Barrylocke
Member
To be honest, your "let's just jump into it and figure it out" host probably has the right way to go about learning this game. It's hard to get your mind how it plays out until you get going. I've taught this game 3 times and my best experience so far has been when I kept the rules portion shorter and taught the players how to use the role sheets as we went along. In this sense (ie, making the 1st Tragedy be a sort of tutorial mission that you guide them along for) it can indeed be a quick teach. I would probably leave the players with the following info:
1. The premise behind the game (they are time loopers that have X amount of time loops to stop you from fulfilling the tragedy)
2. The basic layout of of a day and a loop (turn phases and such)
3. A general statement that Goodwill = Good for players, Paranoia = Bad for players Initially, and Intrigue = Bad for players.
4. You may want to ask if any of the players have ever done matrix logic puzzles before. The type of thinking you do in those sorts of puzzles is very similar to what players will need to do in Tragedy Looper.
Because of this, I suppose I can somewhat agree with the idea that it's a quick teach, at least upfront. But in reality you actually be teaching them throughout the game, or at least throughout the first half of the game. Because of this you should make yourself very familiar with the first scenario.
The first tragedy scenario that is played will NEED to be guided, so that after you perform your initial choices, you prompt the players to look at the role sheet and how to narrow down what is going on. The 1st tragedy has a specific play that when done (unless the players happen to throw it off with their own plays) will lead to a situation where you can feed the players a couple of key pieces of information. As a mastermind, you need to make sure they don't go forward without that information, prompted by you if you must. It is this game moment that should get players to start to realize how they need to go about thinking for this game.
I'm still waiting for the day when I can actually play Scenario 2 with someone, much less the standard or expansion tragedies, as well as being able to play a game with the standard rules of "no player communication unless they're between loops".
...I'm also wonder if the day will ever come that I play the game as a Protagonist instead of as the Mastermind. As the only person I know who has close to my enthusiasm for this game has been the Mastermind many time and apparently has grown sick of it, that day may never come, lol.
