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This Discord Has Ghosts in It

You've been invited to a haunted house. That haunted house is a Discord server. · By will jobst, World Champ Game Co., Good Luck Press

Some thoughts and ideas from our game

A topic by Carragen created Oct 09, 2021 Views: 493
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Hi,
also in Germany the ghosts are hunting innocent discord servers. I've played the game yesterday with 8 people, 4 ghosts and 4 investigators.
Here I want to share our thoughts, experiences and ideas.

Changes we've done

  • Ghost only channel
    This channel we used to give us the chance to align, like at one point all the ghosts agreed to become much clearer with the hints we gave to our investigators.
  • Setup phase for the ghosts
    We set the list of frights first. Then we split the party into ghosts and investigators. The investigators going to create their investigators. The ghost discussed the setup of the house, a shared story and connections. They created the ghosts together and also get some time to set up rooms and prepare other stuff.
  • Only two frights
    We reduced the frights everyone can set on the list and only set 3 per player. It felt better to find at an early stage the true frights of the investigators and directly use them in the game instead of trying longer to find them out. At the end, the cool thing to trigger a fright of the investigator is the reaction of the player on it and how they play this fright, not the process of finding the frights.
  • Tell the others, where your going to.
    To get an idea, in which room an investigator is looking, they should declare in the voice chat if they are going to change the room

What worked well

  • The usage of safety tools worked really well, because of the way the game is handling the frights. With the frights, you have an additional step to review the lines & veils you have set and can take out frights, you do not want to have represented in your game. With this (and the x-card) everyone felt really safe in the game.
  • Push to talk worked really well to emulate the communication with walkie talkies and created a simple way to avoid speaking over the other. Although every investigator is researching simultaneously, the communication worked very well in the game.
  • The main selling point of the game is the easy usage of GIFs and audio files to set the scary tone in the game. It was so great to be able to use all this things in the game for descriptions and was the most fun as a ghost. 
  • It seems like there are a lot of duties for a ghost: Share their stories in posts, try to find out the frights the investigators, listen to what is spoken, searching for GIFs and other files, take care on the actions of the other ghosts to not play in the same room at the same time and a few more. But you can easily focus.

Room for improvement

  • Roleplaying
    If you establish a setup phase for the ghosts, in which the can discuss an overall theme, relations between their ghost stories and give them some time to prepare a bit, then you can also use this time for the investigators for a roleplaying scene. Let them play out the arrival and get a good understanding for the other characters. Because this they might not get during the main phase, when they are doing the research and exploring stuff.
  • Notes
    Most investigators in our game take notes about, what they found out. Here it would be good to have a channel for this where they can share their information and have one place for them all together.
  • Clear distinctions between the ghosts
    Think not only about connections between the ghosts, but also about in what they differ and how you can present it. For our investigators it was at the beginning hard to notice, to which ghost a clue or information relates. Think about how to make this clearer.

All in all, it was a great experience and I will definitely play it again in the future and recommend it to do it too. It's great game and a cool way to tell an old horror story in a - for roleplaying games - new medium.

Best

Jörg