Players: Sam, Anna, Laura, Ben.

This was the first time with CDC for any of us, and... oy. Tough game. We got some good scenes in here and there, but the overall result was pretty rough and discombobulated.

I’m in two minds about the cards-score-points-that-keep-you-alive mechanic. It’s cool that you’re offered an incentive to push certain elements into the story, and the hidden-information and conflict matches up well with the distrust of the scenario; but it can produce some decidedly sub-optimal results. Our group had two players who were really enthusiastic about the prospect of playing swamp ghosts, but the first death ended up going to someone decidedly less comfortable with the role.

We had a couple of new storygamers in the group, and I think they struggled a bit; I would not classify this as an intro storygame at all. There are a lot of demands on the player without a great deal of corresponding structure. The swamp ghost role, for instance, is an antagonist, a role which appears in a lot of storygames and can be really narratively powerful when used effectively. Many of those games, however, offer rather more concrete methods for how antagonism should work; Polaris in particular is very good for training the skills of a good antagonist. Carolina Death Crawl sort of assumes that you’re already pretty familiar with how this works:

The job of the Swamp Ghosts is to compel the
survivors to reflect on the horrors and atrocities in their
past and guide them into an unspeakable future.

Cool objective, yes, but as guidance it’s a bit vague; there’s a big difference between ‘here’s the effect you should accomplish’ and ‘here’s how to get that effect,’ and a lot of RPG design tends to overlook this.

Again, the game says that you don’t need any historical knowledge, but I got the distinct sense that the players would have been more confident if they’d had a firmer grounding either in Civil War history or Southern Gothic fiction. The content is almost entirely delivered on cards, which are terse and evocative but – in some cases – didn’t really seem to give the players enough to feel confident about their situation.

Our game ran a little long, and we had to condense the second and third acts; it seems likely that the setup would go a little quicker if I was more familiar with the rules, but my guess is that it would take some really efficient players to finish this in the advertised three hours. One problem was that scenes often got kind of bogged down: there’s no clear mechanic for when a scene should end. I suspect that a big reason why Microscope and Fiasco produce relatively consistent games is that they have simple, decisive mechanics for this.

This still feels like a potentially awesome game, and one I’d like to try again – but I’d caution novices against it.

Interesting! I've read CDC but I haven't gotten to play it yet, so I'm very interested in your report.

I wasn't sure how well the swamp ghost mechanic would work in our setting, particularly with the LARP-esque idea of lurking over people's shoulders whispering suggestions.

I love the hovery swamp-ghost mechanic in theory, but in practice I think it needs a pretty confident player to pull it off, and the competitive mechanics mean that you don't get to choose who wants the role.

When we played it (outside of Meetup), I was actually more comfortable as the swamp ghost then I had been as my character. I agree wholeheartedly with Sam about this not being a good game for a first-time roleplayer, though. It can be good to get comfortable with the general idea of story-gaming structure before you start screwing with it.

It is LARPful; but since you are supposed to be hovering around the table, it should work fine as long as you have a walking area cleared around the circumference (Swamp ghosts also conference with each other later on, but that doesn't really have to be done in character).

I'm also thinking about things like personal space: some folks new to the scene might be weirded out by someone lurking over their shoulder. Could be awesome, but could also provoke some bad reactions with the wrong combination of players.