thread: 2011-10-03 : Murderous Ghosts playtest
On 2011-10-10, jenskot wrote:
I sold the game concept to a friend who has never GMed and only played 1 RPG ever. She agreed to GM.
Unfortunately she gave up after 10 minutes.
I tried to study what was going on as best I could. And asked a few neutral questions after to understand what the issues were. As best as I can tell, it felt too overwhelming.
She started reading the "TO PLAY" section. The part that said "Your job is to create an unexplained terrifying experience for yourself, and leave troubling unanswered questions" caused her anxiety. The word "your job" felt like a lot of pressure. And "create an unexplained terrifying experience" sounded simultaneously too big and too vague.
She then moved on to the "USE THIS BOOK" section. This completely confused her. I LOVE that in the MC book, all the page numbers are odd now (and even in the player book). This made playing the game much easier. But when she read that the top number was "all odd numbers", she had no idea what the context was. It was confusing but she didn't blame the text for being vague but blamed herself for not getting it. Causing more anxiety. She skipped pass most of this section.
Then she moved onto the "THE PLAYER'S DRAW" section. This made things worse for her. It was a lot of information that didn't relate to her job or responsibilities. She was still waiting to read something that would calm her anxieties... something that would tell her in easy steps how to do her job.
She moved to the "YOUR DRAW" page. She drew the card face down into her hand but was confused. In most cards, face down would go on the table, not into your hand. If she held them face down in her hand, the face of the cards would face the other player which seemed weird. Then when she read "whenever the other player moves closer to her eventual escape, draw another card..." she assumed that this happened whenever she wanted, not dictated by the game rules themselves (which isn't the case). The section ends with, "for complete details, see 3 and 23 in the book". So she flipped to 3. It starts with the words, "CORE LOOP", she got even more confused, and her anxiety increased.
She flipped back to the "BEFORE PLAY" section. This repeats some of the info in the previous "YOU DRAW" page. It says to draw a card into your hand again, so she ended up drawing 2 cards.
We were then about to start and she said, "I can't do this."
We then played Dungeon World, no problem. Most of the info on the Dungeon World / Apocalypse World style character sheets didn't confuse her at all. Partly I think it is because she didn't feel alone in using them.
