We completed our game - ending in defeat, as three characters got Taken Out (and two did so permanently!) and the Danger Meter hit 6. We could have continued to play, but chose not to.
We had a blast, for the most part, but there were some concerns about:
- The potential for “death spirals” built into the game (actually, both positive and negative).
For instance, when I saw the rules for characters who are Taken Out (I’m using Gamma Patrol’s 2-pt countdown), I thought they were really “soft”. If a character gets Taken Out, we have two turns to save them. If that’s three characters remaining (as was the case at our table, with four players), that means we have six “moves” to take down this threat (and most threats go down after one or two moves). Easy!
However, I hadn’t taken into account how this builds on itself, since each character getting Taken Out also effectively speeds up the progress of countdowns and the Danger Meter. With only one character remaining, we had only one shot - one roll of the dice - to rescue a character, and then the remaining two were lost to us.
(To explain: three characters were all lost on a given turn. That leaves one action, for the remaining character, which, in our case, also failed. Now - I presumed, since any other reading of the rules didn’t make much sense - we advance each countdown by one. Now we have three characters who are about to be lost, and only one action to save them. A “chain reaction” of rescues is possible, as each rescued characters tries to save the next, and this is what we tried to go for, but a single loss ends the “chain”.)
- I didn’t mind the potential of losing the game as much as the other players, it seems, but they found it quite grim.
What didn’t help is that, when things are going against you, there aren’t many ways to turn them back in your favour. The only real recourse you have is trying to roll as many dice as possible - and, in a way, even Threat dice help you, technically, to score more hits - but this is a path to sacrificing your character, which doesn’t necessarily help all that much when the other characters are counting on you to rescue them.
A lot of RPGs have “last resort”-type things you can lean on when everything is not going your way. In PDP, though, you’re pretty much always using all you’ve got, so there isn’t a whole lot more there to pull out at the last minute.
Add in the way the action economy goes wildly against the heroes when some are taken out, and it’s quite a death spiral. The Threats, after all, act each turn - so the fewer characters are rolling, the more often the Threats take action.
Giving characters the Gamma Patrol “lost but can be rescued” possibility is nice (dramatically, it’s lovely!) but makes this even worse, since each character “Taken Out” means that the heroes lose one action per turn AND need to expend an extra action per turn to rescue that hero. i.e. One character Taken Out means that you’re losing 1-3 Actions (on average) compared to the Threats.
Challenging!
(Notably, in the original Danger Patrol, the Threats act in reaction to character moves, so the action economy is automatically balanced.)
We brainstormed once possible redesign: rescuing characters is a minor threat, rather than a major one (requiring 3 hits, perhaps), and characters who are Taken Out automatically “recover” while they are imprisoned, making their return extra dramatic. Something like this could help counterbalance a death spiral.
Meanwhile, though, this is all conjectural! It’s possible we got something wrong in this game, after all.
I’ll be playing another game of this with @Hopeless_Wanderer over the next week or several weeks, and I’m excited to see how he runs the game! I will definitely report back after that happens.
There’s a lot of really cool stuff in this game, and I’m keen to learn more.
