First Draft: Euthymia

[kleenestar]

[Troy_Costisick]

Heya,

I’m making these comments as I read though so you get a pure glance at my initial reactions. Which would be similar to those of someone thumbing through your game at a store or game con.

Do you think that using the word “Believe” instead of “Thinks” would ruin the angle you’re going for with the game? Believe seems like a stronger and broader theme for players to draw from.

I do like how the card suits interact with the character components. Very nice.

You write:

Throughout the game, the Strength of the Feel Aspect must always greater than the
Strength of the other Aspects.

I would word it like thus: “For the duration of the game, the Strength value of your Feel Aspect must be greater than the individual Strength values of all the other Aspects…” or something along those lines. Right now it could be interpreted that the Feel must be greater than the sum of the other Aspects.

Have you tried playing the first hour session yet? Seems a bit brief to fill 60 minutes. But that comes from someone who hasn’t tried it yet. So take it with a grain of salt

I get the turn thing, and that’s very cool. But what is the motivation for the players and the motivation for the characters? What do they want to accomplish? If they choose their own, what kinds of system supports or hooks do you provide to help them choose?

I might have missed it if you did, but you should make sure to stress that everyone needs the same kind of glass. Otherwise it will be hard to tell who has the most drink left at the end of a turn. I think you just list “a glass” at the beginning of your list of things the players will need.

How does a character die?

It sounds like becoming an ideal citizen is an undesirable thing. That’s intentional, right?

I like how the player with the bottle has such dictatorial control. It very much reinforces the theme of your game. Nice.

Ha, I see you reference Paranioa. I was going to mention how this game seemed a lot like that one. Well, if Paranoia was one of the parents of this game, I’m sure it will turn out well for ya.

Overall, neat idea! I'd definately play this if I got together with all my old buddies from college. We would so love to play this over a bottle of B&B.

Peace,

-Troy

[Graham Walmsley]

[Graham Walmsley]

Hi Kleenestar,

Your post made me think a lot.

You're right. At the moment, there's no absolute mechanical reward for finding the Committee Member.

What I'm aiming for is slow burning paranoia. (I don't know if I'll succeed, but that's what I'm aiming for). The Committee Member, in the final hour, will attempt to drive the players' Aspects up towards 10 or down towards zero. He'll probably start doing this before the final hour. So it's in the players' interests to work out who he is, because he's going to sit there in the corner quietly trying to screw them all over otherwise.

But you could be right. Perhaps I need something much more mechanical. I could offer some sort of mechanical reward (say, you can change any Aspect you like by two points) if they successfully identify the Committee Member, with a penalty if they mistakenly identify the wrong person. This could add to the paranoia a lot.

Having said that, it might make the players focus too much on finding the Committee Member.

And, honestly, I don't know which is right. So, for the moment, I've left it the way it was. But if it all goes wrong in playtesting, I'll definitely give your idea a try.

Thanks very much indeed.

Graham

P.S. Troy? I tried changing "Think" to "Believe" and it made the game much stronger. Excellent. Thanks.

[Graham Walmsley]

I've just submitted Euthymia.

Thanks very much indeed to everyone who gave me feedback. It was incredibly useful.

In general, this has been a great experience: in a sense, I feel I've written my first proper game. Thanks to everyone involved.

Graham

[kenjib]

For what it's worth, I jotted down a bunch of notes when I read Euthymia and found that they were the same things that the other posters had noticed. The three that still stick out as somewhat unresolved for me were:

1. No reward for outing the committee member. The first thing that came to mind for me was that it could remove the committee member character from the game and all players could draw new cards to see who the next committee member is. Failure then would have to result in something unpleasant, such as the accuser losing their character. To make this work, the player who knows who the committee member is would have to be forbidden from making a direct accusation themselves. Anyways, this is a pretty drastic change from what you have, and might cause too much character turnover in a disruptive fashion, but it's what popped into mind for me.

2. "In the final turn, each Active Player should guide their character towards a cliffhanger, where the character either gets what he has fought for this hour or is crushed while trying." This is cool, but I think it would be even better if there were some mechanical support to help the players to achieve this.

3. If there is only one hour, how many turns will each player actually end up having? I wonder if there will be enough to justify the "final turn" mechanic being different from other turns. For example, what if each player only goes once or twice? In my groups, things don't ever seem to move quickly enough so that we would get very many turns in this time span. I wonder if this game would perhaps be better without a time limitation per session.

Anyways, I know it's too late for your entry, but it's certainly not too late for your game.

This looks really fun. I love the source material you are working from and your game mechanics capture it in a really fun way. Some more flavor text (perhaps via play examples) would help to bring it home even stronger, I think, in terms of invoking the right mood.

[Graham Walmsley]