Fan Club “Blog” #13: A Good Society Review

Damn! You guys get a bonus review on the Patreon today.

One of the videos I had planned for Season 2 was Good Society, a TTRPG of romance and scandal that lets you tell your own Jane Austen story (albeit one that's loaded with panicked anachronisms in the manner of “You’re doing WHAT? That's my BETROTHED, you SHITHEAD!”).

But: Disaster! This week my players and I completed our campaign and in the hours-long discussion that followed I admitted to myself that assembling a full-fat video review might not be the best investment of my time (or your Patreon $$$ 💸). That’s because there’s a pretty stark incompatibility between what I want to do with Quinns Quest and what our group's experience of playing Good Society was like.

But let me start by saying we had fun. In fact, our final session had whole hours of scenes where my players were roleplaying with such intensity that a player had to tell me off for eating my peanuts too loudly. I - the GM! - was ruining the tension.

So if you want to play out either a Regency romance, romantic comedy or a farce, by all means purchase Good Society in print or .pdf, buy some cheap fans for your players to hide behind when the play gets a bit much, and slap that game in front of a consenting group. It’s got some fabulous ideas and I can’t wait to tell you about them!

But... y’know, just not in a video review, and instead in the lower-stakes format of a blog post.



Why? Well. With Quinns Quest I want to encourage folks to just try new TTRPGs and see how easy and rewarding it can be, right?

But from our second evening of Good Society onwards (because session zero in this game is SO good, it’s a smokeshow, hot damn), this system - this book - wasn’t easy or rewarding. And I’m just not comfortable pointing the retina-searing Quinns Quest spotlight at a game that I think might be exactly what people worry TTRPGs might be: A little confusing, a little awkward, and constantly saturating them with doubt that they're playing this wrong.

So let's get into it.



As I say, the preliminary session of Good Society where your group works together to lay out the building blocks of your Austen story? It's just a blast. Where most TTRPG designers like to lean on dice, publishers Storybrewers really like working with cards and tokens, and it’s in session 0 where that decision makes the most sense.

Depending on the kind of Austen story you want to tell, the game gives you a bunch of character archetypes, then everyone gets a card that describes a relationship (and maybe a secret about this relationship on the other side of the card), then everyone has to give this relationship card to give to another player to tie your characters together, THEN everyone gets a card with a SECRET objective. This is something like a win condition, and it's one of several things that makes Good Society among the most PvP TTRPGs I've ever played. You're not a party of adventurers, you're not even necessarily friends! You're just a bunch of people trying to get your way.



So to summarise, Good Society might tell you: Okay, you’re a New Money-type person who is distrusted by high society, and you’re secretly engaged to be married to this other player character. But why is it a secret? And why won’t they marry you yet? Maybe you’ll get out your IRL phone at this point and start texting secret ideas to that other player.

(Hot take here: TTRPGs where players are told who their character is, even if it’s just a little bit, like how Mothership makes everyone roll on a d100 table for the patch on your clothing and another d100 for the trinket in your pocket, make for better stories than games where players are given a blank canvas. The best thing about TTRPGs is telling stories that are (a) good and (b) surprising for everybody, and giving players a blank canvas to doodle their character on is a frighteningly good way to ruin both of these goals.)

Finally, the last thing you do in Session 0 of Good Society is the GM dumps a pile of 30 people on the table, each with a picture and a scrap of a personality attached, and every player gets to choose two of these would-be pains in the ass as NPCs who have power over their player character.



Perhaps you create your mum and your dad, perhaps you create two conniving yet wholly repellent men who are fighting for your affections! Whatever you fancy. And then - here’s the best bit - the other players draft which of these NPCs they’d like to play. So everyone gets to put their own spin on your pitch for an NPC, and everyone gets to enjoy having power over everyone else.

At this point, your game of Good Society feels like it’s about to take off like a rocket ship. You’ve got secrets! A character sheet full of intriguing-looking boxes for stuff like your “Reputation” and “Inner conflict”! And you’ve got a cast of NPCs where everyone is going to feel a shared sense of responsibility for making them memorable.

At this point in the campaign, my group’s setup felt SO full of potential. My two female players were playing two rival men, the awkward (but wealthy) entomologist Henry Pickleswick and the dashing (but broke) cavalry Captain Charles Branworth. Then my two male players were playing two semi-doomed women who desperately needed to get married: the hedonistic (but almost-too-old) Emma Darlington, and the fascinating (but at risk of being deported and jailed any day now) Russian emigré Mina Tsarinovich.

What’s gonna happen next? Who’s gonna fall in love with who!? Who will suffer under the yoke of our 8 powerful NPCs?

