Feedback on the Rules: From Toulouse to Alexandria

This is a copy of the summarized feedback we got on our Toulouse By Night online influence game, along with my brief responses to some of it.

===

Feedback and Update
FYI, we’re thinking of running a second game, but it’ll probably take 4-6 weeks before we could start.  We’re exploring a more powerful website to handle the computation behind the game, and allow for more players. We’re thinking of Alexandria in Late Antiquity as the setting, around 360. Constantine has recently legalized Christianity, but Pagans are still quite a powerful force in the Empire. Alexandria is a Greek city in Egypt, so it is a confluence of ancient philosophy, mysticism, and secrets from the past. It may not be the most familiar setting for everyone, but we’re not expecting much background info. We’ll try to recommend a couple vital Wikipedia pages, or some films for inspiration.


Here’s a summary of some of the feedback we got (loosely grouped into a few themes) and a quick response to how we’re thinking of incorporating your feedback. If you had an important comment that it seems like we missed, or if this sparks some new ideas please pass them along.

Set-up, Characters, and Setting

• Game had a slow start.
• Context to start the game.
• A lot of actions were watches and follows and stealths and Manage Influences because it was the only way to get information.
• All vampires should have a basic spy network to inform them of some of the major events in the city. 
• Clearer factions would help, factions which have their own goals.
• In retrospect, I made a character with goals that largely didn’t involve the other players. 
• If a new game isn’t in Toulouse, a more “western” setting would be easier than something exotic.
• It was a little disappointing to discover one of the characters I was interacting with was an NPC.

Response: We’re looking into using the various Roads as the basis of some factions within the game, alongside clans and mortal ethnicities and religions. Factions may have conflicting goals and give you some characters to trust (at least somewhat) at the beginning and to interact with. We’ll probably also suggest some likely characters to be or concepts that will help your

Logistics:

• Scheduling was difficult at times or might be in the future.
• A weekday deadline might be better than a weekend (easier to forget or lost track on the weekend).
• The online system seemed really awesome, though Obsidian Portal wasn’t used or updated much.
• Occasionally, actions (and plot points?) seemed to get lost.
• There are some characters I never had contact with.
• Sometimes messages seemed lost in the ether.

Response: We’re looking at a good time for deadlines, but that’ll depend on who is playing. We may be able to let the website let you plan a turn ahead and have a “back-up” submission if you’re going on vacation. Also factions might help with messages being lost in the ether, though not every character needs to interact with every other character, especially if we end up having 12+ players for a second game. We’re hoping the setting might foster debate and interaction as well.

Rules:

• Rules are quite complex.
• Complex rules makes it feel like everything isn’t just the ST’s whim.
• There were bonuses for achieving goals, but not acting our your nature/demeanor or road.
• Rules were also long. Presentation might help with the complexity. A 1-page summary might be a huge help. Converting the rules to a wiki might help too.
• Actions like Acquire, Boost, Conceal, and Follow could perhaps be eliminated or folded into other actions.
• Since influences are not particularly specific, you don’t always know if attacking someone will damage your own interests. 
• It was really easy to plan actions with the rules, but some of the other players didn’t seem to understand the rules as well as I did.
• Personal actions could be insanely useful. It wasn’t clear how much should be able to be put into a personal action or retainer actions.
• Messages were either too rare or too abundant. Sometimes I reached out because I had messages left, and other times I couldn’t because there weren’t enough messages and my personal actions seemed more important than communicating with others. Sometimes I was waiting on responses so I didn’t know what I should be doing with my influence.
• A set of generic options for the “story” actions might be helpful. What types of things can a level 2 action do that a level 1 can’t?
• Rules could be more complex to use more of the stats from the basic Vampire rules.

Response: We’re looking at a few things to simplify the rules, but focusing on presentation at the moment. A 1-page summary or quick video tutorial might be really helpful. A more powerful website should help too, but renaming some of the actions (conceal your resources vs stealth an action) and organizing them should also make them seem less complex than the text we shamelessly stole from some of the old rules books.