Hi, at Ropecon we played some games and I'll try to get around to putting AP up for ALL of them.

But, first, we have E&E. Mainly because after posting in that thread it left a question that needed answered.

What did I mean by "some pretty fundamental problems"?

E&E is a game that Matt is working on that is in a very rough, early stage. It uses traits and a city map. You create characters who are from an imaginary tarot and are tied to bits of the map. You then create antagonists in game and risk traits in conflicts, to hopefully get more traits. Traits can then get aligned to Entropy or Enlightenment so that one of them can win out. Sounds OK doesn't it? (Oh, and this is just what I can remember about the game, so don't take any of it as canon.)

Well, it does see to have some big problems at its core which really reared up in play. I think this playtest was incredibly valuable as reading that paragraph above about the game I might find myself nodding my head and thinking "cool, that sounds OK". After playing it I found there were some real disconnects.

I don't know if Joe wants to pipe in with anything he noticed. Anyway here is a bulleted list as time is short before Indianapolis. I hope we can discuss this stuff over the next while and learn from it.

* Creating characters went OK. We put in the colour and picked traits. That was all fine.
* But the game seemed to have no premise or thing to be addressed. I didn't feel that I should favour Entropy over Enlightenment or vice versa.
* I couldn't see why I would want to make antagonists when there were other things I could be doing on my turn.
* Joe's character's traits evaporated in a conflict with an antagonist, which was alarming as that had taken his traits out of play. Conversely, I mugged an antagonist and rendered him obsolete.
* Shuffling the traits about the board seemed a thing to do but it just didn't seem to do anything for me.
* It all seemed a disconnected mess.

Reflecting on it reminded me of a game idea that lives in a folder of my hard drive: C is for Cancer (about getting cancer and maybe living or maybe dying -- an interesting idea).

It's a game that has an appeal to me, but actually is not something that is realisable as a role-playing game. There is no drive to play it and any game I brought to it would be above the rules and mechanics.

Matt, I feel that you are going to work away on this game for some time trying to find a game in it. It's just that I'm not sure there is one there at all, and effort that you put in could well be in vain.

I don't really know where or how to help you with this one, except to say I think it's looking bleak.