Dato che le recensioni che ricevo non passano da questo forum, ve le copincollo:
Recensione di Dan Marushack:
True Men Don’t Kill Coyotes
The game starts with some caveats about not being “easy to playtest”, but it seems like a complete enough game to me to be eligible for the competition, although there would be some logistical barriers if people wanted to actually play it. It’s definitely aimed at a more “experiential” kind of play, closer to a jeepform experience than something you might see in a tabletop RPG that focuses on designed interactions.
Using dancing around a fire to achieve a different psychological state is an interesting technique to build a game around (I just read a book that argues that the development of this feature of human psychology was a key to creating group cohesion and trust which enabled early human tribes to function like “superorganisms” rather than a collection of purely self-interested individuals, so it’s some pretty deep and powerful stuff). Many of the character descriptions are specific enough to fire the imagination but vague enough to be conducive to the dreamlike feel the game is going for. They also felt like archetypes that many people could be comfortable playing rather than references to specific mythology, folklore, or tradition. That seems like a smart way to go since people might be intimidated if they felt the need to portray something authentically. Some of the ingredients are used more strongly than others, but overall it seems like a good use of the ingredients.
The game says it’s aimed at a “cathartic experience”. I’m not sure catharsis is going to be reliably achieved since there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot that will bring people’s personal emotions out, but I can see how the game could lead to a general heightened state of emotions. The “blood” mechanic could eventually produce 2*NumPlayers statements that can’t be contradicted. If I were preparing to play I’d worry that it might be difficult to keep that many things straight, especially with all the dancing and other statements going on. I imagine that stopping to correct mistakes and get people back on the same page would be pretty disruptive to the effect this game is trying to achieve, so knowing that I might have to accurately remember a bunch of things would probably make me nervous. I also wonder if the “slips of paper in your pocket” technique might be a little clunky in play (when visualizing what play would be like, I imagined the people near the fire squatting down which makes pockets hard to access). Another area of concern for me would be the “when everyone has stated to have killed the coyote god” endgame condition, which strikes me as a little fuzzy. Since it won’t be easy to discuss things without breaking the mood it might be easier to have a crisper and more concrete trigger so that it’s simultaneously self-evident to everyone when to start the endgame. Maybe the ability to read body-language, etc., will make that a non-issue when actually played, though. While I think most of the character descriptions are likely to work the way they’re intended, I’m not sure I understand the Mimic or the Mingle.
I’m not familiar with what people normally expect from games like this in finished form, but from what I can tell it already has everything that would be needed to test it. There are some things that could be done to facilitate large group play, like distilling the rules to a single page that could be easily handed out to each player, but I think the next step to developing it further would be to see if it actually produces the aimed-for emotional effect on players.
- Dan Maruschak