[Infected] Camp Nerdly: The Inwood Zombie Fortress and Drama Club

[Narf the Mouse]

As a neutrsl obsever, it looks creepy to me. As for pretentious, I've gotten indications that my pretentiometer is very loose. For one thing, I like the Drizzt series, so...

[joepub]

Okay, I'll try to state it more succinctly:

-I dislike secrecy and hidden goals in this game. It seriously cripples the GM's ability to affect the characters in a meaningful way, and it doesn't add anything. I would strongly, strongly push you to remove secrecy.

-I think the cards aren't being used as well as they could be.
My suggestion of personifying the card's imagery in order to gain Infection dice is one way that you could better use them.

-I don't think card images tie into goals very EASILY. Tying a goal to the images feels FORCED.
Some cards are cool and evocative, but aren't TANGIBLE.

Saying they felt pretentious was entirely un-productive. It's not a criticism you can really work on.
And yet... I find myself at a loss for describing what I was trying to say.

Here are the cards I have a major issue with:
-Butterfly girl. (it feels kinda cheesy and middle school)
-Crow and Mouse playing checkers. (it doesn't feel like it fits in a game about zombies and infections)

Here are the cards I like the most:
-Martyr
-Missing Pieces

[Jason Morningstar]

I'm married to them.  Big time.  I love the idea and I'm totally convinced that the final product will be far superior to direct mission statements. 

Enough said - we don't need to believe in your design, you do.  And you do.  That said, if I were running this game as it stands at a con I'd leave the cards at home and say "Each of you needs a cool, fun goal that has nothing to do with the infection.  'Win back the love of my ex-girlfriend' is a good example.  Go."

[Eric Provost]

Hey Narf, thanks for weighing in.  If that card looked creepy to you, then awesome.  Creepy certainly can't hurt.

Joe,

How long did everyone keep their goals a secret?  From what Jason said, Frank kept his a secret pretty much throughout the entire game.  But I don't know how long everyone else kept theirs a secret.

Some cards are cool and evocative, but aren't TANGIBLE.

I don't know what you mean by this.  I've got a guess, but working on guesses sucks.  So, I'll need you to step up and correct me where I'm going wrong here.  This is how I'm imagining those first few minutes went down;
Before reading your card you had a strong idea of who your character was.  When you read your card you had two immediate and negative reactions.  The first being to the quality of the prose.  The second, possibly fueled in part by the first, was that the image the card presented was in contrast to the idea you already had in place for your character.  Those two negative reactions worked to prevent you from being inspired to create a malfunction for your character.  With no malfunction you couldn't easily create your goal.  Which left you trying to figure out what part of your character you could take and force to fit into the prose on the card.  Which sucked because the image was contrary to what you already had.  A bit of a round peg & square hole issue.
How close am I?  If I'm close but not quite there yet, then let's work out the differences between what I'm imagining and how it really went down. 

-Eric

[Jason Morningstar]

Nobody revealed their goals until they were ready for their final throw-down conflict.  Joe and Frank had pretty obvious ones.  Mine may have been.  Kevins I still don't know.

[Eric Provost]

Nobody revealed their goals until they were ready for their final throw-down conflict.  Joe and Frank had pretty obvious ones.  Mine may have been.  Kevins I still don't know.

That's what I needed to know.  It wasn't a direct violation of the rules.  At least not what I wrote.  But it was a violation of the intent.  I'll be sure to make that bit more explicit in the next iteration of the rules.  See, you're not supposed to keep your character's goals a secret indefinately.  Just until after you've had a chance to illustrate them through narration.  It's still a bit of a wobbly rule, but I don't think that we've had a chance to playtest it out properly yet either.

[Eric Provost]

I just re-read my last post and realized that it was really crappy.  Here's what I meant;

Keeping your Goals hidden past the first act is not what I intended with these rules.  Unfortunately, the rules don't say that very clearly right now, which is kind of a vestage of the very first draft, pre-playtesting.  My intent was to encourage players to illustrate their goals to one another though narrating their character's actions and reactions.  To make those goals very clear very quickly without having to declare it like a personal mission statement.  I theorize that the open mission statement would be counter to the idea of being able to change your goals mid-stride.

Secrecy in goals 'till the end of the game?  Yeah, that totally sucks.  I can see why you guys are rallying against it so much.

[Jason Morningstar]

I see your intent there, but in play I'd much rather know from the first minute that Player A wants to keep his daughter safe, so I can make her an NPC and make him awesome by threatening her.  What do you lose by knowing that immediately?  And what do you lose when somebody says "I just changed my goal - now I want to be a leader"?

[Eric Provost]

So, while I was at work today I really had all this rolling around in my head.  I was thinking about the cards and running through all sorts of different scenarios in my head, trying to figure out how come they just didn't fire properly.

