I thought I’d share a problem I’m encountering with White Books : time. (WB is a GMless, no prep hack written on six pocketmod playbooks. It’s dungeon themed, inspired by OD&D.)
Originally, I thought a game would take an hour or so. The first playtest session took around three hours. While I’m not against longer games, I’d really like White Books to run under two hours. Ideally with a way to tune the duration anywhere within 1-3 hours.
The current rules state that each one of the three acts is over when every player has: 1) read the act’s event/question/rule on their book and 2) triggered their move if their book has one for this act.
This obviously makes each act too long with five or six players, and possibly too short with three players. I’m considering options, but I thougt I’d ask the hivemind: what other ways are there to pace the game?
– Real time (an act is half an hour)
– Fictional objectives (reach the deepest level to fight the lich)
– Dice rolls (the next act starts when somebody rolls a 1 on a move)
– What else?
#whitebooks
The next step might be to provide playtest feedback and suggest that the pacing is off and needs to be increased.
What do you mean by playtest feedback – an actual play kind of thing?
Set up the acts so that two characters have a major thing per act, making it distinct each time. Have backups, so if all six aren’t there, the major dealies are still covered. (Ie if there is no barbarian, instead of barbarian dealing with x, the thief has y this act. Select characters from the four non-thing players for a given act.
It’s more or less what I’m doing, except I don’t restrict challenges to such and such character type. We’ll see how it works this weekend, and then maybe I can share the draft.
That’d be much easier to get feedback 🙂
Is it White Books available somewhere?
Yes, in my head 😉
Seriously, it’s still a few versions from public beta. Getting there, though. I expect to be able to show it to volunteer testers in the next month or so.
(But you can click on the hashtag to see all my updates)
Eric Nieudan I was intrigued, so I’ll stay tuned!