Retrospective: Night's Black Agents

So my game is complete, the villains vanquished (and mostly blown up), and the agents have vanished in the smoke of a 10 kiloton explosion. Time for a retrospective. What did I learn from running Night's Black Agents? What worked and what didn’t? And how might I do better next time?

What Worked

In general, the system worked well. Investigative Abilities did their job of delivering information and tactical advantages while the General Abilities handled spotlight time and narrative pressure. My players got the concept of the game in the end and warmed to the idea very well, even asking if we would do another Gumshoe game in the future.

The high action scenes in particular worked well: combats, chases, and improvised plans. I really warmed to the Hot Lead system on the second try. The extended chase mechanic worked well for situations where the PCs struggle to remain one step ahead of their opponents while attempting to conduct other time sensitive missions. The first time I ran it I did not have that time pressure element (they just wanted to escape) which was a crucial flaw in running the mechanic.

Having players move in and out of the game was also a success. For the most part it was quite easy to explain why a given agent was absent for a mission: they were scouting another lead, babysitting assets, or prepping another mission. It also helped that I kept each session relatively self-contained with a minimum of PC-tied subplots. That helped us maintain a regular schedule even as life complicated things. I’ll be trying to adapt this game structure to my other games as much as possible.

What Didn’t

The number one failure of the campaign was attempting to play with my one year old son in the room. At this point in his development, he demands a lot of attention and can be quite disruptive whether or not he gets it. In the end this meant I lost my wife as a regular player in the game. Hopefully Sebastian will be able to be more independent in the future but for now that will have to be something we work around.

Learning and teaching the system for Night’s Black Agents was rough. It took some time for my players to see how to take advantage of the rules. For my part, I often had difficulty finding the relevant rules for a situation. Some things could have been called out better in the book (such a leaping onto a moving vehicle or how to deal with sedatives), others could have more support in the system (like ways to restrict the movement of a target or subduing them via a grapple), and some items were entirely my fault (short changing tasers and completely missing the garrote rules).

I also did not press hard enough on Stability tests, often allowing the agents to kill with impunity (as well as neglecting tests versus the supernatural about half the time). This wasn’t so bad in play but did push the tone of the action more into thriller than a horror.

The final problematic issue in the game was a number of incorrect references scattered throughout the Zalozhniy Quartet. I used the adventure series for much of the middle section of my game. The material was terrific overall but several times there were places where it contradicted itself (particularly in Out of the House of Ashes).

What I want to improve

One key thing I need to do, especially as I move to running several Chronicles of Darkness games, is communicate the stakes better. Most of the times I really fouled up was when I assumed that I had given the players enough information to decide how to handle a situation but had in fact not made it clear whether they were going up against a significant threat and what the consequences of failure might be.

Mechanically I would like to run better short-term chase scenes. Night’s Black Agents was an improvement of over games I've tried but still relied too heavily on the gamemaster to do all the heavy lifting. I think I might have found a new option in the Chronicles of Darkness corebook but only time and practice will tell if it finally answers my need.

Finally I really need to work on my endings. I reach the finale of this campaign so fast that I didn’t really get to devote as much time as I would have liked to planning it. I think it worked but compared to other sections of the game (like Project Werewolf) it felt underdeveloped. Of course I'm the one that gets to see what's behind the curtain so it might just be me.