Sons of Liberty “Pre-Alpha” Playtest!
Wednesday, December 20th, 2006Last night Mark, Judson, Jim, and I got together to give the chassis of Sons of Liberty a whirl. Since the game works in some pretty odd ways (more on that later), I wanted to test out some mechanics at a much earlier stage than I might normally start kicking the tires. The situation creation and the basic card mechanics were my primary concerns, and both got a thorough road test.
For context, Sons of Liberty is intended to be a pick-up-and-play game that can be whipped out at the drop of a hat. It can be played in one session, requires no prep, and has pseudo-pregen characters. The setting is familiar (the American Revolution) with the setting tweaks (clockworks, ornithopters, laser cannons) embedded in the rules so they get incorporated without having to read large chunks of setting material. The premise, in short, is America’s Founding Fathers kicking ass and taking names – as literally as possible. An early tagline for the game is, “If you are playing Ben Franklin and you aren’t clearing the cobblestone streets of redcoats by swinging an electrified kite over your head, you’re playing it wrong.”
Situation Creation
The first stage of the game – before character creation and before picking the Tory Player (pseudo-but-not-really-GM) – is to generate the situation for the current session. Each session has three primary objectives and one secret objective. Each is created by filling out a mad libs-like sentence by pulling words off of a chart, determined by card draws. The format goes “The Sons of Liberty must (verb) (object) in (location) (preposition) the British (verb) (object).” So you draw a 10 of Clubs and see that its verb is “improve” and then you draw a 6 of Spades and look up its object, “Tories” and so on, until you get something like “The Sons of Liberty must improve Tories before the British buy a good wife.”
Because these randomly-generated objectives can get a little arcane, all the players portray the 33rd degree grand masters of the Sons of Liberty in this phase, calling on their expertise and connections to unravel the meaning and significance behind the objectives. So a brief in-character dialogue later, the players could take the above and spin it out to, “Well, I’m from Virginia and I can tell you that the Tory mayor there has a wife who’s having an illicit affair. He doesn’t know, but the British do. We intercepted some intelligence on this. We believe they’re going to blackmail either him or his wife to ensure their loyalty. Of course we can’t let that happen.”
You do this three times over to get three objectives for the session (the fourth secret objective comes in later). I’ve also got a little webpage that can generate objectives on its own.
So because this is, well, a little kooky, I was concerned it might not fly. This bit worked marvelously, though, providing instant entertainment around the table, getting everybody in the madcap nature of the game, and creating a situation in less than ten minutes. Players immediately got into narrating their “expertise” by making stuff up on the fly, although I did sort of play moderator here, which should not be necessary; I want the thing to run itself through this stage.
Selecting Figures
After the objectives are determined, players pick Figures to play. Now by the rules, everybody draws a card and goes in card order, highest to lowest, picking either a Patriot Figure to play or decides to become the Tory Player. If it gets to the lowest card holder and there’s no Tory Player, they must be the Tory Player. For playtesting purposes, I skipped that this time around and simply volunteered to play the Tories. Mark selected the Marquis de Lafayette, Judson picked the Martin Women (two lady spies who masqueraded as men), and Jim grabbed Paul Revere.
Character generation also follows the mad libs theme. Each Figure has two specialty suits and a list of favored circumstances. The four suits correspond to four flavors of narration; hearts are patriotic, diamonds are station, clubs are clever, and spades are unorthodox. Each Figure is grossly typed by which two suits are their specialties. Favored circumstances are things like “when riding” or “in Congress” or “with George Washington.” The Patriot sheet is about eight lines long and explains the rules in shorthand, with blanks for slotting in suits and circumstances.
So the Marquis de Lafayette ended up looking like this:
I am playing Marquis de Lafayette.
I normally have a hand of four cards.
I have a hand of five cards when evading pursuit
I can draw a new hand when being French.
I can claim a joker when laughing in the face of danger.
I can call for diamonds (station) when spending money.
I can always play single spade (unorthodox) cards.
I’ll get to how all that works in a moment, but in terms of character generation, this went very fast and seemed to be very enjoyable for the players. The mad libs format helped, I think, in letting the players “just go with it” rather than agonize over what to place where and contributed to the ongoing sort of cavalier attitude (which was awesome).
