Playtest Report 4/21

We played another session of the in-development RPG and while I think this after-action report will be short, it’s cool. :D

(Warning: description of necromantic body horror below.)

James was our GM, we picked up basically where we left off from one of the previous adventures, tracking a Necromancer who was collecting artifacts to perform some fell ritual at a nearby graveyard.

This involved some investigation, roleplaying, and a short combat against some undead that all went well. For reference we’re using the current die mechanic:

• Action die with successes and surges; used whenever your character is acting or reacting.
• Proficiency die with successes and The Crit on it; used whenever you’re doing anything you’re trained in.
• Boon die with successes and Bane die with failures. The failures cancel out successes. Used for situational modifiers.

This is all working pretty well, no notes.

After talking with some NPCs, we eventually follow the Necromancer to a graveyard with a small chapel. We stealth our way past the graveyard avoiding an encounter with a bunch of minions, no problem. It’s minor but worth noting that, even though it’d been two weeks since the last time we’d played, and I’d only ever made a stealth roll once in this entire game, I remembered what Stealth Surges did without having to look it up. You can either give a surge to a teammate to help them avoid detection, or you can convert it into bonus damage against whoever you’re sneaking up on. So that felt good.

The battle against the necromancer was the star of the show for this session and it was pretty epic! She’s a proper Villain complete with Villain actions, so this was a real boss fight. She was inside this small chapel with large doors (closed) and stained glass windows. We want to surprise her, but we don’t actually want to go in through the front door.

So we concoct a classic Fantasy RPG Plan whereby my Talent used his telekinesis to throw the Beastheart’s pet Mushroom Dude, Mot, into the chapel through one of the stained glass windows. This started the combat and granted us surprise.

Now, this might sound cool and fun and cinematic, and it was, but it was also done strictly according to Hoyle. By the rules. My talent has a Triggered Action I can use in response to an ally beginning or ending their turn. It allows me to move them 2 spaces in any direction.

So technically what happened, and this is how we played it, was the Beastheart decides to enter the chapel and starts their turn. This triggers my Talent power, and I move Mot two spaces, which hurls him through the window and into the chapel, then the Beastheart and Mot finish taking their turn and the fight is on.

The Necromancer was at the chapel altar performing some ritual with some Skeletons and Zombies and an Undead Owlbear! Christened the Foulbear.

A ton of cool stuff happened during this battle. Hannah’s Tactician sliced up the Fowlbear, she parried an attack against the Beastheart, which reduced the damage against the Beastheart to zero, triggering a counter-attack. The Beastheart then critted on their counterattack which granted them an immediate extra action…and it wasn’t even their turn!

That kind of gameplay, where an enemy goes, but Hannah got to modify their action (Parry) because she’s a tactician, then the Beastheart got to counter-attack, AND gained an extra action from a crit was really cool. It made combat feel a lot more interactive. It was basically a combo! And it all happened during an enemy’s turn! Crazy!

My Talent used Flay (basically, Cyclops Eye Beams) and zapped a 3x3 area frying a lot of undead. That was cool because Flay not only does damage, but it shoves them back which, since they were all standing next to pews or the altar, meant they took more damage when they hit those. That felt very cool, my eye blast hurling these monsters back so they took damage from the blast, and then took more damage when they hit things.

It was a really small chapel!

But then the Necromancer used “Bone Request” or some such nonsense, I failed my resistance roll and she SUCKED MY LEG BONE OUT OF MY BODY! Rendering me prone and unable to move until someone healed me! THAT was awesome, I loved that. Proper villain action, that.

At one point, the Necromancer attacked Hannah’s Tactician, critted, used the extra action from the crit to attack again, and THEN used her Villain Action to invoke the Shadow Form whereby she became incorporeal, flew across the room, flying through the tactician, beastheart, and Mot doing 3 piercing damage (ignores armor) and then flew out the window we jumped through!

She was trying to retreat! All eyes turn to the Talent and Lars says “Throw her ass back in here!”

But! I was prone! I needed to spend some movement to stand up, and that didn’t leave me enough to run outside to get Line Of Sight on her!

