 |
Wild Blue Playtest |  |
On Saturday, I went to my friend Mike’s house and ran a Wild Blue session with him and my friend Rich. I thought it was awesome. This was the first time that either of them had been introduced to either Gamecraft 2.0 or Wild Blue (aside from what I’ve shared on this website), so I had to take about forty minutes to explain both before we actually got down to playing. We didn’t finish the scenario I wrote up, but we did get to do a few short, non-combat conflicts, as well as a number of out-of-conflict skill rolls.
I’m pretty happy with the way the system is shaping up, and I got some good suggestions from them. I’m working on allowing assets to scale better (that probably sounds like gibberish to those who haven’t actually played this system with me, and for that I apologize), and I realized one other thing: Gamecraft 2.0 is kind of hard to teach people. Not necessarily time-consuming, and not necessarily that hard to learn or play, but hard to teach, to some extent. I think a lot of this is going to get easier as I explain it more and more; the problem is that virtually everything in the system is interconnected, and it’s kind of difficult to explain one thing without first explaining another. What I need to do is get the system written down in a sequence that makes it easy to pick up, read, and learn; right now it’s sort of mish-mashed, reflective of my thoughts while creating the system, and that’s not necessarily conducive to learning or explaining the system. Once I find a logical starting point, I’m sure it’ll flow easily from there.
As for the session itself, it was a lot of fun. Mike and Rich played a couple of lawmen, big-time lawmen in a small town, investigating recent murders. Mike’s character was a gunslinger, a trained killer, but one with a lot of faith and a deep belief in doing the right thing. Think of the mentality that the Operative had in Serenity: building a better world, but one that he has no place in. That sort of approaches his way of thinking. He knows he’s a killer, and he doesn’t really like killing all that much, but he does it anyway because he believes it’s a necessary evil. Rich’s character was much less moral; he was a rogue and con-man turned lawman, the classic example of using a thief to catch a thief. He drank, he caroused, he insulted people, and generally had a good time, but he also did his fair share of investigating (though a lot of it involved breaking into peoples’ houses to snoop around). They both played their characters to the hilt, and I tried to reward them for that using the mechanics of the game (which is a design goal of mine).
I did more prep work than I have in the past for Gamecraft 2.0, largely because this was a mystery, and I wanted to keep everything straight and not get caught mixing things up. Basically, I figured out what had happened before the players got there, and I came up with short bios on all of the important inhabitants of the town, as well as on important locales. I was careful not to plan out anything that was going to happen though; I let Mike and Rich determine that, and I reacted to what they did, dropping breadcrumbs only very occasionally. It worked really, really well.
I plan on running this scenario again with another group, so I won’t share any specifics until afterward. Expect to hear more about that later.
April 10th, 2007 at 8:39 pm
I think I liked my summary from the gameplay itself “Mike had tea and Crumpets while I got beer and strumpets.” Great session, game mechanics worked pretty well, just wish we could have gotten to more of the “meat” or the scenario. I’m still trying to decide on whether I like the Motivation usage for XP thing - it is good for ecouraging the accomplishment of character driven goals/motivations, but I can see it getting abused pretty easily. I know, I know, good GMs and social contracts can mitigate it, but if I had thought of it more often, I could wager a token on easy rolls that forward my motivations - especially since I can make motivations at any time. However, I don’t have any good alternatives at the moment. I’ll back burner it and see if anything boils over from an unattended pot.
April 11th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
To be fair, crumpets never actually exchanged hands (though everything else certainly did).
As to your comment about drives and their relationship to experience, I have to admit that I had the same concern for a while. But then I thought: “So?” This game system is really supposed to be able to become what you want it to be; I want it to meet the needs of the gaming group as best as it possibly can. In a gaming group like you, me, and Mike, extra rules regulating how much experience you get from drives aren’t really necessary, because you guys were more concerned with having fun, doing good role-playing, and finding out what would happen next than with leveling up and grabbing phat lewt. And what if a gaming group goes the other way? Is there really a problem with that? If the GM wants to allow every tiny use of a drive for getting and spending drive tokens for quick experience, and the players are down with that too, then what’s the problem? I say, let people play that way if they want to.
Truthfully, I fell like I should have been handing out more drive tokens and you guys should have been spending them more often; I mean, you guys each wound up with about 4 or 5 experience at the end, and that didn’t seem like enough to me. That’s just a gut feeling, though; I don’t know if there’s anything to it. Also, bear in mind that you can’t actually gain a drive token from a roll that you spend one on, so it’s not exactly wagering.