#experiment 2

Here is the second one I made today.I think I did better than the first one. I’m getting the hang of this! For those of you who aren’t familiar with this I’m working on a series called flavor of love, I compare characters to different chocolate flavors. People can also chose to partake in my matchups as well. I do them for both Haikyuu and Twisted Wonderland, but I’m thinking about adding others as well… 

I’m also doing matchups you can find that here: 2 Lines & A Circle : Flavor of Love, Find Your Match~ (tumblr.com)

I was intimidated by actually making a game with this concept, and I definitely think I would need to do a lot more iterations to actually make it a complete game. I definitely took inspiration from where I’ve seen murder mysteries in games before, namely Werewolf, which then led me to thinking about Blood on the Clocktower. I was very inspired by the idea of two opposing sides and some neutral characters from that game, and remembering the goals from the discussion of Everyone is John, decided to have goals that fall under three different sides: reveal the truth, conceal the truth, and neutral (no goal). I wanted players to have a relation to the murder (that they kept hidden), inspired by these social deduction games. I also wanted players to have a public identity to allow for more roleplay than is allowed in a game like Werewolf, and tried to come up with archetypes that appear across many different mystery media. I wanted players to have freedom to set the game wherever they wanted to. At this point, I felt confident about my setup, but very uncertain of what I wanted the actual gameplay to be. I assigned some points and skills to try and give a gameplay benefit to roleplaying, but I wanted to use the playtest to see how players would actually react to this scenario.

I knew this was a GM heavy game, so I took on the role of the GM for testing and made a small two-room mystery. I had a feeling that gameplay would be pretty unstructured (I also went last in my group and we were running a bit short on time, so I went through the actual rules a little bit quickly), but I was surprised by how little the players interacted with the world. It seemed that they were roleplaying more outside of the structure that was supposed to exist in the game. I had wanted each conversation to encompass a turn, but conversations seemed to spill over out of turns. When I asked for feedback, I was told I needed to make the actual game more structured. This was what I expected, as I was happy with the setup but not the content of my game. One of my testers referenced Ace Attorney as inspiration to draw from (which I found interesting because I accidentally based the scenario for playtesting on my least favorite Ace Attorney case), in having specific things to interact with planned out. They also mentioned giving more of an outline for GMs to follow, which I agree would be very useful to have. I still don’t know the best way to do investigation work like this; I made a game for another class that was much more investigation heavy, but that had a pre-planned world that was used every time. Additionally, it was not really a roleplaying game, so it was designed far more around telling a determined story than letting the players make one. I’m still struggling with how exactly to create this sort of gameplay in a TTRPG.