See, guys!  I used the right name!

The last couple of Fridays, I was able to playtest Dirty Secrets with my regular gaming group.  Last session was particularly memorable, and Ralph demanded that I write it up.  I agreed with him, so here goes!

We actually played the first session of Dirty Secrets because Gabrielle wasn’t available for gaming that night.  So, Ralph, Keith, Crystal, and I sat down to play.

Setup

Dirty Secrets has a quick-and-dirty situation generator that is intended to get the group up and running pretty quickly.  This test worked pretty well, but it showed up a couple of interesting “features”.  First, it was possible to end up with a private investigator that is only 12.  The second is that, at least in the four-player game, the investigator player doesn’t actually get to name the investigator.

The first item is no good, and it prompted a rules change that minors can only be citizens.  The second item is actually a feature for me.  Even though the investigator is played by a single player, I still want there to be a sense of group ownership over the character.  So, not forcing naming privileges to the investigator player is actually a good thing by my book.

Thus, in this case, we ended up with an investigator who a nineteen year old preppie who plays tennis at the country club.  His name:  Reginald Hastings, III.  Or, as we all called him, “Reggie”.

We ended up with Jim Brown approaching Reggie for some help.  Jim Brown is a retired police officer who works as a groundskeeper at the country club.  Oh yes, he is black, and Reggie is white.

Actual Play, Part 1

This is my best recollections of two sessions worth of gameplay.  These stories are turning out to be as twisty as the source material, which is good, but makes it a bit difficult to explain if you weren’t there.  That being said, here goes….

Jim’s old police revolver has been stolen, and Jim thinks that his granddaughter LaTeesha might be responsible.  Reggie used to babysit for LaTeesha, and Jim figures that Reggie can find out more easily than he can.  A little weak as an opening, I admit, but, as you’ll see, it actually worked out well in play.

So, Reggie goes to confront LaTeesha.  This led to a hysterically funny moment, as Reggie ultimately rips LaTeesha’s backpack away from her to go through it and ends up being chased down the street by a protective neighbor with a baseball bat.  Reggie’s car gets smashed up a bit, and he finds nothing in the backpack except a notebook that says “I love Reggie” and things like that.  Apparently LaTeesha has a bit of a crush on her former baby-sitter.

Overcome with guilty, Reggie attempts to return the backpack to LaTeesha’s house without being seen.  Unfortunately, the police have been called and are interviewing LaTeesha and her parents.  The helpful neighbor with the baseball bat points out Reggie, who tries to escape.  The police give chase, which ends up resulting in Reggie’s crashing his car and being arrested by the police.

Reggie’s father bails him out.  This led to our first Reflection scene, with Reggie staring out the window, brooding, while his father chewed him out on the way home from the police station.  Then I tapped Reggie’s father (Reginald Hastings, II)

Reggie decided to find out from Jim Brown what is so important about this stupid gun anyways.  So he drove over to Jim’s house in a rental car to talk to him.  Jim wasn’t home.  However, Jim’s girlfriend Cherry was at home with another man.  They were arguing about something, but Reggie couldn’t hear what it was.  So, when the other man left the house, Reggie called Jim and then tailed the man.  This other man walked down the street into another house.  Suddenly there was a gunshot.  Reggie called 911 and waited while the police and emergency crews showed up.  The murder victim:  Mike Washington.  LaTeesha’s father.

We got to resolve a Crime at this point and determined that, yes indeed, LaTeesha had stolen Jim’s revolver.  Now, with her father dead, we wondered if she knew that something was going to go down….

At this point, we wrapped up for the night.  We had some good rules discussion, and Ralph solved my Research problem.

Rules Excursus

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’ve been struggling with the rules for Research.  But no more!  Ralph suggested that what Research really ought to do is “reveal” a new relationship between Characters.  After all, the goal of Research is to provide inspiration to the players, not really to provide more raw data.

So, here are the new Research rules.  If the investigator calls for Research, we create a new relationship between two Characters.  The investigator may choose one of the two characters or choose the type of relationship from the Research table.  The other two items are chosen randomly.  After determining the new relationship, the investigator gets to narrate how he discovered this new relationship.

The options on the Research table are as follows: sexual/romantic, familial, business, friendship.  Why yes, the table is weighted towards sexual and familial relationships?  Why do you ask?

This system got a solid test in our next outing.

Actual Play, Part 2

So, last Friday, we gathered again to play.  Gabrielle was with us this time, so we slid her in as another player.  This was mechanically effective, although Gabrielle said that she never really felt like she got a grip on the Characters.  So, that experiment had mixed results.

There were several moments of awesome in this session, though, that need to be reported.