Well, James ruled I didn’t need to go outside, I could see her through the window because it’s just a one-story building and the window isn’t that high up, fair enough. But the reason I bring this up is that moment where earlier events left my character in a tactically disadvantageous position felt right. That’s what a tactical game is about. I wanted to run outside and around the chapel to target the Necromancer, but she’d knocked me prone previously so I had to deal with that, I couldn’t just effortlessly achieve all my goals every round. That’s tactics, and even though I thought it meant I was screwed, it felt right.

Eventually the bad guys accumulated enough Goblin Points (the Director’s version of our class resources like Ferocity or Focus, probably a temp name?) and spent them to power-up a Skeleton’s bone arrow, turning it into an Exploding Arrow which really hurt us. Me and the Beastheart down to 0 stamina and 1 health.

Finally, the Beastheart player hadn’t known about the rule where your companion gains ferocity whenever they take damage. Which meant it Mot was FULL OF ANGER! And companions rampage if they have too much ferocity…so Mot rampaged!

The Beastheart rolled the Cosmic Die, rolled 3 Chaos which means…Mot Attacks The Beastheart!! Mot uses Corruption Cough on the Beastheart and KNOCKS HIM OUT! 0 Stamina, 0 Health! “The tiny mushroom man steps on your head to make sure you’re dead!”

But….Mot critted! Which means Mot gets another action, and it chooses to attack the Necromancer! And MOT KILLS THE NECROMANCER!!

That was the end of the battle! It was EPIC, epic shit happened! It was super cool! Everyone got to do cool stuff, I’m leaving out a lot.

It felt like, in this battle, we achieved everything we were trying to do with this system. It was tactical, cinematic, heroic. We were buzzed afterwards.

However, and this is where it gets into some noodly game design…the entire battle against the necromancer only took 2 rounds. 4 players (plus Mot) and 6 bad guys (Necromancer, Foulbear, two skeletons, two zombies).

Is that a problem? A boss battle only took two rounds? One hour total? Seems like it! Should take way longer!!

But…why do I assume that? I mean the actual log of what we did…it was epic! Not only did the players all do really cool things, so did the bad guys! There was ebb and flow, the beastheart went down, I was reduced to 0 stamina and 1 health. The Necromancer tried to escape and was thwarted!

It was only a 1st level boss fight! How many rounds should it go?? We need room for 10th level boss fights!

Finally, the thing I noticed going over the log was that my notion of what a “round” is…doesn’t really make sense for this game. In other games, a round is usually just a checkbit. Did I Hit? Yes/No. If no, you’re done. If yes, do a little damage, move on.

But our game doesn’t work anything like that. The Necromancer took Villain Actions which allowed her to act when it wasn’t her turn. ALL the characters get an extra action on a crit, and everyone can Counterattack if they reduce incoming damage to zero. And you can crit on those! (Currently).

We saw combos from the Tactician and Beastheart, the Conduit was doing damage and restoring stamina to folks through the whole battle.

Basically…it was an entire 5E bossfight, compressed down into two rounds in which everyone did way cooler stuff than you’d normally see in a 1st level 5E boss fight. Now, we didn’t really design this system to resolve big battles in two rounds! So not all classes were earning their Class Resource at the same speed. The Beastheart? Tons of Ferocity! The tactician? Not as much focus. But that should be relatively easy to dial in.

It’s gonna take a lot more testing, this was just one session, but gosh it felt good. We need to bring other folks into the tests, try it out in different scenarios, but it really feels like we’re onto something.

James and Hannah are working on a prototype of our Upbringing System which lets you define your character’s culture whether that's your parents, village, or nation. We now have 12 skills and rules for Extended Tests (aka skill challenges) so lots is going on. LOTS of talk about what skills are for and how players can and should be using skills to customize your character, so expect to see an update on that pretty soon.

Hopefully we can find the time during the week to do more testing. I feel like we really need to hammer on what we have right now to make sure it’s working before we take everything apart and put it back together For Real. Meaning replace our stubbed-in prototype characters with real characters that have gone through Actual Character Creation, but that’s gonna be a lot of work.

In the meantime…more testing!