[Serial] A first play test

[Kat Miller]

Last night was the first opportunity we had to play test our detective game Serial.

The Players: Michele, Michael and Kat. 

Serial is almost Gmless.  One player plays the part of the Chief Inspector.  That person is responsible for handling the envelopes. Other than that The Chief Inspector does everything the other players do. The object of the game is to catch a serial killer.  An Indictment Pool is rolled against the killers stealth.  The Stealth is Equal to the number of players times 2. In this case 3 players times 2 is 6. 

The game has several phases.  In Phase one we made a victim profile.  This is what the killer is looking for in a Victim.  We each had a turn to add one trait.
Kat: Prostitutes
Michael: Dark Hair
Michele: Young looking.

Our killer is going after dark-haired, young-looking prostitutes.

In phase two we all make up a victim.
All our victims are dark-haired, young-looking, prostitutes. We need to give each need a name and a question.  The question pertains to some unknown in their lives. 

Kat: Marleen – Am I Pregnant?
Michael: Jasmine – will I graduate with honors?
Michele: Desiree – will I get my big break?

In phase two we also make up our detective type characters.  They don't have to be detectives; they do have to be the type of people who would work on a murder crime case.  These characters need a name, an occupation, an a brief description:

Kat: Sandra Warrik- Chief Inspector with Insomnia.
Michael: Stanley Liebowitz – Investigative reporter with thick glasses
Michele: Charlie Bosworth – "old school" Homicide Detective

At the end of Phase two, each victims name is written on an index card.  The cards are placed into envelopes and the envelopes are given to the chief inspector who then shuffles the envelopes and hands them back.

Phase 3: Victim Scenes

Starting with the chief inspector each player frames a scene around the victim and the question.  The player declares what should happen if the roll is a success, then a d6 is rolled.  A success was a roll of 4, 5 or 6.

Kat: Marleen is in the bathroom.  There are two boxes of pregnancy tests in the trash.  Marleen is hovering over the third one looking at her watch.  If I succeed then she is pregnant.  I rolled a 5.  Marleen curses, throws this last test in the trash and storms out of the bathroom.   (There was no interactive role play in my scene by choice)

Michael: Jasmine is at a college classroom frantically searching through her things for her paper.  Michael asked me to play the professor, and he tried to explain that he had just printed the paper.  I got to give him a hard time.  If he succeeded Jasmine would have triumphantly handed in her paper.  As it was he rolled a 1.    The professor snidely commented about the price of partying and let jasmine know she had failed his class.

Michele: Desiree was at an audition.  Michael played the part of the casting director.  Michele had fun describing Desiree's desperation.  If she had succeeded she would have been accepted for the part.  She rolled a 3 and was laughed at on stage. 

Phase 4 Enforcement phase.

The Chief Inspector opens his envelope. Then he addresses the table announcing the victims name and making up where the body was found and how the victim was killed.  The Chief Inspector doesn't want to give too many details of the victims death because each player will be adding a discovery about the crime.

Kat: We found a body early this morning.  The Victims name is: Marleen.  She was found strangled in a hotel room. 

I this point I want to roll dice.  Each success on a die adds 1 die to the Indictment Pool.
I automatically get 1 die for my turn. 

You can get other dice for building on someone else's evidence; or adding a personal detail about the victim from the scenes we just played.  For my first turn I just stuck with 1 die.  I rolled a 3. No success. 

Michael's turn:
Michael framed a scene having his reporter interview the cleaning lady of the skanky hotel that the body was found in.  He can add evidence and decided there was a matchbook with a number on it recovered from the trash in the room.  He had his die and one for building on the hotel.  He had no successes.  Stan also discovered that the pillowcases were stolen.

(There was some confusion at this point about the rolls making the evidence we were gathering relevant.  Michael though maybe the number was to a Chinese place.  It needed to be clarified that we are all competent at what we do.  A lack of success doesn't mean that the evidence isn't good, just that it isn't helpful in providing an indictment against anyone.)

Michele's turn:
Michele interviewed the coroner and discovered that the victim was strangled with pillowcases and that the body was posed.    Michele received her default die; +1 for making the missing pillowcases relevant, +1 for having the coroner not Marlee was pregnant.  She rolled 2 successes on three dice.

At the end of the Enforcement Phase we could choose to roll the indictment pool.  If we have more successes than the killer's stealth then we can arrest our killer.  If we roll from the pool and don't have enough successes then we have arrested the wrong person and one of the victims automatically dies, (proving we have the wrong guy).  At this point we only had 2 dice in the pool so the point was moot.

We start another Victim Phase.  Since my victim was already dead I just frame a scene showing her loved ones mourning her.  I could also show community outrage over the murder.  I showed Marlee's brother fetching Marlee's 6-year-old daughter from school.  It was sad.

