Another review of In Between (Polish version)

Yet again, I was poking around over at RPG Kepos only to find that In Between has been reviewed again. It got a positively glowing review this time, no doubt thanks to the great layout and translation work done by the RPG Kepos team.

This time the review comes from Poltergeist, a Polish blog interested in all kinds of geeky things. The review scores were broken down into a number of different categories, but all of them came out as either 8 or 9 out of 10. I don’t have a lot to say about the review this time around. The reviewer didn’t really mention anything they didn’t like about the game for me to think about. Man, I hate it when they only have nice things to say!

It seems a common theme between this review and the last are that the mechanics for the game are really good. This is great news since back when I originally submitted In Between to Game Chef the main complaint was that the mechanics were weak. The game has come a long way since then and moved away from the Universalis-style bidding to something much different. The game still uses a power economy, but that economy is built within the confines of ritualized components and twisting narrative decisions. It is a much different beast from what it was two years ago.

Categories: In Between, Poland, Poltergeist, RPG Kepos

A review of In Between (Polish version)

I was browsing the posts over at RPG Kepos and discovered that their Polish translation of In Between has been reviewed, and positively at that.

The review was from a blog named K20 and got a score of 3 our 5 which, if I understand the comments, is a pretty good score coming from this particular reviewer. One of the issues that the reviewer had with In Between is that The Wasteland was too empty and with too little direction. I can’t say I can disagree with this, The Wasteland acts as a gateway in the game. The players meet each other there, learn about the afterlife and in some cases may become involved in a conflict with a demon. While I can’t see removing The Wasteland phase from the game as it is by far the most evocative aspect of the setting, I can certainly see putting a little more flesh on its bones.

The second issue that K20 brought up was that they felt that the demons are an unnecessary component of the game. I’m not sure I can agree with that one. The demons fill three roles in the game, the first is as a threat to the characters. The demons are there to add an element of danger and drama, something that can pose a threat in all of the phases of the game. The second role they fill is as a balancing mechanic. They exist to counter exorcists (and vice versa). Finally, they provide an alternate path for players to take in the game, they answer the question of “What happens when I do evil/selfish things in the mortal realm?” In fact, through playtesting I soon found that players wanted to be able to go down a darker road. A lot of the demon rules did not exist until version 2 of the game, prior that they had mostly acted as set dressing. So no, I don’t agree that they are unnecessary. Players want to have that darker option, even if they won’t use it. They want to know what happens if they don’t try and redeem themselves. If someone wants to play a game more centered around personal exploration, without the threat of demons (and possibly exorcists), then I think they should go right ahead and do it. It’s very easy to houserule out that portion of the game. Perhaps I should talk a little about that in an Optional Rules/Tweaks section. The Polish version of the game actually has a section like that where the translators added a few house rules that they like to use and I see no reason not to add it to the English version.

The final thing that K20 didn’t seem to enjoy was that the game is GMless. That’s far from surprising. Story games, especially GMless ones, are a very small niche of the RPG world. In this case the reviewer likes to have someone in the role of GM to guide the game, they aren’t interested in sharing that role. That’s fine, not everyone enjoys sharing that role and I can’t hold matters of personal taste against the reviewer.

Those things out of the way, it was still a positive review of the game. The reviewer thought that the mechanics were solid, the theme was interesting and the game was entertaining. Perhaps not to their personal tastes, but entertaining nonetheless. I’ll chew on their criticisms for a while and see if I can make the updated English version even better.

Speaking of the English version: yes, it is on the way. I haven’t forgotten about it, I’ve just been busy with other things. Tweet, the fellow that did the layout for the Polish version, supplied me with some layout and logo files that will make this the nicest version yet. I also have the revised set of rules that was hammered out in the back and forth during the translation. This means that the Polish version is actually more up to date than English version because they translated from my in progress new edition and not from the published second edition. Layout work is slow going, but I hope to have this finished up sometime in the summer.

Categories: In Between, K20, Poland, RPG Kepos

There is now a Polish version of In Between.

Just like the headline says, the folks over at RPG Kepos that reviewed In Between so long ago have actually gone and translated the game into Polish. This was the last thing I ever expected to come of a game I made in 10 days for Game Chef almost two years ago.

As if translating a game from English to Polish wasn’t enough work, the Polish version of the game is quite a bit nicer than mine. They secured the rights to some artwork, got a nice layout put together, and generally prettied things up in ways I couldn’t even begin to do on my own. I got in touch with their layout designer, Tweet, and he agreed to send me that files he used to gussy-up the game so hopefully I can make the English version look almost as nice some time in the near future.

I’ve actually been emailing back and forth with RPG Kepos while they worked on this project and between clarifications on rules and additional playtesting done by their team the rules were reworked and added to. There have been enough changes to the rules that it wouldn’t be remiss to call the Polish edition version 2.5 of In Between. One of the highlights of the new additions are rules for taking a more demonic path rather than the path to redemption. While I have a copy of these updated rules in borrowing old .doc format, there isn’t a nice PDF in English available. Those updated rules will make it into the version using Tweet’s layout which will probably show up whenever I have a free weekend to work on this stuff.

You can see the Polish version by visiting RPG Kepos, which I have handily provided as a translated google link. If you’d like to just go straight to the PDF then click here.

Categories: In Between, Poland, RPG Kepos, Translation

A review of the In Between 2.0 from Poland

Those Polish gamers are at it again. This time they have played my revised version of In Between and it looks like they had a pretty good time with it. You can read their review here. It does happen to be in Polish, though.

The review author was kind enough to send me the gist of it via email. It sounds like most of their problems were due to vagueness in the writing, something that I’ll definitely fix when I get around to updating the game again. They also spotted a few mistakes. Whoops, looks like I need to spend more time proofreading. They seemed pretty happy with the less competitive nature of the game and the system mechanics rework.

I love hearing from people that have played my games so please let me know if you give them a try.

Categories: In Between, Poland, RPG, RPG Kepos

A review from Poland.

I also got a very cool email last night from a group of people that had played my Game Chef entry. The neat thing is that they're all the way in Poland! They liked the game but had many of the same problems that came up in the Game Chef judging. Looks like I'm going to be hard at work getting a better ruleset put together.

If you can read Polish then go ahead and check out their review. I found Google Translate did a good enough job to get the general idea across.

Categories: In Between, Poland, RPG, RPG Kepos