So I managed to get in a playtest of Stitch while I was down at Conception and I had changed a lot since the first one. Here is a summary of the game as it stood at Spodely and the changes:

Overview
Stitch is basically ’12 Monkeys’ the roleplaying game. The characters a group of civilians and military personel sent back in time from a post apocalyptic world to change the past and alter the future.

The initial game was written for Game Chef. The central mechanic is that the players have skills, responsibilities and beliefs. They have 3 of each category one rated 5, one 10 and one 15. At the beginning of a mission, or ‘Knot’, a count up clock is started. When a player want to do something they compare a skill to the minutes passed: if their skill is greater then they pass, if less they fail. The GM and the player can bring in other things on their character sheet in a positive or negative way, respectively, to raise and lower their skill. Once both sides are finished with this they check the time passed again and see if it is a fail or a pass.

Changes
Originally the game was very GM fiat based which meant I could run it but that was only cause I knew exactly how much of a bastard to be. I changed this by introducing a planning stage where players put counters in the 3 events that make up a knot. This represents them knowing where some of the difficulty in an event lies but not having perfect reconnaissance. When the GM wants to throw an obstacle in their way he spends one of those counters.

I also changed 'beliefs' to 'psych profile' made up of 1 hope, 1 belief and 1 doubt.

The Game

I had four players for the playtest and we had one commander, one solider, one scientist and one engineer.

Rather than using, the admittedly weak timeline I had written for the first version, I let the players come up with their own. They decided to go with a skynet storyline and they created the first three events of that storyline. They had 10 obstacles to place over those 3 events. The later they placed them the harder they are to overcome but the more inconsistency they gained. A team needs 100 inconsistency to succeed in their mission.

Event 1: 3 obstacles – Funding approved for skynet development
Event 2: 4 obstacles – Assassination of Putin by a CIA funded Chechen rebels
Event 3: 3 obstacles – Distributed Computing at an Expo in Vegas

One of the early problems was a matter of where they appeared in the event. If they appeared too far away they spent a few minutes staring at the clock, which is not really what I wanted. We decided there was a teleporter on board their ship that could be used once per event.

Rather than going blow for blow for this AP I will just give you the overview. The team arrived at the pentagon and quickly dealt with the chip development process. They purged design files, burned documents and killed a couple of soldiers. I threw in all the obstacles I could but it just wasn’t enough to slow them down. A quick jog back up the needle and they were away to event 2 where they capped a large number of rebels and shot apart a CIA helicopter. This done they then jumped to Vegas, setting up an EMP device that wiped out the distributed computing chips at the expo.

All in all it took them about 17 minutes to complete the mission.

The Good
Getting the players to come up with the timeline gives them a better chance to buy in which is excellent. It also takes some of the pressure off the GM which is only a good thing in this game.

The basic resolution system is solid and the players got it, I think.

Obstacles I think work but there needs to be more of them.

The Bad
For some reason I had remembered the players creating the environment and me reacting rather than the other way around. This is how I played it and the entire game fell flat because of it. The GM needs to be in the players’ faces from the off.

The psych profiles don’t really give the players enough to latch onto I felt and responsibilities were hardly used at all.

When I created obstacles there wasn’t enough adversity for me to bring in to force the players to work together more.

Going Forward
Some of this section I will split off into separate design threads. I will indicate where that is going to happen. All of these are ideas rather than solid ‘This is the obvious solution’ kind of statements.

1) I am introducing something I am going to call ethics to replace responsibilities and psych profile. This will be a separate design thread which I urge you to read if you are interested in the game as it is totally cool. I think. This will include a character sheet redesign.

2) When obstacles are placed the value of those obstacles will become dependent on their number. So for instance if there are 5 obstacles in an event 2 will be -15, 1 will be -10 and 1 will be -5. This gives a bit more variety to what the GM can do and also makes the obstacles an actual mechanical obstacle.

3) The GM needs to be aggressive and the game now needs to emphasise that and provide tools for him to do so.

4) The military nature of the team brought to my mind the idea of having character creation be part of a mission briefing. That will be explored in future playtests.

That is all for now.

Thanks to everyone who played at Spodley. Please feedback to me on what you think of the ideas above and if you have any suggestions of your own.

Cheers

Iain