[Throne of the Spider God] A Playtest Session

[Nick]

Hey all,

Last night a few friends and I convened for character/world generation session of Throne of the Spider God, with intentions of playing through the first adventure tomorrow night. There were four of us present: Nicole, Phil, Nick and myself.

Nicole's RPG experience so far is either zero or pretty near to it. She's had some exposure to communities that are close to the RPG one (non-RP games, anime, and other such) and had been looking for a game to play for a while.

Phil is one of my old dnd group members, and played that off and on over the past four or five years. He's been playing Mountain Witch more recently, and was interested in playing a different nar-type.

Nick's been gaming the longest, with game-specific engines when he was much younger, dnd more recently, and forge-types over the past year or so. The same goes for me, except for the much younger game-specific engines stuff.

All four of us are 20, give or take 2 years. The session was slow at first- Phil and Nick just met Nicole that night, and we were all a bit tired from having worked all week, but this dissipated pretty quickly as we got into the collaborative creation. By the end we'd created something we were all very excited about, but which might have strayed outside the bounds of the game's intent. I'll explain.

Straight off the bat we had to establish a 'jump-off point.' We all tried to think of something we all knew that was sword and sorcery pulp, but realized that none of us were familiar enough with the genre to actually have more than one common ground for it between us. The discussion of what we imagined it to be like though, and the various examples we hit on eventually led us to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which we all agreed embodied pulpy feel, which to us took precedent over the fantasy setting.

One of the main reasons we were worried about doing that was that it would negate one of the most intriguing aspects of the game- the unexplored/uncertain world. To counter this, we all agreed that any actual adventuring would take place in India- a place unfamiliar enough to all of us to essentially be an unmapped wilderness, and that we agreed would serve as a sort of generic "mysterious east" rather than attempting to impose any semblance of real India into it.

The list of perils let us build up some more specifics to the world, and customize it further. One interesting note was that we did end up collapsing a few after gathering all of them and voting and reading through them (specifically, "steam powered nazi robots" and "nazis" got collapsed into "nazi mad science" which was understood to encapsulate a few elite nazis, rather than a horde of efficient underlings.) We ended up with the list: puzzles (8), weird nazi science (5), cultists/insane priests (4), corrupt government (3), rivals (2) and mole people (1).

This helped establish a few interesting things into the world, as we discussed their correlations and how we wanted these to manifest.

1) The tech-level of the game is somewhere around 1940's
2) Religion is extremely important, magical, and strife-driven in this world
3) There is a fantastic undercurrent, but it's mostly resigned to the deep jungle
4) A lot of gameplay will revolve around treachery, deceit and badass heroes who fight against it.

The post-peril discussion also led very organically into the actual task itself, and the patron who gave it to us. What we decided on was that the Raja of India hired us to steal a sacred text which detailed the secrets of reincarnation from the priesthood, which certain corrupt priests were using as a bargaining chip with the Nazis, in return for inspiring rebellions that would eventually lead to a non-colonial India (perhaps one led by said corrupt priests). We set the opening scene in a bar, just before footsoldiers of the corrupt priesthood attempted to trap the PC's (they having just learned of the mission).

Creation of heroes ran similarly to the above. The four heroes created were

Nicole's:

True Name: Former Scholar (3)
Use Name: Mikhail Shen
Passion: Solving Pules
Supernatural Price: none

Fated Deed: Read scrolls of reincarnation herself
Heroic Deed: Survived an attack of trolls in search of Kahli's Brahma in Sri Karan
Sign: Uses a cain

Phil's:

True Name: Troll Defender of the Outer Planes, Slayer of Molemen
Use Name: Tsoll
Passion: Fighting
Supernatural Price: none

Fated Deed: TBA
Heroic Deed: Defeated the champion of mole people during their invasion of his home.
Betraying Sign: Carries the champion's shrunken head.

