This was posted publicly on Google Plus on August 24, 2017, a review of my game Discernment available in the No Press RPG Anthology.
Michael PrescottRPGAug 24, 2017Tonight we played Discernment! This is a tiny little story game by +Michael Miller of With Great Power fame. The premise is really engaging: one player is the Subject, a person essentially abducted by aliens and given induced amnesia. Everyone else plays alien scholars, who are trying to suss out the essence of the subject’s personality.
The researchers take turns immersing the subject in scenes designed to reveal the subject’s inner truth (one of 14 personality traits). The scene designer crafts roles for the subject and the other scholars, and they thenplay out the action until the scene-designer announces that they have reached the crucial conflict. At this point, a little bidding game takes over.
The bidding game determines who wins the scene, the subject or the scholars. If the subject wins, the holographic/hypnotic veil is pierced, and the subject learns something about their captivity.
In either case, the scholars have a chance to guess the subject’s hidden quality. What’s fun about this is that it’s played a little like a double-blind version of Mastermind – the scholars are forbidden from sharing their guesses. The subject takes them, scores them as a whole, and tells the scholar team their collective score.
If enough scholars have guessed the answer, the scholars win the game. If the subject pierces the veil three times, the subject wins. Until either one of those things happen, the game continues with another round of scenes.
Overall, this was a fun way to spend a couple of hours, although we felt the game suffered from not really connecting the role-playing to the bidding game.
The role-play aspect of the game seems to have a lot of potential, especially if you’re looking for bleed – the whole point is for the scholars to craft a scene that really reveals personality, so this feels like a framework where you could get some really juicy scenes.
On the other hand, the subject isn’t required to reveal their inner quality through role-play in an obvious way (they can respond to the scene naturalistically if they prefer), and since there are 14 to choose from, very little reliable information comes this back to the scholars this way.
Just to be dicks, for our third game we experimented with not doing any role-play whatsoever – we just renumbered the personality traits 1 through 14, and played the game as if it were a team number-guessing game. It worked just fine, which seemed to suggest to us that this is basically two nearly mechanically disconnected games that are connected only by the theme of guessing. Rather than underscore and deepen the role-playing, it feels a bit like cognitive overload.
We’d have preferred mechanics that helped deepen the scenes somehow, or spent some of the game’s mechanical complexity on forcing the subject to make choices about how much of their inner personality to reveal.
Anyways, really interesting regardless, especially as +Tim Groth is banging away at a little game that has some thematic similarities.6 comments68 plus ones82 shares2Shared publicly•View activity
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- Tim Groth+3We borked up one thing about the narration in case of the scholar victory, and when I realized that it made me think of the game as really about which of two different sides of the narrative (subject’s past or future) is focused on—and to an extent that playing involved deciding which you prefered along with how hard to play for control of particular scenarios, winning, and so on.
I liked the ritual phrases, as I generally like that kind of structure especially in concept games.
Leaving aside mechanical tweaking, I think the thing that the game would most benefit from would be a reorganization / relayout such that instead of the icon indicators for levels and so forth it had three columns per page, with each column referring to the section’s relevant rules for a particular layer. Required phrases for framing things would be bolded (or maybe bold for scholars and italics for subjects). Also a single page immediate reference chart just for quick consultation as people are learning it.
Oh and the subject should definitely keep a copy of the wheel in front of them so that they can always see their adjacencies.REPLYAug 24, 2017 - Michael PrescottYes, 100% on the relayout. The basic procedures aren’t that complicated, sifting them (and re-sifting them) out of the textwall is tricky.REPLYAug 24, 2017
- Kyle Latino+1This was a really interesting review about a very cool sounding game! I like the notes about mechanics connecting to the theme, and the way you hacked the game to explore the connection. Very clever.REPLYAug 24, 2017
- Michael Miller+1Thanks, +Michael Prescott! I’m glad that you and +Tim Groth got something fruitful from it! (May I reshare this thread?)
Discernment was one of the first games I designed after finding the Forge. I was still figuring out that interplay between fiction and mechanics you point out. It was more of a thought experiment in the beginning, before +Luke Crane gave it immortality in the No Press Anthology. I should probably make it available electronically. Hmm.
As a personal aside, I’ve played it maybe three times and always lost, twice to +Ben Lehman. I suck at the Mastermind part of the guessing game!
Over the years, it’s been interesting to see the parts of the game that different people latch onto. One group played it and thought of it as “GM/scene-framing boot camp” where the Scholar-players are there to hone their real-life skills.REPLYAug 24, 2017 - Michael Prescott+2+Michael Miller Reshare freely! We view games like this very charitably, we know they’re essentially experiments that don’t get the benefit of large budgets, oodles of play testing, and a bunch of revisions.
We did have one funny experience, in the second game we honed in on an answer with such laser focus that we inadvertently gaslit the subject, and he changed his answer without realizing it! Wups.REPLYAug 24, 2017 - Tim Groth+2I have a physical copy of the book, but to get sheets and so forth I found it an electronic copy to make them from (because it is easier for me to print from a PDF at work than to plop down a book on the copier).
The other thing we noticed was that three scholars creates an uncomfortable math situation in that six points has only one possible meaning. It also means that the use of the nickel is riskier. Which ultimately is an interesting thing about group consensus finding without the ability to directly talk about what you’re trying to converge on.REPLY