Repertoire First Playtest (or Procrastination)

Well, after much delay I’m finally getting these notes down. And I’ll admit I’ve learned something significant here: write up playtest notes immediately. Stale notes aren’t as worthy.

First of all: hey, this game actually works! Fie on harsh Game Chef critics! Kudos and congratulations to the incredibly awesome games which did win and their brilliant designers. Repertoire is not their peer. Yet.

Anyhow, the catty backstage sniping of a troupe of actors boiled out of the game without any coaxing. Honestly, at the beginning of the session, I’d forgotten that particular part of the design, absorbed instead in trying to translate mechanics and text into an actual game.

The biggest problem was certainly that the producer either needs more to do or not be a player role. It’s easy enough for a player to pick up the producer’s end of an endgame argument. Any responsibilities that the producer took on would diminish the power of the actors, a lot, so for the time being I think the producer is going to become the face of the game-as-challenge.

And generally, the mechanics are about half-baked. The token currency is little too complicated, and there’s significant weakness in how scenes resolve. On the one hand, as it stands, it’s easy for everyone to lose, so the the producer’s rancor increases rapidly. And it’s not clear why you would want to bid against another player; on the other hand the bidding against was a significant contributor to the cattiness.

There are few places where the rules are really soft. There ought to be some control over who can be in a scene—one idea that got suggested was that the number of dice and actors in a scene have to be different which is interesting enough to playtest. On a related note, there needs to be a clear rule about how and when a scene gets called – possibly the framer of the scene calls it when he wants to.

Cards should probably get a fact when they’re written (and actor cards should get 3 written by their player). Furthermore, once the last fact is added to a card (i.e. if the type of card dictates a d8, when the 8^th fact is added) it should be retired at the end of the scene.

Oh, and about 30 tokens per player is probably plenty.

Virtual Playtesting

For some time now I’ve been toying with a little language for randomizers, which might even be a subset of a little language to describe game rules —with role-playing games have the focus. For the most part, the application has always been testing ideas or for a convenience die-roller. I’ve always been frustrated with every die-rolling program I’ve ever used, because there’s invariably a dice mechanic that hasn’t been thought of, and the program isn’t flexible enough to model it.

And, obviously, the kernel of a randomizer representation language exists. 3d6 is the sum¹ of three six sided dice. It’s only when games start to need “the highest of” or “reroll 6s and add” that things get complicated. Which is almost every game. And of course Dogs in the Vineyard² needs dice to be commited in pairs, and whatnot. Although for a die simulator, this is hardly a new problem.3

But a real application just raised it’s head: playtesting. If you playtest with virtual dice, on a MUSH, or IRC, or even in person with a coupla laptops, then not only is it really easy to change rules and whatnot, you get an automatic record of play, plus empirical exercise of your system. So you can see up front what different card distributions do, or run quick simulations of conflict resolution systems that use dice.

Plus, if you’re like me, it makes as much sense to write the intial rules text in a programming language, and you get very abrupt feedback when it’s broken.

The pitfall is that the system warps your thinking about the rules. The same way that System Matters in play, the framework would influence design decisions. “Why not use d12s for this? They’re a pain to code for.”

Certainly worth thinking about.

¹ usually.

² Dogs, why is always Dogs?

³ Consider the method that several games use to generate stats: roll all the dice up front, and then assign the values to stats. Same thing.

International Intrigue rides on

I still dig on this idea. Every time I pick up a little Greg Rucka, I keep thinking “This! This is what I want to be playing.” And I don’t know if this is where I want to go with it, but I really think I’m going to rob Ben Lehman blind, and pull the bargaining mechanics out of Polaris.[1]

Honestly, regardless of what I think of the color text, the basic idea of negotiating the results of a conflict, of using the wonderful fun of a bidding game like Modern Art or Pizzarro and Co. except plot elements are the stakes and the wager really jazzes me. And I think this completely fits into what I’d been pondering for International Intrigue.[2]

I’ve also been contemplating the idea of silent use of the rules of the game, so that all conversation can be in character or action related. And while the “key phrases” idea is interesting, it jars me a little. I’ve been thinking about a system that grows on the simple act of handing someone dice in order to suggest that they need to roll to resolve conflict. Especially if the ultimate characters are spies, some sort of tactical combat hand signals] might be in order.

On thing I’m playing with is the idea that as action moves from back at the home office, M and Q to actual theatre of operations, man in the field kind of stuff, that the number of adversarial bidders will change. I also like the idea of compelling each player to take a role in a scene where he want to bid, and then offer his bids from the mouth of that character.

So at the home office, the best way to represent the schemes of Them⁴ is to take the role of a Moneypenny, or a signals officer, or something, delivering the bad news.

An essential component, and one I still want to play with, is the conflict between the agents personal lives and their work.

¹ And I really ought to get in at least one session of the thing.

² which so needs a better name, it’s sickening

³ or do I mean these

⁴ a la Asimov