Our team started off simply wanting to make a game that was more collaborative than the typical D&D-esque starting point. At first, we considered making a world building game. We tried out The Quiet Year, but found the tone a bit too serious to our liking. We moved toward something more traditionally fun, and something a bit more character-based, but still with simple rules. Three Kids in a Trenchcoat delivered with a whimsical tone and an assortment of roll tables to easily construct a unique scenario for any game. Since it captured our attention, we quickly started “hacking” Three Kids in a Trenchcoat into something a bit different.
Our first change was to stretch the narrative of the game into something with even more breathing room. The realm of space has the most possible breathing room, which brought us to aliens, and then to the popular trope of miniature aliens piloting a human figure. Immediately, we could imagine many more possibilities for how the player characters might look or act, and we wanted that kind of freedom to be possible for our players. During playtesting, we realized that we needed a bit more structure to determine what the aliens’ avatar looked like as well. Rather than the barely-held-together illusion of three kids in a trenchcoat, alien technology would allow for a meatsuit that was a nearly flawless recreation of a human… with some small quirks. We added new roll tables to flesh out our version of this adventure, and greatly adjusted the existing roll tables. We also realized that using multiple kinds of dice was clunky, and it improved the general “flow” of the game greatly to use only 2d6 as our materials.
With only the three of us for the first playtest, the next and easiest change was making it a three-player game rather than a four-player game. Regardless, the “middle” kid (or, in this case, alien) didn’t quite serve a purpose the same way the other two did. We also made the players work together for every roll, rather than having only one player roll for a given action. After all, each action would require multiple adjustments to allow the aliens’ avatar to come off as both human and convincing. We also decided that we wanted the difference between players’ rolls to mean something. We came to the conclusion that the differences could imply how in-sync the players’ actions were. As for our reasoning, consider the following example:
The players are trying to convince an NPC to give them a car. if both players roll a 1, then they definitely don’t succeed, but they also don’t seem inhuman. They just don’t succeed because their avatar comes off as an untrustworthy person. If the head rolls a 6 and the body rolls a 1, then the GM might let them successfully convince the NPC with smooth talking, but the body language is noticeably off. The NPC would get an “uncanny valley” feeling from noticing the body’s movements not matching up with what the head is saying.
From there, we wanted to adjust the success/failure system. In Three Kids in a Trenchcoat, the game operates on a basic “three strikes and you’re out” rule. Aliens needed a bit more nuance to their situation. We made it so that uncanny valley feeling determined by the difference in rolls would also add to a “suspicion meter” that determined whether someone would try to expose the players as non-human.
Overall, we’re satisfied with the general mechanics of the game, though we expect the suspicion mechanic may need some tweaking to feel like a proper challenge. Additionally, we have yet to playtest this game in a setting where the GM is not one of the three of us. It would be useful to see how understandable the instructions are for a GM that doesn’t have the same background as someone who created the game. Additionally, we have been considering whether the game could work with more than two players – perhaps four players could act as two avatars, or three players might have an avatar and a “guy at the computer” who monitored the situation from the crashed spaceship. There’s still lots of possibilities to explore!
During our in-class playtesting, we got feedback that people appreciated the focus on social interactions/comedy, but that it could use some more structure or build-up to prepare the players. We added a story to the beginning of the game to help players that might be unfamiliar with roleplaying and need some help understanding the premise of the story. We considered one suggestion to incorporate a timer that would add pressure to the alien players, but ultimately decided that was a bit too much for the GM to keep track of and might add even more pressure than we were looking for. Additionally, we realized we needed to represent the Suspicion Meter in a more physical sense that was visible to the players and the GM. Dylan made an adjustable paper version of the Suspicion Meter, where the piece of paper can be slid back and forth to display the current level of Suspicion. We added more specific language to the rulebook to help future GMs, but made it clear that everything was still up to the GM’s discretion, and we didn’t want to stifle anyone’s creativity.
— Donaven Craddock, Jude Denning, & Dylan Martin
