Well, I think you're right, the scale is all wrong. We should have been aiming for a simple holiday themed "bad things are happening, party come help" or "party, help us achieve what we cannot alone" adventure.
What we tried didn't work, but we had fun playing with the idea, and I may re-use some parts from it.
And, certainly, the fantasy setting was just set dressing, but my players liked it; "we deal with enough real life already". We played the goblin workers a little goofy, and the management as cartoonishly evil. We figured it was about twenty years after some brave adventurers had pacified these lands in the name of Good.
The closest thing to a successful mechanic that we came up with is a kind of graded-rhetoric game.
One player would make a pitch to some NPC workers and the rest of us checked off which rhetorical "moves" they used, and which of the workers concerns had been addressed. Moves and unaddressed concerns added bonuses and penalties to a final +CHA die roll vs a difficulty that was based on the number of miners you were talking to.
The players picked the difficulty of the group they wanted to talk to, based on limited information (pre-rolled groups of workers on index cards). We agreed on two minutes per conversation before an overseer noticed, and three minutes before someone came to break it up.
Of the other four players: 2 were good at the speech game, 2 thought it was fun, 4 liked the overall concept, and all of us thought the mechanic was "interesting."
I think it didn't work for a lot of reasons, and I would never want to run a game around it. But, I think the mechanic could be a fun way to gamify a petition to a captain, monarch or council. Run it like a heist: gather intel (councilors concerns, or logical fallacies that they've fallen for in the past); make a plan to check those boxes (as a group! not making one player do an impromptu speech in an imaginary world!); then run the scene, adding complications on a timer. Definitely don't end on a die roll though, that was an unfun move. When the players are doing so much work it feels totally unfair to leave the result up to chance. Or do the CHA roll at the beginning, and let them decide if they want to push for more challenging goals or risk running over time to check more boxes?
In any case, I have another year before we attempt this again.
Well, I think you're right, the scale is all wrong. We should have been aiming for a simple holiday themed "bad things are happening, party come help" or "party, help us achieve what we cannot alone" adventure.
What we tried didn't work, but we had fun playing with the idea, and I may re-use some parts from it. And, certainly, the fantasy setting was just set dressing, but my players liked it; "we deal with enough real life already". We played the goblin workers a little goofy, and the management as cartoonishly evil. We figured it was about twenty years after some brave adventurers had pacified these lands in the name of Good.
The closest thing to a successful mechanic that we came up with is a kind of graded-rhetoric game. One player would make a pitch to some NPC workers and the rest of us checked off which rhetorical "moves" they used, and which of the workers concerns had been addressed. Moves and unaddressed concerns added bonuses and penalties to a final +CHA die roll vs a difficulty that was based on the number of miners you were talking to. The players picked the difficulty of the group they wanted to talk to, based on limited information (pre-rolled groups of workers on index cards). We agreed on two minutes per conversation before an overseer noticed, and three minutes before someone came to break it up. Of the other four players: 2 were good at the speech game, 2 thought it was fun, 4 liked the overall concept, and all of us thought the mechanic was "interesting."
I think it didn't work for a lot of reasons, and I would never want to run a game around it. But, I think the mechanic could be a fun way to gamify a petition to a captain, monarch or council. Run it like a heist: gather intel (councilors concerns, or logical fallacies that they've fallen for in the past); make a plan to check those boxes (as a group! not making one player do an impromptu speech in an imaginary world!); then run the scene, adding complications on a timer. Definitely don't end on a die roll though, that was an unfun move. When the players are doing so much work it feels totally unfair to leave the result up to chance. Or do the CHA roll at the beginning, and let them decide if they want to push for more challenging goals or risk running over time to check more boxes?
In any case, I have another year before we attempt this again.