I, meanwhile, would normally select the Tory Figures that I’d be using, but those rules aren’t finished yet. I was a little concerned that this would be a problem for the playtest, but it didn’t turn out to be that bad. In fact since play hardly seemed to register the absence, I think the Tory Figures will be a lot shallower, rules-wise, than I might have otherwise made them. All they really have to do is put a human face on the adversity.
In the Field
With our Figures selected and customized, we were set to start play and tackle my other big concern: the core mechanics. In short form, the Patriot players play cooperative rummy with each other while the Tory player follows his own rules (more later). The Patriots play willy-nilly without turns, and must accompany card plays with appropriately flavored narration. So if you play a heart, you need to do something patriotic. The suits and circumstances on their character sheets give them special rules or ways to break the basic rummy rules (like having a larger hand, or playing single cards instead of melds). The players can also play off of each other’s cards, splitting up each others’ melds to liberate that one card in the middle they need and so on. The idea is that they’re all working together to get as many cards down on the table. At the end of the scene, the number of cards on the table (not counting the singles) is the Patriot score.
Meanwhile, the Tory player has a hand of cards equal to the number of Patriot players (so I had three). The Tory player may play a card when he violates the Bill of Rights amendment that corresponds to the card’s rank. So you play a two to disarm colonists (Second Amendment being the right to bear arms). After you play a card, you draw one to replace it. Face cards are not played, because you’re trying to collect them. If you can get three face cards, you can end the scene. The Tory score is the total of the cards’ ranks, with face cards counting as 11.
All of which is a highly compressed version of the rules, so I hope I made sense, there. In any case, when the scene ends (by the Patriots moving and seconding a scene end or the Tory player collecting at least three face cards), the Patriot score is compared to the Tory score and the highest score gets their stakes. Everybody narrates a little bit of the scene wrap up, with the Patriots going in order of the highest card left in their hand and the Tory player going last if he won or first if he lost. Whoever has the lowest card in their hand frames the next scene and sets the scene’s stakes.
Which is all more than a little kooky as far as game mechanics go. On the whole, the scheme worked. The first couple scenes were a little shaky as the players figured out what ‘counted’ as a heart or club or what-have-you, and how to leverage their favored circumstances to help get cards onto the table. I believe Jim suggested putting what each suit counts for onto the character sheet along with “normally I have four cards,” which I will most assuredly be doing.
I was a little concerned that some of the special abilities would vastly overpower others: that maybe having five cards instead of four was way more useful than getting a joker. We didn’t see any evidence of this, and in fact saw the beginnings of a couple different strategies (and multiple valid strategies is good), so at least at this stage, all things look relatively balanced. The book is not closed on this one, though, and I’ll be hawk-eyeing later sessions for glitches.
I was pleasantly surprised that the Tory rules were both challenging and prompted me in new and interesting ways. At a number of points I was thinking to myself, “Well, I can violate due process or I can break up an assembly of colonists… let’s see….” The decisions were difficult but not too much, and the players later commented that they couldn’t “just play cards whenever” like I could, so it appears that the process looks clean from the other side of the table.
We did find that the more aggressive the initial scene frame, the better the resulting scene. Like, a lot, and way more than most games. I started us off with what I thought was an aggressive frame, with the Patriots walking into the mayor’s ball with British all around them, and it didn’t really fire. The best scene in the game was when Judson said something to the effect of, “We get the wife’s lover to get her to arrive for a secret rendezvous, then kidnap her and storm the mayor’s mansion. Scene starts as we step onto the grounds.” We skipped all that wife-kidnapping bit and were the better for it. So there’s aggressive, and then there’s aggressive, and the latter worked a lot better than the former.
The rules-as-written have the first scene always being about sneaking in unnoticed or gathering information, and I think I’m going to ditch that, since it tends to put a damper on the high-action craziness that the game’s supposed to foster. The opening options should be more along the lines of (a) beginning in media res in a big melee, (b) a chase scene, or (c) explosions of some variety. Judson also suggested that players frame the next scene after they get their initial hand for that scene, so they can plan a little better how to frame, and this sounds like a fantastic idea.
Swapping Tory Player and Circumstances
We only played through one objective. In the after-game recap, I was a little surprised to find that the players were interested in swapping out the Tory player role between objectives (instead of at the end of the three-objective session). They were also curious how they could swap out circumstances for something else – either because what they had wasn’t working for them or because they wanted to try something else.
