Pretend
Emily writes a fascinating Actual Play post, sort of. This is really cool to me, because although I’ve never really lost the capacity to engage in pretend play like this, I’ve never considered it from a design perspective.
Fair Play
A New Idea
I’m ruminating on a new project as we’re prepping the Roach for production. It emerged from my most recent game of Dogs, where I found myself (as I always do) feeling real sympathy for the town. What, I thought to myself, if instead of playing the all-powerful Dogs, you played the poor Steward of a town in crisis?
So in this game, you are just trying to keep your village from falling apart - things are constantly spinning out of control due to natural entropy, and then you’ve got these powerful “angels of God” who show up unannounced to pass judgment and order you to do stuff. It’d use the socially ablative damage Shreyas Sampat first suggested, like I use in Grey Ranks. So you can get hit over the head by a bandit and it may cause the crops to fail.
Right now I’m mulling over how to handle session design in some way that is as elegant and beautiful as town-building in Dogs. I need to think a lot more about what the game is about, which will probably suggest a solution.
Bow Down Before Your Master
In this case, that master is Patrick Murphy.
The Shab-al-Hiri Roach is going to be beautiful.
More Roaches
The third and final game of the con went better than the other two and was really kicking. I’m not entirely sure why, but I think it helped that all the players were very familiar with narrativist structures and played until the wheels fell off. After we finished we discussed the game, particularly the endgame, and came up with some really good ideas for improving it. I got excellent feedback from this and the not-so-hot session Saturday night as well. Good thing layout isn’t locked down!