(i'm from italy so sorry if you find some grammatical-rubbish around the post)

Heya, man ;)

Yesterday we played Dirty Secrets here in Italy. It was for all of us the first time we played it, so even if it all went without problems and the game has been spectacular, we found something to ask you about.

1) The first question regards what here in italy we call tone, and probabily it is the same also in english.. what i mean is: the story created was a lot (A LOT) Tarantino-style. To make an example, one of the characters was called "Uncino", or "Hook", because he was a surgeon that had loss somehow an hand, so he continued to do his job, even if he had to use special prothesis with the shape ok bisturi & co., so he was able to work. This is what we consider tarantino-style, but i will do an other example: almost at the hand of the session we had a dead man we had to hyde somewhere, so we (we= me, the investigator + one of the characters, a member of the canadian intelligence) cut it with a cleaver, with the canadian man that was singing the canadian anthem (oh, canada..). You join this scene with "Uncino" and other subtleties, and you have something that is really tarantino-style. All this to ask: is it normal that the session had a tone like this? We ask this because Quentin Tarantino isn't exactly what we consider a noir director, you know :S

2) Ok, now something about rules. As i was saying i've got the italian versione of the manual, so i don't know exactly how you called this in the original version: i'm talking about alias (when two guys are the same one). Now: why you have to have an empty character sheet, when you declare something like that? We arrived at the end of the game when we had to characters that it would have been spectacular if they were the same, but we haven't got an empty character sheet, so we cannot declare an alias (this in theory, but we chose to ignore this thing and to declare the alias anyway, just because we didn't understand why there was this rule, and we all preferred if it was like that). It is strange you need a new character sheet, because you don't create a new character... actually you just reduce their number by declaring that two of them are the same one. So, what we wanted to know was the reasons behind this choice.

3) You can push (is it like that also in the original version, right?) a conflict a number of times equal to the number of empty cells near the pawn, and at the end of the chapter you move thesimilar to this one:

(X means the cell is occupied, E are the empty ones, P is the cell where there is the pawn)

[table]
[tr][td]X[/td][td]E[/td][td]E[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]E[/td][td]E[/td][td]E[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]X[/td][td]X[/td][td]X[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]E[/td][td]X[/td][td]X[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]E[/td][td]P[/td][td]E[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]E[/td][td]E[/td][td]E[/td][/tr]
[/table]

Ok, now: the highest number of cells in row near the pawn is 1. So we pushed that conflict one time. This meant we had ti exchanges. Now, if i have to move two times without bending.. where i make the second movement? We decided to move only one time, going right, ignoring the second movement. But this sounds strange to me, so please tell me if and where we made a mistake.

4) After you arrive in an occupied cell, you found who is the offender in one of the crimes, than you have to move in a casual cell throwing two dice. What if you land in an occupied cell? When this happened to us, yesterday, we assumed that the name written in the cell where we landed was the name of an other crime. Is this correct?

(i'm sure there was at least an other question.. so probably i'll be back ;) )

Hey, sorry for taking so long to get back to you. The private message was helpful.

Now, let me answer your questions!

1) Well, actually, I could make the case that Tarantino is working within the noir tradition, at least somewhat. So, sure, I could see a Tarantino-style game going down. Really, within the confines of the genre as expressed by the mechanics, there's a lot of room for variation in how the game plays out. You could have a deeply cerebral game, a game filled with action, or anything in the middle. As long as all the players were happy, I can't really say that you were playing "wrong".

2) Heh. That's a rule that doesn't get a lot of play, so I don't usually think about it all that much. Essentially, if I remember my thinking from when I designed the game (it's been a few years, after all), I wanted to limit the amount of insanity in the game. It's possible for the backstory to get too complicated to keep track of. So I tied the use of the alias and mistaken identity rules to the Character currency, which I had established in order to eventually force reincorporation. I figured that if you only have a certain number of Characters to use, eventually you'd have to start reusing them. In a sense, an alias or mistaken identity creates a new character, so you have to use a Character card to do it.

3) The rules you are using are correct. So, in your example, you can push once, which means moving twice. But then, as you note, you cannot move the Witness. Now what? Well, when you can't legally move the Witness, you roll for Crime Resolution, bouncing the pawn to a new location and seeing if you land on a name or not.

4) If I'm reading you correctly, I think you have it backwards. You only resolve a Crime when the Witness lands on an occupied space due to a die roll. When you're just moving the Witness, you can only move onto an empty space. And, if you can't legally move the Witness onto an empty space, then you roll.

Did I answer your questions? Feel free to follow up with more!

thanks a lot for the response, man ;) in particular about the last two questions, now it's all clear.

if i will have the possibility to use again the rules for alias and mistaken identity i will tell you what happens. I admit that I am not too sure about the possibility to create too much insanity using them: in particular when you use the alias, what you obtain it's a character that vanishes. I mean: if you have those nine characters and you declare an alias, you find that two of them are the same one, so from nine characters you find yourself with only eight. And in the game i had, that helped us to find a resolution, because otherwise we had this character that we never found in the story, that was guilty of a crime. Declaring the alias we found that this woman was in real an other one, that was much more suitable to be the crime responsible. And it was much more cool, because she had several relationship with half of the other characters.

anyway, i'll let you know about new questions and doubts.

See ya ;)