Expert at Making Bad Movies
August 9, 2007Finally played zombie survival horror with the latest version of Giger Counter. It went really well, overall. I’m getting a firmer handle on what the mechanical pacing should be like, at least for a group of 5-6 players. However, I’m beginning to worry, because, so far, we’ve only made really BAD movies.
Playtest #1: Storm Windows, a late night tv movie about a high school caught in a major storm while a slasher was on the loose.
Playtest #2: Queen of the Swarm, SciFi channel movie about a government-sponsored group sent to investigate the alien infiltration of a secret research facility.
Playtest #3: Til Undeath Do Us Part, hordes of zombies assault a wedding party trapped on a private island.
I enjoy the occasional bad horror movie as much as the next guy, but I was kinda writing Giger Counter to create GOOD survival horror movies in the vein of Alien(s), Scream, and classic zombie flicks. I’m not sure if it’s the current rules that are keeping that from happening, if the players (who have mostly been new to the system each time) don’t have enough of a handle on things to pull that off the first time, or if we just need to collectively decide we are going to make a really good movie and not play it for cheesy laughs.
One thing that I think would help would be spending more time on the brainstorming that leads up to picking an overall premise. That’s one thing that makes Primetime Adventures work so well and may be the key ingredient missing here.
I’ve seen many games – usually the ones with more open-ended setup – become focused on riffing on and messing with genre tropes, sometimes to the point of parody. You can also count on a general dose of “silly” you get when youre learning a new game, there are some unintentional outcomes, and if the players have a little less “deep” attachment to the characters (esp. with oneshots). It sounds like a combination of the above is what we have here.
Try another go-through, keeping the rules the same but with a majority of players having experienced the rules before. Start off with the explicit intention of keeping things serious; early on, display a “soft veto / suggestion” to others to keep the tone in check. (“Dev, I think the swarm thing might get a little silly. How about more like…”) Others will start to do the same, hopefully.
Then we’ll see if the sillyness is due to the rules themselves, or the social context in which they’re working.
Yeah, I find that this happens with playtests too, particularly when you’re just stepping into a genre you have not worked a lot in before. Deconstruction is a lot of fun and it can easily turn silly. It takes a bit to get reined in and actually embrace the genre.