Wow, Gen Con pretty much rocked my world.
I learned a lot. I got to playtest Grey Ranks with four young turks who gave me a ton of useful feedback, and I got to meet many friends in person for the first time. We sold a lot of Roach and some Drowning and Falling as well. Working the booth was very satisfying and I had a great, exhausting time. Expect big GR revisions as well as a flowering of exciting new ideas based on actual play and discussion at Gen Con.
I finished a Grey Ranks alpha test tonight and it worked as expected, mechanically - the dice escalated relentlessly and the characters had a hard time keeping up. The first death came during the mission in scene seven. Two more characters died in scene nine (the very end of the game), and the really neat thing about that was that there was an awful, cold equation - there’s a very limited amount of currency to boost die rolls, and by allowing one character to spend it all, they ensured that someone survived. The math is still probably off, but it’ll take a full playtest to find out. So far so good.
Here’s a first crack, for playtesting. I’m guessing the version for the actual game will be a beautiful and functional Mad Irishman deal.
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!
Last night I ran an interesting game of the Roach. It was the first time the game didn’t really fire on all cylinders and I’m not sure why. There was not much mayhem (Regina was molested a little but never really used) and things were very sedate, and the endgame was pretty unsatisfying. What went wrong? We had six players - four Forge regulars and two old skool guys who were a little uncomfortable with taking narrative control, who struggled to frame scenes and passed a lot. I don’t think that player mix was the problem, per se. Eric suggested that nobody used NPCs to drive the action, which is true, and we didn’t roleplay very much - and this is, I think, the root cause of the problems. I have another session scheduled for 10 AM, and if it happens (not sure if I’ll have any people, no one signed up) I’ll really emphasize assigning opponent dice to people and narrating scenes.