So, recently we had the opportunity to playtest Misspent Youth.  Daniel Levine was kind enough to run it and he also made a recording of the session.  I won't go into a ton of detail, I'll leave that to the recording.  The overall premise was our Authority was a man by the name of Adam Duvall and he was controlling the society by controlling reproduction.  Due to mutations in the population he mandated who could and could not have children, and if you broke those rules you were removed from the city. 

The setting creation went really really well.  I don't think any of us at the table weren't really excited to play as soon as we were done with it. 

The gameplay itself fell a little flat though.  I haven't completely been able to put my finger on it as to why.  The tag ended up becoming more of a hindrance than being useful.  We ended up stopping using it halfway through play. 

I feel that if we played the game again that it would go smoother, and I absolutely love the concept of the game.

Rob, we're there any specific questions that you have? 

Daniel, could you provide the link to the recording?

Sorry, I can't write up a long text summary right now either, but anyone who wants to listen to the recording (warning: about 300MB, and a bit over 3hrs) can do so here:

http://www.2shared.com/file/3321811/3ee7337e/VORC001.html

- Daniel

Travis,

Thanks for taking the time to post this. Apart from The Tag, is there anything else you thought fell flat?

A note on The Tag: it's not supposed to just pass when you compliment one another, but whenever you act like a friend to one another. So for example, in that first scene, someone came to the rescue of the girl who was getting her ribs kicked in. He should have gotten The Tag for that.

It certainly is a sticky bit of the rules. I'm considering dropping it, but I keep thinking that if I can figure out the alchemy of describing it correctly, it'll snap into place.

Ah, crap.  I described it wrong. 

Re-reading the description in the rules I have, though, I'm not sure I described it right, but I'm also not sure I'd have gotten that out of it.  I could see how I maybe should have emphasized that if you *ask* for help, you should get the Tag.  But helping someone, like in that scene, I would think falls under "making sure the game stays about friendship," which is a bit broad to interpret (and so easy to see as a "summing up", at least to me, of the other circumstances).  It also would make it a little ambiguous who should get the tag in that situation - the person who highlighted your coolness by needing help, or the person who gave the help?  Presumably something like the player who explicitly initiated the action?

I think, at the very least, some examples would help people get a grip on what you want.  And if it's too implicit, there may be issues with folks being too caught up in the moment to be thinking about the Tag (I think that's part of the dynamic both in my playtest, and the one at Dreamation).

I wonder if it would help to tie it to some existing mechanical element?  Like, when I win by hitting a number another YO has claimed, I narrate how her friendship was necessary to my win, and then she gets the Tag?

I was thinking the other day that if you have the Tag you might be able to reroll one die on one of your rolls per conflict.

Take any input I give with "it's your game..." of course.

I'm not thrilled with the idea of a re-roll.  I actually think I *like* the fact that the complete randomness of everything in conflict except the decision to sell out or not gives a kind of purity to that decision.  It's like the game saying, "look, the conflict system is just a way of getting us to the point where you decide how far you'll go."  I feel like adding a decision about re-rolls would just dilute that.  And since the system is already random, it seems like an odd way of adding additional win chances that could be handled more elegantly by, say, changing claim numbers.

Actually, I could almost see making the system just: you ALWAYS lose, unless you sell out.  But then, I'm a glutton for punishment.

After having a chance to reflect on the game I think the reason I thought the game felt flat was that there was little fear of failure.  We didn't fail enough and selling out didn't seem like a big deal.  Not that it didn't have story impact but that you always had a security blanket.  If we were playing a long term game I don't think it would be a big deal.  For a one shot maybe doing something like selling out just gives you a reroll not an automatic success? 

Travis,

I think the way to combat that is to make The Authority's side of the stakes so odious that you don't want to lose. That might be something good for the GM advice chapter.

Hey, I tried to make the stakes odious!  I seem to remember threatening to have lots of their friends get trampled in a riot, have them get chewed up by machine gun fire, and have the whole city turn on them and rip them apart!

Actually, I felt - as GM - a bit the other way.  The stakes were usually rough enough that I felt like the choice to sell out was always the *obvious* one.  But it's hard to say.  When I played, selling out my character was cool, but also a bit of a gut-punch, even aside from any mechanical impact.  I really cared about trying to get Julia's character to come around and respect me even after what I'd done to Bret's.  I'm not sure if the players in my game felt the same way.

Thinking about this as I write it, I feel like maybe part of what drove things home for me, when I was playing, was then when I sold out, it ended up with me hurting one of the other PCs, whereas in this game, most of the sell-out fallout fell on NPCs.  Then again, there were sell-outs in the Dreamation game that seemed potent, but still were mostly aimed at NPCs (Julia's father, and bat-kraken), so maybe I'm talking out my ass.

I wonder if a mechanism like BW/BE's compromise would help here, or whether that would just be an unnecessary extra layer.  I mean, in my BE game, I know I use compromise as a GM a lot to twist the knife in PCs (yeah, you win the firefight, but then you turn on the TV and everyone's talking about the mass civilian casualties...).

Just jawin'.  I didn't feel the same 'flatness' from the GM side that some of the players did.