[Dirty Secrets] [Forge Midwest] Pediatricians and photographs

[GreatWolf]

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.  (If I got your name wrong, please correct me.)  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!

[Paul Czege]

Hey Seth,

Y'know, I realized this morning that I did nothing but playtesting at Forge Midwest: Acts of Evil, Dirty Secrets, Costs, The Oath of Stars, Galactic. Yes, it was a shameful gluttony of design fun. But I'm unrepentant.

I think the problem with Dirty Secrets for the non-investigator is that it's boring when it's not your turn. In My Life with Master, when it's not your turn, you remain interested because you had a share in creating the antagonist, for some folks because there's some gamism in who ends up killing the Master, because the resolution mechanics have a low handing time that keeps things moving, and because it's easy to be interested in seeing how the stories of another character plays out when the other player took your suggestions during character creation. Primetime Adventures keeps players interested with the shared creation of the show, even quicker resolution mechanics, and with the way fanmail has everyone hooked in mechanically to everything that happens. In Dirty Secrets there's no gamism between the non-investigators. There's a high handling time. The contributions you make to the cast of characters are trivial, and not subject to approval by anyone. There's no character ownership or association of characters with resource pools. And when it's not your scene you're mechanically isolated from what's going on. You've argued that players can make suggestions into the scenes. But it's just not the same as the suggestions having an impact on the effectiveness of your own or someone else's current or future mechanical situation. Does a game about creating stories provoke player enthusiasm if more than half the time for more than half the players the creative fun is something that they have to choose to do that has no mechanical impact on play?

I still like the suggestion that the game be a competition between two investigator players. Because watching a competition can be interesting even if you're not involved. But here's another idea I thought of this morning that I might like even better: give players pools of dice that they gift to the NPCs, and that then follow the NPCs throughout the story. So scenes are resolved between the investigator's pool and the pools associated with the NPCs, regardless of which player happens to be controlling the NPC. Maybe giving a die to an NPC goes along with writing a fact onto their card.

Honestly, right now there's just nothing keeping me engaged.

Paul

[Valamir]

Lack of engagement wasn't a particular problem in the session I played.  I was pretty engaged even when it wasn't my turn.

The related items that I did experience were:

1) there's nothing for me to do EXCEPT advise.  A contributing issue is that when another player plays an NPC, its a player who just recently had a turn as an antagonist, leaving the other players even longer with nothing to do.

and 2) this opens the door to more aggressive personalities steamrollering the story a bit.   I had to reign myself in a few times in our game (and don't know how successful I was) because I seemed to always have a "oh, yeah, wouldn't in be great if this happened idea.  At one point I was basically playing the Investigator...even though I wasn't the Investigator...because I'm loud and think quickly on my feet.  Polaris doesn't allow this, because even though kibitzing is permitted its clear whose job is what and the kibbitzers are merely petitioning the authority.  In DS, the kibbitizing is fairly unstructured and so at greater risk for domineering players.

I think that's a real danger with the game.

I'd like to see some more structure around the "advisor" roles.  Maybe not Polaris level precision, but something.

Right now you have the Investigator who's responsible for everything the investigator does and says.  And the Antagonist who's responsible for everything else.  I think maybe you can identify all the various functions in the game and assign them (maybe just by dealing out cards at the beginning of the session...with the Antagonist card being passed around.

Some ideas:
"Declarer of Conflict":  This person is the person who declares when something "goes to the dice"
"Declarer of Traits":  This person's job is to observe play and identify when a Trait should be added to a card.
"Keeper of Characters":  This person's job is to identify when a character should be assigned a card.
"Arbiter of Setting":  Whenever there's a setting element that people don't know (like "what's the name of that bar on mainstreet with the big crazy sign?") this person makes a decision.

Something like that so that players (i.e. mini GMs) have tasks that they are responsible for and have authority over.

You could also do the Polaris thing and assign cops to one player, poor white guys to someone else, etc.  But I don't know if that would have the same benefit as in Polaris.


I also mentioned in our play that I think Liars dice just plays better as a game when there is more than 2 players.  There could be an opportunity for a third player to jump in

[Matt Wilson]

I think this game has the potential to be really awesome. It's hard to tell from a playtest that involves a working draft and a designer who's still working on the best way to talk about it. Looking past the roughness, I see great stuff.

