Good Society: second editon

A second edition of Good Society, the ttrpg that lets you create Jane Austen-style stories, is coming to Kickstarter soon. You can read about it here, and if you follow their campaign, you can download the playtest packet and see some of the planned changes.

So that’s what I did, and this week we wrapped up our short but very satisfying two-cycle story. These are my thoughts.

First edition revisited

I’ve written about Good Society before on my blog. I played in a game a couple of years ago, and I’ve run one-shots at Furnace and AireCon, with a third one-shot (with the updated rules) planned for Continuum next week.

Much as I like Good Society, it’s not perfect, and I found a few issues with it:

Resolve tokens

Two problems with resolve tokens. The first is that there are too many. You can get resolve tokens from characters, rumours, reputation tags and more. It’s not long before the table is covered in resolve tokens. Worse, I find I often don't use them. Resolve tokens are used to “force” a character to do something they might not otherwise want to. But in so many cases, the players I play with quickly see the drama in whatever is presented and say “that’s a great idea,” and so spending the resolve token becomes unnecessary.

(I do wonder if that’s a structural problem with meta tokens like this. Resolve tokens work fine with players with a “my character wouldn’t do that” mentality – but I haven’t seen anyone like that in many, many years – if ever. Most players I see are happy to put problems in their character’s way – especially for a light game like Good Society.)

That means a surfeit of rarely-used resolve tokens.

Reputation

Reputation doesn’t do very much. Characters can gain a reputation, which has a mechanical effect (more resolve tokens), but is mostly just a roleplaying aid. But only if you pay attention, and in my experience, reputation isn’t something anyone pays much attention to. 

Fiddly character sheets with teeny font

I found this when I ran Good Society at Furnace (I mostly play online), but goodness, the character sheets are fiddly. They look nice, but each character consists of a basic character sheet, a family sheet, a desire card, and a relationship card. Oh, and two connections (more cards). And the font on the cards is tiny – my ageing eyes struggle to read it.

The table at Furnace. It's all a bit chaotic. And hard to read.

Part of the problem is the huge image – which is lovely, but condenses everything else. For AireCon, I completely rewrote the character sheets to be more legible. (And moved the image to a table tent.)

Second edition changes

So while the second edition preview does nothing about the character sheet (although it did introduce a very nice online Google sheet character keeper), it does change resolve tokens and reputation (and some other points).

Resolve tokens

While the rules for resolve tokens have not changed, there are fewer of them because they are no longer generated by reputation or rumours.

Reputation

The biggest change is reputation. There’s an alternative way to earn reputation tags, and during the reputation phase, they now trigger reputation consequences that might be good or bad. (These are great, more on them below.)

Rumour and scandal

Rumours now start as whispers, and the main change is that there’s a new action: overhearing a rumour. So you can roleplay hearing the rumour, which works well. You can also spend a resolve token to turn a rumour into “the talk of the ton,” which is a nice touch.

Epistolary phase and upkeep

These are tweaked slightly but didn’t affect our game much.

Play materials

Finally, the pack includes revised characters, family backgrounds and a playset.

Our game

Our game ran for five two-hour sessions. One session zero, followed by four sessions of play. We completed two full cycles, and we were in our third when we reached a satisfying conclusion.

We had three players: me, Thomas and Terry. I facilitated the game and played a major character. We played online, using Discord and the new Good Society character keeper.

I didn’t use the included playset because it’s the one we played last time, so I chose Family Matters from the rulebook. That was slightly awkward as Family Matters uses the Heir (not part of the 2ed pack), and so I replaced the Heir with the Hedonist from the second edition preview.

We spent a full session on session zero, and we needed that to get the characters and background sorted properly. (I reflected after Furnace that creating a coherent backstory in under 30 minutes is a challenge; I’m not going to try that again!) Even then, we ended up revisiting part of the background later on.

Family matters

The heart of our story was a feud between the Bainses and the Hardwicks.

Terry played Captain James Baines (Careerist, New Money).

Thomas played Solomon Bains (Dependent, New Money), the disinherited son (and previous friend of Eleanor).

I played Eleanor Hardwick (Hedonist/Heir, Old Money), who wanted to bring the families together.

Our minor characters included:

• Arthur Bains (played by me), stern father of James and Solomon
• Marley Jones (played by Thomas), James’ assistant
• Horatio Flinders, Lord Mountwick (played by Terry), Solomon’s benefactor
• Henrietta Bourbon (played by me), Solomon’s friend
• Lizzie Hardwick (played by Terry), Eleanor’s younger sister
• Miss Charlotte Collins (played by Thomas), Eleanor’s friend

Our story

Over our three cycles of play, our story involved Solomon and Eleanor repairing their relationship (after the slight that Eleanor caused), James and Eleanor getting engaged (yikes – she’s engaged to the wrong brother!), Solomon impressing his father and regaining his inheritance, and, finally, James breaking off his engagement to Eleanor (at his father's behest), leaving Solomon to propose to Eleanor.

Along the way, minor characters Lizzie and Marley threatened to steal the show by courting and becoming talk of the ton. 

It was delightful to play, and it felt like a proper Jane Austen-style story with setbacks, complications, and a happy ending. Towards the end, I was aware that I was thinking “And now we need a scene with these characters…,” as if I was an author, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

The new rules and mechanics

Resolve tokens

Even with fewer resolve tokens, we rarely spent them.  Maybe two or three a session? Most often we used them to seal a decision already made. I think that’s fine, and it’s useful to have them in the rules as a fallback – as long as you’re not expecting them to be a big deal.

Reputation

We used the new “reputation by fashion” rules, which sound great in theory but were a bit odd in practice. These work by selecting two reputation tags which represent the current fashion in the ton. The playset includes a table of sixty tags (eg plain or rigid), from which we randomly chose. This meant some headscratching to work out which character best embodied them. Maybe choosing tags shouldn’t be random.

On the other hand, the reputation consequences were great, adding drama to our story. For example, at one point I decided that Eleanor’s father had cut off her allowance, forcing her hand. (I found the consequences that cause your character trouble are more interesting than the others.)

We found that as we approached the game’s climax, we didn’t want to trigger new consequences because they didn’t support the flow of the story. (We had four reputation phases, but only triggered consequences once each, early in the game.)

I don’t think that matters (triggering consequences is always optional), and I wonder if that’s a common experience – focusing on the story rather than the rules as the story approaches its climax. (We did the same with one epistolatory phase as well, when we realised we didn’t have any letters to write.)

I guess if the trajectory hadn’t been so obvious, or had we wanted more complications, we could have triggered more consequences to see what would happen. But it felt unnecessary.

Rumour and scandal

The new rules worked well, particularly having a character overhear a rumour.

My thoughts

So that was Good Society second edition. The new rules are an improvement, especially reputation consequences. I’m not sure how much I would want to play a longer game of Good Society – the game we played felt just about right. 

So, am I going to get the second edition? I am torn between wanting to support the publishers, but not wanting more stuff that I don't actually want (like a book that is 80% the same as I already have, or the alternate settings in Good Society's second volume, which don't interest me much and no doubt will be part of the new set).

And while I would like to play more Good Society, it’s not the only thing I want to play.

So we’ll see. I suspect I'll end up backing it, but probably only at the pdf level.