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A jam submission

Haunting GhostsView project page

An RPG about ghosts hunting ghosts
Submitted by NotWriting (@NotWritingGames), katamoiran (@hedonicink), gray — 1 day, 6 hours before the deadline
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Haunting Ghosts's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
How cohesively designed do you think the game is overall?#34.5004.500
How elegant, useful, and intuitive are the game's mechanics?#63.6673.667
How clear & compelling is the game's central idea?#113.8333.833

Ranked from 6 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

  • "It's a living" ends the introduction of this game, an old joke that still had me crack a smile. This game feels similarly comfortable, taking both a recognizable story trope of "ghosts who are ghost hunters" and polyhedral dice to create a statisfyingly simple system. At the same time this game does not rely on your comfort, and does a great job explaining the basics for anyone (not just someone who has roleplayed before). One thing that could have used a call out is safety surrounding the themes of death. Suicide, murder, parent death, and other triggering material is all possible to explore in this game. That needs a litle a little call out of having a safety conversation before play begins. The last thing that I think should be pointed out is how wildly variant the different dice combinations can create. Rolling a d10+d12 gives you between 2 and 22, which is big swing compared to possibly rolling a d4+d6 for a later action. Dice swings can be real fun though, and this game seems to be very comfortable interrupting that as some built in whimsy.
  • How clear & compelling is the game's central idea? The Idea is good, but has more suggestion of what I will be doing in a game as opposed to a concrete direction. It could use more showing of what to do. How elegant, useful, & intuitive are the game's mechanics? THe mechanics are clear, and very well defined success-failure scales help with that. I do worry that the default target numbers are a bit high given the size of dice used. How cohesively designed do you think the game is overall? The game as a whole reads very easy, and seems to all go together very well, there was never a moment I felt lost reading it.
  • This is a game that I thought was especially interesting to see evolve over time, since each iteration I thought could work perfectly fine as a complete game! I found the theme of helping (or enforcing) ghosts pass on while navigating the afterlife and mortal attachment yourself to be very compelling, and I was similarly impressed with the mechanical synergies that reinforce that theme. I thought the tips for playing fate and principles for the game were quite good as well.

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Comments

Submitted

Fun!  

I find myself wondering about advancement, if not through character improvement then possibly through ladder climbing.  Maybe this could crossbreed with iHunt and the haunting spirits are working the gig economy.  

There is a ton of potential in this, and it is a goldmine of great ideas.