[The Lucky Joneses] A playtest draft, at last!

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To celebrate my birthday, I'm posting the beta playtest draft of The Lucky Joneses, my long-in-development game about an everyday family in a sit-com universe.

My aims for this game are:
- start playing within 10 minutes
- finish playing within 45 to 90 minutes
- a simple resolution system
- an introductory RPG that'll appeal to board-gamers and non-Story Gamers.

You can download the beta playtest draft here.

The Lucky Joneses
(200kb, 15 pages)

Previous playtests are here (featuring an episode that turned into American Pie-meets-24 - a sleazy sex comedy coupled with an increasingly serious work situation that eventually involved the FBI and terrorists) and here (featuring a sexually confused adopted son struggling with a potential girlfriend and a male stalker).

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I've made a lot of edits to this draft, and have yet to playtest it myself. At this point, I'm interested in whether all the moving pieces of the system work together, whether the rules are easy to read and understand, and (especially) whether the game plays as quickly and as simply as I hope it will.

Your comments or playtesting would be appreciated. From experience, The Lucky Joneses is the sort of thing you can pull out at a boardgames night, and I've also had good responses from non-gamers who've played it.

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Some specific questions have occurred to me since posting this.

Do the player vs. player rules work? This is probably the biggest untested thing in the rules. What happens if two Family Members want the same thing?

Are the procedures for finishing a scene clear?  I don't think they are.  I've tried to be as clear as possible about the procedures for the rest of the game, but I think there's ambiguity when it comes to what happens after the best- and worst-case scenario has been decided.

Would the game be more satisfying if the rules created a climax at the end of an episode?  And how could I do this?

Are too many Bonuses being introduced into the system?  Should they be a more scarce resource?

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I also thought it would be good to go through the Big Three for this game, and talk a little bit about my writing process so far. So, the Big Three:

1. What is your game about?
Families.  They are funny, challenging, unpredictable.  You can hate them or love them, and sometimes in your life you have to decide whether to be there for them, or do your own thing.  The Lucky Joneses tries to capture a little bit of the craziness of families by filtering tough decisions about selfishness and generosity through a sitcom setting.

2. What do the players do?
Each player defines a Want for their Family Member - something they will try to achieve by the end of the episode.  Everyone then takes turns being the Star of a scene.  As Star, you can either choose to get closer to achieving what you Want, or help another Family Member.

Players who are not the Star adopt a variety of different roles.  There's the Supporter, whose's job is to ask the Star how they're trying to get what they want.  There's the Knock, whose's job is to try and make the Star's life difficult. The Knock controls the pace of the game; they determine when the Star's scene ends, and the best-and worst-case scenarios for the Star's next scene.

Everyone else plays the Cast (similar to TonyLB's idea of 'The Chorus', mentioned on Story Games a little while ago).  The Cast act as everyone and everything that the Star meets.  All of these roles (Supporter, Knock, and Cast) rotate and swap as the game proceeds.

Players also have the opportunity to inflict Penalties on other players - something that gives the inflicter an immediate short-term advantage.

3. What do the characters do?
The characters are members of the Jones (extended) family.  Each of them has an overriding Want, that they are driven to achieve by the end of the episode.  So, what they specifically do changes with each game - but in general they are pushing out of their comfort zone, and reacting to a universe that seems perversely aligned against them.

They also have the opportunity to help other members of the family, by having quiet scenes alone with them.

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I started writing the Lucky Joneses (at that time called The Fortunes of the Joneses) in 2004.  My main influences were Polaris and Primetime Adventures (both of which I've only read about at that stage), and Shadows by Zak Arntson

After stalling on it for a year and a half, I decided to use Kapcon (our big local convention) to play test the rules.  The deadline made me kick the game into shape, and included one very successful test run with 2 gaming friends and their non-roleplaying wives.  The con went very successfully, numerous playtests followed, and the rules began to bloat.

The last play test really shook my confidence, and made it clear to me that I had to introduce very clear procedures for how options were being set at the end of each scene.

Unfortunately, the rules had bloated out to about 25 pages.  Big enough so that I couldn't hold everything in my head. Eventually I decided I needed to boil it all down to 2 or 3 pages of bullet-points. At that level, the game would look like maths and instructions ... but I could lay it all out in front of me and take it in at a single glance.

That ability to see everything 'at a glance' was important to me because I had a folder bulging with feedback from playtests and next-draft ideas. Without having that simplified document, I felt all hopeless about where I should start implementing all that stuff, and about how - for each rule change I made - I'd have to track back and forward to make sure everything else had been changed in a consistent way.

Eventually I cleared a lot of other major projects from my life and got sick of procrastinating. After creating the bullet-point draft, I rebuilt the game so it'd be readable by other people. Despite my procrastination, that rebuild really only took 24 hours.

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From here, I want to playtest this new iteration of The Lucky Joneses, and create an ashcan. I may publish it more officially after that,  depending on whether I decide it's worth proceeding with it.  I also think my next few game designs are going to be free (so I don't put so much pressure on myself) and short, between two and five pages (so I can easily playtest and adjust the rules, and hold it all in front of me).

Hope that provides some more insight.