[Medical Hospital] Indianapolis General

[Jason Morningstar]

I had the good fortune to run two playtests of Medical Hospital at Gen Con with some great people.  Both were fun but highlighted a number of issues with the game right now.  This makes me happy.  Some thoughts:

I've set up roles that provide particular "powers" - if you are the best trauma surgeon, you get to delegate roles when someone declares a trauma scene, for example.  There are roles that can add or remove time from procedures and spend stress to negate complications.  In play this doesn't work.  It's too fiddly and not that fun, and keeping track is a burden.  They didn't get used much.  I think these effects are important but can be allocated more intuitively and passed around freely.  I'm thinking there will be six really fun effects ("add one stress to add a complication", that sort of thing) with color associated, and everybody just gets one.  You can swap  or steal one by spending a point of stress. 

Speed of play is an issue.  The procedures may be too complex, because there is a long moment when the surgeon reviews before initiating.  It's down time for everybody else.  Rafael Chandler suggested "dotted lines and large colorful shapes", and he may be right.

Wants need to be stacked rather than over-written.  This is just intuitive and was pointed out to me in the first playtest. 

The dynamic and chaotic nature of play at Gen Con caused me to realize I need hard rules for introducing new primary characters in mid-stream, as well as losing same.

Seriously, the post-session debriefs were stuffed with great ideas and really useful feedback.  Thanks Rafael, Graham, Marc, Carl, Dave, Will, Sam, and Benjamin!

[Graham W]

Jason, I really enjoyed this game. I'll talk with you more about this in person, but just quickly.

I agree speed of play was an issue, but I also thought that there was a lack of story continuity that made play seem long. Like, when we were waiting for an operation, it was just downtime. If we'd been waiting for an operation on the attempted suicide from the last scene, everything might have seemed slicker.

Does that make sense? I'm perhaps not explaining it well.

In general, I think some focus on linking scenes might have made things easier. Like, I remember one operation scene where we decided the victim had been hurt when a Ferris wheel fell into the gift shop. Ideally, I'd have wanted the Ferris-wheel-gift-shop sequence to be the ending of a previous relationship scene, which then led into the next operation scene.

I think you should put a timer on the relationship scenes, too, both to keep them short and to make them more like the operation scenes. In general, making the rules for relationship scenes parallel those of the operation scenes would be rather nice, I think.

It was fun! Thanks.

Graham

[Jason Morningstar]

Thanks, Graham,

I think you're right!  Putting some sort of pressure on relationship scenes is intriguing and I must try it.  Time pressure - something that encourages brevity and intensity and perhaps reincorporation.  It'd be great if they were as nerve-jangly and focused in their own way as surgical scenes are.  Right now they feel like the filler between procedures, which is all wrong.

It's interesting to note that this would further move the game into the realm of player skill as a success determinant, along multiple dimensions (the new one being social somehow).  Hmm.