I facilitated a playtest of Geiger Counter at Gamestorm last weekend. Our game had four players and was almost exactly three hours long, including set up time. Jonathan was kind enough to send me an updated playtest document before hand, so we were playing with rules that were slightly different from those linked above (unless he's changed the version that it links to). Here's a brief summary and some comments/concerns/questions that arose:
Here's our movie: Title: Diamonds In The Sky Menace: Aliens (Eventually established as giant spiders with clawed tentacles that injected hundreds of eggs into their victims). Location: Asteroid Mining Facility Directorial Style: Artsy, High Budget Sci-Fi (Our prime directive was "Like the movie Sunshine, only good.")
The book recommends around 12 total characters, with 6-7 central protagonists; as you can see, we went a little past those numbers. This came out of a desire on my part for everyone to be "equal" starting out, but I honestly think that it was a mistake. Eight characters meant that there were more scenes with different characters in them, which meant that Conditions were being acquired more slowly and characters were taking longer to die. The increased number of available Survival Dice didn't seem to affect anything, since there were lots of deaths that had no witnesses, but the slowed rate of death actually made things really tough on the Menace. Several bad rolls in a row took the Menace from 8 dice to 5 very quickly in the middle of the game, and if a bunch of the characters hadn't turned on each other in the last hour or so, then there would probably have been four or five survivors instead of just the one that we ended up with. I think that 6 is really the way to go, although it might work okay to have more if you increased the dice cap on the Menace to maybe 10 for a group of 8 main characters. In fact, that's probably the one thing I'd like to take a good look at: adjusting the Menace cap and Advantage Dice up or down to accommodate a larger or smaller cast.
Speaking of Advantage Dice, that's probably the thing that seemed most off to me in our game. One character managed to acquire 7 of the 10 available Advantage Dice and basically became unstoppable half-way through the game. I think there should be a limit to either how many portable Advantage Dice a single character can have or (this is what we eventually implemented) there should be a cap on the number of Advantage Dice a single character can roll in a given conflict, based on the judgment of the group around what a character could realistically do with the items at hand.
The group loved the opening setup material, with the casting of the movie and making the trailer. Prepping for the game is as fun as playing it! Casting the characters gave us a really clear view of who they were, too, and it's something I may very well start doing in many of my other games as well.
The group also liked the Secret Goals (6 of 8 characters had them), but none of them actually got accomplished due to either the object of the goal going away (such as the Naive Android being killed before it could be seduced) or because characters died or because other characters stopped them from accomplishing them. We also had a couple of scenes where the Menace and a PC cooperated against another PC, and it actually worked pretty well.
We occasionally had a little trouble keeping track of characters, even with the map and markers. Sometimes someone would frame a character into a scene without us really giving a plausible transition from where he or she had been before. Overall, it didn't diminish our enjoyment of the game, but it was slightly jarring at times. I think if we'd had fewer characters, that might have been easier too.
One question we had was how to deal with ties. The method we went with was to compare top 3 dice (or top 4 if the top 3 matched); if you didn't have a 3rd (or 4th) die, then it counted as a 0. The other method I considered was to simply have the Menace win all ties, but an option for PC v. PC would still be needed if you went with that.
We had one survivor (the Environmental Activist), who got off in an escape pod and the Infected Condition while one other character blew up the asteroid. There was 1 Menace die left, so we narrated an epilogue of the survivor's escape pod being rescued by a passing ship. When they opened the doors, she looked at them and said, "They're an endangered species, you know..." at which point the aliens boiled out of the pod to begin their terror anew.
One player (coincidentally, the one who owned the final survivor) mentioned that she felt a pretty strong competitive streak arise in her as she played the game, which occasionally caused her some annoyance when it felt like people were targeting one of her characters repeatedly. She also said that if she'd been aware it would arise, she would have been able to distance herself a little more and care a little less, but it might be something to note as well. Some people do gravitate towards strong character ownership, even in a game where they know that the characters are likely to die.
So, that's basically it. If you have any specific questions or you'd like a full write-up of the story as it occurred then I'll provide what I can. Everyone had a really good time. As one player put it, "You might be able to tweak things slightly, but there's nothing here that doesn't work as written. I would pay money for this game as it currently stands."
I'm really psyched you folks played it and had a great time, Lukas! I just posted the updated draft up here (PDF), so other folks can check it out.
