Surveying Game - Second Playtest Report
Quick Second Playtest Session
After last week's playtest of our 18th Century Survey game, one of my players sent me a writeup of ideas on how to lean harder into the poker aspect of the Stewardship subsystem. He recommended that we go back to basics and treat the action resolution as a hand of Texas Hold 'Em; at first I wasn't sure if that would meet my design objectives:
- More workers applied to a task should make success more likely
- Having the right workers on the task should make success more likely
- You can overwork a hireling for an immediate benefit and pay a consequence
It put me on the right track though. I slept on it and read back through his proposals the next day and a new vision of the system completely clicked. I thought more about my design objectives and decided to reframe them:
Modified Design Objectives for Stewardship
Having the right workers on the task should make success more likely (or just skip a check)
You can incur costs for an immediate benefit and pay a consequence if things are left to fate
You have access to a finite number of workers for day-to-day tasking and part of the game should be that activity of allocation/opportunity cost
Entropy is a currency that nature can spend to make tasks more difficult or escalate the stakes for the survey team
I fiddled a little bit with the Orientation and Navigation mechanics, but I will cover those later. The core change here is that when players attempt a task, they initiate an action resolution procedure:
- The game facilitator assesses the difficulty, complexity, or risk of the task at hand and assigns a Crew Requirement. This represents the minimum number of hirelings and the sets of Functions and/or Side Interests required for the task to be successful. For many tasks, this may be the end of the procedure; if the players commit those hirelings to the task for that phase of the day, it is probably successful.
- If the task outcome is uncertain, then the facilitator deals two cards to the initiating player and two cards to themself. The player then decides whether to Ante, Bet or Fold. (The chip economy will be discussed in a moment). For tonight's session, Nature always Calls :)
- The attempted action is played out through successive betting rounds on the flop (first three community cards), the turn (fourth community card), and the river (fifth community card). The structure of this is that when one side decides to raise the stakes, the other side may Call or Fold. For players, raising the stakes means attempting to accomplish extra goals during the action or otherwise responding to new information, and thus risking time, equipment, or wellbeing. For Nature, raising the stakes means sinking Entropy into the encounter and becoming stranger.
- If the survey crew wins the hand, they are successful at the task and able to extract some form of resource from the exchange (as reflected by taking the wagered Entropy). If Nature wins the hand, then the crew is unsuccessful in the task and the wagered resources (time, equipment, and wellbeing) are lost.
An Example Case
This is actually a bad example because I shouldn't have called for a check, but I was more interested in exercising "Role Played Poker Hand" than I was in "Perfect Game Mastering".
Volan, the party mechanic, was Stressed headed into the morning of Day 4 of the expedition. As the party navigated westward, they discovered a Lake south of their bearing. Volan is something of a watercraft hobbyist, so the Steward, Kermit, allowed him to take the morning to scout out the lake and relax.
I decided that checking out the lake with the intent of reducing stress was not a sure thing - he could run into something terribly stressful and end up worse off than he started! I dealt the initiating player a hand and drew an Ace and a 2. I decided to use my same Entropy Spark Table shared last time and limited myself to entropic effects involving Gigantism (Ace) or Miniaturization (2). The player Antes, so I set the scene.
Volan makes his way to the lake's edge. The water is clear, but he thinks that it is odd for a body of water this large to be so near the meteor crater they surveyed the day before.
I deal the Flop and the player raises the bet. I see that I already have a pair in play, but I decided for this session that Nature Calls. This will probably change when I stop chuckling at it. The player explains that he is going to do some poking around and investigating, potentially losing time in the day, before he relaxes for the morning.
As he peers into the crystal waters, Volan is excited to see fish this close to shore! But they aren't fish...they're tadpoles. The size of his forearms. He mentally scales the size of these larvae to an appropriately-sized frog and does not lose his nerve.
The player is still confident in his hand, so he raises again as I deal the Turn. I am still at one pair, but I continue to Call.
Volan goes looking for more information about the tadpoles, finding a reedy part of the shore replete with tall grasses. He happens upon a clutch of translucent eggs the size of softballs with visibly vibrating embryos. He is ecstatic! People back in First Pier would surely treat these as a delicacy if he could get one back to the city intact, but he doesn't have a way to keep it moist. Unwilling to take the time or resources to make a tank or enclosure, he stops and remembers to look for signs of whatever laid these eggs.
At this point I've decided that he will only encounter the mama frog if he loses the hand, so I narrate that he sees large depressions in the soft soil but nothing more. I deal the River and see a 2; I have two pair! We reveal our hands, and the player shows three of a kind. The hand, and four of my hard earned Entropy, are his.
