[Dirty Secrets] MKRPG second playtest

Dirty Secrets is Seth Ben-Ezra's game of detective fiction, in the mould of Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer. Read Seth's notes and some other playtests, including the MKRPG first playtest.

We played Dirty Secrets last Tuesday at my local RPG club. The game went well and people seemed keen to play it again. At the end is a set of questions and observations that came out in play.

All the players had role-played a lot before (some mainly trad games, some with more hippy story-game experience). All had at least a passing familarity with the detective genre. I didn't take an active part in the game; instead, I took the role of rules guru and general facilitator. As with the first playtest we did, this was because there were five other players (the maximum the game allows for.

Characters
(Name, sex, age, ethnicity, social class, legal status. Note the slightly flippant attributes in places, a reaction to the novelty of the game and the freeform nature of character generation).

(The Investigator is the only 'PC'. Other characters are played by the rotating GM and other players on an ad-hoc basis)

Investigator: Charles Fenton, male, 29, Scottish, down on his luck ex-aristocrat (poor), 'helps old ladies across the road' (and starting up his own private investigation business)

Victim: Marcus Steele, male, 57, Malaysian, successful business exectutive, civilian

Suspect: Suzanne D'Artangon, female, 33, hispanic, poor (unemployed), with diplomatic immunity

Stuart Douglas, male, 24, Scottish, street bum, ex-con

Julie Vernen, female, 36, Irish, upper middle class, FBI agent (in the UK!)

Initial Crime: Murder. Brought to Charles's attention by Stuart.

Scenes and Events
Prologue
Stuart found Charles at a soup kitchen in a rough part of Milton Keynes. They knew each other previously. Stuart described how he saw a man and a woman arguing near an abandoned retail unit in Winterhill. The woman then clubbed the man over the head with a cricket bat and dragged the limp body into a car, with French diplomatic number plates. The car drove off. The police didn't want to get involved, but Stuart thought that something was wrong and wanted Charles to investigate.

Scene 1: Investigation
In the car park where the attack took place. Charles saw a man in a suit vigourously sweeping the ground. Charles wanted to know what the man was doing, he didn't want to tell, and a conflict ensued. The Authority lost, lost three dice and suffered 1 Violence. He was thrown to the ground and revealed that he was driving the car the previous night, and Suzanne was his girlfriend.

The sweeping man was Michael Rodriguez, who became a Character (male, 31, Hispanic/French, Security from French Embassy, French citizen)

Scene 1a:
Charles did some background research on the diplomatic car and people involved. He found the identities of Suzanne, Marcus, and that they were having a relationship. As there were no other Characters around, we didn't do this as a scene and quickly skipped over it.

Scene 2: Revelation
Further investigation into Marcus's business revealed a business connection between Marcus and Suzanne. It turned out that Marcus was paying Suzanne to smuggle unlaundered money via the French diplomatic bag.

Scene 3: Investigation
Charles tracked Suzanne down to a hotel bar, flashing some cash around (this was out of character for her, as Charles knew she was very poor). Michael was already there and everyone saw each other. Michael suggested that Suzanne try to find out what Charles was doing. The Investigator won the conflict but elected to take the 1 Violence himself. While Suzanne was flirting with Charles, Michael rabbit-punched him. As he was lying on the floor, Michael said that they had to get rid of Charles 'before he finds the body'.

Scene 4: Violence
Charles, Suzanne, and Michael were all ejected from the hotel for fighting. Outside, Michael piles into Charles and Charles is slightly injured. When Julie turns up (undercover as security in the hotel), Michael and Suzanne flee.

Scene 5: Investigation
Charles and Julie have a non-committal conversation. No conflict and the scene us quickly over.

Scene 6: Investigation
Charles staked out the hotel overnight. At about 6.00am, Michael, Suzanne, and Julie leave in a car together. Charles follows, is seen, and a car chase ensues as the Characters try to loose Charles before he discovers that they're going to Cranfield airport (a small, private airstrip near Milton Keynes). Charles loses, suffering 2 Violence. The cars collide near the airport, writing off Charles's car and immobilising the other. Marcus's body fell out of the boot of Michael's car. Michael, Suzanne, and Julie run to the airport. Charles, with his broken nose and lacerated face, examines Marcus's body and finds the evidence of Marcus's blackmail of Suzanne to participate in the money laundering (our second Crime defined and resolved).

