Impressions: Dirty Secrets

November 11, 2008 9 comments

Dirty Secrets, written by Seth Ben-Ezra, is very interesting, very unique story game about crime that incorporates some board game sensibilities. In the interests of full disclosure I need to tell you that I’ve never read the rules and don’t own a copy (yet). But I got a chance to play it at RinCon and had a good time with it. If I misremember something or we somehow weren’t playing it right, I know that Seth will leave comments to correct me, and Jason (who ran the game) will jump in to fact-check me as well.

In Dirty Secrets you start with three characters, regardless of the number of players at the table. One character is the Investigator, who works to solve the mystery. Another is the Suspect, who may or may not be the person who committed the crime. And the last is the Victim, upon whom a crime has been perpetrated. These characters are created using only descriptions such as name, age and race, and are created collaboratively. Each person write one thing about the character on the sheet, then passes it to the left for the next player to fill out one thing, until the sheet is filled out. Then the players can hash out any disagreements about the characters, and once everything is settled the game begins.

One player takes the role of the Investigator, who is the only character in every scene. Think of it as a first-person mystery novel, where everything is seen from the lead character’s point of view. The other players are basically all gamemasters, taking the roles of other characters and contributing to the story in a round-robin fashion. It’s odd, but it works. At the start of each “scene”, the Investigator announces what he wants to do. This can be looking for clues, interviewing suspects, getting into someone’s face, or having a relfective moment on how the case is affecting him. Yes, in an actual game mechanic, the Investigator refreshes his die pool (which I’ll explain in a moment) by performing that classic detective novel trope of wandering down the street in the rain accompanied by a bad movie voice-over, sitting in the bar getting drunk and lamenting about dames, any sort of “character moment” that puts a pause in the action. It’s one of the best ideas in the game, which I plan to steal for another project.

The other players take turns being the GM (or whatever the game’s term for it is), rotating the duty each scene. The GM for that scene can appoint the other non-Investigator players to take the roles of NPCs, who can be created for the scene so the cast grows as the game progresses. If they seem like they’re important or interesting, they get jotted down as character and come back. If not, they’re extras and they’re gone.

If there’s a conflict between the player and the gamemaster, and this can be any sort of conflict from an actual fight to a disagreement over how the scene should play out, dice are rolled. This is similar to the function of the card mechanic in Primetime Adventures, but different in execution. The player and GM play a hand of liar’s poker with dice, concealing the result from each other and betting on the quantity of a particular number on the table between them. for example, you look at your roll and you have 4 threes. You guess that the other player has at least one three, so you be 5 three. The other player can escalate, and it goes around until someone calls. Now, again in the interest of full disclosure, I played this on Sunday afternoon at a convention and I was pretty fried by this point, and I really didn’t get it at first and still don’t. I have no idea who went first or why, or how you figured out who won a contest, other than rolling with Jason saying who won because he was the guy with the rulebook. This is really the only thing I might change about the game (and honestly, I’d just steal the card mechanic from PTA), but aghain, I was tired and it might make more sense if I read the rules for myself and could take time to get my head around it.

When you win, you get to write a name on a grid and move a piece. This is part of the game that you can look at and go “oh, I get it”, but is hard to describe. The grid has numbers, and you roll 2d6 (as separate results, not added) at the start of the game to figure out starting position. So it you roll 2 and 4, you start 2 down and 4 across. At the start, you write the suspect’s name. At the end of each scene with a challenge, the winner can write the name of any character in the scene on the grid, making them a potential suspect. If there’s a blank square, you have to move there. If there isn’t, the winner of the contest picks the name to land on, and that person committed the crime. The next scene will be between the Investigator and that person. It’s interesting because no one at the table can know who did it until the last scene, and the player who gets to pick the guilty party doesn’t get to by the GM for that scene.

The game really is fun, but it takes a table full of gamemasters to play it. It’s obviously not intended for campaign play, although I could see a way to do it, with players taking turns as the Investigator and every game session being a new “novel” in the series. You could even carry over characters from one episode to the next, although any recurring character has the chance to be guilty of a crime. I could also see switching it up in a recurring game by having one of the other characters (say a cop, a private investigator, any character acting as an amateur detective) taking the role of the Investigator and the normal Investigator character being a supporting character.

If you like crime novels, film noir, detective shows, mysteries, anything akin to those genres, buy this and check it out. It seems like it would be a good party game for mystery buffs who aren’t into roleplaying games and might be a good “gateway drug” to introduce your non-geek friends to roleplaying. It handles genre tropes in clever ways. Definitely a good touch. Nice job, Seth.