“Oh jillikers,” my players were shouting (possibly literally, I can't remember). “When’s our next session?!”

And again - I really cannot overstate this - the story we told across five more evenings was cool and fun! As candle wax dripped and spattered across my dining room table we giggled our way through so many classic romance scenes. We had kisses, arguments, words whispered during a dance. We had a selection of agonising dates where characters were being shoved together by overbearing parents. We even found the time for an unexpected and tender romance between our two most repulsive comedy NPCs, Jasper and Mina. Both of the players controlling them gave each of these characters a voice so horrible you wanted any scene they were in to stop immediately, and yet there was something... oddly captivating about the two of them together.



It was like squishing a bug- we couldn't bear what we were seeing, but we weren't about to look away.

So where did this all go wrong? Well, it never went super-duper wrong per se, but our campaign of Good Society did have dozens and dozens of irritating little surgeries where we had to stop a scene to discuss the game’s mechanics; we had to analyse the precise wording of the rules-as-written to see if we really understood them. And we'd often discover that we were playing the rules correctly, which led to a further, more exasperated discussion of whether we were just... playing... weird?

Let’s start with our big problem, which is what Good Society uses instead of dice: Resolve tokens.

Basically, as the game goes on every character can gain Resolve, which they can spend to do the sort of stuff that in other TTRPGs might come down to a die roll. Perhaps you want to attempt something challenging, or perhaps you'd like fate to intervene in a way that benefits them (like your rival’s horse getting spooked, or you're at a party and you bump into the exact person you were hoping to speak to).

We ended up using pretty little seashells as Resolve tokens. So thematic! So cute!



Look at them! Don’t you just want to earn them? Hoard ‘em? Spend ‘em? Ah.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that by the end of the campaign, I loathed these seashells. These little bits of eldritch carrion. Why did we ever take them out of the sea?? I ask you

The thing is, you know how dice rolls are often the high point of an RPG night because they’re a little flash of tension and surprise, but they don't disrupt the flow of a scene, they just cause it to fork dramatically? Well, when a player wants to spend a Resolve token? It has the same effect on the scene people are roleplaying as blasting the participants with pepper spray.

I’ll explain. First, take a look at the wide range of applications they can be used for:



So basically you get a player or the GM yelling “WAIT!” or “STOP!” in the middle of a conversation people are having, and then pitching what they’re thinking might suddenly happen. Perhaps, they say, the scene someone was framing in fact isn’t going to happen because a snowstorm means they can’t leave their house. Or perhaps, they muse, the light in this moment catches a PC just right and the NPC they’re talking to suddenly falls in love with them.

There are a hundred ways you might spend Resolve tokens, but tons of them cause you to stop the game in order to have another, separate, confusing, more adversarial conversation, and then sometimes when you get to the end of this not-easy discussion the Resolve token isn't even used.

There are some small reasons for that (the GM needs to consider if this is a fitting use of a Resolve token, because there are strict things that these tokens can and can’t do, also the request has to not be too big or too small, also actually also let’s think about what the consequences of this would be to make sure doing it still serves the character's interests), but the big one is that if your Resolve token spend is “Harmful to another player’s interests” (which the book informs us it not the case if this is simply "good for another character", which is a philosophical mindfuck because these are never separate in an adversarial situation) you don’t get to spend the Resolve token unless they agree, and if they do agree their character gets the token (which undermines the drama of the scene because you're creating a problem for them while simultaneously giving them the resource to solve it) but also if they like they can instead present a counter-offer by changing what you’ve pitched, and you can decide if you agree to that.

Or you can reject their counter offer, at which point you could try and pitch something else, or you could shamefacedly retract the Resolve token because it’s clear that nobody in the room is really into your idea, which is embarrassing because that’s the room telling you that your idea was bad and you and your bad idea just stopped the scene for 3 minutes for no reason.



All of this is made even knottier by the fact that players receive some confusing messaging about what we're even trying to do here. In a traditional RPG, the players are responsible for being in character and the GM is responsible for inserting enough adversity into your lives that it feels like you're in a story.

In Good Society, that responsibility is shared in a way that is nowhere near as clean. The players are still sat at the table because they want to experience a story, but the Resolve tokens mean they’re given a WEALTH of narrative control. They literally have as much control over the story as the GM. But they’re expected to spend this narrative control advancing the interests of the characters they’re playing. So you're basically taking power away from a GM and giving it to the players, but not telling the players they have the responsibility of a GM.

In this way, Good Society is easily the most PvP game I’ve ever covered on Quinns Quest, and that is exciting! But it just means that often when players are tasked with spending the growing pile of Resolve tokens in front of them, the system encourages them to blow holes in the side of perfectly good scenes, using the tokens like shotgun shells.

