[Where The Heart Is] An RPG about the families of tomorrow

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An absolutely stonking playtest at Indiecon, the UK's premier con and showcase for indie RPGs. It’s amazing how the group builds a family unit, and then roleplays the family as if they really do exist. I think the Interval- where players discuss OOC how the PCs have behaved, casting judgment on them or sympathising, as I say, as if they were people we knew- helps with this.

In Saturday’s game we had twin brothers, one hippy dippy and the other straitlaced, sharing a house and clashing about how to bring up the children and being messy/tidy etc. Ultimately, after Franklin, 11- natural son of straitlaced family- was dared by Alice, 14- foster daughter of hippy family- to attend a teenage house party (where there was porn being watched and pot and strong alcohol being ingested), which ended up being raided by the police, things came to a head, straitlaced brother's wife announced that she was fed up with everything and the family broke up.

Those two paragraphs hardly do the game justice, but I hope gives folks the flavour of it. It's the sort of game where practically anything can happen. Let's see what sort of family the next group creates.

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Sorry, should have added that after last Saturday's playtest, instead of handing out feedback forms I simply asked the players for suggestions. One lady, who was very enthusiastic about the game in general, thought there should be a Game A, with a set of pre-gens (although I think there'd have to be a lot of them, given the multiplicity of possible family structures) and no player ownership of PCs, and a Game B, with player genned characters but where the players own the characters.

I personally prefer a mixture, with player genned characters and no ownership (as it is now), although having pre-gens at cons would save an awful lot of time, time being in some ways the enemy as world-building eats into game time considerably. I think Microscope also suffers from this problem, that of the set-up phase chewing up game time. Also, I can see the point of player ownership of PCs in a club setting, especially in a campaign-length game. Thoughts anyone?

Edit: Apologies if it seems as if I only jump on this forum to talk about my games and then scarper. I'm trying to find time also to read and comment on other people's posts, especially those of folks who, like me, are struggling to make it in the world of games design and need help and advice with their mechanics and settings etc.

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