Across the Endless Sea: Second Playtest (#5)

So, the initial playtest with my housemates had proved that the game, at the most basic level, worked.

The resolution mechanism was functional; the game produced interesting play; and the flavor of it was interesting to a group of people broader than just me.

I took away the feedback from people and made several changes: some major, some minor.

Being able to ask too many questions when investigating encounters was breaking the game a little - allowing players to work out a plan that would certainly succeed rather than having to take chances – so I revised the number down. The wording of some of the moves was confusing; as was the layout of the moves on the sheet.

There was also a request for more substantial information about the People, which was coupled with an observation I made during the game: not having all the choices made about the People centrally listed was slowing play.

So, I also created a playbook for the People as a whole, intended to be printed A3 to everything else’s A4.

It has space to record choices made about the People; a list of evocative names (drawn in equal parts from proto-Indo-European syllables and Pacific Islander cultures); some basic details about the technology levels and beliefs of the People; and a listing of the twelve months of the People’s journey and their traditional names (for flavor).

Thus armed, I was ready for a second playtest.

I was lucky enough to get in contact with EricVulgaris of Once Upon a Game, a Twitch show that streams storygames and indie RPGs, who kindly agreed to host a playtest.

Eric was a phenomenal to play alongside, as was our third player, and if you’d like to see the tragedy we unfolded you can watch it here.

Some really useful feedback came out of the session, as did a deepening confidence in the game seeing how enthused two experienced storygamers were by what we created as a group and the way that the system facilitated that.

Unsurprisingly, one major piece of advice was that the game needed to include mapping.

Storygamers seem to really love their maps. I think the craze might have started with Avery’s The Quiet Year, but I don’t know the scene well enough to be sure. Regardless, they were right about the coolness of mapping the People’s voyage and so that advice is now in the game.

The session also highlighted the importance of reincorporation to the game, and so I’m now slowly building a “player advice” document to help ensure groups have the best experience.

What really became clear during the session, though, was the issue of timing.

I’d written the game originally to assume 12 – 24 encounters per game, but what both playtests had made clear was that encounters take far too long for that to be viable. Even playing with just 3 players, we only made it through about 6 encounters over the course of 3 hours. Of course, that includes a bunch of extra time costs unique to doing a Twitch show, but still.

Something had to give.

So the year-long journey is now a half-year, meaning there are five standard encounters (one each for the first five months, which also allows every player to take a turn as the Endless Sea) plus an extra three: one for the Voice’s choice of what has changed since the People last made the voyage; one for the Eyes’ choice of what sign reveals that the People are coming close to their destination; and one for the Hands’ choice of the final challenge that awaits the People.

Eight encounters seems like a much more manageable number, and the option to play an extra encounter per month is still preserved if a group really wants to settle in for a long game.

Of course, this was all theory. It needed testing, to check that the game could fit into 3 hours.

Luckily, my workmates and I had a PD trip coming up and an evening set aside to play a game of some kind that they agreed I could commandeer…

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Of Children, Dungeon World, and Playing Fair

This blog has been fairly quiet of late, because for the last month and a half or so the only RPG-related stuff I’ve been doing has been at work (or working on a game for an upcoming convention, but I'll talk about that later). 

And I always feel weird posting about my work, for several reasons.

It feels too much like boasting, for one – I’m sure there’s any number of amazing designers and GMs who would kill to have a job that’s RPG-adjacent. Then there’s always the imposter syndrome, the fear that talking about my work is either boring to everyone else or that I’m not qualified to draw anything out of my experiences at work.

And always, of course, is there’s the privacy concern: for me, and more importantly for the kids.

But after thinking (and blogging) for a while I think I’ve found a line I’m comfortable with in terms of privacy. And the last frantic fortnight of GMing 10-hour days has spawned all kinds of thoughts I think are interesting enough to share.

While I work on the more theory-heavy stuff (including the next installments of my series on GMing for Children), there’s a quick story I want to tell.

***

So, for the last fortnight the kids and I spent our lunchtimes playing Dungeon World.

The actual programs we run are played using a custom system that combines LARP combat, improvisational theatre, and tabletop gaming, but starting in the first week I found the kids begging me to run freeform Dungeon World instead of taking a break from gaming.

No dice, no character sheets, nothing but our imaginations and my best memory of the mechanics.

And even though these kids are doing a lot of roleplaying, both within each day and over the course of the fortnight for those who are regulars, they were still hungry and keen for it every day.

And so, we played Dungeon World.

It started with one of the older kids, who’s most invested in systems and the mechanics of RPGs. We’ve been chatting about Powered by the Apocalypse games for a while, and he’s even tried writing his own.

He was telling me about a recent failure running Dungeon World for his friends as I diagnosed his issues (he was running just with the free sheets from the website, without reading the GMing chapter of DW or Apocalypse World), and to prove a point I started GMing it for him.

Incredibly free, incredibly casual: making decisions about stats and equipment as they became relevant and just having a conversation in the most Powered by the Apocalypse way possible.

It took us five minutes before a single move was even made (which served to prove my initial point).

By then, though, we’d attracted a crowd. Other kids were piping in with their desire to play, and soon where we’d had a single character we had a party. Over the course of the fortnight, numbers swelled until I had to limit the numbers of characters in the party and kids had to work together to play people.

The point of this story, though, the part of it that’s interesting, is the mechanics.

As I mentioned above, we were playing freeform. We only had the mechanics and sheets in my memory, and so we ended up playing in some ways the purest form of DW: players simply describing actions, with me activating moves when their triggers came up.

But we didn’t have any dice.

Whenever a roll needed to be made, I simply told the kids their modifiers and asked the player/s to tell me what they rolled. It was the usual 2d6 + MOD, but all the randomization and math was going on in their heads.

One might expect that there was a string of 10+s, that failures vanished as they learned the thresholds.

I’ll be honest: at first, I had the same fear. When we talk about children and RPGs, the discussion is always framed by unstated assumptions about maturity and fairness: the belief that children will have issues with consequences, or with failures, or with randomness giving rise to differences in reward and difficulty.

And yet the failures never disappeared. The partial successes never disappeared.

From start to finish, the statistical probability was pretty much the same as on a set of dice (perhaps slightly skewed towards success, but then I was more generous with bonuses). In fact, if anything there was an increase over time in their willingness to embrace danger or failure.

All of this surprised me.

I’ve been GMing for children for a decade now, seven of those years professionally, and still, I was surprised: by their ability to play fair without an external arbiter; by their willingness to embrace failure and consequence; by their openness to pushing towards difficulty as an interesting and desirable outcome.

And I think, as I work on more articles on GMing for children, that all this is very important to remember both for me and for my readers.

Playing fair and embracing failure aren’t limited to adults.

And children are often far more capable than you give them credit for.

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If you'd like to support me to keep creating material like this and working on other RPG/game-design projects, check out my Patreon to help me do more cool stuff and get access to monthly Q&As, early-access playtesting of my story games, or a place on the credits list for any game I make).