Scene 7:
Charles doesn't wait for police and ambulance to arrive and chases after the other Characters. He catches up with them as they're boarding their private jet. The struggle on the steps results in 3 Violence, so Julie is flung into the plane's engine and dies. Suzanne and Michael then confess that Julie was Marcus's murderer: she was a crooked FBI agent and wanted in on his trade.

With both Crimes resolved, we ended the game, and just about on time.

In play, we had conflicts in most Investigation scenes. A few of them required re-rolls, but results were never Pushed. No Aliases or Mistkaen Identities came up.

Points Raised

Players raised the possibility of other demographic descriptions for Characters, such as religion and nationality. I can't see any reason why they shouldn't be demographics, but including them would lead to there being too many. Perhaps all characters are described by name and sex, and the group then chooses two or three other demographics to describe characters, with the understanding that these demographics will contribute to the story. This could be done at the same time as the decision is made about whether to include under-18 Characters.
Initial generation of Characters, again, led to some silliness. This was mainly my fault as I forgot to get the players to discuss what they were putting down as they did it. Perhaps the rules should stress that initial character generation should be done collaboratively?
The suggested times to play a game seem optimistic, especially for people who don't know the game. We started on a 6x3 grid, but quickly moved to 3x3 as that was all we could finish in the time. We got through setup and seven scenes in just over 2.5 hours of play. The timings may be more accurate after people have played a few games and everyone knows the rules, but checking that may be problematic for me. Anyway, the estimates are most useful for the first few games.
Things did move more quickly than last time after I suggested that we frame scenes tightly around interaction with Characters and pushed them towards conflict. This is a piece of text that needs to be prominent in the text.
Given that, did we do what you intended with Scene 1a? There was never going to be any conflict in it, so we never promoted it to being an actual Scene
A question about the Crime Resolution step. Does it alwasy resolve Crimes? If, following an Investigation conflict, the Witness cannot make a sliding move and is placed on a random square, and that square is empty, is a Crime resolved? We played it as 'no', a Crime is only resolved when the Witness lands on a name. Otherwise a 3x3 game would be over very quickly. In that case, I think this phase of the game is misleadingly named, as Crimes aren't always resolved. How about calling it something like 'Repercussions'?
The explanation of Liar's Dice needs some work, especially for someone like me who hasn't played it before. It's not very clear, and I think it needs some correction. You say that a follow-up bid must have one of the numbers larger than the previous bid. You give the example of five 3s following three 5s, but surely you could follow the five 3s with three 5s again, leading to a cycle. Is this intended, or am I making a mistake? We settled on requiring the face to be non-decreasing and the count to always increase if the face stayed constant. We also ignored Ace Bids as just being too complicated for little if any gain.
I found the process of who selects what scene type to play next confusing to explain, especially when combined with details of who gets to frame that scene. Perhaps the Authority should choose first, with a possible Appeal by the Investigator? Whoever finally chooses the scene type gets Jurisdiction over framing it. (This was confused somewhat in our game, when the Authority should have framed a scene, but the Investigator had a really good idea and the Authority just let him get on with it. This meant that some of the other players lost track of who had responsibility for what.)
Reversing the order of the Investigator Connection table would make more sense, so that larger numbers of players produce larger results.
In play, there is a lot of stuff on the table: many character cards, crime cards, the grid, the Witness, each player's dice pools, nibbles, and so on. There's just quite a logistical problem keeping it all organised. We didn't have enough room to keep everything layed out neatly enough to find things.
You should perhaps include a piece of advice in the rules that states that Violence scenes are strictly optional, depending on the type of story you're trying to tell. There was some confusion at the table about the different purposes of the different scene types (exasperated by my not spending a chunk of time at the beginning of the game explaining everything in detail, and violence occuring as side-effects of conflicts).
Although we didn't have one, there was a suggestion that any Reflection scenes also include a cut scene showing the other Characters continuing with their own agendas. (Personally, I think it's not a great idea, but several of the players thought it should be there.)
If there's a disagreement about whether an extra should be a Character, or whether an illegal act should be a Crime, who gets Jurisdiction over that decision?

I think that's it. An enjoyable game, all told.

Neil.