Dirty Secrets is Pretty Cool

Last night I played Dirty Secrets with Brennan Taylor and a guy from the NERDNYC boards named Gil. Dunno his last name. Sorry Gil.

I'll cut right to the chase. This game makes detective stories. Really good ones. I thought at the end, huh, someone could make a novel out of that.

I played this with Seth and Paul C and a few others back when it was in playtest. At Forge Midwest, maybe, in 2006? I recall being a little bored at times in a group of maybe 5 players. With that number, there's down time for a few people every turn, no way to contribute. It may purely be a matter of my ADD attention span, but I had trouble.

With three people, everyone's involved every turn, so of course I recommend it with three.

One other possible bug--and let me stress that this game is really fun--is that setup doesn't immediately hook me. I think there might be a way to play it where you don't have to do as much front loading of information. The passing around of cards is cool, but the demographics on them didn't seem to matter much in play.

I'll be thinking about it some more. It's a fun game, and I agree with Brennan wholeheartedly that it doesn't get enough attention.

What gaming cons really need

Doggie Day Care.

creative progress

Here's all the things that I pretend to be working on at any given time:

• Edits to the revision of Primetime Adventures. That's on hold until my editor has room in his schedule. Same with the art. In both cases, it looks like that'll pick up at the end of October.


• Galactic. Yeah, it's still around. Doyce Testerman is editing it. Here's the cool thing: to edit it effectively, he decided to play it some more and see how his group responds to stuff. I remember liking that game. It'd be cool to see it finished.


• Music. I might have an actual composition job lined up. I've only just started with that. Several other miscellaneous tracks in various states of completion.


• Writing. I have this novel that's off and on. Been thinking about getting a laptop other than the eee pc so I can write anywhere. The eee is just too small for me. It's a typo every other word.


• Other games. Just notes right now. I'm less interested in the micro premise games than I am in big setting premise games like TSOY. More about that in a follow up.

a new edition

I think I'm officially out of books now. Primetime Adventures is in the middle of a light overhaul. Call it the 50,000-mile tune up.

Trying to make a few things easier to find, updating some of the TV info, and adding in some material to help groups get a show together more quickly.

music for games

I started composing some game music.

Take a look, and take a listen: http://www.dog-eared-designs.com/music.html

I have more music to load up when I have a moment. More!

making games again

I have a new job now. It's cool. It leaves me sane when I get home. I don't lie awake at night wondering if there was something I forgot to do. I can do other things in my spare time. One of those things is a project that's about to go up for sale on IPR.

The other is, y'know, making games. I'm back working on one.

Galactic, as a game concept, kinda got away from me. I took so much feedback that I was left with something I didn't recognize any more. And aside from Doyce & co who loved it, I got a lot of "we played it for fifteen seconds and disliked it so much that we just gave up."

Maybe part of that is the crowd who are stepping up to try it--and that's a genuine concern, as I'm not out to make a twin to Primetime Adventures. But I kinda feel that way about the game, too.

This game, the way I see it, is more of a medium-weight game, like TSOY or FATE. Or maybe like what Luke is doing with Mouse Guard. I want the game I wanted when I was 11-15, when all I had was Star Frontiers or Traveller or Space Master. I don't want "here's three paragraphs on the setting" or "here's your character's two scores." I don't want 70 pages of skills and character traits either.

Honestly I thought for a long time about whether TSOY would work for what I wanted to do. And I even brought it up with Clinton. He was of course more than happy to support whatever I wanted to do, but I ended up with a long enough list of changes that I figured I might as well start from scratch.

So here's what I want, and fuck if I'm going to do that bloated Power 19.

• A set of character abilities that bear at least some resemblance to ye old games of yore. Not stat+skill (because oh god no) but not arsty game nouveau like "roll your Discount plus your Rage against my Shoe Size."
• Characters with healthy background info that matters. Where are you from, what baggage do you carry from your past, etc.
• a play experience that is lightly focused. The characters have an overarching mission, but it'll sorta be like the Elder Scrolls games, or Mass Effect, where you can do lots of stuff on the side.
• Lightweight GM burden. That's probably the kicker. Good info on how to tell a story. Because I didn't know what to do when I was 15, and I had not yet played any "brain damaging" games. Hell, I'm not sure I know what to do now.

So that's kinda what I'm up to. I'm gonna post about progress as I go.

been down so long

I sorta remember this blog. Seeing as I don't like using LJ much, and seeing how RPGtalk sorta vanished overnight, and seeing how I can't remember my admin info for wordpress and it just gets clogged with spam anyway, I've been thinking I'd just come back home to this blog after like almost three years.

I was at Dreamation yesterday -- probably going back again this morning in a few-- and several people were asking, "so what's up with Galactic?" and frak if it's not killing me that I've worked hard on it for how many years now and what I have just isn't hitting the fun button for me.

I think I might know why, though, and I'm going to start kicking the game in the pants again to see what I can come up with. Hopefully I'll have some updates here.