[Serial] A first play test

[Kat Miller]

[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