I had the pleasure to sit (mostly) quietly in the corner for a playtest of my game, Rogue, the other day while two gamers ran through The Initiation. This was valuable since I was present for the "Actual Play" but took little or no hand in teaching or "running" the game myself. I'm still a bit new here as well, so if this is the wrong forum or worded unhelpfully, I apologize and please correct me. First a bit of background, then to actual play and my question ...

System Background: The Initiation is the special format the first night of play takes. The goal is twofold: first, to familiarize all players with the roles and rules, and second to explain how all the rogues in the mob got together. Characters are made, and then they are brought together via Initiation. First one player, then each in turn, plays the part of the "Lug" (a specialized narrator role) for another player whose character is being Initiated. The Initiated player sets up a Situation their character is in, based on some background info, and then sets a Goal for their rogue within that situation. The Lug and the player to be Initiated narrate freely until the Lug sees fit to create a Challenge that blocks the Initiated rogue's progress if it is not overcome.

The Play went something like this: Bill O'Reilly, an thief prone to wild hallucinations and visions who had been incarcerated by his nemesis the Dr. Selarzo, was seeking drugs to sell on the black market. Despite the "good doctor's" particular interest in studying Bill's madness, the old rogue decided to follow Selarzo to the chemist and steal the drugs he and his assistant were buying so he could sell them to Vincenzo. So, Bill sneaks up to the door to the chemist and leans against the wall in the shadows thrown by a gaslight, where he waits to filch the drugs from the doctor. He gets the drugs, and the Lug (played by Vincenzo's player, Dan) didn't Challenge him. Interesting. So Bill turns and starts to slink away into the shadows, when suddenly the doctor's assistant, Jillian Trace, says "Hold doctor, I think I know him." Dan calls for his Challenge, and the players begin rolling Heat to see who comes out on top. The assistant, the Lug determines, can't really see Bill in the shadows and so the Mark (difficulty) is set at a low 5. Bill easily slips away in the shadows and sells his drugs to Vincenzo, a brilliant but drug-addicted art thief who ...

[Here the Lug switched. Bill's player, Cameron, took over as Lug and Bill took a backseat, essentially becoming part of the "flavor" or "color" of each scene. Right away, Cameron exercised his Lug's right to force 1 action on another character and said "Okay, so Vincenzo is pretty desperate for these pills, and he pops 5 right away. That's way too many, and he starts tripping balls."]

So they were off. Vincenzo wanted to steal a blueprint for a bridge design kept deep in some monastery or another (I missed that color detail while getting a soda from the game shop's owner). The Lug complicated the whole issue by throwing detail after detail at Vincenzo that changed what I thought the Challenge would be. First Vincenzo was too high to walk straight and the drugs made him hallucinate, but Dan just accepted it and no Challenge was forced. Then the two of them cooked up that there were hallucinatory undead in the tomb, and the Lug kept hinting that maybe some were real, but still not Challenge. Finally, Vincenzo burst out of the catacombs through a sewer pipe and into the middle of a private church service (don't ask me why the sewer vents into the church -- some details in rogue can strain the imagination) and I was SURE the priest would get involved directly, but instead summoned the monastery guards. They chased Vincenzo out of the building, and I thought "and now the whole thing devolves into swordfighting," but no! Instead Vincenzo's player Dan turned the tables again by saying "So Vincenzo turns to his right and tries to shoulder through the gate in the garden wall." And at that point the Lug said, "That's a much sturdier gate than Vincenzo thought in his drug-addled state. You're going to have to roll to see if you can force it open and escape the guards." So they rolled some dice and Vincenzo ended up escaping by nearly trampling an old woman on the other side of the garden door, leaping through some hedges and escaping with his blueprints into the city. There he met up with Bill and the stage for the first Heist was set.

Afterward, Dan told me he was trying to force Vincenzo into a position in the story that would allow him to use the Crash skill (a breaking and entering ability) and so he kept turning the Lug's narrative aside until he got to a favorable position. Cameron said he'd considered Challenging sooner, but was enjoying the freeform back and forth they'd gotten into, so he just let it go on until the stakes felt "right." This is exactly the kind of back and forth narrative construction I was hoping to foster with Rogue, so it was nice to see such delightful flights of fancy and oddness happening without me being involved directly in "instructing" the gamers.

Mechanically, conflict resolution was a bit skewed in favor of the Challenge winning, but that's just a numbers game and can be easily corrected. They stumbled a bit on how to organize the Initiation at first, which makes me think that could use a rewrite for clarity (clarity, clarity, clarity, brevity, then more clarity!). Tempting Fate (a re-rolling mechanic) was a mess as well, and while they managed to cobble together something *close* to what was intended, it's clear to me that recent changes suggested by another playtesting group's reported "house rulings" are not helpful to either clarity or game play. Character creation went swimmingly though, and Dan walked Cam through it from top to bottom while I sat utterly silent. Neither one had played the game before, and Cam hadn't even read past page 12, nor do I know either one particularly well, so I think they were kind of cold and their fumbling was educational for me as a designer.

So that's the playtest. The question I've got is, has anyone been able to organize and sit in on a playtest while having little-to-no interaction with players? I found this extremely hard to do "honestly" because players would keep asking me questions when they got stuck, and there are only so many times I could answer "just muddle through or make something up" before it was clearly ruining their fun. It would've been nice, for example, to tell players that I wanted them to focus primarily on testing and breaking the Conflict Resolution mechanics. Saying that in the middle of a rapidly flowing collaborative moment of storytelling would've derailed any testing of the game's roles that was happening.

Designers talk about the value of "Blind" playtests, where the designer isn't present at all, and "guided" playtests where the designer is explaining the game to new players, but seldom do I hear of the designer watching a "blind" test and taking notes. Has anyone else used this kind of playtest to get focused notes on what's working and not working in their game? How do you organize them? How much do you guide playtesters with lists of questions in advance? Or does this whole endeavor seem to be a pointless exercise that would be better handled through traditional "blind" testing?