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[Durance] Playtests are winding down!
Bully Pulpit Games is in the process of playtesting Durance, a game about the intersection of savagery, servility and human weakness. I've got enough playtesters now, so thank you to everyone who has expressed enthusiasm for this project. Anyway, here's the pitch:
Far beyond the edge of civilization lies an indifferent planet orbiting a dying K-type main sequence star. A hurried initial survey pronounced it habitable. This evidence, plus its great distance from anything of worth or note, made it an ideal candidate for a penal colony.If you agreed to try Durance, please get a game in between now and 30 November and let me know how it goes. The playtest document includes 16 questions I'm particularly curious about. Thanks!
There would, politicians reasoned, be no need for walls. Escape would be impossible. Convicts would, in building their new home, rebuild themselves. They would thrive or they would perish, and it was all one to the people who sent them.
And the men and women sent to mind them? Anyone willing to accept such an assignment was probably best forgotten as well.
1500 convicts and 300 officials, civilians, Marines and hangers-on comprised the first colonists. The journey took 250 days.
The survey was wrong.
Comments
So... It's 3:16 meets the Stanford Prison Experiment.
No idea if that's accurate.
Jesse
Shame.
If you have any special notes or directions for people playing in a one-shot situation, please post them. (I haven't read through the full text yet, it may all be there, for all I know. But if it's not, here's a good place!)
Looking forward to trying this!
Scouts Honour!!
It was a very interesting group of people to play with, one player wanting to play extremely positive characters and another being an older guy, a first time storygamer who did toastmaster competitions and was really great to play with. Setup takes a while since there is a fair amount of discussion in the worldbuilding stage, but it was fun. And it's difficult to tell and how to pace the game, my feeling being that it's probably ideal for playing 2 or three 4 hour session long games or one longer game. In the two player game we were more able to play to our time limit and bring the story to a resolution in a single session, but it was more difficult to telegraph a focus in the story to the other players in the bigger game.
Also, for some reason no one ended up betraying their oaths in the 5 player game I played, which could probably be solved with more agressive scen framing questions. I think people were still trying to establish the plot and all the characters before they felt ready to start bringing them down. Again, since a lot of the first session is spent with world building I think playing a two or three session game would help push over that hurdle as well, giving people more time to get figure out the game and characters. I really like the game Jason and I'll let you know when I play it again!
Pacing is something I'm really interested in so your feedback on that is valuable. I'm spending a lot of time in the rules trying to inculcate the right expectations about it, but it is heavily influenced by group dynamics as well.
I had 37 people respond affirmatively that they would playtest Durance within a 60-day window. Of these, 10 groups consisting of 48 individuals have played and reported back - a pretty good response rate. Two facilitators have hosted multiple sessions, and you guys (Orion and Piers) are the b-bomb.
It's been an interesting process for me. I've tried a disciplined approach. I asked fairly pointed questions of the playtesters, and I've methodically dissected each report, breaking out cogent items that I can address and resolve in the game text, as well as larger design issues. The biggest problems get repeated across multiple blind tests. These get broken down into four categories (clarify this, design decision, layout issue, and new idea) and knocking them down one by one has been really productive.
Science hat on!
New thread to explore your ideas?