenes, but when I consciously prep that kind of stuff I do a much better job of making it engaging during play).

In the playtests, I don't think the players were feeling pressure to jump to the mechanics, except occasionally during action scenes toward the end but that tended to also make sense from a pacing perspective since you'd expect lots of quick scenes at that point in the story anyway. Part of that could just be our natural style, although I notice we do sometimes do the "skip to the mechanics" thing in other games, especially when we're first learning them, so I think there's at least something in my game design that's working to prevent that. Occasionally I would say things like "remember you guys are supposed to be watching to see if the mechanics trigger, too" which would frequently be interpreted as "Oh, it must be time to use the mechanics now" and they'd start reading over the lists to see which ones applied rather than just taking my words at face value and playing the scene with the mechanics in mind, but I think that was just a consequence of the "the GM is in charge of the mechanics" habit combined with the fact that I designed the game and was therefore the mechanics expert, so it was an understandable reaction to assume I was hinting at something even though that's not what I intended.

it seems to me as if the game runs on the notion of colorful adversity and thoughtful success, but not on "if you fuck up you suffer greatly" to any degree. I don't have a real recommendation for you because it's likely that this game isn't built toward horrific consequences either for the main characters or for the various people and critters they encounter. I'm thinking, however, of how in the original Star Trek, things didn't always work out - in fact, pretty frequently they didn't. Do you want any touch of that in the game? And given the eras of Who-dom you're interested in facilitating, what degree of such stuff is in there?

In Doctor Who there usually aren't any horrific consequences for the main characters since it's an episodic show about the title character (although a handful of companions have died), but bad things can and do happen around them, and it does weigh on them. I think it tends to be a bit more generalized, like "if you were smarter/quicker/better this bad thing could have been avoided" rather than "you did X, and look at horrible thing Y that resulted!". This is more prevalent in certain eras than others. My general perception of the Peter Davison years, for example, is that he was sort of a sad-sack who would show up, witness the terrible things happening, try (and fail) to stop them, and move on. In the reboot it was actually a pretty significant plot development partway through the first season when The Doctor was finally able to achieve a "save the day" type of ending. I do want to support that type of story, since it's just as much a part of Doctor Who as the lighter episodes I tend to prefer. My hope is the the "something bad happens offscreen" and "someone is incapacitated, killed, or subjected to similar catastrophe" can deliver some of the "collateral damage" kind of consequences, and the Injury and Horror risks are there for witnessing and being affected by the bad/scary stuff. I think some of the raw materials are in place in the design for this kind of thing to happen in the game, but the dice probabilities are probably making the risks a little too rare. In our playtests we actually ended the first scenario with the "The grave threat comes to pass" ending (partly because of the wonky Threat math I mentioned in the first post). One of the players played it off by saying something like "maybe this was the first part of a two-parter...". I think the fact that the scenario was set on present-day Earth contributed to the negative ending not seeming completely real, since there's a pressure to maintain a real-world status quo, but I do think the "bad" endings can happen. I think my intention is that's somewhat celebratory of the source material too -- kind of a "yes, that bad ending was the sort of thing that happens when stories like this have bad endings".

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Dan,

Quick provisos: I'm going only by what you've reported, and I'm talking about attention or issues for later playtesting. Please disregard anything I say which clearly demonstrates that I didn't understand something.

I've looked over the text and also over your posts, especially the last part where you answered my question about tough/unwanted outcomes.

I'm not sure if I was clear enough about the distinction I drew between the eventual, big-threat outcome and little, here-and-now outcomes within the story but not concluding it. I'm talking about, for lack of a better word, small disasters along the way which can't be corrected, such that when the big threat is (let's say) successfully dealt with, the victory therefore came with a price. I wish I knew the show well enough to provide examples, but your account at least shows me that they exist and that you know about them. If you didn't say you wanted to provide for that, then I'd simply drop the subject, but I think you're saying that you do want to.

I'm pretty sure that this design won't do that. I think you're going to get what you're seeing at the table already, an informal level of adjustment that bumps play, conceptually, back into the non-threatening, save-the-day mode - even after play which manifestly gave contrary results. One such adjustment is the fact that in order to keep playing, you had to find a way to pave the characters' way into a given location even though their characters' actions were utterly off the mark; another is the telling comment by one of the players that the negative final outcome of the adventure could well not be the final outcome after all.