Yeah, I've found that when I run the game with more than 6-7 protagonists, things slow way down. You're right on the money that 6 is the ideal number of main characters (and players too, really), but I was trying to offer a little bit more leeway. I should probably include a note saying that, if you have more than 6 main characters, adding a die or two to the menace is probably a good idea. Then again, there is a degree of luck involved. Sometimes the menace rolls really well and kills everyone, which happened in the last playtest I ran ("Zombapocalypse: Boston"). When the monster seems weak, focusing on Goals (which usually create inter-character conflicts) is a good way to weaken the protagonists sufficiently so the final fight with the monster is more balanced. Honestly, at this point I'm not sure if I need to alter the mechanics to make the pacing more railroaded, because I think relying on play groups to adjust their play to suit the kind of pacing they want seems to work pretty well.
Wow, having one character acquire all the Advantage Dice definitely ruins it for everyone else. Were they really able to use that many dice all at the same time? We're always used a "logic cap" on rolling handfuls of dice. For example, when that kind of hoarding started happening in our games, players quickly figured out that they, for example, needed both hands to wield a chainsaw and, therefore, couldn't use the rocket launcher (or whatever) at the same time. So if one player grabs all the Advantage Dice and can't really use more than a couple at a time, it just makes the entire group more vulnerable to the menace, since it always rolls all of its dice.
Glad the casting and trailer worked well for you. How many of the scenes from the trailer managed to actually show up in your game? This has been pretty variable for us.
Yeah, having Goals about mooks is much less interesting, because they don't cause conflict between the chief protagonists. I should probably make a note of that. The whole point of Goals is that you should have to roll against another character, in a conflict, to achieve them, and you can't be involved in conflicts with mooks.
Losing track of characters has occasionally happened to us too, usually in really large groups. Often times, before framing the next scene, the scene framer will take stock of the situation by asking, "So where are you? And what conditions do you have? Where were you going and what were you trying to do?" This definitely helps a bunch. In fact, it might be helpful to jot down a character's intentions when a scene ends, so when you pick up their story in a later scene, you can easily remember what they were up to (something else to add to the rules).
In ties, both sides lose, gaining a condition or, in the case of a tie against the menace, losing a Menace Die. This makes sure people die faster. I pretty sure that's in the version of the rules I sent you, but maybe it needs to be emphasized more, since it sounds like you missed it.
You epilogue sounds sweet. Nice work.
I think different groups have reacted to the "character ownership" issues you mentioned in different ways. Eben, who played an evil infected robot in a session I ran, said something like "This is a story game. It's about every player working for the good of the overall story, not for the survival of their own character." I think this is definitely the best way to approach it, but that can be a bit counter-intuitive in the survival horror genre, where each character is struggling to survive. My best advice to players, when I've run it recently, is to say: "The goal of the group is for at least one character to survive. This may require your character to be sacrificed so that others can live." Still, I think Eben's approach gives the play group the most control over pacing and ends up making better movies, because you can decide "What would be the coolest thing to have happen now? Oh, clearly my character needs to get eaten by a giant shark!" without really considering whether that's a tactically smart thing to do.
Thanks, Jonathan. I found the tie rule that you mention; I definitely wish I'd caught it the first time around! I recall us having at least 4 or 5 ties, and I think the Menace only won one of them using the 3rd & 4th die rule that I mentioned above. Things would definitely have been deadlier earlier on if I'd gotten that right.
I think we had somewhere in the area of 12-14 trailer cards, and we used more than half of them. Some of the ones that come to mind that we used are "Two people in vac suits, their faces lit by brilliant green light", "A woman walking past a grating is yanked into the ductwork", "A massive explosion with slow-motion fire spewing everywhere", "A satchel full of diamonds", "A ship crash-landing on the asteroid", and "The walls and floor of the infirmary covered in blood."
I think you're spot-on about how the secret goals should be linked to protagonist conflicts, and it should definitely be emphasized in the text. Of our six goals, I think two were directly linked to two protagonists duking it out, and they were the only ones that really took center stage in the game and caused trouble for the group (particularly "Make sure the Environmental Activist dies in an "accident"). Others could have lead to character conflicts (like, "Steal all the survey data from the facility's computers") but could just as easily have been accomplished unopposed.
I generally take the top two dice rolled, period, so that would give them an 11. Your method is interesting, though. I might try that out. The only concern I have is that it makes it more difficult to beat or tie the menace when the menace is rolling all 8 of its dice.