[The Final Girl] Arcon Playtesting

[Bret Gillan]

So I got to go to Arcon this weekend at my old Alma Mater, SUNY Oswego, and hook up with some old friends and the new crowd of kids that have replaced us. I was only able to run one of the two slots of Final Girl I'd signed up to run because there was a scheduling problem with the first one. The second one went off.

I got overbooked on people. At first I was flustered but this was totally serendipitous. It let me play with some alternate mechanics and it also showed me that The Final Girl works very, very well with a big table. We had eight people and we could have easily done nine or so.

I also on-the-spot fiddled with the mechanics to make play work. I may have to have a couple different layers of rules depending on how many people are playing. It also makes me want to test the game with two players which is the other end of the extreme that I didn't think would work but now I'm thinking it might.

- Such a huge game was not the place to test my new "relaxed pace" mechanics. I hope to get to test them in the future (the basic idea being a scene can go two ways: monster attack or a "plot" scene where the nature of the Slasher is revealed or characterization happens depending on whether a black or red card is drawn from the deck) so instead we used what I'm calling "Carnage Rules." Every scene is a Slasher attack.

- In order to make sure there was a steady supply of corpses and everyone got a chance to play the Slasher I increased the cast from over-10 to over-20 so each player made three characters. This worked pretty well. Everyone got a chance to frame a scene and everyone but two got to be the monster.

- Rather than have eight people in a single scene, I had three people sit out as the audience. They were each dealt a card that would let them help to either save or kill a character. In the Final Scene of the game at the suggestion of one of the players I increased this to two. This worked really well.

In the end it was what I would consider a huge success. Everyone had a lot of fun, there was no huge problems with the game, and people asked me to e-mail them the rules once I get them out of my head and into a document. One player told me she'd never played roleplaying games before and found the game easy to play and super-fun. Yessss.

The game doesn't need any major tweaks. The core is sound and produces fun. I do want to see if I can make it more funner though so there's some things I am thinking about.

- After Paul's feedback in my last thread, I paid careful attention to how people reacted to their characters getting killed. Mostly it didn't matter, and people's frustration to character death had more to do with which characters they liked than which characters they were playing. One character, Alejandro the Stoic Frat Boy, became a game favorite and there was a lot of disappointment and some mild frustration when he died. Alternately, one of the characters was a terrier and one player was getting frustrated that the terrier just would not die.

- On that note, one thing I think the game does well is, "No, not Alejandro!" Players get emotionally attached to the characters so when the Slasher kills them it actually matters. In this way I think my game is more successful than most slasher movies. Right now I'm pondering ways to increase the survivability of favorite characters. It's not something I'm convinced I need to do as having well-liked characters produce some angst seems to be more of a feature than a bug, but I also have yet to have a real "favorite" be the character that survives to the end.

- For this game just for the sake of simplicity and keeping cards from flying all over the place, I told people they couldn't create relationships once cards started getting played. This isn't how I' would normally do it, and in play I found that it didn't work. You end up in a conflict and you really want to help or hinder somebody but since you don't have a relationship you're holding cards you can't use. That's lame, so that's good - the way I'm doing it right now is optimal.

- People were declaring relationships as soon as they were handed a character. This is something I'm still thinking about. Is it gaming the system in a weak way? Is it helping to set up meaty roleplaying for the scene to come? Needs further testing.

- Sometimes you get stuck with a hand full of cards you can't use because the monster drops an Ace or something. I think with regards to character survival or death them's the breaks but I'm pondering alternate uses for cards like discarding low-value cards for narrative power in the scene, or maybe even whoever has the lowest card in their hand at the end of the scene is the one who plays the Slasher in the next one.

- Currently a scene ends when one character is left alive. I'v gotten some complaints about the narrative effect this has when the Slasher starts pingponging between two characters which leads to a teleporter or dizzy monster effect if the characters go in different directions. I'm not sure this is something I can fix with the rules, and in play I felt like there were possible narrative solutions that the players just weren't pursuing (narrate the character finding a safe place to hide before the Slasher turns towards the other victim, etc.) This might be something to put advice for in the book rather than trying to fix the rules to prevent it.

- I got some more feedback about pacing that maybe I should change the rules so that the scene ends when at least one character dies rather than all but one. This is something I'm just going to have to test and I have no idea how or if it'll change the game. I understand the feedback, but I'm worried it will cause the game to drag and again I think the pacing problem can be resolved narratively rather than mechanically.

- The Final Scene contained characters that had not been introduced the whole game. This I think was just because of the hurried way in which I increased the cast size and how I didn't increase the number of characterization scenes in the early because I was worried about entertaining all the players and getting right to the killing. I think if I just take the time to think about it numerically and figure out how many scenes it takes to make sure everyone gets introduced before the Slasher starts killing this won't be a problem in future games. I might need to set the game up to rotate through characters though. This might actually help with the problem of mildly likeable but uninteresting characters being the ones to survive since they're not being used in scenes, and are just likeable enough to survive the ones they are used in, rather than the characters that everyone loves who get used in every scene and end up getting killed through bad luck.

So it's not quite baked yet, but it's currently playable and fun.

[Emily Care]

Sounds like a great session, Bret. What are the card mechanics you used, and what are the "relaxed pace" ones that you didn't get to?

[Bret Gillan]

So the way it works right now is, briefly, that after a number of setup and characterization scenes (that I haven't pinned the exact numbers down for yet) people take turns being the Slasher/GM. This person frames the scene and picks from the pile of created characters and hands them out to players.

Players can declare relationships between their characters. They are Friends, Rivals, and Fucking. You can only have one and they go both ways, and you get one card for each relationship you have. If you are Friends that lets you play a card to help another character, Rivals lets you hinder the character, and Fucking lets you do either.

There is only one type of conflict and that is 'Does the Slasher kill you?' The player of the Slasher chooses one or more characters to attack and draws a card from the top of the deck. You have to play a higher card to survive. At the moment this goes until only one character in a scene is left alive. You cannot attack a character a second time until you've already attacked everybody else.

The relaxed pacing mechanics that I need to test break the post-characterization scenes up into Attack scenes and Reveal/Characterization scenes. The Slasher player draws a card in secret at the beginning of the turn. If it's red than they can attack the players on that turn. If it's black then they can do a Reveal/Characterization scene. I want to test this out and see if 50% attack scenes is not enough (it seems like it might not be) and to also see if it sucks to be the Slasher and not get to attack.