My thinking in designing the game was that every session would have a different Tory player and each session the Patriot players would select and customize their Figures anew. So if I played John Adams last time, I could play Ben Franklin the next. Or, if I really wanted to keep playing John Adams, I could play him with an entirely different set of favored circumstances. That was odd enough for me, but apparently the crew wants even faster turnover of PCs and pseudo-GM. I’m still not sure what to think of this.
Valor and Inter-scene Structure
The biggest hole in the design – presently patched with placeholder rules – is the bigger picture of how the individual scenes work together, how they link up, and what relationship they have to each other. The question being, assuming the goal is to fulfill all three objectives, what’s stopping the players from simply playing three scenes, the stakes of each is one of the objectives? The present answer is Valor, which either needs to be upgraded or replaced.
The current rules go like this: in a scene that doesn’t have Objectives at stake, the winner of the scene gets Valor points (we used little tokens). Patriots get one each; Tory player gets one per Patriot player, depending on which side won. In later scenes, Patriots can spend a Valor to “Stick It to the Man” by taking any meld on the table, shuffling it, and forcing the Tory player to trade one of his cards for one of the meld cards. The rest of the meld is discarded. The Tory player can spend Valor to draw a new card and decide whether or not to swap it into his hand, discarding as he does so. These are very rough placeholder rules, although I have a real fondness for the Stick It rule. I know as the Tory player I lived in fear of having the Patriots Stick It to me before I got my third face card. On the other hand, I never spent my own Valor.
In any case, Valor is a moderately useful commodity, and so players have a reason for framing non-Objective scenes. However, as useful as Valor is, it’s not necessary, and the Patriots can still rush right to the Objective without much fear.
Now, if I keep Valor in the game, it seems to me it should have some more uses, but I don’t want to belabor the game with too many rules or things to keep track of. “I’ve got cards and circumstances and I play off everybody else’s cards, and oh yeah, I’ve got these Valor points that can do a dozen more things.” seems like overkill. So it’s sort of a balancing act at the moment, where I have this sense that Valor needs to be a bit more, but not too much more, or the game just gets unwieldy.
Perhaps the answer is simply that stakes cannot resolve an Objective unless a Patriot (or the Patriots collectively) pays a certain amount of Valor? Or defining Objective stakes for a scene automatically gives the Tory player some Valor, and the Patriot players will want to stock up some of their own before wading in to where it counts? (Note: there’s a real problem with overloading the Tory player with too much Valor, since it becomes very feasible to spend Valor to get three face cards before the Patriots have even a few cards on the table.)
On a related note, the suggestion was made last night that, instead of making the Valor available to be won the same set number each time, the “Valor Pot” could be determined by the longest meld. So the truly impressive melds (they had six aces out there at one point) could actually stand for something beyond the current scene. I really like this idea. So there’s another variable to toss in there.
Cut Scenes
I’m also toying with the idea of restructuring the end-of-scene-frame-next-scene rules a touch. Mostly, this is cosmetic; instead of “narrating the end of the scene” I’m thinking of giving the winner of the scene the ability to “narrate a cut scene.” I’m not entirely sure what that even means at the moment, but it’s there in the back of my mind.
The Tory Player and Prompting
The last little bit that I’m hoping I can get the playtesters to chime in on is a matter of the Tory player’s role in the game. Now, the Tory player is not supposed to be the Game Master. The division goes: the Patriot players control and narrate for patriots; the Tory player controls and narrates the British, Tories, and allies; everybody has joint control of everybody else (neutral Indian tribes, for instance). Note that stakes of individual scenes can make an “everybody else” into a patriot or Tory, as we saw in the game last night when Mark set stakes of recruiting the mayor’s wife’s lover.
Now here’s the rub. Last night I was the Tory player, but I was also running a playtest of my own game. I did a fair share of directing attention between players, prompting people to say their piece, and so on. During situation creation, I think I did all of the calling on other people to ask them to interpret the dealt objectives. Now, this isn’t something that I should be doing as the Tory player; it is sort of a necessity as a guy running a playtest. What I’m not sure of, however, is if the game can run without somebody playing circus ringleader.
I’m not sure how I can really find out if it works like I want it to outside of throwing a copy of the game into a room with some poor saps playtesters and watching from the sidelines. The game isn’t to the point where I’d want to shoot it out for full playtests, but it will be really annoying to get it to that stage only to find out that it needs a ringleader.
So Mark, Judson, Jim: what do you think? Does the game need somebody directing traffic, or can people around a table play it like they’d play Monopoly?
And, as always, happy and eager to answer other questions or consider more points of view!