I stress again: I'm not telling you what to do. If the game is basically alternating "Fortunately -- but fortunately --"* there's nothing wrong with that; if I'm not mistaken, Full Light Full Steam and probably a fair amount of Fate work that way. The question is whether you want to see during-play, pre-climax failures and genuinely (i.e. non-reversible) negative outcomes occur. And again, maybe I'm not understanding it, but I'm not seeing a way that they can, in the current design.

Best, Ron

* I'm thinking of the kids' book "Fortunately" by Remy Charlip, which I read a lot when I was little.

[Dan Maruschak]

If by the small disasters thing you mean things like "a minor character (i.e. an NPC) is killed", then that kind of thing can and does already happen in the game when risks like "something bad happens off-screen" or "someone is incapacitated, killed, or subjected to similar catastrophe" manifest (e.g. in our second scenario an NPC was murdered by a space-vampire, and in the third scenario an NPC was clubbed to death by a space-mummy, although this sort of thing was somewhat rare in the playtests because the current dice probabilities make it unlikely for the risks to manifest). Whether something like an NPC dying is weighty and horrific or just kind of a thing that happens is going to vary based on tone (to use a Star Trek analogy, sometimes redshirts get killed and it's just kind of a thing that happens to establish the threat, sometimes guest stars get killed and it's a big deal and the main characters get really broken up about it). The color and tone of that kind of "bad stuff" is going to vary from game to game and group to group. I expect people whose aesthetic preferences are closer to a "darker" end of the spectrum will put more emphasis on embellishing that sort of stuff, whereas my first instinct is to treat it as more incidental. I'm not sure I'm exactly comfortable calling these things consequences since there's not always an in-fiction causal link between what the characters are doing and these events, but those sort of fictional things can happen in the show and I think they happen in the game, too.

I've been sort of baffled by your train of thought, but now I'm thinking maybe it's something along the lines of "Building a vampire net was a bad choice. There should be some negative consequence to that bad choice, but the game doesn't give you the tools to attach negative consequences to things like that." If that's the kind of thing you mean I think I see where you're coming from, but I'm not sure I agree with the framing. It's true that the GM in this game doesn't have any tools like "if you don't think the PCs are doing anything, escalate", although it does tell the GM to incorporate stuff into the scenes as they go on, some of which will tend to seem like escalation. If the scene hadn't come to a dead stop I don't think it would have been as problematic. The "you notice the vampire near the infirmary" wasn't a completely arbitrary scene-shift, they had built their net outside near a compound of buildings, one of which was the infirmary -- it was awkward (at least in my eyes) but I wasn't trying to "pave their way to a location" but trying to communicate that the vampire character wasn't getting caught in the net (it's hard to describe a negative, the only thing I could come up with was to describe him doing something else). This was a rough area of play, though, so I'm definitely concerned about it and will be watching for future instances of it.

As for the example of the final outcome not sticking being a symptom of a bigger problem... You may be right, but I strongly suspect that setting the story on Earth was a big part of that, since there's a strong assumption that the fiction shouldn't be upsetting the status quo we can see out our windows (that's how the show itself did things for many years, although in recent years they've started going in a different direction). But it's something I'll keep in mind for future playtests. The second playtest ended with the positive ending, and we called an end to the third session before we could get it completely wrapped up, so I've really only got one data point for how people react to the "The grave threat comes to pass" ending so far.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Dan,

I wasn't there - you know how it went, and I don't. If what I'm saying isn't on target even a little, I'll drop it. (Give me a little credit for the qualifiers throughout my post, trying to leave that door open.)

What do you want to talk about? Or perhaps, is your initial post best read as a status report?

Best, Ron

[Dan Maruschak]

I don't think I had any specific topics in mind (I tend to be bad at focusing design conversations about my own stuff, usually if I can pinpoint something well enough to identify it as a topic I just focus on solving the issue independently rather than wanting to talk about it), so the initial post was more like a status report. That said, even though we've been talking past each other a bit, the conversation has been helpful for me by making me think about my game in different ways which has shaken loose some ideas for how to address some of the dice mechanic issues.

