First, a comment on writing style. This work is meant to be a game. As such, the most important thing in the sheets are the goals, which need to be clear. Giving character detail, while interesting, is secondary to the purpose of clearly defining the character's plots. Unlike most literature, in Assassin games the author is available for questions regarding a character, so extra detail is always available upon request. I also exploited the fact that the game contained only six players, so each player can recieve personal attention fromt he GM and constant monitoring. Therefore, this game has tendancies towards tabletop role-playing games in that the players may be creative and try new things and have quick responses from the GM.
I wanted to do a few experimental things with this game. First of all, I don't much like the Assassin genre of the spy game. I believe that in such a genre it is too easy to resort to guns and shooting to accomplish one's goals, in fact the plots are often set up to achieve such a result. Personally, I think resorting to guns is a cop out. Lifeboat is specifically designed to take action oriented plots typical of the spy genre and put them in a situation non-condusive to violence. The pre-game set up, spies on board a pleasure liner, could be a typical spy game set up. The game world is clearly defined, there is an excuse as to why all these important people are here, and why everything must be done in a specific length of time. I then took this game and condensed it into a small space and limited populace. Any violence may cause the lifeboat to flip over. Gunshots could result in holes in the boat and sinking. There isn't even much privacy, since there's no place else to go. Under these strained circumstances, I am curious to see how players will resolve their plots.
One note about Banner and Kent: One thing that always interests me is how two different players play the same character. One way to do this is by running the game twice. The other way is by writing two near-identical characters into game. I tried to do this with Banner and Kent. They have symmetrical plots and most of the same information. I even reused some of the character sheets in each one to try to prevent unintentional bias.
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