[Circle of Hands]Playtest: The Indulgence of Kaspar

[John W]

Hello all,

we had our first playtest last night.  It was a really fun session.  The fact that we played an hour past the time at which we had all agreed we would wrap up should tell you something!

Since time was short, we had originally intended to make up one character each and then get to playing; but after making the first characters, everybody was intrigued enough with the process that we all made second characters, too.  And I had originally planned just to run a skirmish (again, because of time constraints), but after character generation all the players were really into their characters' personalities and key events, and I thought that a mere battle scene sine fabula would be a let-down; so we started (but didn't finish) the scenario that I had prepared.

C vs.12 rolls were both a great feature and a point of great contention.

Great feature: I had prepared a situation that had the potential to be explosive.  But I'm often too soft of a GM and let my players talk their way through everything (I have trouble making NPCs irrational I guess).  A couple of failed C vs.12 rolls stopped that from happening!  "This guy is suspicious and hostile," I thought to myself, "he's not buying what they're selling."  And so things got interesting.

Point of contention: One of my playtesters in particular, who is only used to traditional RPGs, had a REALLY hard time with the idea that he only got one die for his C vs.12 roll, despite his excellent role-playing of a friendly and helpful merchant, and his high Charm score.  I re-explained the idea about having to allay suspicion first by behaving within your social rank, and he eventually saw the logic behind it, but I don't think he ever bought it as a good way to conduct a game.  To him, it invalidated all his efforts at role-playing.  To be fair, it didn't really sink in for me either until I'd read a few discussions about it on this forum.  I'm not saying it's a bad mechanic; I like it.  And I like the move away from "whoring for dice."  I'm just saying that social behaviour and C vs.12 rolls is one of the more radical ideas in this game, and it will require focused explanation with lots of examples in the final text.

We talked about it some more, and one idea is that it (requiring PCs to engage with the rigid social dynamic of the times before getting on with what they came to town to do) seems like a heavy-handed way of forcing players to play "your way," Ron.  This could be the "But it's historically accurate!"/"But it's no fun!" argument.  Or this could be the "it's a tightly defined game, if you don't want to play that way you're playing the wrong game" argument.

Part of the concern is that we didn't have a strong enough idea about what certain PCs, given their social rank and profession and the particular situation, could do to earn that second d6.  Example: the professional/merchant encounters an encampment of armed men.  He could go among them, trading sharpening stones and shoe leather for food and a place by their fire, before asking anyone why they are there.  A freeman (martial(low)) Circle knight gets an audience with the village chief.  What can he do in that situation to act within his profession and social rank?  We couldn't think of anything.  So, a bunch more examples/discussion in the book would be helpful.

Combat:
First of all, I had intended to try out the latest mechanical tweak (about announcing your next action at the conclusion of the current one), and we even discussed it, but when the time came we completely forgot.  Sorry ;-).

I pitted 1 named NPC and 3 ascended NPCs against the 3 PCs.  In the very first action of the combat, one of the PCs was completely felled by a thrown francisca.  He took about 12 BQ, his B went to zero and he went down in a heap!  In hindsight, we might have forgotten to subtract his armour from the damage.  Anyway, it was a great illustration of how deadly combat can be in this system!  The named NPC had B5 Q8, and she was devastating.  High Q is definitely key to combat effectiveness.  One PC took a turn to sneak in the back way without being heard (W vs.12 roll, success), and on his second turn summoned a bear, which we decided would be able to attack on the turn in which it was summoned.  The bear only lasted 1 round, but it did some damage and caused Miss High-Q to use her action out of turn, so that was valuable.  Combat settled into a fairly uniform pattern of toe-to-toe attacks, but it didn't feel very dynamic, and the PCs were really feeling the pinch when they didn't have the Advantage die, so I started reminding the players of some of their other options, e.g. to go full-defense to preserve their action, to make a tactical move to seize advantage, etc.  Then things became more dynamic and interesting!  It turned out that sometimes NOT going full defense is a smart move, e.g. when you are being attacked on 3 sides, because it means you get 3 attacks per round! 

The combat mechanics were cumbersome at first as we were learning the ropes.  Roll dice, add something, then add or subtract something else, then do the opposite to get your defense, then compare four numbers... a couple of times we got lost and had to re-do it.  The scale on the edge of the character sheet would probably have helped, except i didn't make up character sheets for the NPCs, I just tracked their stats on note paper, so we couldn't use that.  One of my genius players suggested that I laminate a page with that scale on the edge, and use a wipe-off marker; that way, I need only the one page for all my NPCs.  Brilliant, I'm going to do that.  Combat started to proceed more smoothly towards the end of the battle.

