Monthly Archives: February 2014

Play testing a game is likely the hardest part of game design. You take all your ideas, work and creativity and put it all out to lie on a cold hard slab in front of people you don’t know. As a designer we all  fear our play test will turn into some bizarre scene out of CSI:GenCon where we get ritually cut apart by our critical players and then someone makes an ironic joke about how bad the game was before the theme music rolls and some idiot puts on a pair of shades.

In reality this is generally pretty far from the truth. Most of the time, especially at welcoming environments like Dreamation players are there to see the raw idea, to play around in the sandbox of our dreams and hopefully enjoy their time. These early sandboxes don’t have as many rules as a final product, which means they almost always offer more creative solutions and sometimes those lead to better ideas that ultimately end up shaping the design.

The problem is how to pull the experiences the players liked out from the game. Post game most people are emotionally exhausted and while this can be a hard time to pry intellectual mechanical discussion about the game, it’s not a horrible time to ask people how they feel. Roses and Thorns is about prompting the exhausted players for an emotional response, “What made you feel good?” and “What made you feel bad?”.

I like to think Roses & Thorns isn’t about “What mechanic didn’t you like?” or “Why do you hate my dice stacking/stepping thing so much?”. Roses and Thorns is about striking at the raw emotional nerve of the player experience and demanding a response.

The process is pretty simple, go around your table and ask each player to describe a part of the game that made them feel happy. This could be a scene, a player interaction or a specific event. The Play Tester’s job here is to take good notes and to tie the emotional response to the underlying structure of the game. As a Tester I don’t write “Bob enjoyed the Teamwork in the shootout where everyone communicated” I write “Bob enjoyed the Teamwork that came from mechanic x/y or fiction x/y”. As a tester you are essentially tagging player emotional response to specific components of your game.

Then come the Thorns, hey we all hate this but it is arguably the most important part. Go around the table and ask each player to describe a part of the game that made them feel sad/bad? At this point I usually make the ironic joke and put on sunglasses so they can’t see my tears.

At this stage, we as Testers are tagging negative emotional response and correlating it to the game. If everyone felt frustrated in a certain scene take note of it. As a Tester, what was going on in that scene? Was this when you used that specific negotiation move? Maybe this is what needs some work.

The point of Roses and Thorns or at least my take on this method is to not ask people to “fix my game” but to ask “how it made them feel”.

– Mark

Hello Everyone,

This is basically my first blog post on this site and also a quick re-cap of my tremendous experience at Dreamation in Morristown, NJ. I ran my first public play test of my new RPG Headspace to an overwhelming positive response. I’m in a general state of shock at how well everyone took to the ideas and thrilled the game is generating some early buzz.

I really want to thank my play testers, you were a joy to GM and made the entire experience wonderful!

The Good:

The mechanics reinforced the teamwork in the party. Everyone was working together in a dystopic future, one player even called the game “Shadowrun meets Leverage” and I’m certainly OK with this comparison. The core “Professional” and “Headspace” moves worked accordingly, in fact my design has clearly moved all the GM’s “soft” moves into the players hands.

The Players basically succeed and created their own complications and in the end the GM just has to ask questions, nudge the agenda and provide a the “hard” moves when required. I’m beginning to think there will be a lot less GM moves in Headspace.

The Middle:

The stress track feed-backing on a value of 7 was way too high. So high that we only hit it in the morning because everyone just wanted to see what happened. In the evening session I made feedback happen at a value of 5 and that seemed to work/threaten the players as it was intended too.

The Bad:

The Memories didn’t really come into play at all. Everyone agreed they needed to be there and would have value in play, they just need more meat.

Also Improvised Moves while good on paper never really came into play. It is possible it has a greater effect on small player count games?

If you are interested  in the continuing development of my game, the current draft and the scenario/character sheets used for the convention are available on this site.

– Mark Richardson