For example, if two players want their characters to start a plot against you, you might spend a resolve token to mean they can’t meet up. If the GM introduces a sexy new NPC to try and start assembling a love triangle, you might give a resolve token to a player to say “You aren’t attracted to this new NPC.” If the foundation of improvisational storytelling is “Yes, and...” and “No, but...” the Resolve tokens are a tidy little pile of “Yes, but...” and “No, and...”

Which isn’t to say my campaign of Good Society didn’t have superb Resolve token spends where a player presented an idea for what might happen next in a scene that was so good, they bypassed all the swampy negotiation stuff and, perhaps with the unexpected arrival of just the right NPC or by narrating a flicker of doubt in someone’s heart, managed to supercharge a scene that was good anyway and in doing so improved their PC’s situation. It turns out that sometimes letting players be GMs is great, actually!

But more broadly, there's no getting away from the fact that by our third evening our table of players had uniformly turned against the systems of Good Society. And the resolve tokens were only part of it- the more time we spent with this game, the more it was like living in a crumbly manor house where we kept finding new features that didn't quite work.

I could add here that Good Society is frustrating because while session 0 is amazing, the book gives you almost no help for how to give your campaign an arc or reach a satisfying ending. The book sets you up and then says "Play until you're done", and I think I expect a little more from the games I'm reviewing on Quinns Quest.

I could add that the economy of Resolve tokens in the game is demented, and we rolled into the finale with approximately 35 Resolve tokens to spend, if you count all the ones we had from Rumours and Reputation Tags. That's approximately how many tokens you need to turn turn Pride & Prejudice into the church fight scene from Kingsman.

I could add that the rules as written in the book needed to be twice as clear!

But it’s as simple as this- I think a great RPG sees players slowly falling in love with its systems either because they’re exciting tools to use, playful restraints to wrestle against, or perhaps they’re awkward but damn, you cannot argue with the consequences that the heavy machinery spits out.

In Good Society - romantic as the subject matter is - we just never fell in love.

Though we did have a couple of crushes. I want to end on a high, because I do think I’ll remember the story I told in Good Society for a long time, so let’s talk about a couple of systems I really liked.



First off, the Rumour Phase is a hilarious and excellent thing. I think rumours and reputation are both really fun underexplored areas in RPGs - this blog post from Luke Gearing has been living in my head since I read it, for example - and the way that the Rumour Phase works in Good Society is that you go around the table twice with players either starting a rumour about anything or anyone they like, or spreading a rumour that anyone's started. Once a rumour's been spread, it can then be brought into scenes as a plot point. In the hands of a funny player, the Rumour Phase is hilarious. In the hands of a cunning player, it's devious. And then forcing a player to do a scene where they're confronted with a rumour about themselves is equally entertaining if the rumour is true or false, which is sort of up to the player, and that generates an interesting choice for them.

And second, I have to big up Good Society's Inner Monologue tokens. Holy hell. I had a player tell me that if we took this rule and bolted it onto any other TTRPG, he'd put his character into serious physical peril if he could earn one.

Basically, every so often in Good Society each player is gifted a single, precious Inner Monologue token that they can spend at any point to hear what's going on in the head of any other PC or NPC, and the player controlling them has to describe their inner monologue like this is an episode of Peep Show.

There are too many reasons why this is good. It encourages players to be interested in the other characters at the table. It can be used by either the giver or the recipient to add a twist or a punchline to a scene. It can be used to get out of character information! And perhaps best of all, it can be used to dig deeper into a character and find unexpected depths. I think as roleplayers a lot of us know what our character would do in a given situation, but being asked what we're thinking? With the whole table watching? That's a really provocative prompt, and at our table players often found themselves playing a slightly different, more evolved character after a monologue token was spent on them.

Oh my god. Okay. That's almost 3,000 words on Good Society. 😅 On the one hand, it makes sense that a game I was thinking of doing a video review on brought up so many feelings in me. On the other hand, this is continuing evidence that I cannot do a short blog post to save my life.

I'll just close by saying that one thing that Good Society taught me is that it's clear Storybrewers aren't content to do things the same way as everyone else, and candidly? I think that's fucking amazing. Playing this game wasn't perfect, but it's made me even more interested in Fight with Spirit and Castles in the Air than I was before.

Hope you're having a great weekend, everybody. Peace! And if you've had any experience with Good Society or have any thoughts on it of your own, PLEASE leave a comment. Do we think I'm alone in these thoughts? Does the game work better with shorter campaigns? I think it just might.

xx

Quinns