Two more PBP games

I know that the playtest period is over, but I figured I'd link and talk about these anyway.  I MCed (am MCing) both of these games.  

The first one just ended with the player's death.  I think I was playing a little fast and loose with what "ghost" means.  Either that's OK or you should define more about these ghosts, I think.  You do a lot of that in this version compared to last and I love it, but maybe more yet -- like in the intro material.  This player also didn't always answer my questions.  I think that's largely an artifact of PBP; I didn't want to spend time drawing attention to it and bugging him for answers.  In retrospect, it made the game seem kind of mechanical.  (Long ago, I was one of many (I think) who talked about that as a problem with IaWA and you helped straighten out how to play.  If you have tricks for making that natural here, they might be valuable.)  

As I mentioned in an email to you, I really like p17.  And also, the series of 6, 8, 10, 14 & 16 as builders of character.

The second game is still going though I thought the player had a good chance of falling into the death spiral on the last turn.  We recently encountered a situation where the player had already narrated trying to run back the way he came and then I sent him to 42 and on his high hand, he had to pick something bad, but one of the options was running back the way he came...how terrible!  I narrated his escape and some prolonged running and getting turned around a little to help frame it as a bad thing, but I'm not really sure how much we're supposed to do like that.  I guess it's OK as long as it keeps working.  :)

It's a fun little game.

Hi, I'm the player in the first game above. Yeah, I suppose I didn't really answer a couple of those questions, truly. But at the same time, I have no idea what this game is really supposed to be about, and therefore don't know exactly what is expected of me other than doing what is written in the book. What is the experience that the designer is trying to evoke? Also, it felt mechanical because it was a playtest. I am playing the game to test whether playing it as it is written does what it's supposed to. Are you supposed to die when you draw a bust? Are you supposed to run away when you see a ghost? Again, this boils down to having zero idea what experience I was ever meant to be having. I'd give it another shot, but based on that single go, I would say this game pretty much sucks.

That's an interesting reaction.

There's this chain from the end of 5 to 11b to 15a and then the end of 15 and on into 13 or 17 during which I'm supposed to describe the ghost as it's doing stuff it's thing and then reacting with no input from the player.  There's something weird about that.  Like a run-on sentence; it's maybe OK if you're doing it on purpose but if it's oversight, it feels like 15 is ripe for player input.