[Committee for the Exploration of Mysteries] Two Dollops of Pulp Goodness

[Josh Roby]

Eric Boyd sent me ashcan copies of his new game The Committee for the Exploration of Mysteries and the Advancement of Mankind.  I played in two separate playtests, which I will outline here.

To Shangri-La!<for<connecting<To the Depths of the Amazon!<six

[Eric J. Boyd]

Joshua,

Thanks so much for taking the time to give my game a try with your group and facilitate a playtest at OrcCon. Getting a view of how the game plays without my presence is invaluable. Here's some thoughts I have on your feedback. I would love to hear more info or suggestions as well. If any of the other playtesters would like to offer comments that would be great, too.

(1) The Build the Expedition Phase - I hadn't encountered a problem with this before, so it's good to hear about it. It sounds like my overview description of the game at the beginning of the text needs to better explian the purpose of this phase of the game to better guide creating the hazard list and such. A play aid is a great idea - any thoughts on what would make such a play aid well-designed to address this issue?

(2) The Expedition Log - This part of the design is what is giving me the biggest difficulties. I want to have a mechanism that encourages continuity in the story and rewards player creativity. But balancing the incentives without having Acclaim flow like water has been tough. I like your proposed fix of awarding Acclaim only for making connections between elements (the fact that you already playtested the fix and found it to work well also helps a lot).

In my own tinkering with the Log mechanics, I've been thinking of removing the need to invest a point of Acclaim to create a story element (so creation is free), and to reward only the player re-using the story element, not its initial creator. I also want to award only one Acclaim per scene, no matter how many elements you re-use. This no longer rewards the initial creativity of coming up with the element in a concrete way, but it still rewards continuity and creatively re-using elements.

Do you think combining your "reward only for making a connection" fix with the fixes I've been musing makes a more robust system?

(3) Calling for Help - I find it really interesting that you guys ended up calling for aid so often. So the hazards presented a lot of difficulty that required it? Did you end up using Gear and Associations dice in addition to your attributes? Did you spend Acclaim to reroll your low die results? I've had another group find that the hazards have been too easy and proposed making them harder.

You are correct that after calling for help the first player no longer contributes dice, but asking for help currently isn't a compulsion. There may be ways to use the helping mechanics to get the additional character interaction you mention below.   

(4) Sabotage - No one is using these options, so you're not alone there. I like them for the ability to control inappropriate narration and tweak your fellow players, but relegating them to optional rule status seems the way to go.   

(5) Festive Beverages - Hmm, you're right that the beverages don't figure into the mechanics very strongly. I've been thinking of removing the current stymie rules and using the beverage levels to determine narration rights there. Perhaps allowing bonuses for draining a glass or accepting a refill would be useful, too. Any thoughts on how else to use them, or if I'm better off just removely them entirely? I do like the atmosphere they provide as props, but leaving them as a suggestion only would be fine with me, too. 

(6) The Hourglass - You're right that using the real thing really enhances game play. I plan on selling the game with a 3-minute hourglass to make sure that everyone has one.

(7) Too Many Options - This has been the consensus of all the external playtests, so many of the Acclaim spending options are being combined or removed. Unexpected obstacles don't really do much currently, so removing them is likely. I'd like to rescue the beverages, but they may end up on the cutting room floor, too.

( Character Interaction - You're absolutely correct that the format of the game doesn't allow much character interaction, since everyone is recounting tales of the expedition and highlighting their own accomplishments. Group hazards help a little, but still keep the individual focus. As I mentioned above, perhaps modifying the asking for help rules to provide more interaction would work. Do you think that adding additional free role-play scenes would help? Such scenes could be flashbacks to the expedition, or could be scenes at the Committee HQ? Perhaps each player gets several scenes to highlight their desire that falls outside the normal hazard rotation and must feature at least one other character?

Again, I really appreciate all the feedback, Joshua. I feel like my development of the game has been a process of accumulating various bits and pieces on top of one another and now I'm getting the chance to go back and chip the unnecessary bits away and get to the polished game underneath.

If anyone has other thoughts on these or any other issues with the game, I'd love to hear that, too. Hearing from some of the other playtesters who hadn't read through the game text would be awesome.

If anyone is interested in seeing the current state of the game, you can take a look here. Once I get these fixes made, I'll be looking for playtesters to take another go at the game in hopes of getting it published this summer and appearing at Gen Con (fingers crossed).

[redivider]

I took part in the Shangri-la playtest and had fun trying the game. I had two main impressions (and I'll also try to weigh in on a few of the issues Josh raised).

I played and enjoyed the game primarily for its story-generating feature. The accumulation of acclaim as a competition with the other players didn't engage me as much. We ended up with almost equal piles of chips but that wasn't the focus of our play. I liked the system for shaping scenes that seesaw between danger and the players' efforts to over coming the threat... and new complications emerging etc.
In our middle location, a teeming city in India, we hit a sweet spot with some really cool scenes involving thugees, secret passages in our hotel, resucuing a widow from immolation, a guru who was actually a dangerous cultist, hidden messages... The conclusion scenes got weirder with mole people, different hues of yetis.

