Natalie, JC and me sat down under hot lights and filmed a session of Caroline's game Downfall. I've played it twice before (uh, a year ago?) but it's technically still a playtest, so… feedback!

We decided to go with a mythic setting: a floating island called Ætheros. The island was technological, a complex system of gears and machines, but the inhabitants had long forgotten how it operated and just followed traditions. They lived on it in primitive villages, fishing things up from the ocean or caretaking bits of the clockwork towers without understanding why. Many, many awesome implications were hidden in this basic premise.






Our Flaw -- the change that is going to bring down our society -- was Trust. It led to some awesome fiction but it was probably a mistake: it would have been a lot more straight forward to pick something obviously bad like greed or hatred, instead of picking a "positive" trait as a flaw. Explaining why trust was bad actually led us to make a lot of really ingenius fiction (e.g. children were taken away and raised away from their parents. Why? Because we didn't trust the parents to raise good kids). But doing that on camera in a *very* tight timeframe was extremely challenging. It was also really easy to lose track and accidentally make traditions that were about trust and forget that it was supposed to be a bad thing.

We combined our random clever bits, like having the children being taken away connected to the migrating villages and the moving pattern of the gears which moved all the villages so when kids came back they never could find their original home… damn, how did we manage all that in such a short game?


PLAYTEST FEEDBACK

I think we all agreed that the rules should recommend sticking to "negative" Flaws like hate or greed, etc. Tricky "positive" flaws like love should be clearly marked as bonus difficulty and not included in the default list. Definitely not something for your first play thru.

We also talked about whether it would be useful to discuss how the abstract flaw was ruining the society before jumping straight to actual traditions & threats. There are a lot of different ways hatred could be a problem, but if you make a bunch of threats that all focus on a different kind of hatred they might not tie together well. That happened in our game, but we wisely just abandoned half of our threats and focused on the core ones.

"Witness the aftermath" was a little hit and miss (caveat: we were super in a hurry at some points). I still think that the Downfall and Aftermath steps should be combined, since it feels like one flows right into the other ("lemme tell how messed up society is and then let me darken in this circle to prove it"). Better momentum to just do each player once instead of a loop and a loop.

Natalie and JC, what did you guys think?

I think Ben hit most of my thoughts as far as feedback goes. The idea of having "positive" flaws is super cool and something I'd love to see in play (my first thought for a flaw was piety even before I saw the list so that's kind of where I go naturally) but having something as manifestly positive and all-encompassing as trust made things really difficult.

We kind of got a sense of how distrust was a virtue through the tradition mechanic but including something there about actually explaining how it fits may be good. For example, hospitality seems such an odd fit that I'd've loved to hear some more going into the game about how those two interacted.

I can understand wanting to see all three people react before filling in circles but calling them two different steps seems a bit odd. Perhaps that bit was exacerbated by the filming since it was very much "ok now we're doing this thing, now we're cutting and waiting, wait what are we doing? oh filling in things."

You two covered pretty much all of it, but that won't stop me from possibly repeating things!

I don't even think discussing the abstract flaw is enough; I feel we needed something as simple as adding a sentence in big block letters above the flaw would add a lot to remembering the point and keeping the game on track.

Example: our flaw was trust, but in actuality it was more that the traditions of distrust had led people to lose faith in themselves and blindly trust that someone knew better, so something like, "Flaw: Trust ...which manifests as surrendering personal agency" would have helped us stay the course and avoid the "WHA-OH! Sounds like someone TRUSTS their friend!" silliness.

I'm on the fence about the reactions. I do feel it's redundant for both the Challenger and Sentinel to do one, since the questions they are trying to answer are sort of the same, just worded differently. Just the Sentinel and the Hero doing it when they are shading makes sense, maybe doing it for one another - Sentinel narrating the Hero's downfall, Hero narrating society's.

avoid the "WHA-OH! Sounds like someone TRUSTS their friend!" silliness

Yes, that was silly, but be a little merciful: we were cramming in play at breakneck speed and trying to keep the flaw in our sights as both the central theme of our game and a bad thing even though it sounded like a good thing. We're trying to tie it all together.

It is appropriately ironic that the entire "salvation" at the end hinged on all the people putting blind trust in the hero, just as they were previously putting their trust in the heralds. But again, that's part of the point of the game: society is going to fall because of this flaw. It's unavoidable. We're just seeing how.

I agree it was not an ideal situation and that was just an example that stood out -- I know we (or at least I) got a little confused on occasion as to what, precisely, the flaw was and how to play it. I imagine this might be an issue even in a slower game, which is why I think it should be written out somewhere for easy reference.

There's also the twist that, as the Challenger, I'm trying to show why the Flaw is a good change from the status quo. So highlighting that you need to trust people to get things done (like the people who fled the island in the end) is showing that trust is a necessary "evil".

The moment I was referencing happened when you were the Hero and I was the Sentinel, who was all about the distrustful tradition and therefore trusted in tradition and it turned into a catch-22, which is why I think it's important to clarify how the flaw manifests; otherwise, is the expectation that the Sentinel and the Challenger are just playing one side of the coin or the other? To continue the Challenger example, if 'distrust' is our tradition and we haven't defined it further, then the Challenger not thinking the people could handle the information uncovered was admitting that a lack of trust is a benefit, and does that mean by not revealing the information he's actually upholding society?

(I may completely be misunderstanding everything about this game.)

I'd also forgot to mention switching characters. That was a part I was really iffy on, but it may be due to the confusion re: the flaw was only compounded by getting a new character and having to understand what his or her role was; again, the learning curve on this part might not feel so steep in a full game.

Yeah, that's part of trust being an ultra-slippery flaw, no matter how you slice it. If you require someone to trust you blindly, you aren't trusting them, yadda yadda yadda

I love Natalie's sentence idea!

The short film we were playing this game for is out! Check it:



“The people at the table are what matters”