In which I talk about Murderous Ghosts!
Tim Franzke started a thread about AW games, and Declan Feeney had this to say:
“Of those Murderous Ghosts is unusual in that its a two player game (one GM and one Player)”
This is true! Also, this is not the whole truth!
When Vincent and I designed MG it was absolutely as described above, and that way works beautifully. Then we went to PAX East 2012, where Jared Sorensen had no voice (which was a thing in and of itself). And he ran a game of Action Castle in which he did not talk at all. And apparently it was legendary levels of awesome. Which got me thinking about large group games, and how that happens. Which lead me to look squinty at MG, and see how it could be something beyond what we had designed.
So I proposed to run it as a game event at Connecticon 2012. They gave us a room with 75+ people for a two-hour slot. Vincent Baker had no idea what I was thinking, but he went along with it because we’re like that.
Here’s how it works:
Select a member of the audience to manage the cards. One person familiar with the game runs the ghosts and one other person holds the Player book. Treat the Player as a shared character, and when there is any choice to make, poll the populace to come up with the decision. Whenever there is a question like “Who will miss you if you don’t come back?”, the Player chooses a different member of the audience to answer. Enjoy,
The first time we did this, Vincent was the Ghosts and I was the Player. I died in 28 minutes. It was super-fun.
Then we had a new volunteer take on the Ghosts and another take on the Player, and a third handle the cards. Vincent and I shadowed the players for the first half-hour or so in case they got stuck, then it just ran. The Player managed to crawl out alive in just under 90 minutes.
Since then, I ran it for 12 people with John Harper as the Ghosts, facilitated six other people playing it after PAX Prime, and played in another 5-person game. So officially, it works great as a two-player game, but also as a small-group game and as a large group game. Try it, it’s fun!
Hopefully, Vincent and I will be running it at PAX East in a few months.
This makes me very happy to hear. I want to play it in this format more than as a 2 player game now.
Am I right in seeing that the Player is crowd-sourced but the Murderous Ghosts are not? Why is that? Why not do both? I can’t see any reason at all that it wouldn’t work equally well, but I’ve only played a couple times.
That is correct! The Ghosts need a bit more cohesion in terms of what their deal is, what they do when no-one is there, how they attack, etc. The Ghosts don’t have the same sort of “choose from this list” decisions to make that work so nicely for crowd-sorcing the Player. Having one mind holding that makes it connect.
And the PAX East game is a go!