thread: 2011-10-03 : Murderous Ghosts playtest
On 2011-10-04, jenskot wrote:
We played again, I GMed this time. It went almost an hour!
The game ended with Terry escaping / winning, after I drew my 5th card (after the 4th card, I had 3 suits).
Terry busted at least 5 times, lots of Low hand results and I believe 2 High hands.
We kept looping back to player page 17. Which confused Terry at first with the starting text, "the ghost expects you to fit yourself into its story". Most other player pages say things like "you do this but...". Where this was odd in play. She busted on page 17 at least twice which tells you, "do not ask the GM what this ghost expects you to do next" and then it doesn't prompt either the player or GM to turn to any specific pages or to do anything specifically. After some awkwardness, I figured that the intent was for us to roleplay back and forth till a specific mechanic was triggered on my original page.
There were also at least one point where it wasn't instantly clear who is turning to a specified page. I believe it was in the player book. Usually it says, "tell the GM to turn to X" but I think there was a spot where it says, "Tell the GM to do X, and to turn to Y." Going back to it, it was clear. But in the heat of play (especially scary play), we first misread this as telling the player to turn to a specific page. We didn't make that mistake but it was a point of temporary confusion.
After 30 minutes we were frustrated and a little worried the game was caught in a loop. I think part of the problem was that Terry didn't commit to 1 type of action. She didn't keep trying to escape. Sometimes she interacted with the ghost, sometimes she attacked it, often she tried to escape, 1 time she went backwards. Part of this was my fault. I describe victims that the Ghost was doing horrible things to, which kept giving Terry reasons to hesitate and consider helping them or finding out more.
In the end, both of us had chills. The story we experienced was brutal.
I would love to see this run by someone who has never roleplayed before. I will possibly find out this Saturday.