The first was the use of the new Research rules.  After being questioned by the police about the murder, Keith decided that Reggie would poke around at the Crime Scene after the cops were gone.  He chose to include Mike Washington (the murder victim) in the Research.  So the other character and the nature of the relationship were created randomly.

The other character:  Reginald Hastings, II.

The relationship: romantic/sexual

This provoked an extensive out-of-game conversation about the rules, but we were okay with it for our game, so off we went.

At the crime scene, Reggie found love letters from his father to Mike Washington.  This was one of those discoveries that turns everything sideways.  But it got even better.  The next scene:  Reggie goes to confront his father.

Reggie finds his father on the back nine at the country club.  Just as his father putts, he throws the rubber-banded packet of letters on the green, deflecting the ball.  Reggie was furious, and when his father tried to talk down to him, Reggie started reading one of the letters out loud, so that all the people standing nearby could hear.  Reggie’s father slapped the letters out of his hands.  Reggie started to slap his father, but he wasn’t fast enough.  His father punched him in the face, laying him out on the green.  In the meantime, the wind blew away some of the letters, and various individuals who were nearby, including Jim Brown, pocketed some of them.  As Reggie lay there on the green, Reggie’s father informed him that he needed to be moved out of the house by sundown.  Then he strode away.

Reggie packed up his things, then he went down to the Par-a-Dice Hotel, where he proceeded to run up his father’s credit card on an expensive hotel room and alcohol.  This was our second Reflection scene.

In the morning, Jim Brown came knocking at the door.  We figured that he was an ex-cop and knew how to find people.  He had news:  LaTeesha had gone missing.  Reggie told him about seeing the mysterious man go into Mike Washington’s house, and Jim recognized the man.  “Chainsaw”.  So they drove to Chainsaw’s house and found him in the living room, hands in the air, with LaTeesha pointing a gun at him.

Reggie tried to talk her into putting down the gun, but she wasn’t having any of it.  She had already shot a table lamp, and she shot another one, demanding that Chainsaw tell her why he had murdered her father.

So Reggie lays it all out.  “LaTeesha, if you’re going to be my girl, this just won’t do.”  In shock, LaTeesha turns to him and says, “What?”  Then she accidentally pulls the trigger again, shooting her grandfather in the foot.

It was only one point of Violence, so it wasn’t too bad.  I have to say this.  Otherwise I would feel bad about how hard I was laughing during the scene.  It was truly great.

After this, we ran out of steam pretty quickly.  Another Research scene established that Chainsaw is the father of Emily Watson, a friend of LaTeesha’s, but that wasn’t providing any solid handles for us.  So we called it in for the night.

Post-Game thoughts

Research suddenly jumped from being a trouble point to being a major cool point for this game.  But it’s a scary cool point.  There are no provisions for Lines within Research.  Veils are easy to accomplish, but, as written, there are no Lines.  Now, I think that this is ameliorated by the investigator’s being able to select one thing.  If you don’t want the really icky stuff in your game, then always define the relationship type and all will be well.  Still, this is definitely one of those “mature themes” games.

Between this playtest and our other playtest, I’ve had opportunity to see a fairly competent investigator and a fairly incompetent investigator.  However, in both cases, the story continues to advance, despite the personal setbacks of the investigator.  Also, in both cases, I have a strong empathy with the investigator, regardless of his actions.  I want him to do well and to do right, even when he is being beaten up or being underhanded.  I also want him ultimately to succeed, even though, as a player, I’m doing my best to oppose him at every turn.  So that is definitely a win.

There was some confusion about termination of scenes, which I will need to address better in the next rules draft.  However, I think that the rules are just about stabilized.

I’m really happy with how this game is coming together.  I’m starting to write the manuscript right now, in fact, and I’d like to get a blind playtest draft together within the next couple of weeks.  If all goes well, this should be ready by GenCon this year, which is much better than I had originally been anticipating.

The game is tres cool.  It has elements of alot of different games in.  There's a Universalis like feel in that whatever ideas you MIGHT have as a player as to who committed the crime and why it happened remain totally open to revision until its officially nailed down.  There's a Polaris like feel in the Investigator / Heart role while another player in rotation is selected to be the opposition / Mistaken.  There's a PTA like feel in that there is a lot of kibbitzing about what happens next with a good deal of focus on the genre and a limited number of characters to focus on.

Two hurdles I've noticed (not necessarily bad...just hurdles).
1) the game takes an AWFUL lot of player creative spark to drive it.  There are a few hooks to hang your narration on: The Crime Resolution and new Research rules that provide a "here's what it is, now figure out how it got that way" hook, the group quasi-random character creation provides an eccentric cast of characters (especially if you have players like Crystal and myself trying to be purposefully eccentric) that gives a little material to work with, and the character card layout is something of an unspoken master stroke.

