[Grey Ranks] Playtest over Skype

[Travis Farber]

[Jason Morningstar]

Good stuff, Travis - how does it play over Skype?  How are you guys handling the visuals, particularly the grid?

I noticed that 75% of your things held dear are represented by actual people - that's hardcore.  Do you plan on playing a full game?  It sounds tense already.  I love the scene where Nena's outing her own father as a collaborator.  Harsh. 

[Travis Farber]

We do plan on playing a full game, I expect it to get really tense coming up.  Hopefully we'll have it completed before Gencon. 

For the grid, I scanned a copy of it and forwarded it to the group over skype, seemed to work pretty well with each of us keeping track of it ourselves. 

As for the game play itself, I've never played any other game over skype so I don't have a lot to compare it to.  The structure of game seemed to help people from jumping on each others toes.  The most challenging part was to explain how the game worked since I was the only one who had read it.  Luckily, Nick seemed to catch on pretty quickly so I ran a mission scene and he ran his personal scene early on to demonstrate to everyone just how it worked. 

The one thing that will be interesting is that we are going to be adding a 5th player into the next session.  I think the plan right now is to run him through the first two chapters by himself working him into the story.  Any thoughts as to how to handle adding someone mid game?

[Jason Morningstar]

Adding somebody shouldn't be a problem - use the rules for a short game to "fast forward" that character's reputations and so forth, so they are roughly equivalent to the rest of you.  Let me know how that goes. 

I think the sweet spot for the game is the second session, where you go from "pretty easy" to "pretty damn hard" in terms of overall difficulty, and get to set up the difficult choices you'll make in the third session that will define who your guy is and what he stands for.