Hi Andrew,

I remember when you first started talking about 6 Bullets, so it's gratifying to see it at this stage now.  I've gone through and made some fairly detailed notes about aspects of the text, but I'm afraid I've also strayed into critiqueing the rules of the game.  Feel free to ignore those comments if they're not useful to you.

I'm going to post my page-by-page comments, with a summary of my reactions at the end.  It was an enjoyable read, and I'm looking forward to the final game.

P. 6 – You write "his revenge" when I think you mean "her revenge", in keeping with you "protagonist is female, antagonists are male" rule.

P. 7. – In this section, it reads like you're trying to outline the various roles, but it suffers from confusion between player roles and character roles.  Maybe it would be a good idea to divide it into two sections? First talk about what the characters are trying to achieve in each scene, and then talk about what the players are doing in each scene.  Dogs in the Vineyard has a really great section like this, which you could use as a model.

P. 7 – In the "The Protagonist" section, you use "singular they" for the protagonist.  Should it be "her"?  I think your text could benefit from more use of singular they, as I'll point out later.

P. 9 – The "loaded gun" analogy is maybe a little confusing for Attributes.  By definition, a bullet is a one-shot item, wheras loaded dice are distinguished by being re-usable.  Cool name though.

P. 9-14 – I found it really hard to follow all this information out of context.  Maybe it would be better to present the rules in procedural order, so you learn the rules as you need them?  I think this is my primary problem with the text.  Each section of the rules comes out of context, so it's hard to understand what to do.  I'd rather see "Here's the rules for playing out the epilogue.  Now, for the next scene, do the same, but with these differences."

P. 15 – Are conflicts between players, or between characters?  This is leading in to my biggest problem with the rules of the game, the stakes setting.  It's unclear from what you write here whether conflicts emerge from two characters wanting different things from a scene, or two players.  This is critical because as players we know that the protagonist is going to win every time, but the characters don't.  I suggest that what really matters here is conflict between characters.

The term "chambering dice" makes your earlier "loaded dice" analogy even more confusing.  I suggest calling them something else, sadly.

More P. 15: This feels like "I__E" resolution.  Your example of a simple conflict has the players declaring outcomes (it's unclear, but I think the rules don't support this), and then rolling to see which one "comes true".  This has the danger of "deciding before you roll" in that often what's really important can be negotiated out of the stakes, and also it tends to fast-forward through the really gritty parts of conflict.  The narration becomes a post-script to what has already been decided.  Basically, what you narrate after the conflict doesn't really matter, since it doesn't affect anything mechanically, and the really important fictional stuff has already been decided, and often described as well.  You're left with "ok, that happens."

P. 16 – You refer to characters as "he" throughout this page.  Should this be a singular they moment?

This further explanation makes it clear that resolution happens at the "picking your targets" phase, and the die rolling is just a fancy way of picking between the two.  You've already decided everything important about the conflict, and the die rolling just tells you which "comes true".  This can be pretty weak in play.

P. 17 – The protagonist is "he" again in the last big paragraph.

P. 19 – Players are referred to as male in the "Using your opponent's attributes" section.  Singular they again?

P. 19 -  It seems like there's a lot of back and forth of die trading going on here, creating attributes, using opponents' dice, scene dice and so on.  Maybe this could be made more integrated with the conflict, so that it happens as you play out the conflict, rather than in a kind of liminal stage before?  There's a lot of potential for cool stuff here – "I move so the sun is in your eyes", "I goad you into anger, so you're not thinking straight."

P. 24 -  Disagreeing with revelations. This seems like a weird extra step in conflict resolution.  How much does this actually happen in play? How important are revelations? It kind of seems like they're the point of play.  If the antagonists are trying to make the protagonist look unjustified, then it seems like there's going to be a lot of conflict at this stage, but in your examples it doesn't seem like they're doing that. 

What's your motivation for making revelations?  Why take revelation dice when reward dice increase your effectiveness? What's the conflict here?  I feel like you know the answer here but you're not expressing it in the text.

P. 25 – Players are male again.  Also, this "Rewards" rule feels like it's contrary to the spirit of the rest of the game.  Up until now, I've got the sense that the game promotes a slightly adversarial role between the antagonist players and the protagonist player.  This rule suddenly means that we've all got this conflict of interests.

P. 27 – The sentance after "The Antagonist Sheet" should read "who's in it, where it's set, and what's yet to happen"

We're getting rules for setting up scenes after rules for resolving conflicts.  I think it should be the other way around.

P. 28 – "I give them of the scene dice" should be "some of"?

So that's my page-by-page commentary.  Like I said, feel free to ignore the rules critique if you're not interested in it.  I haven't played the game so I'm just going by impressions and theory here.  On the other hand, I'm happy to expand on my comments if you like.

I think the biggest weakness in the text is in the order in which the rules are presented.  Like I said in my comments for page 14, it feels like I'm getting all the information at precisely the wrong moment, and a more procedural approach would be better.  Tell people what to do at each moment of play, as it comes up.  If you have to, tell people what to do, like "give six dice to each player, and put another pile of six red dice to the side – you'll need those later".  Does that make sense?

The same goes for the dice mechanics.  I'd like to see a step-by-step, numbered procedure for rolling dice, telling you what to do when.

Reading back over it, I see that some of my questions are the same as those you outlined at the start of the document.  They're good questions. I'll try to answer them just based on my impressions:

1. revelation dice – are you encouraged to take them as a reward?

This depends on whether the players have a goal of discrediting their opposite side or not.  If so, maybe.  If not, no.  In general, I'm not sure of the utility of the mechanic (see my later comments).

2. spare dice – do you use them, or load them into attributes?

Your mechanics seem somewhat inspired by "The Pool".  In the pool, the tradeoff between Pool dice and attribute dice is that while attribute dice are specific, they never go away, whereas Pool dice have a chance of being lost.  In your rules, spare dice are always lost, making them a lot less attractive.  Players are better off putting all their dice into really broad attributes like "Awesome" or "Good at everything".  You don't have any guidelines for what makes a good attribute (or in fact, any description of what an attribute is), so I can't see a reason in your rules not to do this.

3. the revelation map – do you use it as written, or do you just add revelations as they strike your fancy?

I think that your mechanics for the revelation map are possibly unneccesary.  If something is revealed in play, it needs to go up on the map.  If it's not revealed in play, how can it go up there? If the protagonist says "You shot my father, now I'm gonna shoot you", but the player doesn't have any revelation dice, does that make the protagonist a liar? Possibly it might be better to let adding a revelation to the revealation map give the character a big bonus in a conflict.

4. disputing revelations – do you ever dispute a revelation, or do you just let it ride? Do you think it's fair, or not?

Like I said in the page-by-page comments, I think that thise probably doesn't come up very much in play.  It depends on what the players are trying to do.  If you have some players who are trying to make the protagonist look bad, and others trying to make her look good, then you'll get conflicts here.  Otherwise, you won't.

Ok, so that's quite a lot of comments.  Hopefully it's helpful to you.  Please let me know if you want me to clarify any of my comments.  I think the game is very interesting, and there's a lot of potential in the mechanics you've presented.

Cheers,

Simon

Interesting.  I'll have a think about it, and another look at the text, and get back to you.