At some point, I pondered the question "I wonder if anyone missed that step where you're supposed to create a problem for their character using the card?" to which some other part of my brain immediately responded "If they did, it's probably because I keep telling them to create a goal with it."

Picture of me with a lightbulb above my head, followed by a picture of me scribbling furiously in my gaming notebook.  I don't know if this solution would have helped everyone at this session, but I do think it addresses at least part of the issues you were having.

The cards represent what's broken about your character.  Their primary and most important major malfunction of that character.  Drop the part about authoring a goal.  One has already been authored for you:  Fix the broken part of your life.  Each time you put up a chip from your stack you are saying that this conflict is a little step on the way to fixing that broken bit.  And, eventually, you get your once chance to fix that one broken thing in your life by giving your chips to someone else as dice.

Now, instead of authoring a goal you're authoring a malfunction.  Nothing left to keep a secret.
I passed it by Jason a couple hours back, and he seems to think it's a groovy fix.  I'd be curious to hear what the rest of you guys think.  Me, I think it's totally awesome. 

-Eric

[joepub]

The cards represent what's broken about your character.  Their primary and most important major malfunction of that character.  Drop the part about authoring a goal.  One has already been authored for you:  Fix the broken part of your life.  Each time you put up a chip from your stack you are saying that this conflict is a little step on the way to fixing that broken bit.  And, eventually, you get your once chance to fix that one broken thing in your life by giving your chips to someone else as dice.

Now, instead of authoring a goal you're authoring a malfunction.  Nothing left to keep a secret.

This reads much better.

So... are the cards still being turned down and kept secret? I hope not. I hope the secrecy element has been removed.

[Mark Causey]

So, I finally have some time to type something up. Obviously, I'll be hitting the playtest from something other than the cards as I didn't deal with them directly.

As always, I felt awkward explaining the rules. I like how tight the rules are, but always wish I had some scene prepared so that everyone could see them in action, especially the Harm that comes from failed rerolls, which for some reason I always have problems remembering.

RE: Not authoring zombies in during moments of importance (chip usage). Here are my thoughts:

One, there should never be any conflicts where the goal is "Do you escape from the zombies?". I made this mistake once and avoided it for the rest of the evening. For one, it is always a chip using (i.e. important) conflict to survive, and therefore a waste of the mechanic. For another, I can't kill the PCs anyway. If anything, I should just let the conflicts arise and make sure that zombies are present to complicate or heighten the situation. That is, if the chips fall, I should step in before dice get rolled and add in danger to the narration.

Two, it was a natural feeling progression to create a safe house where zombies weren't present to allow further character issues to boil and explode. But I, as a player, was not wanting to add in zombies that to me felt contrived. As a GM, I knew that I'd be affecting the End Game and the player side of me won out.

Everything else ran pretty smoothly that hasn't already been mentioned as a problem. One conflict I set up was, "Do you get out of the city?" It was a game changing conflict that focused us inward instead of outward. I did have a hard time hitting players flags with their NPCs as I wasn't sure what to hit all of the time. I felt pretty slack not hitting Kevin's character with more cops and not focusing on the families of the Drama Club or Jason's character afterward. These weren't NPCs, but they were previous elements that had been introduced but not reincorporated.

Joe, when I shut you down at the beginning, denying you as simply describing your character and making us see a scene with some visual indication as to who you were, was that cool? I felt pretty harsh with the way I handled it.

So, after this gameplay, the big thing that stuck in my head was how I wasn't being the proper GM for the game which ended up with some lame consequences. The players were having a great time, as far as I could tell, but weren't working hard enough for their End Game, and they sometimes came off as limp. The next biggest thing was that we didn't see enough scenes with the authored NPCs acting on PC issues. When it came down to, "Does she see me as a helpful father?" for Frank's characters, I felt kinda surprised.

My mind keeps coming back to how I'd like to play the game. I know that this won't necessarily vibe with the game as written currently, but .... get rid of the GM and let everyone play a character. As this is pretty radical to the game at hand, I won't spend time with my ideas on how to implement it until you feel it's warranted, Eric. I think I can express it succinctly, though: now that the GM no longer wins all ties, only those on the first round, I think it would be easy enough for players to simply deal with the consequences of giving up ties in the first round to the zombies.

[Jason Morningstar]

Down with the GM!

Heh.  Probably not on your to-do list at this point Eric...I think we've butted heads on that issue before.

[Eric Provost]

Thanks for weighing in Mark.  I think I see what I need to do with the GM now.  I knew there was something important missing there, but couldn't quite put my finger on it until now.

And, of course, thanks to everyone else for weighing in.  It's been super-productive.  I have plenty of really good material to work from to improve the system now. 

I'll be sure to let everyone know when the next iteration of the playtest rules are available.

-Eric

[Mark Causey]

Awesome. Glad to be of help.