[Josh W]

It seems to me that the "doctor who" way to solve the problem is to cut to a scene of the vampire in the building doing something horrible, under a general category like "an innocent bystander discovers how they have underestimated the threat".

More generally I suspect you need to de-emphasise distant solutions, and encourage solutions that involve getting into the middle of problems.

I haven't looked back to check, but I imagine in most doctor who episodes you can find a place that people travel to that is either the lair of a threat, an obvious focal point for resolving a problem that someone beats you to, or some villain's office you get strongarmed into with a nice overview of the situation handy.

Regardless, almost inevitably, the doctor gets a chance to chat to a spokesman for the problem, monologue to his companions about what he's going to have to do, or otherwise set up some human interest situation around some visual spectacle relating to the threat.

If this is true, then part of the plumbing of any episode is finding ways to draw the doctor in, so that he's in the right place to have these kinds of scenes. That whole spacial dimension is probably something that people need help with, which could be a good excuse to watch a load of old serials and see what excuses they come up with.

[dindenver]

Dan,
  I just read the latest draft. Your writing style is excellent for a game manual.
  I think I see what Ron was talking about. So, in the new Who's there is this sort of tunnel vision that develops. Essentially, when they arrive, almost anything is possible. But as the story unravels, so does the Doctors options, right? Look at Dinosaurs on a spaceship. When they arrived, it was a novelty, dinosaurs on a spaceship. They had access to Dinosaurs, weapons, teleporters, computer logs, etc. As the real threat is revealed, they lost access to those tools. I mean, when they lost access to the teleporters, I wondered how they were going to make it. Even if that isn't what Ron was talking about, I feel that this game would benefit from a mechanic that emulates that risk with each roll.
  And I think it would give you that bite you are looking for as far as challenging the players.

  Also, is there a reason you tied the final threat to the number of unused seeds? It seems like the winning strategy is to keep framing scenes and not getting anywhere near the Act 3 seeds until you have exhausted as many Scene 1 and 2 seeds as possible. It also means, if you are rushed, as in a Con scenario, then the final threat is killer. Is that intentional?

  I have to say that I love the way that the cruxes are formed, it is ingenious.
 

[Dan Maruschak]

I've had another half of a playtest via Google Hangouts with a different set of players (and with me slightly frazzled, because I didn't realize I would be running it before we got together) and ran into some other headaches which had some similarities to the ones I already mentioned. In my mind the problems aren't about postponing the climax or anything like that (e.g. in the vampire scenario I wouldn't have had a problem with them confronting the "big bad" as Josh describes, just that the confrontation in the scene as-established wouldn't have made fictional sense to me). From my POV, the problems tend to manifest when the players are telegraphing assumptions about what they want to happen and there's a huge social instinct for the GM to pay off those assumptions. The game currently tells the GM that it's not their job to do that, but when the conversational onus is on you to make the next move it's hard to stay zen. The common solution in many games is to have the GM escalate in that situation (e.g. in Apocalypse World, if the players look at the GM expectantly the GM is supposed to make a move), but I have been trying to keep the GM in this game in a more passive/reactive orientation. The idea of doing cutaways might be worth investigating, but I don't want to put tension on certain things in the game. I don't want "narrative authority" to be adversarial and I don't want the GM to have a judgmental role based on his opinion of how the scene is progressing.

Dave, I don't think I'm really looking for "challenging" the players (and unfortunately I'm not up to date enough to properly parse your example -- the first episode of the new season soured me enough on the direction I feared they were going that I haven't been able to force myself to watch the later ones yet), my concern about the lack of early game failure is just about a lack of variety (plus the lack of good Hopes makes it hard for the mechanics to kick in, and there aren't enough good Hopes in the early game as it's designed right now if the players win every roll). Tying the Threat to the number of introduced details is to incentivize behavior that will be conducive to the GM introducing most or all of the prepped content. If players are very aggressive about how they go about their scenes, e.g. dominating screen time and forcing other characters to react to them rather than interacting with the stuff around them, then it is harder for the GM to introduce content, so the Threat will probably end up high when the third act transition hits (when players are "aggressive" like that they tend to end up with scenes where it would be awkward to not introduce the later act content so the transitions happen faster). But I think a tense third act tends to be appropriate for that kind of story, so the mechanic gives it a consequence but I don't think it's really a punishment.