See you have your crime grid in the middle, and along the top you put all of your cops and government types and along the bottom you put all your criminal types.  Then along the right side you put all the white people with the rich people up top near the cops and the poor people down near the bottom with the criminals, and then on the left you got your non whites in the same order.  So you got white and rich in the upper right, white and poor in the lower right, non-white and rich in the upper left, and non white and poor in the lower left.  Even without rules...just having the character cards sitting there laid out like that...provides some story meat.  The new research rules that take characters at random from this arrangement and then creates a relationship that the investigator "discovers" is dynamite.

BUT:  it definitely takes ALOT of player energy to make it work.  Much more than I've experienced with any of the above mentioned games.  There was definitely a point in both games we played (even with a group of story game die-hards) that we hit the wall and said, that's all for today. 

Perhaps some greater guidance in how to assemble the next scene would help mitigate that.  I'm not familiar enough with the genre but perhaps there are certain "standard" genre scenes that could be assembled into an optional "idea aid" deck of cards..."now there's a scene where the Investigator confronts the original victim about coming clean"...that sort of thing.  This could serve as a "browse and be inspired" deck or a "draw one and see where it goes" deck.

2) The Crime Grid is total coolness.  But there does seem to be an opportunity for a crime to linger out there well after from a story perspective it would seem sensible to resolve it.  This isn't totally a bad thing.  Given the genre there are always twists and turns, so glomming on to the first "sensible & plausible" resolution isn't ideal.  But currently the crime absolutely cannot resolve until a certain combination of mechanics align allowing it to happen.

One of those mechanics is moving the positioning marker on the grid to a non-blank space.  If moved to a blank space (required if possible) the crime does not resolve but another suspect gets added to the grid.  If a non-blank space is moved to the perpetrator is established randomly...unless the random determination results in a non-blank space.  Since there is no direct tie between these mechanisms and the narrative you have the Investigator more or less falling through the crime as opposed to actually "solving" it.  This is great because its one of the big differentiating factors between the "hard boiled detective" genre and  the "mystery" genre.  There is no "sleuthing" going on per se...just a unraveling cover-up / conspiracy with the detective often cluelessly tugging on threads.

But, I can see the potential for crimes on the grid to outlast their entertainment value while waiting for all the mechanics to align and give the players permission to resolve it.

Couple of thoughts here...perhaps tied into the Challenge Mechanic, there could be an option where a player could move the grid marker freely to a non-blank space even when there are blank spaces available.  This would give the players (unanimously if tied to Challenge) the potential to accelerate resolution if it seems appropriate (with still the opportunity fo the "game" to "say no" if the random perpetrator was blank.

Also, I'll reiterate the suggestion have something happen if the random perpetrator comes up blank...something should happen.  I like the idea of the Investigator "proving" (aka becoming satisfied) that one of the characters is absolutely not guilty of this particular crime, but there are a number of possibilities...such as making a Research Check where one of the elements is automatically the perpetrator and left blank until known, and one of the elements is left open to be decided by the Investigator when the crime resolves, and the third element is determined know and associated with the crime.

The idea of an inspiration generator makes sense.  Heh, maybe even a few verbs and then draw a Character card.  "Watch", "Confront", "Talk to" and then draw.  Bears some consideration.

Also, I'm adding special spaces to the Crime Grids.  In particular, the one that is most applicable here is "Suspicion".  Land on a Suspicion space, and fill in any space on the Grid in addition to your regular name placement.  I figure that this will allow the players to shape the developing Grid to force Resolution.  Between that and pushing conflicts, I think that the players tend to have enough tools already to force Crime Resolution.  Often during play I find myself checking out the Grid to figure out what it would take to trigger Resolution.  In general, I've found that players tend to cooperate to push things towards Resolution, once they learn to read the Grid.

That being said, it's much easier to shape a small Grid than a big one.  Our 3 x 6 Grid is pretty easy to block off, while the 6 x 6 Grid in the other playtest is harder to mold.

Finally, I agree that something should happen when a blank is rolled for Crime Resolution.  Resolution shouldn't just be a dead end.  I've decided that I don't like ruling out characters, but something should happen.  Probably at that point we should have some sort of game accelerator.  It could even be as simple as allowing the player to write down a name somewhere on the Grid to accelerate future Resolution.  Right now, that seems the most elegant, and it feeds directly back into pushing further Crime Resolutions, which is a good thing.  I'll roll it around and think about it.