Esoterrorists: Actual Play

[bryant]

We played some Esoterrorists over at Jere’s last night, and it was awesome. I may have some more analysis-like thoughts later, but I wanted to get down some actual play stuff before it faded from memory. One of my questions going into the game was how smoothly the flow of play could work; would it be awkward getting clues? Would point spends work well? Turned out that all that can work very well. Here’s how it played out, more or less.

The setup is here. In short, we’re a bunch of former students whose shared mentor, Professor Thorne, has a missing son, Brandon. She’s asked us to find him. After a bit of stage-setting, we headed off to his dorm room and talked our way in to find evidence and talk to his roommate.

Kirby, who spoke Cantonese, split off to talk to the roommate and keep the housemaster busy (”you’ll want to sit in, of course”) while we shook down the missing kid’s room. We did Kirby’s mini-scene first. It played out exactly like any NPC interaction does, with the exception that no rolls were required to get him to say the right things. He talked, Kirby pushed a bit, he talked more. At one point, Jere said “and you can do a Flattery point spend or an Interrogation point spend to get some more info about that.” Kirby did the Flattery point spend, and the roommate opened up a bit more, giving us the name of Brandon’s quasi-mentor and telling us that Brandon had been on drugs Tuesday night. He also mentioned that Brandon had written something on his window in soap and wiped it off afterwards.

We’d have gotten the name out of a later scene in any case, and we were about to find out that Brandon was doing drugs, but the point spend gave us more context. So it wasn’t a case of having to spend points to progress; it just gave us the opportunity to understand the existing clues better.

Meanwhile, the rest of us hit Brandon’s room. Jess, playing a Sotheby’s investigator, identified the painting in the postcard on Brandon’s desk — Jere had a copy printed out along with the Wikipedia article on the artist, and handed it over. This clue was available on sight.

While searching, we noticed a bunch of beetles scurrying around. Jere: “Jeff, you know those are carrion beetles from South America; given their current state of development, they hatched on Friday. The eggs can remain dormant for up to a century, though.” Jeff had the right skill, so he just got the information up front. Very clean, very smooth.

We proactively tracked the beetles back to the closet, in which we found a Mesoamerican vase of some value. We also found a Guatemalan bag full of yage, which I identified immediately, somewhat to the distress of my compatriots. “I sniff it, rub a little on my gums, use my lighter to set a bit on fire and sniff the fumes.” Tom: “… I’m pretty sure I ought to arrest you for that.”

Tom had points in Data Retrieval, so he worked over the computer, getting a bunch of names from Brandon’s email. Most of the emails were oddly encrypted, so we saved those off for later perusal. The email patterns were plenty enough to give us an idea of who Brandon’s closest friends were, though. We also found a bunch of photos of a South American archeological dig, including photos of pots much like the one we’d just found. None of this took a point spend, although Tom did specifically say he was looking at the computer. Jess realized, since she had Archeology, that the pictures were clearly an illegal, unauthorized dig.

Finally, we found Brandon’s diary, which was coded in much the same way as the emails.

Much discussion about the clues, their meaning, and so forth ensued, cut somewhat short when we realized that Kirby would run out of distractions at some point. Jeff paused at the end and asked if he could make a Chemistry spend to notice the traces of soap on the window and do something to figure out what the designs had been; Jere said sure and described a weird mathematical sequence partially based on the Fibonacci series. We headed off to the next scene, pretty satisfied.

That was probably our busiest scene, which makes sense given that everything has to branch off the first scene. We had clues that Jere just handed to the appropriate person; we had clues that were easy to get once we roleplayed looking in an appropriate place; we had point spends prompted by Jere; and we had self-prompted point spends. I’d been concerned that the system would just dump clues on us automatically as we entered scenes, but it’s clearly way more flexible than that.

A strict reading of the rules might mean you didn’t have the clues available with appropriate roleplay, but I think that’d be too limiting. The sample scenario includes that sort of thing. I don’t think you’re blocking investigation by expecting PCs to, say, look inside a closet or open up computer files. The blockage would be if we’d had to make Computer Skill rolls once we decided to look at the computer.

That middle range of clue gathering also prevents any sense of railroading. Clearly our choices did matter, even if they were relatively easy choices. By waiting for us to seek out clues, we were firmly situated as protagonists rather than onlookers. Leaving some point spends for us to request further cemented that.

At the same time, I never felt like we were having communication failures. As Jeff noted the other night, one peril of an investigatory game is that the GM and the players will differ on what’s important, and one or the other will get frustrated. In our play, the GM’s take on important clues was very much up front. It was not at all difficult to understand what Jere felt was important, because the important stuff was all clues, and he was free to say “you notice this, this, and this.”

