Category: Night Witches

Night Witches isn’t working for us

I’m running a game of Night Witches at my local club, for four players. Despite all our best efforts, it’s not working.

The game is hard work for everybody. Nothing’s really flowing from the fiction into play. For instance, one of the PCs decided to open a book on an aerobatics competition between a couple of NPC pilots. Another PC decided to make a bet on it. What should she bet? Cigarettes? Choccolate? A week of doing the chores around the base? Whoever won, what would the consequences be for how the game unfolded? What was really at stake for the players (not the PCs)?

Another example: when a plane is damaged during a mission, how does the fiction inform me (as GM) whether the section’s mechanics can repair the plane themselves, whether the PCs need to help with the plane, or whether they need to scrounge for parts first? If they need parts, how does the fiction inform me about how hard it will be to get those parts?

Now, I can just make this stuff up, which is what I’ve been doing. But it’s hard work, as it’s hard to be able to point to things in the fiction that compel me to introduce situations and consequences.

The other main problem we have is with character goals and motivations. The PCs are spending a lot of time simply reacting to events that I, as GM, are throwing at them. The players aren’t finding much they can latch on to as things for their characters to strive for. War stories/films/biographies are full of things like soldiers striving for the basic staples of life: chocolate, cigarettes, sex, warm boots. Those are really important to people who are suffering from a lack of them, but those basic drives and wants are really hard to translate into feelings in players at the table. (Reflecting on this, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most goals suggested for PCs in most games are rather higher up Maslow’s hierarchy.)

The military hierarchy plays its part in this too: to a great extent, it doesn’t matter what the PCs do in the game, they’ll still get the basics of food and shelter, and they’ll still have to fly on their missions every night.

Finally, a smaller problem (but a problem nevertheless): the characters, especially at first, are all very similar. Without a bunch of custom moves, there’s not much to differentiate the character natures from each other.

These problems didn’t become huge until the third and fourth session. Before then, excitement about the game and the general novelty of the characters carried us through. That’s not enough any more.

Moving on to questions: how to fix this? My usual approaches to making games interesting are to have a dynamic, unstable situation with real consequences, and hence have factions/Fronts/threats taking action. But the military setting makes the situation rather static (apart from character deaths), and the book suggests that factions/Fronts/threats aren’t something that the game should have.

We’d all like the game to work. Everyone’s got a lot of experience with various story games, including a whole bunch of PBtA games. But in this game, the fiction being created isn’t doing anything to drive the game forward.

Help.

A quick note on the second session of our game. We only managed one mission, completing the training station. That was because we were all having fun dealing with the aftermath of the disastrous second training mission.

The deputy politruk told her illicit lover (a PC) that someone would be punished for the disaster, and the PC would be that someone unless she should stitch up someone else. Meanwhile, the rest of the section had realised the PC in question was a disaster and tried to sabotage her plane. It ended up with a brand new pilot (brought in to replace the two who died in the previous mission) being blamed for everything after she chickened out of an attack run.

Two observations.

1) There’s a lot of GM intervention in the game! The PCs haven’t really discovered their own agenda/goals, so they’re spending a lot of time reacting to events. I can see that continuing, with a lot of play being driven by the GM throwing War events at the squadron and the PCs reacting. (I’ll have to prepare a bunch of PC-NPC-PC triangles and see if that helps the game run itself.)

2) The missions throw a long shadow over the game, but there seems to be little “game” in them directly. There’s very little interaction between fictional positioning and the mechanics, with each mission following near-identical structures. (Perhaps that will change when we get more missions under our belt and people are prepared to fail some missions.)

We played through the first session of Night Witches last night. We went through the “structured intro” document and did the first two missions. The first went badly, the second was a disaster, with a plane of NPCs crashing into the riverbank when a PCs’ plane flew into it. The NPCs died. (We had three PCs, as two other players volunteered to run additional games in the now-very-busy club.)

Everyone really enjoyed it, and the look of shock and loss when I narrated the loss of the section’s third plane was palpable. Everyone’s keen for next time!

Three follow-up questions.

1. The Mission Pool is going to be vital. How many opportunities should I, as GM, be offering them to build it up before a mission? I think a pool of 3-4 is about right, but things will vary depending on the fiction.

2. It looks like one, perhaps two, of the PCs will fail to get their combat wings. What’s the consequence of that? An earlier post here suggested that she be embarrassed and under the tutelage of an experienced flyer until she can make the successful rolls. Would that put her in a different Section?

3. All three PCs are Sergeants. I think one of them should be the section leader anyway, as having the GM make personnel decisions isn’t fun. But how does that fit with the “tutelage” part of question 2?