Chaos & Order, first playtest

[jphannil]

The first playtest session of Chaos & Order was a quick-possibility one-shot game with my brother and my cousin through IRC. The players are quite min/maxers and diablo freaks so we played Hyborea game heavily oriented towards high powered characters and fighting.

My brother's character was Antillian Priest/warrior who was sent to hyborea to collect some magic to restore Antillia's flyships and to begin some raids to hyborea. Of course Antillian priests infiltrated Zingara and made a pact with Zingaran king so that Antillians would raid Argos and leave Zingara alone. Think of high level necromancer and warrior with black clothes and glass weapons.

The other character was Aquilonian knight on a run for loot or treasure to bring back his family honor and position in Aquilonian court. Think a mercenary knight with good bud worn out armour and 10 scum mercenaries with him.

The goal of the game was simple, to kick some ass and retrieve a magical stone from the center of the Zingaran ghoul-forest. During the travel characters met also with possessed villagers and lots of mercenaries died of course.

The end was spectacular, I had this necro guy facing a image of shemitish sorcerer and they fought a magical battle for the stone. In the end this aquilonian guy became suspicious about his 'friends' motive (actually the aquilonian was only hired for the job) and there was a situation where I as a gm didn't need to bother doing anything, the players played with eachother.  Using the ghouls the antillian guy got the stone and only half of the mercenaries survived from the forest (including the Aquilonian of course).

Some notes:

- point method of character creation + 100 points + min/maxers + generous gm -> Powerful Characters

- extended contest is great method of handling a duel, but for smooth gameplay (especially in irc) it should be not used very much, in session finales, however, it fits.

- trait affinity behaves oddly, if say you have two traits +5 and one at +10, then use them frequently together, the effective value is +12, but if you use a bump to the +10 ability and raise it to +11, then you only have +11. Odd but I cannot say how I could correct this.

- point based character creation needs some ideas, especially the natural/obtained trait difference needs clarification. Obtained trait +10 costs now less than natural trait +10. I've been thinking of putting the cost of natural traits as value x 2 instead of value x 3, this would make obtained traits always more expensive than natural traits.

I hope we get to play this game some more soon :), there was many threads left open to continue the play.

Now I want to ask you Masters of this forum, how do you put together an effective playtest. I mean what should a good playtest session have if the purpose is to get benefits from game designer's point of view (in addition of having lots of fun of course) ?

Best regards