The 4th of February was the first official playtest using the rules laid out here in the blog. As quickly and succinctly as I can, I'm going to attempt to put together everything that came to pass, both good and bad, as well as things that are just suggestions for how to enhance the game overall or just general stuff. Hopefully I can consolidate it and group things together well.
- First and foremost: it took us two hours to get three people to have their characters prepared.
- Now, it must be noted that the two hours portion was due to multiple factors: the blog wasn't laid out well, one of our players didn't have access to the blog, some rules had to be completely reworked, multiple distractions, and none of us had ever done it before.
- This might seem like a bad thing, but I think that it's in fact a very good thing, because when you think about D&D, creating a character can take at least two hours and that is if you are experienced and have all the resources nicely ordered (and know where to look). So I consider the two hours a success.
- Also, our fourth player went from no character to character in about half an hour.
- Character sheets were half a page. (Glorious success!)
- Right now the way information is organized for making characters is very confusing and not very effective.
- The game works terrifically for one shots, however it seems to stagnate, especially if there aren't creative people. A fix for this has been put forth, which I will address in a later post. Basically, there needs to be some way mechanically to push the game forward and to encourage exploration and such.
- Forces your character knowledge and personal knowledge to be based on the group (Fire and Smoke example), if someone doesn't have knowledge of certain things, they won't appear in the game. Whereas in games with a normal DM, the DM researchers special knowledge.
- Rule changes:
- Character Creation/General
- With numbers, always round down.
- Saves have now been combined into two and joined with armor class for to hit. They are now referred to as BODY and SOUL/MIND, essentially BODY is the average of your Passion, Bravery, and Guile stats, and it determines how easy you are to hit and anything dealing with physical issues. SOUL/MIND is the average of your Ambition, Faith, and Curiosity and it deals with mind affecting things, magic, etc.
- Armor now adds to BODY, if light armor +1, if heavy armor +2, shields +1. SOUL is increased through things such as holy symbols, meaningful items from the character's past, etc, in the same way. It was also mentioned that to encourage fantasy racism roleplaying if a Dwarf insults an Elf during the day he gets a +1 to SOUL for the day ... potentially.
- Races now gain a special ability instead of Upbringings and now it's choose any attribute to +1, and any attribute to -1, instead of me forcing a certain thing on the players.
- Initiative is the combination of Bravery and Guile.
- Combat
- When drawing for combat, Attacker always draws first
- On a tie, the Attacker wins
- Critical hits (aka Fatal or Deadly hits) happen on a 10 (can be countered if Defense draws 10) are counted as double damage.
- Drawing an ace is an automatic failure, for both combat and skills
- Players describe any and all damage that they deal
- Add status effects to characters in combat, if they are dealt half their current HP in damage, they move down a number on the condition track. The condition tracks are as follows: Wounded -1 to all stats, Seriously Wounded -2 to all stats, Fatally Wounded -4 to all stats, and then lastly Dead.
- You can be dead whilst still having HP technically, essentially if you are above 0 HP, you are considered "Living Dead" (Think Princess Bride) and they can be brought back through healing, but anything 0 or less HP cannot be brought back, they are permanently dead.
- Other
- Allow the Berserker to dual wield when raging
- Potentially give the Berserker more potion based abilities instead of just raging
- Change the name of Knight's Challenges to Battle Cries
- Change Slavery Upbringing, switch out Athletics with B&E, makes more sense
- Add Lizardfolk to the races players can choose
- Instead of a complete Bestiary like D&D and Pathfinder, we should do a minor Bestiary with about a dozen, two dozen creature examples and then use a table so that the players can essentially piecemeal their own creatures together very quickly and have them be leveled well with the party.
We also now have an official goal: A playtest with people who have never played before/not heard anything about the development, and have Cabana and myself sit in.
Other notes:
Overall, it seems like everyone is liking the system thusfar, there are some kinks within, but the combat system is quick and easy, the character sheets themselves are rather simple too. Granted, we still haven't touched magic or leveling up yet, but with the base classes things seem to be going smoothly. Combat was quick and to the point, however we didn't get a whole lot of story telling in with this session, hopefully more will come.
No comments:
Post a Comment