Cool stuff: that the game tells you things, facts; that we share the generation of NPCs; that it's one lone investigator and several GMs; a bluff-powered conflict mechanic.

Potential issues: downtime as we take turns, like Paul says; the need for the game, maybe, to give the players more information; the need for something that connects the GMs a little more with the investigator.

It has definite potential to be a coffee table game.

[GreatWolf]

Could you explain a bit more what you mean by this:

the need for the game, maybe, to give the players more information;

And this:

the need for something that connects the GMs a little more with the investigator.

Read this as a request for clarification, not being defensive.  I think that I understand what you're meaning, but I want to make sure that I'm understanding you.

[Matt Wilson]

Yeah, sure.

So I was thinking about the first item above and how you remarked that you want the game to give you plenty of setup info so you can start playing. I was thinking that it might be cool for scenes to provide some kind of similar result, so that when I win a conflict as the investigator, I can roll on some table or establish a specific fact based on what happened. I know someone gets to write a name in a space, but maybe something even more than that.

That's more of a wistful, daydreamy kind of what-if thought.

As for the second, I didn't really get a sense of who the investigator was in our playtest at FM. I knew a lot about the suspects and victim, but nothing about what the investigator was all about. Who were his friends and enemies? What did he like and dislike? What did he fear and love? That's the stuff that will get me to lean in and pay attention if I'm one of the GMs.

Does this come up in longer games, and if so, where do you think it comes from? What can make it happen sooner rather than later?

[Tod Olson]

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.

That may be. I certainly neglected to play up the noir aspect, that all came from the GMs. Also, I was getting fatigued after awhile. IIRC, the investigator is responsible for initiating every scene, and that's fundamental to the game concept. Maybe there would be a way to encourage sharing that responsibility when the investigator player begins to flag. Might help with Paul's comment about needing something to keep interested.

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.

I can see that. You expect the city to be a supporting character.

...I didn't really get a sense of who the investigator was in our playtest at FM. I knew a lot about the suspects and victim, but nothing about what the investigator was all about. Who were his friends and enemies? What did he like and dislike? What did he fear and love? That's the stuff that will get me to lean in and pay attention if I'm one of the GMs.

Agreed, and I played the investigator. You may just be seeing the limits of my ability to juggle developing a character while initiating scenes. I suspect I fell into task completion mode: just get it done.

The investigator, as I recall, was Indian, rich, 42, and named Prashant. In my head, I imagined him as the well-dressed swarthy fellow who the white characters don't get nervous around. Until he tries to talk to them. But that's just how people react to him, not who he is. It also seemed that the act of investigating other characters forced stuff about them to emerge. It may also be that there wasn't an equivalent force pressing on the investigator; I won most conflicts. I would expect losing conflicts to reveal something about the investigator. Hmm, maybe the mechanics could use that somehow to help flesh out the investigator.

-Tod

[GreatWolf]

As for the second, I didn't really get a sense of who the investigator was in our playtest at FM. I knew a lot about the suspects and victim, but nothing about what the investigator was all about. Who were his friends and enemies? What did he like and dislike? What did he fear and love? That's the stuff that will get me to lean in and pay attention if I'm one of the GMs.

Does this come up in longer games, and if so, where do you think it comes from? What can make it happen sooner rather than later?

I would expect losing conflicts to reveal something about the investigator. Hmm, maybe the mechanics could use that somehow to help flesh out the investigator.

I thought that I'd reply to both at once.

Yes, character development for the investigator comes up in longer games through the Reflection mechanic.  As the investigator's dice are worn away, he refreshes them through calling for a Reflection sequence.  This is supposed to provide insight into the investigator's personality.  Of course, with as short a game as we played, there's not really a lot of room for Reflection, unless the GM players are really able to beat up on the investigator.

In general, the character development issues haven't appeared in the longer games that I've played.  I think that's because there's more time for details to accumulate and settle into the collective psyche of the group.  As a result, over time, the characters tend to reveal themselves and become quite interesting.

Of course, the characteristics of the short games that have been played are similar to the detective short stories from the source material.  That being said, the novels are better stories and are more interesting.

All of this to say:  I'm starting to take a long, hard look at the small Grid.  I'll probably still include it in the game, but I'll probably recommend that folks use the larger Grids if they are looking for a better-developed story.  Originally I had hoped that Dirty Secrets would be able to be a quick one-shot game, but I think that its actual strengths are revealed over several sessions of play.