Seeing no sign of an amphibious parent, Volan eyes one of the eggs like an enormous dollop of caviar and decides he has to try it. He bites into a rich yolk sac and feels his stress melt away. He makes note of the location and returns to the survey crew with a skip in his step.
Analysis
So what worked about this? The players and I very much enjoyed seeing the narrative stakes of the action/interaction evolve as the hireling risked more and more time at the lakeside. On the other hand, I hadn't formalized my mental model of how to account for things like time, wellbeing, and gear so the player probably felt like he was playing with the casino's chips. We will talk about this more in a moment. Hand resolution took a while; I think one of my unstated objectives going into the first draft of this subsystem was for resolution to be a speedy affair, but I very much enjoyed the gamefeel.
One idea that I had going into this test was that, if the players had hirelings attempting multiple tasks during the same phase of the day, then each group of hirelings would be dealt a hand in the same round of poker. I think that would speed things up and collapse all actions for a Morning or Afternoon phase into a single task resolution. We didn't test this because of another tweak that I tried, but I want to revisit it next time.
Chip Economy
When I sketched this idea out over Discord this past Monday, my vision was that the players' wagers would be somewhat abstract against nature's Entropy chips. That vision sucked! I wear glasses for a reason! My math teacher player had the insight that our atomic hirelings should have intrinsic chips that reflect their current wellbeing. Something like 2-3 chips; if they have a full stack, they're healthy. If they're missing one, they're stressed or injured. If you bet a hireling's last chip, then they are Critical and will desert or die if they don't heal. This makes total sense and can be visually reflected at the table. I made index cards for each of the hirelings and tossed some poker chips on each one, bam the players have a visual indicator of how their person power is looking.
This also immediately clarifies how to track crew resources over time. Make another index card for the wagon, throw a stack of chips onto it, and that's your gear and raw materials at a glance. Every Night phase, discard a chip from the wagon for every, like, 5 people in the crew and now you're showing attrition for feeding hungry mouths. If you find a deposit of materials in the survey, that's chips for the wagon if you can safely harvest them.
On the Nature side of the house, I probably need to speed up Entropy generation. The party was averaging about 1-2 Entropy per stargazing phase. This is probably insufficient and worth amping up, or at least tuning. Zak H also talked about a framing where there's the moment-to-moment budget of Entropy available for betting vs something more like a clock that tracks overall strangeness as the survey wears on.
Other Tweaks From Tonight
Orientation
I tried a version of the Orientation/Stargazing minigame where I dealt the five cards facedown and had the Astronomer flip one card at a time. They could perform the same suit change operation at any time to drive the sum of the constellation to zero, and I offered that they could treat any unflipped cards as cards-in-hand for the rest of the day. They flipped a 10 of Diamonds and a King of Hearts, so they incurred an Entropy and kept the remaining three cards in hand for the rest of the day.
I stand by the idea that this is a cool mechanic, but it kind of sucked in play. I like cards in hand/up sleeves, but I let the players basically treat the three cards as a stock to swap from during task resolution and it made tasks too reliable in their words, not even mine. Maybe there's something else that can be done with this, I want to fiddle around more with constellations and horoscopes for this game, but it needs more time in the oven. The players expressed a preference to go back to the first version of Orientation, so I'll oblige.
Navigation
Navigation was mostly unchanged. The biggest change here is that now any doubles are "encountered", but the number of cards drawn in between the doubles represent how far off of your bearing the feature is encountered. Thus, in our example above, the party discovered a lake south of their current bearing. What that means is that they drew double 8s during navigation, but there were four or so cards in between the 8s, so the lake was something like a quarter mile south of the survey line. In the same navigation check, they drew double Jacks right next to one another. Jacks are a herd of sheep, so the party had to deal with navigating through a herd of grazing sheep. Low stakes, but if their Animal Husbandry hireling hadn't been busy with other matters, they could have wrangled some of them for a cattle drive back to the city.
I like this update. The original version was too finnicky to determine when something should be a sign, spoor, or encounter. I think you could easily make the GMing call of whether to turn a monster encounter into a sign because there are six cards in between your double Aces.
Next Round
I feel good about a lot of the updates we came through in tonight's test. We only played through a day of survey time, so about four linear miles, but it felt like we exercised some new ideas.
I want to take another crack at simultaneous action resolution so that multiple players can be in the same hand of cards, but it'll take a little bit of thinking to figure out how the betting should work. I think it's narratively consonant. If you have multiple groups of people trying to do tasks in the same local region, Nature's immune system is going to give them both the business! Maybe it'll take some judgment calls on when to combine hands and when not to; I think it would help with the Entropy chip economy too.
Let me know what you think!