Nick's:

True Name: Plunder God Cide, expelled from the Brotherhood of Malen-Ka (3)
Use Name: Cid Pryce
Passion: Making a name for himself
Supernatural Price: none

Fated Deed: TBA
Heroic Deed: Stole the Amulet of Kirugash from the High Porter of Malen-ka
Betraying Sign: He always wears it

Mine:

True Name: Reformed Mad Nazi Scientist (3)
Use Name: Hans Kriegshauser
Passion: Experimentation
Supernatural Price: Costly (mad science)

Fated Deed: TBA
Heroic Deed: Concocted a serum to liberated the peasants of Sharania from Jael'Mahmesh's voodoo domination
Betraying Sign: left thumb and index finger permenantly stained green

As you can see, we didn't do armour or inventory yet, though we discussed it. By this point it was midnight thirty and the meeting was adjourned. A good time was had by all, and reactions were on the whole very positive.

Summary:

Good Things

+ Collaborative world-making got everyone excited
+ Individual inputs were able to congeal into a group vision
+ The pulpiness inspired by the rules made everyone very comfortable being as ridiculous as they really wanted to be
+ The method of world-building flowed naturally, and gave good structure to the discussion

Bad Things

- The imperative tone of the game text made us feel a little guilty about things like fourteen word heroic deeds, and non-fantasy setting.
- Some things seemed rather arbitrary (the strength bar can be calculated instantly by pretty much anyone playing the game, for example)

Things that are Niether Good nor Bad... or are a little of both

/ I think the rules are more flexible than the text states, and that should be embraced on further revisions. (the non-fantastic setting, for example, and the easy translation of magic into mad science)

Overall, I'm very excited about playing the game, and I believe the other players are too. Any problems we've encountered so far have been more textual than mechanical, which is perhaps easier to fix, and is definitely more subjective. I'll report back after the first adventure.

-Nick

[colin roald]

I'm very curious to see how this goes.

[Nick]

Yesterday we convened to play through our actual first game, and things didn't go so well. There were a number of textual vagaries that made discerning what we were supposed to be rolling difficult, and overall for a game that seems so much to want to encourage narrativist play it's very crunchy. Overall I'd say there were three things that made play difficult.

1. The Text Was Jargon Heavy and a little Confusing

There were a few things that were hard to tell about rules. A few examples include:
- Do you have to spend a zeal point to get the +5 bonus? Intuitively it seems so, but you specifically mention having to spend the zeal point in the two other similarly formated zeal-point-use descriptions.
- Can wound dice generate more wounds?
- If, in battles, risk + disadvantage > 5, does that mean that a hero has the chance to be completely destroyed in that battle? If so, every fight between people whose difference amounts to four or more is potentially game-ending on every stroke.
- When discussing mastery/resist for withstanding attacks (on page 60 I think) you use resist to refer to the number you add to your own dice roll. So far as I can tell, this is the only place you do such and make no note of it.
- Overall, there are a number of grammatically confusing mechanics (Saying 'your hero decides if...' makes sense, but saying 'you decides if...' makes the game text feel uncomfortable)

There were also some bits of jargon that felt unnecessarily obscure.
- Strictures in magic could be determined much more organically.
- Plausibility is defined as though a jargon word, but then used more or less in its common sense throughout the text.

2. The Game is Nigh-unplayably Deadly (if I understand the rules)

Doing some brief number crunching:

Let's say that my character wants to scale a mountain. Its true name is Huge Mountain (4) and mine is Priest of Grumgoor (3). It's a known action, so my master is +2, and the TN is gonna be 14. Let's say I have no wounds and risk 2. I'm gonna need a 12 to succeed. Statistically, I'm at a .64 chance to get up the mountain. Let's say then, that I get an 18 and a 7- that's one wound and one successful mountain-climb.

Once I get up there, I need to cross a swiftly flowing river, same conditions. However, right off the bat my chances are cut by a third by my wound die, so we're down to a .425 chance of success. We get another wound (assuming wound dice can't generate more wounds), and continue on.

