I really love the game! But the duration calculations are unclear. If I give a 150 km letter to the starting raven with a speed of 95 km/h, I would expect the time to delivery to be a little over 1.5 hours. Instead, it's 3.1 hours and I haven't the faintest idea why.
This makes it a little hard to make sure I'm picking the right birds for the job which is rather distressing -- Queen Isadora has demanded the best of avian logistics after all!
I facilitated my first game with 9 players, although a few had to leave early. Here's some postmortem (馃懟) notes
1. Ghosts aren't Dungeon Masters
Most of my players are familiar with D&D, and ghosts viewed themselves as mini-DMs. This isn't wrong, but it contributed to a game flow where ghosts would wait for investigators to investigate. I.e. they would describe a book in a library, and wait for investigators say they pick up and read the book, at which point they'd have to run back into #library and begin typing out the contents of the book. If the investigators even did that, and didn't, say, start chewing on the book instead.
Ghosts were frustrated that investigators didn't interact with their haunts in the way that they wanted, and found it awkward that investigators did a lot of stalling. I pushed the ghosts in #ghost-chat to use more supernatural haunts, over mundane clues, and the more supernatural and explicit haunts (animating objects, feeling compulsions to interact with things, discovering dead bodies, hearing voices, seeing the actual ghosts, etc.) seem to have helped reorient the vibe.
In hindsight, I think "ghost players react to investigator actions" being the main flow doesn't work well, and probably isn't the intended experience -- typing is already slower, and this doesn't take advantage of the asymmetric nature of ghosts and investigators. Rather, I think next time I'll emphasize that most interactions will be asynchronous -- while investigators are discovering and discussing haunts written earlier, ghosts mostly run ahead and fill other rooms with haunts, with occasional overlap by happenstance or particular inspiration. Thus, haunts should aim to be "complete" without the investigators -- i.e. "You find an ornate green book that describes bizarre occult rituals. There's lots of pentagrams."
2. The purpose of the game
I think this was more my inability to explain than anything else: there was confusion as to what the ghosts were trying to accomplish here. They are trying to frighten the investigators, but also understand them, and also seek respite -- I think this was a lot for me to convey, and there wasn't a clear goal to underlie the ghosts' actions, which made it a little difficult for them. I think the investigators also had a hard time remembering their secret motives in addition to their connection.
3. Things I missed in my first reading of the rules, or should have explained clearer to the players
4. Other notes:
Everyone had a good time, and everyone expects the next game to be even more fun now that they're familiar! I think I definitely would have made great use of more examples of interactions, and an easy way to share them with the players over Discord. The examples that were interspersed throughout the rules were tremendously helpful, and I found myself screenshotting and pasting them into #waiting-room to convey ideas more clearly.
Discord very recently launched a soundboard feature! Servers can add several sounds for use in calls within that server, and Nitro users can use sounds from other servers (although this can be disabled). While not all the sounds players used were "spooky" per se, it did add a lot of joy to the game!
If you have recommendations for ghost movies or stories that might be good inspiration for a round of TDHGII, I think that would make an excellent addition if you were ever inclined to publish another edition or supplement for the game!
