Games Design - [Stitch] Blame and Memories

Posted by: Iain McAllister On: Jun 28th 2010 edited

I finally got round to making the changes to Stitch I talked about in this thread.

I think I have made things a little clearer, though the text still needs a lot of work in that direction. I have refocused the game to be about how each of the characters is to blame for the Event, I renamed it Joe, and less about the time travel. I have ideas for making a proper time travel game at some point, but this has evolved in a different direction.

At the moment there are a few things I need to think about:

Memories: do the ones held by the Team need to see better use?
Resolution: Is it still too fiddly? I want it to take a little bit of time, just to push the stress a little bit more.
Length: I want the game to be playable in an evening, its time constraint will help. However this will mean getting over the concepts clearly and concisely, maybe whilst a game is happening. Should I have an alternative rule where if this is your first game, firs Knot then the clock can be stopped?

If anyone wants to playtest it I can post the rudimentary character sheets and timeline I have made up on the CE site.

Cheers

Iain

Stitch(alpha)0.1.pdf

Posted by: Malcolm Craig On: Jun 29th 2010 edited

Hey Iain,

Good to see you are back working on this. I'd like, firstly, to comment on some of the textual elements of the game as it stands, as there are a few clarifications that could make giving help easier. I'm finding the text as written to be slightly challenging in terms of understanding how he game functions.

Are the Target and the Subject the same thing? Both words seem to be used interchangably in the text. It would be good to pick one of those and use it througout.

Page 4, 'Basic Structure', first paragraph: The wording seems to be a little confused here. Is the intention that, during a knot, the person taking on the GM role both GMs and plays their character as the Target? You explain this somewhat on page 6, but it could be fuller and earlier.

I'll be honest, I've read the text a few times now and I'm still struggling to see what is actually going on. The cofusion inherent in the writing is, I suppose, quite appropriate to the game! However, it does make it challenging to understand what play is about and what it is like, and therefore challenging to give meaningful and helpful feedback. Can you, for example, concisely describe what it is Memories actually do in play? How do you expect them to be used in play? What concrete function do they serve?

I'd love to be able to help more, but at the moment the text is creating something of a barrier.

Cheers
Malcolm

Posted by: Neil Gow On: Jun 30th 2010

Looking at the terminology on pg.2 it reads:

Terminology
Player – anyone sitting round the table
Traveller – a character in the fiction controlled by a player.
Games Master (GM) – the person who gets to describe the current situation the Team finds
themselves in.
Target – the character of the current GM
Team/ Team Member – any character who is not the current target.
Challenge – a point in the narration where one of the other players will try to take narrative control
from the Subject.

Might it become more fluid if it was worded like this?:

Terminology
Player – anyone sitting round the table
Traveller – a character in the fiction controlled by a player.
Games Master (GM) – the person who gets to describe the current KNOT the Team finds
themselves in.
Target – the TRAVELLER of the current GM
Team/ Team Member – any TRAVELLER who is not the current target.
Challenge – a point in the narration where one of the other players will try to take narrative control
from ANOTHER PLAYER.

Posted by: Iain McAllister On: Jul 5th 2010

I'll sit down and rewrite the text from the top sometime this week, hopefully that will make things easier to understand.

Cheers

Iain