This is a looooong overdue post. Back in January of 08, I had the pleasure of playstorming my game Sign in Stranger with John, Jason, Jim and Eppy. The session went well, and gave me a lot of suggestions that I’ve incorporated into playtests and version of the game I’ve worked on since then. At Dreamation last week, I did two more playtests of the game using a set of mechanics that fixed a lot of the problems I still had. It made me realize how much I’d gained from my playstorm session, and just how darn long it’s taken to finish up this game! I think I’ve turned the last few corners of design, so this is both a playstorm report and a catch up on some fixes I’ve found to problems I was still dealing with last year.
In Sign in Stranger, you play humans starting small colonies alien planets never before visited by humankind. Earth has come into contact with other species by accident, exposed to a horrendous plague whose only cure is an inoculation that means you can never return to Earth. A one-way ticket into the unknown.
Truly alien
Part of the goal of this game is to get away from a common phenomen in science fiction: having all aliens you encounter speak English and resemble humans with strange ears or bumpy eye-ridges. The world your human colonists choose to settle on is described by the players as they go along. You use a mad-libs-like mechanics to simulate experience of wierd and unknowable alien world. The goal of the colonists is to explore the world and learn about it, and as you have your character investigate things like what to eat or what their host species’ religious practices are, you draw a random word that will be used to inspire the description. The game is meant for long-term play, coordinated by the investigations. These become story lines that may escalate into problems for colonists to deal with.
This was a late term playtest for the game. I was looking to tune mechanics rather than to come up with whole new systems. The game requires a lot of set up. It’s a good investment for a long-term game, but can be daunting for a one-shot game.
You saw what?
The mad-libs nature of describing the world can make for some loopy juxtapositions. The game can range from knee-slapping silly to disturbing. When I played with ISS, we had one of those scary/disturbing experiences due to the nature of the world. We chose to go to a world that had invasive, telepathic communication. And it turned out that this species had no secrets. The form that took was memory boxes, scattered all over the living spaces. When you opened them you experienced someone else’s memory. Jason’s character opened one and was overwhelmed by witnessing the death of a planet. We wanted to keep playing, I think just to try to put some reason into this experience. Why would a species organize their world this way? What did it mean? Was it a massive experiment to spread around good and bad memories to help people share and cope? Or to forget? Or were we just watching their equivalent of television?
The characters have flashbacks to their life on Earth during the game. Though, we didn’t do too many flashbacks this time, but I think I’m finding that just a few can set a nice tone. You have one whenever your character got overwhelmed and panicked due to the strangeness around them. You may also choose to have one to set yourself up to have an advantage in an investigation or conflict. The real point is to create a narrative made up of the character’s past, which will slowly shed light on their present, just as their investigations lead them to learn more about the world around them. In this game, we slipped into a bit of a larp. We acted out a scene where Jason’s character got the news that his cancer was terminal, a fairly traumatic incident where he faced down his doctor who had been avoiding him, in a public restaurant. This was follow-up to Jason’s character finding the devastating memory in the box. John played the offending Doctor, who didn’t have time to break the news properly. It was an explosive scene, and we ended the session on it, I believe.
New Mechanics
Some great changes we came up with at the Playstorm helped me figure out how to coordinate the shared nature of the game. There is no gm to ask what the world looks like so we took turn asking questions of someone else about world. You asked about some aspect of the world, and said what your character did (maybe that order should be reversed, hmm..) and then chose someone to describe what you saw. This has turned out to be an amazing feature of the game. It sets the tone for collaboration, and once you understand the flow, people get into the groove of asking one another and the world builds very organically. Being very clear about what people can describe is a challenge in the game however–they are only saying what the colonists can see, hear, taste, touch etc. And explanations are purely theoretical. You have to put the dice on the table and roll, risking injury sometimes, but also opening the way to become more a part of the world, or to make connections between the things that you see around you.
What dice do you put on the table? In the two playtests at Dreamation we used a set of dice mechanics inspired by Vincent Baker’s Otherkind dice and Chris Moore and Michael Ligner’s Psi-Run, which had some great adaptations of Vincent’s mechanic. To that I added elements of Epidiah Ravachol’s Time and Temp. So when you want to nail down what something your character has experienced, you put dice into various categories, which you get a base die for and bonus dice based on whether you have help, your skills and trainings apply to the investigation and so on. I’ve been thinking for several years (!!) that this is the kind of mechanic I needed, but it was talking to Eppy about Time & Temp that finally put it into place. He uses different die sizes as you negotiate about what the character does and how it affects the world. Using different die sizes based on the resources you call upon opened up depth and complexity into the die rolling–yet the few categories are clear and so the whole process is still fairly simple. Whew!
Final Fixes
A question I was left with after this Playstorm was how to deal with character assimilation into the new world. This is an important part of the story, both as a cultural process of learning about the new world, but also as a physical change that occurs. For the longest time, I couldn’t seem to get a grip on exactly when it should happen. When you get injured? When a plot point happens? When you choose to? Maybe a mix? When it happens will have a big effect on the type of story you get from the game. If it happens all the time, what does that do to the pacing of the game? It might turn it into a short story of humans going native. But if too long, does that slow the pace interminably? That has now been answered for me. Assimilation is another category you can roll on when you interact with the world. You may also change and assimilate due to injuries. Either way, you progress over time, slowly changing and becoming more a part of the world.
The final piece that fell into place was how to deal with story lines. In a recent longer playtest, we worked through one group investigation about what humans could eat, over the course of two months. The players didn’t have a clear enough understanding of how the investigations structured the game, though. I was still working on how to incorporate all of that information into log books the players had to record their character’s discoveries. At the Dreamation playtests, we just took notes on small sheets or pieces of paper. Everybody took turns, so it didn’t fall to one person. Then over time, we learned more about the things we’d seen, and use symbols to label what area (botany, zoology, etc) they fell into. These can later be downloaded into a notebook if desired. Piece by piece, the world will be shaped and formed.
Now to work on a final playtest draft. Thanks so much for setting me on the right path, ISS!
