Offside report of Nick’s Certaine Seditious Personnes

The game is based on the plot of the Neville Brothers against king Edward IV who has fallen under the spell of the Woodville family, rather than the most powerful brother: the Earl of Warwick (aka the Kingmaker). While Warwick thought he had Edward under his control after bringing him the crown in 1461, the new king shifted his powerbase after a few years. So, the Woodvilles must be ousted from royal favour or even die.

A lot of useful feedback was given at the end of the session that Nick can work on from. I won’t repeat all of it, but a few major themes emerged: the form of the game, with players in different locations actually made the conspiring rather more complicated than had the players just been in a committee.

The influence point system didn’t add to the immersion of the players (it felt ‘not medieval’ as someone remarked), and allowed the central players to do too much, thus making the sidekicks unnecessary in the game. Which made for a boring game for the sidekicks.

A more general point is that although CLWG members may be used to online sessions in Discord, many others are not, and this takes time getting used to. There’s rules channels, OOC chat channels, multiple voice channels and message channels, all limited to certain players. If you add the time needed to explain the influence points (a google sheets document), the map (a whiteboard app), the game rules (a google docs document) and briefings (another google doc), this left uninitiated players with a steep learning curve, and too many things to watch, too much to do. It frankly also taxes the players who’ve done this before. Please limit the amount of different media you involve in the game to the minimum.

So I’m not going to complain that the player whose henchman I was, didn’t use me to hench. He probably wasn’t fully aware of the possibility or how to do it, he had too much stuff to do anyway and there was no reward in delegating to me as he had way more PIPs to burn than me so he didn’t need me for that, and I had no in game use to start with. I had no skills, no resources to offer or to negotiate with to further my own goals. Half the time I wasn’t even in communication. But in a megagame I would have walked over to the Woodvilles and asked if they could use me for anything or just raised a ship and gone pirating (if the PIP system had allowed anything as concrete as that).

That coincides with my misunderstanding of the passing of time. It never was clear to me how much time was supposed to pass in a turn. The start if the game is very specific, May 1464. Are the turns months and could I be chasing the countryside after a fleeing Henry VI? Or is a turn a half year and are actions more drawn out? So if I make no progress in the game, is that just a reflection of little time having passed or am I doing something wrong?

Lots for Nick to ponder. I’m sure next iteration will be very different and much improved!