[Comrade Stalin] Beta rules version 1 -- please playtest!

-
I have created a full set of beta rules for Comrade Stalin. It is a simple, yet (I hope) tactically and socially complex game that slightly resembles games like Mafia and Werewolves. Comrade Stalin explores the fear, paranoia and ruthlessness of totalitarianism ... while you are having fun.

To play, you need to download the rules and the roles. The roles are presented in an easy-to-print format: simply cut the pages in half to get role sheets.

Please playtest this game and tell me about your experiences! You can post here, e-mail me (victor@lilith.bb, except that it is "cc" instead of "bb"), or post wherever you like and put a link here. Thanks in advance! All playtesters will be credited in future versions of the rules.

Comments

  1. Dannii11 November 2013 at 13:34

    So if you have two tokens, does that mean you could choose to use your spy ability twice, rather than using two of your abilities? Also, can only the Assassin gain tokens now?

    I'd recommend still having a role card for Stalin, describing the end game rules and how they can win.

    Looks good! I want to play it!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Victor Gijsbers11 November 2013 at 13:38

      Yes, you can choose how you want to spend your tokens, but you can only spend them on abilities on your role sheet. All characters with the "Purify" ability can gain tokens, so that would be the Ideologue, the Assassin and the Informer.

      (I notice that I have forgotten a flavour description of the Informer. Well, no big deal.)

      Your idea about a role card for Stain might be good, I'll think about it!

      Delete
  2. Joey12 November 2013 at 12:59

    This does look interesting. Trying to work out if it could be successfully adapted for play on forums.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Dannii13 November 2013 at 14:39

      Shall we start one on intfiction.org?

      Delete
    2. Victor Gijsbers13 November 2013 at 19:48

      I have no experience with running any games like these on fora, but apparently people do lots of roleplaying and even stuff like Werewolves/Mafia on them. If you can play Werewolves, you can play Comrade Stalin.

      You'd need a Game Master who deals the roles and goal cards, and tells people the result of their spy actions.

      Unlike Werewolves, all actions are taken publicly. So everybody should see that person X takes a look at person Y's goal card.

      It is essential that you know which goal cards have been looked at, so they should be labelled "goal A" and "goal B". Then, spying takes the form of saying "I'll spy on goal A of Peter". When people kill or get killed, they should say which of their goal cards get discarded / given away.

      Delete
  3. Paul18 November 2013 at 21:52

    The oldest home of internet Mafia is the Grey Labyrinth forum. I'm sure people there would be quite open to trying something like this. The problems I see would be making sure that comrade Stalin is a reliable person who will show up with great regularity to keep the game moving, and with the timer. I can't help with reliability, but here's the patch for the timer:

    At the beginning of the game, comrade Stalin constructs some phrase specifying a date between 2 and 4 weeks in the future (assuming 1 day on forum is about 1 minute face-to-face). He remembers the phrase exactly (write it down!), and uses some previously agreed hashing generator (such as http://www.md5hashgenerator.com/index.php) to produce its fingerprint and posts this fingerprint publicly to start the game. When the specified date comes up, comrade Stalin ends the game by revealing exactly what the hashed phrase was, so the other players can check. The point of a phrase or sentence rather than just the date is to prevent people from just trying all possible dates; there are far too many possible phrases.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Victor Gijsbers25 November 2013 at 15:31

      Note that in the beta rules, it is no longer Stalin who chooses the time! (That rule made no sense, because for Stalin it is ALWAYS better to have the end of the game later, since he can stop the game early if he wants to.)

      I don't think you'd need to use a hash generator either, since you would need a GM anyway, right?

      Delete
    2. Paul25 November 2013 at 17:10

      Oh yeah, I missed that. You're right though, since you have to have a GM (or at least an automated GM) anyway, he can announce the time for October October Revolution. In that case this should make a great forum game, and I highly encourage you to suggest it at GL.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Keeping the narrative pressure on

-
I played another session of Trollbabe yesterday, and I would like to take the opportunity to write a little bit about GMing this game (and similar narrativist games). This is not a worked out manifesto so much as an attempt to think through an approach that I've been taking more or less instinctively. First, some context. This game was online, with two people I had never played with before: Judith and Katy. Actually, it's not quite true that I never played with Judith. I've known her for some 38 years, and possibly the first roleplaying I was ever engaged in was on a vacation with her family and my family. She acted as a kind of story guide, and I and her brother Adriaan played characters in an unfolding short story. I was thrilled by the possibilities inherent in such an activity, but it would take more time before I really discovered the world of tabletop RPGs. Both Judith and Katy played a bunch of roleplaying games before, though as far as I can judge they were all fai...
Read more

Walter Benjamin, "Der Erzähler" (The Storyteller)

-
In the comments to my last post, Ian mentioned an essay by Walter Benjamin , Der Erzähler ( The Storyteller ). Benjamin was an important German philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century; he wrote on a wide range of topics, but his best-known work is probably his essay Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (it is widely cited as The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction , but The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility would have been a better translation). Der Erzähler is a very rich and complex essay. It claims to be a reflection on the work of Nikolai Lesskow (in English known as Leskov, I believe); but it also touches on the difference beween a story (in the sense that a storyteller tells stories; Erzählung , not Geschichte ) and a novel, on the communicability of experience, on the role of death in modern life, on the nature of wisdom, on the relation between man and nature, and on several other topics. All...
Read more

Thoughts on a Trollbabe session

-
Yesterday, I played a second session of Trollbabe with Erik and Michiel, even more delightful than the first. ( Trollbabe . I dislike the title of the game, to be frank, but it's the only thing about it to dislike. Let me stress that the whole point of the game is that you're playing strong, independent women. With horns.) To give you an impression of the context, let me say that both Erik and Michiel are very good friends of mine, and that we've done a fair amount of roleplaying before, though mostly D&D. In fact, the two of them have played various editions of D&D almost exclusively, and neither had any previous GMing experience. That was about to change. In the first session, I GMed their characters Rolda (Michiel) and Vekir (Erik), who were together in a single adventure -- something that is not a given in Trollbabe . This time, we were going to do the same thing, but in addition I would also get to play a character, one adventuring at a different location. Mi...
Read more