Other physical aids: I printed out the Circle Of Hands emblem full-size on a page and we used that to track Q priority as discussed here.  To represent the characters, everybody made a token out of some wooden discs that I picked up at the craft store.  I got everyone to draw a symbol or motif to represent their character - no letters or numbers allowed.  I'll post a photo.  It worked pretty well and I was happy with the way it evoked the themes of the game.  Nobody actually spent B to jump the queue, so the method's non-representation of Q wasn't a problem.  The next thing I want to do is add a raised ring around the circle, so that I can advance the tokens by just pushing on the last one, instead of having to carefully slide them all around the arc.  I've seen wooden rings about 8-10" around, they're probably for needlepoint or something...  The craft shop is a surprisingly good source for gaming materiel. :)

Oh, speaking of my genius players: you'll recall that I wanted a name for the act of apportioning that 2Q to offense and defense.  I spent 20 minutes with a thesaurus and came up with "animus" (basic attitude or governing spirit: disposition).  Explaining the concept to my players, one of them just says "how about 'intent'?"  Perfect.  We're calling it 'intent' now.  -Q <= intent <= +Q.  Attack=2d6+Q+intent.  Defense=2d6+Q-intent.

Adventure construction: I had two components: local-power tensions and Amboriyon interference.  I didn't manage to bring the second component into play yet, besides mentioning the clouds and silvery light at the South end of the village; but I think the next scene will be a perfect opportunity for me to do that.

There was probably more that I wanted to feed back, but my notes are at home and I'm not.  I'll post again if I think of anything else.  And I'll post again after our next session in a week.  Overall, it was a really fun night and everyone's looking forward to next week.

Cheers!
-J

[John W]

System for tracking Q priority:



A character who has lost their next action, their token is upside down.

The NPCs' tokens have simple symbols so I can re-use them.  The fine art tokens are for the PCs.  :)

[John W]

Darn, Dropbox is not cooperating.  Here's the photo of the Q priority circle in action:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/2zh3mm3o6ni7lgz/Q-priority-circle-1.jpg

-J

[Ron Edwards]

Now that's a playtest!

"Intent" goes right into the rules. More comments to follow later.

[Ron Edwards]

1. Dropped jaw on the circle emblem being used for the combat ordering. I had not thought of that, I swear. And it looks great, and the "make your own sigil" thing harks all the way back to the misty days of "The World the Flesh and the Devil" by Paul Czege. Into the rules in a heartbeat.

2. Bummer about the armor being bypassed. I'm also a bit surprised the bear didn't last long. (note to self: more armor for bears? the right to bear armors?)

3. About C vs. 12 rolls, my intention is not to block players. The actions to alleviate the single-die problem should be pretty easy to do, given opening circumstances that aren't too dire. Sometimes the components and prep generate dire circumstances right out of the gate, which I understand, but when they don't, then players shouldn't be at a loss for what their characters can do to ease into 2-dice C rolls.

Gentry and peasants should have it especially easy - you basically go where you're expected to go, talk to someone you're expected to talk to and (more importantly) don't talk to anyone else, and glory be, someone will hand you some food. In early play, GMs need to be ready to answer questions to allow all this to happen, so players don't feel like they're groping in the dark. Professionals can put themselves to work - I can easily imagine a smith dropping by the local forge and throwing himself or herself into the work in progress without being pushy about it, then after about an hour, the local smith offering a drink of cold spring water and grunting his name as a means of saying "Hello, you have a place to sleep tonight."

I'll definitely write this up. It's a great way for players to get into their characters' skins, trying out the Traits as well for flavor, and that's a big deal when you're trading character ownership around session by session.

[John W]

1. Cool.  I'm sure it was in the back of your mind all along.

2. I should explain about our bear...  The caster only had Summon Beast 1, but the rules include "bear" under Summon Beast 2 (ie. bigger than man-sized).  We decided that a black bear is man-sized (beast 1) and a grizzly bear is bigger than man-sized (beast 2).  So he summoned a black bear using Summon Beast 1, and its stats were B=4 Q=6 Armour=2 (a grizzly would be something like B=9 Q=6 Armour=3).  So that's part of why our little bear only lasted one round.  He was knocked down to B=0, and the caster failed the subsequent C vs. C roll to control it, so it ran away.

3. Thanks, I'll share this explanation before next week's game.

For anyone who missed it, the game used this scenario here:
http://indie-rpgs.com/adept/index.php?topic=304.msg3021#msg3021

Thanks,
-J