I’ve been thinking more about Midnight at the Library of Worlds, my game about an interdimensional library on the eve of apocalypse. I created it for the 2016 (Atypical) Fantasy RPG Design Challenge. I ran one playtest during the contest period, and with only 3 days before the deadline, made a few revisions and called it good. But there were other issues that came up in the playtest I didn’t have time to address. I’ll talk about them here.
One of the first things you do in Library is brainstorm a lot of books. I pre-generated a list of book themes and types, then we all started filling in titles for them. There was a lot of blank page syndrome and some people seemed a bit stressed by the process. As a variant I suggest using existing books and just assigning them themes and types. I might make this the normal method, or pre-generate complete lists of books.
In addition to blocks coming up with book titles, I noticed a lot of creative fatigue and blocks as GM coming up with challenging situations, and as Librarians coming up with uses for books. I think having more context for the Library will help, and more prompts for all players. But I wonder if the resolution mechanic may also have been an issue.
The resolution mechanic is based on Night-time Animals Save the World. Like that game, the danger of a challenge is never supposed to be outright failure. You’re guaranteed to get something out of trying, even if you lose the coin comparison. I think this made it hard to think of challenges that wouldn’t result in total failure, and hard to narrate the outcomes when the Librarian lost the coin comparison.
I wanted to make a game that borrowed strongly from board games. Unfortunately, with the group I tested, this meant the Librarian players spent a lot of time (at least 20 minutes) strategizing before each of the three rounds to work out the best actions for everyone to take. On the plus side, people were engaged. On the downside, it broke up the narrative flow and means the game is vulnerable to the alpha player syndrome that plagues cooperative board games like Pandemic.
Another thing that contributes to the board-game-y feel is the way the rules and the fiction interact. In the lingo of Vincent Baker’s dice-and-cloud diagrams, the rules either go from the fiction to the cues, or from cues to the fiction, but there are no rules that do both. While I could just turn this into a board game, I think the concept is grabby enough that I want to push it more towards the RPG side.
I think the resolution mechanic also contributes to the gaminess. There’s no randomizer, so large-value coins become a resource to be managed. Now that I’m reflecting, I wonder if that’s the right feel for a game about scrambling to get out before the apocalypse. The obvious way to go would be to try a die+bonus vs TN or PbtA 2d6 10+/7-9/6- mechanic, but sticking to the rules of the Fantasy RPG Challenge I’d need to find something different. And if I could find something book-related, that would be even better. (Page numbers? Word counting?)
The last observation is about my inclusion of “Romance” as a book type. There’s a long history of romance as a genre, and I deliberately included “scientific romance” as a possibility, which was one of the early names for the genre now called “science fiction.” Modern romance is notable as a genre written for and by women, focusing on women’s experiences. However, all my players went straight for “trashy romance” and there was much giggling. I could add a sidebar going into the history of the term and genre, but that seems like too much of a detour for what is (currently) a very short game.
Overall, there’s a lot to work on. The concept seems to grab everyone I mention it to, and my playtest group generally had fun, but there were definitely rough patches.