Jasmine went to the Dean to discuss her paper.  Her Dean was one of her "johns."  From a botched roll he was more than happy to "work something out" in private...(it was kind of heartbreaking)

Desiree also sought out the casting director to see if they could "work something out..."  on her successful role, she got cast.

But then we had Enforcement Phase again and Desiree was the next victim.


It was decided after enforcement Phase that since it was obvious who the next body would be that when we get down to one last victim we do a victim creation phase again before playing out the victim scenes.  That way the tension over who is going to be next is maintained.

In second victim creation there is an added bit, not only do all the victims have to be dark haired young looking prostitutes, but now they need a degree of separation from our detectives. 

Kat: Dawn: attends same AA meetings as Sandra. Question: Will my escort service be successful.
Michael: Aimee: paid informant for Stanley. Question: Will my pimp/boyfriend marry me?
Michele: Chastity: runaway case Charlie worked on: Will my parents find me?

These got places in envelopes, and shuffled with Jasmine then re handed out with Michele getting 2 envelopes.  When the victim scenes were finished that ended the first round of the game.  During the second round, all successes rolled during the enforcement phase added 2 dice to the indictment pool.  This added too many dice into the indictment pool and we went from 5 to 11 in one enforcement phase.  Michael rolled the pool and we had 7 successes.  So we were able to arrest the killer.

As a final phase of the game, we did one last round of Victim scenes. All our surviving victims answered their questions.  Jasmine graduated with honors. Aimee's Pimp boyfriend proposed, and Chastity's mom found her.

It was a very satisfying play test.

Things we'll change. 

Adding 2 dice per success was too much.  Instead of doing this at the start of round two we decided that if the indictment roll fails then each enforcement phase success will add 2 dice to the Indictment pool.

We make descriptors for our detectives, but don't use them. I think if you use your descriptor in your scene you should get a die for it. 

We need to decide how many or few details go into a person's turn.

Also Michael suggested using even and odds rather than 4-6 as successes.

I can't wait to play test this game again.   

[Eric J. Boyd]

Kat,

This is a fascinating playtest report. While it's a mystery game, Serial seems more focused on the victims than the detectives, which seems to have created heartfelt, deep play that a typical mystery approach wouldn't have. Very cool.

A couple of questions about the rules:

-Do the Indictment Pool success have to meet or exceed the killer's Stealth?

-Who determines whether to roll the Indictment Pool? It seems you guys decided not to roll with only 2 successes, but what if one of you did want to end up arresting the wrong person? How would such an incorrect arrest be played out?

-Once you've got the successes to arrest the killer, who gets to narrate the arrest?

I think the fact that you didn't use the descriptors of the detectives is telling you guys something - you don't need them because the victims, not the detectives, are the focus of play. In fact, maybe tying the second round of victims to the first victims instead of the detectives would heighten this focus. It sounds like the detectives themselves only need a name and a little bit of color, but your victim is the one really seeing character development and a possibly good epilogue. I really like the result.

Let us know when you have a playtest doc for this, because I'd be very interested in looking it over.

Cheers,

Eric   

[Kat Miller]

-Do the Indictment Pool success have to meet or exceed the killer's Stealth?

-Who determines whether to roll the Indictment Pool? It seems you guys decided not to roll with only 2 successes, but what if one of you did want to end up arresting the wrong person? How would such an incorrect arrest be played out?

-Once you've got the successes to arrest the killer, who gets to narrate the arrest?

[Kat Miller]

Hi Eric,

Sorry, about the above post, I was trying to respond to your questions.

You need to beat the Killer's stealth.  Matching his stealth is not enough.

At any time any time during Enforcement phase anyone of the detectives can call for a roll of the indictment pool.  It carried the price of immediately killing one of the victims if the roll is not a success.  What we discovered is that there wasn't a reason to roll until the last detective took a turn because each detective has the potential to add more dice into the pool. 

Also all the dice in the pool go away after the roll.  The pool is now empty.  The successes are not help over, so if we had rolled 6 successes from the pool and our killer has a stealth of 6, we would have arrested the wrong guy.  There are now no dice in our Indictment Pool, we have several victims, and Bang the next victim shows up.  With that kind of pressure the players will want to roll that pool only when they're sure they are going to catch this guy.

If there is an incorrect arrest, each Victim Phase gets skipped as each detective narrated the frustration of not having caught the guy and finding new evidence from the new body.  In their scene if they need to address something they did which contributed the false arrest while finding new evidence from the new body.

Once the Killer is arrested, starting with the player who called for the roll we each get a turn narrating what our detective were doing during the arrest.  In our Game Stanley got to cover the arrest, his scene blended in with Charlie's scene who was making the arrest, and Sandra spoke directly to the press (played by Michael and Michele) about how the killer was finally behind bars.

But the game isn't finished until the surviving victims get their final scenes.


Michael and I want to do a few more play test of this, we'll be looking for external play testers by March.

-kat