Playtest of Thieves/Pilgrims/Pillars...fuck this game needs a NAME

Crossposted at Story Games.

Pilgrims to Ruin/Thieves at the Temple game, fast and blazing with rolls driving the fiction in a super crazy way, they snowballed like whoa. I was very pleased about that.

Personal highlights:
*when they tried to fight off the ghoul-dogs in the desert and realized they're too cowardly to stand and fight
*when Abas the Poet realized he would have to leave his companion behind if he wanted to fight through the scorpion-men to reach the water well
*when they claimed and received entry to the Necropolis
*when I realized that the game was doing Vincent's "the purpose of an rpg's rules is to create the unwelcome and the unwanted in the game's fiction" to the hilt - the players cried "you're a dick! you're a dick for designing this game!" and I laughed

Things I learned anew:
*Even if "failure" is constant, I felt there was little real threat to the characters, although this was absolutely not true from their side. Not sure what to make of this yet.
*I'm not sure about the replayability of the game. The way things are now, it loses a lot after the first play. But the players said they wanted to play again, so maybe I'm wrong.
*I will probably have to loosen up the premise. As it is it's extremely tight and feels almost like a minigame, missing a larger context.
*It needs more incentives for roleplaying, which probably means my agenda of removing all NPCs will have to be discarded...but I don't want to do that so I need something to encourage inter-player roleplay.
*I have learned how to better communicate the game.

Oh, and another thing, they tried to hold on to their Beauty, hard. They were extremely reluctant to discard it, so maybe I'm doing something wrong there. It makes sense to keep on to your Beauty, but I wanted them to spend more of it. Boh.

Comments

  1. Just remembered what I wanted to suggest about this thing, related to us holding on to our beauty like hell. Put a few "do or die" sites in to the game. Really challenging encounters, areas, traps, whatever, where if you fail your roll your character dies, game over. Just make sure to remind the DM to properly describe the scene, so that the players get that proper sense of danger.

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