Hi All
I would like to provide some feedback about the Incident on the Liberty Bell game at Gencon as I was one of the players the guy on Tom's right who gunned down the Chief Engineer. I'll explain motives later as it was nothing personal with the player.
First off Tom thanks for the game. My group that was there, there was four of us total did enjoy it, and found it one of the best games we played at the con.
Some feedback from myself and the group as we chatted about the game that evening.
Pros: You kept the pace moving.
You provided a variety of characters to choose from.
You kept us guessing at what we were facing and I still don't know for sure what it was.
Cons: The Navy hierarchy is a bit different then what it looks on paper. My character for example was a deckhand, (in the navy referred to as a deck ape during WWII), my character (an able seaman) would answer to the Bosun and the captain. Also in the navy there is a clear division between hierarchies, engineers and deckhands don't listen to each other and often times call each other deck apes (the deck crew) or snipes (the engine crew). With that in mind the chief engineer giving my character an order wouldn't mean a whole lot. The purser-pharmacist's rank is given the military rank of ensign. The doctor should have been in charge of her as he would have been the head of that hierarchy. The stewards were fine as the chief steward oversees the kitchen but lets the cook take care of the real stuff.
The only senior officers left on board were the doctor and chief engineer.
Secondly a map of the ship would have been particularly useful in giving us ideas of where to go and explore. A map of a liberty ship can be found here.
http://oakgrovedesigns.net/homepage/libships/details.html I understand keeping it a bit vague, but I think that maybe if you knew a bit more about where things are on the ship it would help the flow of the game.
Thirdly and this is something we talked a lot about as a group the way you introduced us to the problem could have been presented differently. Some ideas that would have added a lot of depth to the game we felt were, first during the night having a german strike force board the boat to try to seize it. This would have given us a real sense of what is going on as the engines are going on and off and now we discover we have been boarded. This would have allowed us to put the ship on lockdown and we could have either eliminated the germans or the thing could have started infecting them, or they could have brought it with them. There are a lot of possibilities adding another element to the game. We really felt strongly that by including another faction to throw suspicion on we would have never seen what was coming. I really felt that the way you had us break away from the fleet really worked, but now if only you could have given us another possibility of what was going on.
Fourthly we felt that there was no solution without the use of violence. In CoC whenever a gun is used, its all downhill from there. We felt that the exploration part of the story was lacking. Perhaps that was without a map, we didn't really know where to go or where we could go. Also there was no clear way to react to what was going on as we are being shot at before we can really do any investigating.
It was as I said a good game, its just that I feel that with a little work this scenario could be fantastic. It just needs to fleshed out a bit.
Also my apologies as I mispoke about the caliber of machine guns on board, the .30's and .50's cals were replaced with 20mm machine guns and there should have been six of them. Thats what I get for studying the Asiatic fleet of WWII, misinformation about the Atlantic Fleets machine guns.
Tom if you have some questions about this please post or pm me. I would like to see this scenario go to the next level as its on the verge or being better then anything Ross has put out so far.
Chuck