Now, by the third time we encounter anything we have a straight up 50% chance of failure, assuming we're not putting our lives on the line, in which case we can drop that to 40%. This only leaves open about 2 non-zeal conflicts per game that we can interact with at all. Throw in a single battle, and it's next to impossible to survive a session longer than an hour or so.

3. The Modularity of the Mechanics felt Clunky

Despite their deadliness, feats work pretty elegantly. However, they don't seem to thematically necessitate battles or magic. The complexity of battles seems like either a complex simulationist explanation that tries to more accurately model the complexity of a battle, or a realization that the feat rules don't allow interaction and an attempt to fix it.

There are a couple things I really do like about the battles though, that I think you should perhaps try to emphasize in later drafts:
- The quick pace and assertiveness. It's hard to realize this because of the mental gymnastics that go around interpreting the jargon, doing the math, and taking extenuating circumstances into account... but you clearly have the quick pace on your agenda and have a couple things in there encouraging it.
- The ability to deal with things in different ways. At this point this is worked in with lots of minutia regarding exactly how those different ways work out, different roles and effects for each. It seems like there ought to be a simpler way for handling this, because though the tactics option is cool to have, it makes battles crawl sometimes.

The magic system felt a little arbitrary in places. I like the control that players have over effects, but the text is a little deceptive about that degree of control. The scope of magic is limited to (so far as I could tell at least, though we didn't actually get to playing the magic rules, I did read it over a few times) offensive magic that does a specific amount of damage. This seems contrary to the tone of the game that makes it seem as though the opportunities ought to be limitless. This could be hard to balance though, as the mechanics do get into a fairly high degree of specifics.

Overall, the resolution mechanics were very disappointing for a game that had such fun character generation. I don't think that any of the problems were insurmountable though, and look forward to future drafts of the game.

[charles ferguson]

Hey Nick,
Thanks for the detailed playtest report! Deepest apologies for the lateness of this reply, I just found your post this minute courtesy of a heads-up from a friend (thx Belinda :)

My own playtest sessions (still to come...) have yielded pretty much those exact same results.

Specifically:
* the world-building went better than I hoped for a first pass. It's been collaborative, intriguing, & organic, which I really really liked. We got a world we all like but one of us could have gotten on our own... cool but strange-cool, unexpected stuff is popping up.
* the mechanics need a major overhaul. Battles in particular play like a dog. The wound mechanics just aint working. You nailed it, Nick: there are some heavy Sim tendencies embedded in there that drag down those parts of the game that increasingly want to pull away into Narativism. THe game I'm plyaing now is not the game I thought I was designing. The challenge now is to isolate the things I really like, find out how to do them better, & save the baby while I hurl bathwater in all directions.
* yes, the existing text is confusing & way too wordy. Much of it will be scrapped.

My design & playing time is limited so I don't have anything fixed enough to post as a revised draft just yet, but a shape is definitely emerging. The next, soon-to-be-available draft will contain:

* simplified rolls.
* a more focussed tool for world-building. This involves picking from a list of pulp S&S-inspired elements. They're things like (Nick you psychic you) Weird Science, or Psi, or Flashing Blades, and so on.
* a more focussed tool for character-creation. This involves picking a pulp S&S-inspired heritage for your hero: Savage, Barbaric, Decadent, or Fading.
* a huge tightening of "what this game is about". It's now about telling your hero's story. Your hero will start at a particular stage of their career. As they play through the game their actions will have the potential to move them forward to the next step of the hero-cycle. It's a one-way track, though: they can never go back. At the last stage, the only step left is their swansong/end-game. So each hero's story has an end. This is a huge change from my original vague concept of total open-ended Sim-ness, but my gut tells me it gives the game what it's lacking: a direction & a core & a beating heart. Time wil tell.
* oh yeah, & character sheets

I intend to post my own playtest/AP reports in the next week. We had our 4th session last night, & my 2 players & I are having a blast.

Thanks again Nick for your patience & enthusiasm!

cheers, charles