Messages from Callisto: How did it play?

Messages from Callisto is the fourth part of my series of linked freeforms involving aliens. I ran it earlier this month, online, using Discord. Last time I talked about its design; this time, I’m reflecting on how it ran.

Scheduling

My first challenge was choosing a date for the game. I created a Doodle poll with some dates and emailed everyone who had played before (and was still interested in playing), and while I got the most popular date, I still couldn’t fill the game.

(Now that games are being run face-to-face, online games may be less popular. I’m not sure why – I enjoy running and playing them online. They’re not as good as face-to-face, but they’re better than not playing…)

Anyway, with about a week to go, I still hadn’t filled the game (and I didn’t want to run it with fewer players), so I pushed it back three weeks and filled all the places. (Happily, I got two new players – one new to freeforming.)

First contact with the players

Once I sent out characters, I started getting questions.

One player complained about their character, and I realised I hadn’t read their casting form response correctly. So I radically changed their character to suit what they were looking for – and I’m glad I did so; I think the character is much better for doing that.

I also received questions about science and the specific NASA timeline that made me realise I should have set it three years later. Not that it would have made any difference to the plots, but ‘realistically’, the flight time from Earth to Jupiter is about six years, leaving no time for the development and construction of the probe itself. So in the rewrite, I’m moving it to 1993.

On the day

The day didn’t start well as I had a player drop, and I spent a while finding a replacement. Thankfully Julie stepped into the breach.

As for Messages from Callisto itself, well, maybe there were too many meetings. I had five topics for discussion, but perhaps they didn’t all need to be meetings. And while I had identified those who needed to attend each, it turned out that everyone wanted to hear what was going on.

And despite scheduling the meetings to last only ten minutes, inevitably, they overran. So there was less one-to-one roleplaying than I had hoped for, and not everyone had time to talk to those they wanted to talk to.

But apart from that (and a few players said they liked the meetings), the game went well. The time passed quickly, and we had good decisions (and dilemmas) to manage.

As I now do with all the games I run, I asked for feedback and stories. I got a great response, prepared an epilogue for everyone, and shared some of the stories.

Future changes

I’m hoping to run the game face-to-face at Consequences in November, so I need to take on the feedback from this run.

The main changes I need to make are around the meetings (as discussed above) and the decisions.

One player noted that while making decisions was good, the decisions themselves were made by only a subset of the group. He wondered if decisions could be delegated to subcommittees so more players are involved.

So I may do that – or I may give each player a vote, even if their character wouldn’t necessarily have one. That steps outside the usual “you are your character” style of play that typifies freeforming, but I will try to word it so it’s not too jarring.

However, a more challenging change concerns Children of the Stars, the previous game. I’m also running Children of the Stars at Consequences, and if the players make different decisions, that will affect Messages from Callisto…

I’ve got ideas for how I manage this, but that’s a bigger topic I will probably cover in another post.

Overall

Overall, I’m pleased with how Messages from Callisto survived contact with the players. From the feedback I received, most of them enjoyed themselves (nobody seemed to have a terrible time), and I have good feedback I can use to improve the game for next time.