Because the strength of the game for me was how is crafted intersting, punchy scenes, I agree with comments on paring back some of the options for using acclaim. The game was best when it was moving quickly.

1. Yeah, char creation went well and the committee knows...element  was great
2. I actually didn't have problems with the expedition log. I thought it was nice to have a set of anticipated themes layed out in advance and don't mind if it's sort of a loose resource, a pool of ideas, rather than a 1 for 1 match to scenes or any other kinds of tight, automatic integration.
3. I wonder if we just had back luck with rolling or if the challenges just happened to be with a lot of dice when our characters were down to out low die pool traits? I know I was forced to call for help at least a couple of times because otherwise I would have lost- I may have used it once strategically to draw down my helper.
4. Yes, keep the option to sabotage, especially for groups where the characters have some fun ideological or agenda clashes.
5. Having the glasses was fun- maybe keep them if only for the color.
6. I feel like we usually went over the time limit- mainly because we were considering the options and rules.
7.  Agreed.
8. I didn't feel this was a problem but that's partially because I'm big on exploration of setting and weird color/events so the character-to-character stuff is less crucial to me. 

looking farward to the final produce

mark

[Jason Morningstar]

Hey Eric,

A broad question - can you talk about how this game has changed, post Game Chef?  You've retained a lot of the original constraints to good effect, and I've found that this is generally hit-and-miss with me - stuff that gets inserted to meet GC requirements gets dropped along the way.  What have you dropped/modified and how has the game evolved?

[Eric J. Boyd]

Jason,

The game has stayed the same at its core (free-form narration of pulp adventure under a time constraint to keep up the pace and tension), while changing a lot in other ways. The game was based on the words "glass," "ancient," and "committee" using the 3 sessions of 3 hours time constraint.

Since Game Chef, the time requirements have been completely removed - you can play a one shot or over several sessions depending upon how you want to pace the expedition. The Committee as a group of peers judging the characters' storytelling still features strongly in the game's color. Ancient referred generally to the secrets being unearthed during the expedition - it was pure color and I've removed the term to allow the expedition's goal to be anything the players choose. Glass referred to the hourglass used in conflict resolution and the glasses of beverage used tangentially in the mechanics and as props to evoke the club-like atmosphere. The hourglass is key and will stay on, but the glasses and drinking aspect sound like they're a Game Chef remnant that needs to be reduced solely to color.

The main change to the game is in story development. The original version relied on every player writing down several long lists of potential hazards, swapping them, and inflicting them on each other throughout the game. These lists are replaced by a general brainstorming session at the beginning of play and maintaining an "expedition log" of story elements that everyone adds to throughout the game to tie the story together. The result is much more improvisational, and it also encourages the plot threads to be tied together rather than meandering this way and that. It's still a work in progress, but with the feedback I've received I think I know where to go with it now.

A second change is in focusing on each character having a desire that requires acclaim and attention to achieve, justifying their going on the expedition. At the end of play, currency is tallied and epilogues are given in descending order describing whether the character succeeded or failed in leveraging the expedition's results to achieve their desire. In addition to providing a reward for "winning" by having the most currency, these desires and epilogues give the characters a more human feel than the typical pulp heroes since several may come to a less than glorious end. Very My Life with Master without the scripted endings based upon attributes.

A lot of the crunchy mechanical changes built up during early playtesting when I was finding my way through what game development was supposed to be like. Many of these have worked out great and will stay in. However, the layers of options and tweaks definitely grew too thick, and I'm now going back and paring down to only those that are absolutely necessary. What's emerging has me excited - a no-prep, GM-less, game of pulp storytelling that is both crunchy in its currency manipulation and free-form in its fast-paced timed narration.

[Eric J. Boyd]

Mark,

Thanks so much for your thoughts. It sounds like your approach to the game is much like what I have in mind

I played and enjoyed the game primarily for its story-generating feature. The accumulation of acclaim as a competition with the other players didn't engage me as much. We ended up with almost equal piles of chips but that wasn't the focus of our play. I liked the system for shaping scenes that seesaw between danger and the players' efforts to over coming the threat... and new complications emerging etc.

I know that by using currency to keep score and having a nominal "winner" who gets the rosiest epilogue, I've created a game with some gamist competition. At the same time, though, I want the story emerging among the players to be entertaining and play to be fun no matter how much currency you end up with. Purely pursuing currency to the exclusion of caring about your narration and its effects on the story could become unfun for your fellow players. In my playtests I haven't seen this problem, but did it come up during either of these playtests? Did most of your fellow players take your view, Mark, or did some also assume a pure competitive stance and play the game differently? Did the story ever suffer due to the pursuit of Acclaim?

Thanks again for posting and trying out the game.

[redivider]

Did most of your fellow players take your view, Mark, or did some also assume a pure competitive stance and play the game differently? Did the story ever suffer due to the pursuit of Acclaim?

The other players were also fucused on shaping the story and trying the rules. If anything, I competed the most since I sabotaged once. So the story never suffered from acclaim.