I found this to be tremendously liberating from the immersive roleplay point of view. Transparent mechanics, n’est pas? But more on that if/when I write again.

Originally published at Imaginary Vestibule.

Comments

[bluegargantua]

So the one thing I was worried about would be that you'd go into a scene and just start reading down your list of investigative skills to see what shakes loose. That only sort of seemed to happen in Brendon's room, but it was our first real investigative scene and all of us were crowded in his room. After that, we were awash in potential clues and our character's split up which helped a lot.

I guess my only follow-on worry would be that if people split up a lot, there might be a scene where a clue can't be found because our resident expert isn't with us. I suppose that's down to the player's making sure there's just enough overlap and the GM making sure that important clues don't hinge on just one person.

Still, it is a fun game and this is pretty much how I'll ever play Call of Cthulhu in the future.

later
Tom

[head58.livejournal.com]

I really hate investigative games because they often seem like nose-leading railroading by the GM. I'm not quite getting from your write up here how this escaped that trap, but it sounds like it did.

Does the GM establish the clues based entirely on the skillsets of the PCs? If you hadn't had an art expert there, the postcard might have been meaningless for example.

Also, can you say more on the social mechanics you mention in Kirby's scene there? It sounds like other than being able to spend a point for more info, there isn't any mechanic there but I think I'm missing something.

[bryant]

If you hate the genre in question completely, Esoterrorists is probably not a fix. On the other hand, this felt less railroady to me than some investigative games I've been in. I think it's because there's no frustration building up around clue finding.

The GM does establish clues based on PC skillsets. Or, in this case, Jere worked out the clues and let us know what skills had how many clues available, so we took our character generation cues from that.

Social skills are just another kind of investigative skill. So: I had Anthropology; thus, when we saw the drugs, Jere said "you recognize them as blah blah." Likewise, Kirby had Reassurance (I think), so when he started talking to the roommate, Jere roleplayed the roommate as opening up.

The point spend was for extra information on top of that.

And yeah, the mechanic is that simple. Do you have the right skill to get a clue? You get the clue.

[head58.livejournal.com]

I think I hate the genre because of bad experiences in the past, mainly, and because of a lack of proper tools in my head to do it correctly. Thus I was wondering how this turned things around enough to work.

Interesting stuff. If there's a game of it at Origins I may try to hop in. Thanks.

[princejvstin.livejournal.com]

Which I picked up on when I read Trail of cthulhu. It's an interesting idea, it removes the bottleneck of "find the one true clue or else".

If I have skill x, I can find a useful clue related to that, and if I want more, spend points.

The GM would have to be careful to allow for clues for the relevant skills of all investigators, though. That could be trickier, but it would be more rewarding.

[bryant]

Yep -- it requires a fair amount of GM prepwork to run a session of this. You couldn't ad lib it.

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

Goodness no. At least I couldn't, though you could probably go a little more short hand than I did. We had 5 scenes really and they were 10 single typed 10 pt pages.

[dcltdw]

oooh. To me, the appeal is not its transparency but its lightweight manner. "You're an expert at X. You just know this stuff." Now we're focusing on Stuff, not mechanics: "wait, is it like this? or more like that?". Mechanics still plays a role: "you're... a grad student? You don't know. Oh wait, you're a professor with 10 years of research? Sure, okay, you know...".

Hrm. Now I want to do more one-offs. Pity that I'm such a crappy writer. (Entirely my fault; I don't read enough. :) )

[simonjrogers.livejournal.com]

Thanks very much for this excellent and detailed feedback. I'm pleased that your experience of actual play was what we had intended, and you were very flexible in the way you handed out clues. It doesn't always work that way, and that can lead to frustration.

In Esoterrorists, if a character isn't present at the scene, you can have another character notice the clue but not understand it. Let's call this a proxy clue. A mobile call, or a wireless device perhaps with a visual link up will allow the other character to determine what's going on. Where a player is not at the session, you use the "Compensating for spotty attendance" rules.

I will disagree with you on one point, or at least my experience differs, and that is with improvisation. As long as you have the table of what skills the PCs have and the basic structure as described in the adventure creation section, it's not too hard to improvise, or at least no harder than in games where you roll for clues. The place to start with this is with improvised clues in a pre-plotted adventure. You might notice someone has invested heavily in a clue you've forgotten, and you can throw something in, or react to a player suggestion of an ability use, although some groups hate the latter.

[bryant]

My pleasure.

I like the proxy clue concept; I think we were instinctively doing something similar. There's always the option of stealing clues for later interpretation or revisiting the scene, as well.

I will take your word on the improvisation point, since you're far more experienced with the game than any of us. But man, intimidating. ;)

Thanks for publishing this game.