I had my first Night Witches game last night. I’m running a one-shot at a local convention in November, and wanted to get a feel for the rules before I subjected five players to my fumbling. I was lucky in that my four players last night had all played AW or MonsterHearts, and so had a pretty good grounding on flow and how the moves worked, and when the best time was to use the moves.
Coming from a diceless, heavy RP gaming background, this was quite different. Fun, but different. While I find all RP to be community storytelling, Night Witches really rewards narrative in a much greater way than I am used to. It also requires openness for the players, which is challenging to many of my extended gaming group. For them, you make a character, and you have sole control over that character. Night Witches asks them to have faith in the unspooling of the narrative and to incorporate that narrative into their character. The goal isn’t to “win”, it’s to tell a good story together.
We had 5.5 hours to play. The creating of characters took 1.5 hours instead of .5 hours, and while we had a few side conversations, they were brief and we didn’t dawdle over most of it. But we were all pretty happy with the characters, and as GM, I was happy with the various hooks they’d given me to run with. I gave them 5 advancements instead of 4, and encouraged them to take regard as advancement. Three of them did, and it added quite a bit to the initial storytelling.
We ran Paskovskaya, and made it through three night runs. They skated on one run, pulled another run out of their collective tuckuses by a daring use of Tempt Fate, and had a horrible middle run. The Section Leader took personal responsibility for the three lives lost over the course of two days (all NPCS), the one PC crew woman who was severely harmed (they used moves to heal her up enough to fly the next night), and the fiery wreck of one of their planes. She’s now in serious trouble with the Brass and the NKVD. I challenged them with lack of materiel to fix the planes, the visit of the Lieutenant General, zealot Olga, and the 218th taking credit as well as using seniority to impose unwelcome attention on their fellow airwomen.
At the end of the evening, I felt as if I was getting a solid handle on the flow and how to push the players, and they all said they wanted to play more, and loved the story they were weaving together. I call that a successful night of gaming!
Next game is at the end of the month. I’ll let you know how it goes.