Joe B.

Slow Sleigh to Plankton Downs: debrief

If you tell your players they're in a murder mystery, but the murder doesn't occur until halfway through the session, you're going to have some problems.

I ran Slow Sleigh the other night and it could have gone better. Here's some thoughts.

what?

First, some facts. I had 6 players. I made all of them pick from the backgrounds supplied in the book. Players included

I ran it as a one-shot lasting about 3 and a half hours.

I gave a brief lowdown -- the planet the players were on; the fact that this is a murder mystery investigation module; and that the trip is meant to last 72 hours.

I started by running the game in 1-hour 'turns', but quickly started to skip large tracts of time because we were at risk of ending the session without the first murder occurring.

Overall it was fun -- I always have fun -- but I also finished the session with a pounding headache and a lingering feeling that the experience could have been optimized. So let's talk about it.

so what?

Spotlighting was an issue. Having been told the session contained a Mystery, all of the players immediately split up, each trying to locate the Mystery first. Little did they know that the first murder would not yet occur for another 30(!) hours according to the book. Each player wanted to interview a different group of people on the boat, and this took time. There was a weird meta-dissonance occurring where the players were dutifully trying to Investigate, despite nothing yet having occurred worth investigating. I think this resulted in a lot of session-time and energy being wasted for little gain.

As they waited around for the Mystery to occur, there was also lots of time spent on risky, low, reward escapades like climbing through pipes and bullying the captain to obtain a lobster dinner. Fun, but I definitely sensed a push and pull between the various players, all having different levels of commitment to the supposed primary goal of the module.

When the first murder occurred, a flurry of investigative work occurred. Having been split up already, they continued in this mode of operation. Some people questioned the nuns, while one player decided he was going to lock up all of the Water-Farmers in the lounge and question them Poirot-style. Unfortunately this aggressive move scared them, and they quickly overpowered and beat him up. Another player was getting an in-road with the stewards and spent much of the evening playing cards with them, while the other players were discovering that one of the nuns was the murderer. I felt bad for that player.

I have realised that if the party splits up in an investigative module, some players will naturally hit dead-ends while others chance upon the trail of clues. A player that makes a smart move in the wrong direction will still be less successful than the player that chances to move brashly in the right direction. If the players believe that smart actions should be rewarded, this can feel unfair.

It also means that they get less spotlight time. As a GM I am compelled to follow the action. I could continue to describe how one player is playing cards, or I could focus on the questioning of the Nuns, which is a dynamic and evolving situation.

As a player, I would think that the smart choice when hitting a dead end would be to move on, or even to converge with the players who are making good headway. After all, fun is not the sole responsibility of the GM. If you the player aren't having fun, you have the power to change that by making a fun decision.

One thing that really worked and I was glad I did: Prior to the session, I rolled up the names of every single crew and passenger member. I really liked having that list in front of me to work off of.

Also, a note on the 12 year old. He was by far the 'best' player. He quickly gained access to the entire ship by offering to fix CCTV cameras for the captain, and in doing so was able to surveil the entire ship and piece together that it was one of the nuns who had committed the murder. He was also incredibly excited, but despite this would not talk over other people, instead holding up his hand or informing me that he was going to ask about X or Y when it was his turn to do something. This is in line with all other experiences I have had GMing for kids. They just do it better than adults.

Now what?

There's a few ways I could adapt, if I were to run this again.

One option would be to stretch it out over two or three sessions. This would better favour the hour-by-hour, slow dialogue based approach that we started out with. I think the resemblance that Slow Sleigh has to a capsule episode made me think it would lend itself naturally to a one-shot format, but I was perhaps wrong. There's lots to do and many people to speak to.

The second would be to run it way more loosely, as a montage of 'scenes'. In this format I would exert much more control over where the characters are and what they're doing. If I need everyone back together in the same room, I'd simply say 'ok, an hour has passed and you've all congregated back in the Lounge. Now we're going to question the nuns.' I would also be tempted to move the entire schedule forward, having the murder occur on the first night, and script a Catastrophic weather event for dramatic effect rather than rolling them randomly. This is pretty railroady, but I have fewer objections to this when running a one-shot. Moreso than in a long format game, I feel it's the role of a one-shot GM to keep things moving towards a satisfying conclusion.

The third option, and the one I'd be most interested in trying out, would be to turn the metagaming up to 11. For example, stating at the outset that a murder is going to occur exactly 30 hours from now. This would give the players some control over how much fucking around they want to do before the first murder; if they get bored or run out of leads they can just opt to skip to the 30-hr mark. In addition, in the case of the player that got stuck playing cards, it would have been helpful if I'd had the presence of mind to say, 'hey, I think you've gotten all you can out of these stewards. All the other players are pretty close to finding the murderer. Do you want your character to be there now?'. Similarly, I could have instructed the party to stick together because it was starting to get a little taxing keeping track of them all.

My final remark is that this was not a review of the module. If you want my review, here it is:

it's good!