I held off playing this until Sacksmas was mostly over, hence why my review is a little late. I really enjoyed this story. The writing was very good, the mechanics were fun, and it told me everything I ever needed to know about Moloch Street Station and why people actually take the train to Hell (it was as I suspected, Hell wanting a certain number of physical bodies as well as souls). I liked all the characters and even felt sympathy for the Conductor, who was very polite and professional and oh so dignified at the end…
Generally I liked the story for the same reasons everyone else liked it. So I think I’ll devote most of my review to the question of whether the sabotage/descend mechanic somehow “cheated” players.
In the past the criticism has been made that playing an absolutely awful person generally gets you a greater profit than playing someone who generally the decent thing. I don’t know how true this is, but to the extent that it is true it could be detrimental to role playing as people are somewhat penalized for playing their characters as they imagine them.
But this in turn gets us also the conundrum that you’re not really doing the decent thing within the story if there’s potentially no cost. If good and evil profit you equally then you’re just taking a different, more palatable path to profit. If you do a good deed for the reward, you’re not really doing a good deed for its own sake, so it’s not really a good deed now, is it? And if wickedness doesn’t pay more than good then the only reason for the player to commit wicked acts is their character’s ideology or sadism. This would also be detrimental to role playing.
There’s also the question of how to make Exceptional Stories a bit more challenging given that they involve characters of all different skill levels and so skill checks are necessarily low and pretty much a joke for higher characters, while puzzles that fully advertise themselves can generally be figured out.
I suspect that the hidden content that only revealed itself once the player had committed themselves concerning the fate of the passengers was an attempt to address these issues. And I think this was very successful.
The setup made players choose what was more important to them and/or their characters: selfishly experiencing a revelation or saving the passengers from damnation. There was also the third option of helping repair or sabotaging the train and getting the hell out of there, skipping the revelation entirely. The third option was thus the safe option, choosing to avoid something that might go badly.
As it happened, those who choose to save the passengers also got to experience the revelation and the revelation increased your nightmares a bit but didn’t do anything else to you. But the situation could easily have been reversed, with players who sacrificed the passengers getting a valuable item or something. Or, alternatively, instead of a revelation something really horrible might have happened to you had you lingered too long, just like what happened in the Lifeburg story. The atmosphere at the gorge got increasingly foreboding the longer you tarried, I was half afraid lingering there was going to backfire big time. To be honest, I was more afraid of hanging around the gorge than I was of entering Hell, and Hell had one of FB’s trademark warning labels!
Clearly some people don’t like being taken unawares and felt cheated, but there was really no other way to introduce this mechanic as doing so would spoil the story. Now it has been clearly established that there can be unexpected benefits or detriments to your choices and that going forward not every choice will be completely upfront in its consequences or finality, so we know what to expect. This introduces a nice element of chance into future stories. In playing your characters you don’t quite know what you’ll get, so you roll the dice and hope your decision is better than it seems. Or you can play it safe and focus on minimizing risks (in this case helping repair the train and getting the hell out of there). Whatever you feel is best for your character.
Those who aren’t interested in playing their characters and solely want the most content or greatest profit can always wait for people to post hints, reminisces and reviews on the forums and such. So in the long run everyone wins.
Same here. I wonder if this was very much intentional and they were going the whole “Murder by Death” route, where the cheap detective book trick of the detective semi-concealing information from the reader is exaggerated to the point that the detectives reach conclusions that the viewer could not possibly have come to. Anyway, an actual player determined murder mystery would either be so easy that everyone would solve it or so difficult that most of us wouldn’t, so I think having our characters handle it was better.
My one criticism is that entering Hell didn’t increase Hellfarer at all. That seems to have been a genuine oversight.
edited by Anne Auclair on 1/16/2017