[Workplace Bully] A 2-player diceless hack in playtest

I've written a two-player game exploring what happens when an employee's new boss turns out to be a bully. It's a game about trying to fight an every-day monster.

Workplace Bully (11 page .pdf, 526kb)

• Genre: documentary/real-world
• Set-up: under 5 minutes
• Duration: I estimate a full game will take between 25-60 minutes, but it's playable in self-contained 5-10 minute segments.
• System: a diceless Apocalypse World hack. I think of it as a sibling of Avery McDaldno's Dream Askew


This is a playtest draft of Workplace Bully. It's been through lots of solo playtesting (with more to come) and a few external playtests.

If you're interested in taking a look or playing it, this release is about looking for problems. I'm particularly interested in:

a) places where the rules fall down and don't make it clear how to continue playing, and
b) parts of the game that are too complicated (my main weakness as a designer)

A quick obvious point: on P.5, point 2, it says "Take the MGR playbook [D]", but D is actually the Employee's playbook.

I'll have time for some proper feedback later, but a quick skim looks good so far.

Thanks, James. I appreciate you taking a look at it.

I'll add that correction to my list for Draft 2.

It looks like the kind of thing I'd really have to see in action to assess how the rules supports the theme and intent of the game, but one aspect of it I found especially hard to follow is the parts regarding Stress and Insight, and the Broken and Transformed levels: the latter seems to be how the former get brought into the game, but I couldn't see how the levels were taken? Even after a lot of back and forth through the pages of the document, I was left uncertain how any Stress and Insight would ever enter the game: as a driving mechanic of play, I think it really deserves a call-out somewhere in the introductory text or the description of each player's role.

Thanks, James. I can see that I haven't clearly explained how those part of the system come in to play and interact with each other. That will definitely go into my 'changes for the next draft' list.

Let's see if I can explain it more clearly, here ...

The intention is that you play the game in two phases: a conversational, back-and-forth exchange of Goes followed by a period of downtime (called 'Evaluation'). Evaluation is the primary source of Stress and Insight for characters.

When you're having your exchange of Goes, you're as in the fiction as possible, trying to create the reality of this Manager-Employee relationship.

When the exchange of Goes come to a natural end-point (or if neither of you are sure what to do next), then you go to Evaluation. That's where you assess how much Stress the Employee just earned and how much Insight they got into the bullying dynamic of their relationship. The players can then take the Stress and Insight with them into the next exchange of Goes and spending them to unlock new abilities.

Both characters can also earn Stress and Insight when the employee takes 'damage' from what the bullying manager has done to them (that's the 'Broken' and 'Transformed' stuff you pointed out, James.)

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Man, I hope that's clearer (I have a head-cold at the moment, so I have no idea!) I'll take a look at the rules and see how I can make it clearer, there.