[Spellbound Kingdoms] A lock of hair and a stuck pig

[FrankBrunner]

Well as everyone knows, playtesting is everything. So even though SK is a long ways from completion, I'm testing as I go. Here's a report!


... For this pre-alpha playtest, my goals were to run through the Love and Fear mechanics, the chase mechanics, and to continue to polish dialogue and combat subsystems. Our playtesters were Beth, playing Gorrak the troll savage, and George, playing Asher the nineblood (human) thief. Gorrak's loves were his armor, his shoes, and the trees of his forest home; George loved gold and nothing else. Neither started with any fears. Character creation takes about 5-10 minutes: distribute ability points, pick class, race, combat or magic style, one talent, and then describe your Loves and/or Fears (including how they help you and hinder you).
   The GM always starts first (and is highly encouraged to introduce conflict to as many characters as possible). The setting was a marketplace outside a major city, full of vendors selling fudge, elk meat, dresses and shirts, etc. Gorrak made his perception roll to notice that a man wearing a white plume had just snipped a lock of Garrok's hair while he was browsing a cinnamon shelf. Caught, the lock-thief sent his two accomplices scrambling and bluffed to Gorrak. This was a quick Charisma vs. Reason roll; Gorrak was not buying it and a chase scene resulted (I wanted either a chase scene or a combat scene for the first scene). Asher saw the troll set off in pursuit of the plumed man and joined in.
   The chase mechanics were fun. They're similar to Spycraft chases in some ways, and Savage Worlds in others. Everybody chooses an action, resolves the action, then rolls for advancement in the chase. Since one of Gorrak's Loves was for trees, I expected him to use the chase options that involved scrambling up the sides of buildings, brachiating from flagpole to awning, and running across suspended clothes lines. Afterwards, Beth said she didn't choose those options for Gorrak because she thought they would slow him down. She was forgetting that his Love for trees would have aided him here.
   The courtier ended up winning the chase and escaping with Gorrak's hair. Having tested the chase mechanics, I threw in two other thugs at the end to test the combat mechanics. The fight was also fun, although neither Gorrak nor Asher had yet to choose to risk any Loves or Fears.
   So far we had been playing about fifteen or twenty minutes, excluding chargen. That's the pace I want: fast.
   The story, in my mind, was that a Count suspected Gorrak's armor was of great value. His plan to obtain the armor was to send a courtier to snip a lock of the troll's hair and then use that (and his slave witch's voodoo) to wrack the troll with pains and false visions until he voluntarily gave up his Love. Simultaneously, the Count would ruin Asher's dreams of gold through a series of unfortunate events rigged to convince Gorrak that his devotion to his armor was to blame for his friend's woes.
Now it was the players' turn. Gorrak was up first. Beth surprised me by choosing not to go after the man who had snipped his hair. She instead just set the scene back in the troll camp, and Gorrak polished his armor and shoes and recuperated from the alley fight. He also brooded, so that he would start with a +1 edge if the next scene is a fight scene. I was glad I had put in rules for casual players because Beth is one, and she had no interest in creating a scene. She likes the action to come to her.
George decided that Asher would have a dialogue with Gorrak's chief about the strange assault on Gorak. We ran a dialogue for this. The dialogue rules held up well even though Chief Narl didn't have any knowledge to help. It was still a fun conversation, although I worry that the "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" improv dialogue rules sometimes make characterization hard. They sure help on pacing and overall fun, but is it short-term fun at a long-term cost?
   Two lessons so far: 1) Dice that roll their maximum need to provide some benefit. It was disappointing when Gorrak rolled a 10 and did not get anything for it. Perhaps we should use exploding dice, but I don't like the wonkiness of exploding dice being less likely to explode as you get better. Perhaps we should just find the difference of the dice, a la Savage Worlds's raises, and if you're four or more over then you get +1 damage.
   After Narl and Asher's dialogue, it was my turn again. The city watch tramp out to the savage encampment (near the city walls for the open-air market in the early spring months). They interrogated Gorrak, but remarkably, the beast troll won! Some key rolling by Gorrak meant that he won the conversation and gave up no secrets. The city watchmen were extras, so I didn't have to worry about tracking their Mood after the conversation.
   That night, Gorrak again came through with a clutch roll. He heard some city folk creeping into camp and whispering "de Borchgrave says that the beast Gorrak is the one." The interlopers promptly rolled a 1 on their Reason check and assaulted a sleeping pig, thinking it was Gorrak. Beast trolls are beastly, but not that beastly – it was a bad gaffe. But the thugs were raised in the mansions of Thyre's Pole district, so when they rolled a 1 on their check, I ruled that they spitted the pig instead of a sleeping troll. The squeals alerted the camp, and chaos ensued. Gorrak started by climbing a tree and diving down on the would-be thieves. Asher herded the pigs back toward the thieves and caused one to trip and fall in the porcine stampede. With their 3-to-2 numbers advantage, the interlopers thought that they might find success abandoning their Court Sword style (a tip-off as to their noble origins) and started lunging at Gorrak with their rapiers (lunge has a high probability of striking, but leaves the attacker wide open to counterattacks). Unfortunately for the thieves, Gorrak caught on to this tactic quickly, and after going defensive with the Block maneuver, he decided to scramble up a tree, out of lunging range. When one of his assailants began climbing the tree, Gorrak used his Dive attack again and dropped the thug. Now the fight was 2-on-2, but both heroes were wounded. Finally they started risking some Love. Gorrak narrated how his beloved armor could help him, and Asher talked about how his gold had bought him a potion that would speed his dagger faster than lightning. Both succeeded on their Love rolls and ended up winning the fight.
   We ended there. The Love mechanic worked pretty much as intended. Before the game, I had ditched a two-tier method of Love. The simpler system, where Love can basically be used as action points that carry a big risk, was effective.
I was disappointed that I didn't press the characters hard enough to build up their Fears. That is going to have to wait for the next playtest.
Positives: I liked the pace. Dialogue and combat are still fun. Love is simple and clear. The chase mechanics are overall good.
Negatives: Chase mechanics are a little wonky in determining the places after 1st place. I tweaked that and tested it a little in another game later that week... still too much math for my tastes (I love math, but not when players have to do it in the middle of a session). Love seems like it enters the game too rarely. I'll have to test that more. Same for Fear. It does help to shape plot, though. Still, how it informs the plot needs to be more immediately evident to the players, I think.

[Krippler]

What is exploding dice? Sounds like a system a game I played had, when a die showed it's max you disregarded it and rolled two new dice. They too are handled the same way so you could end up with an awfully high roll even if you only rolled one die. Those were D6 so it happened pretty often, but if you count woth 1s and 10s you'll achiece a similar effect.

[FrankBrunner]

Yeah, it's close to that. Basically what I meant was when you roll the maximum on a die, then you roll it again and add. If you roll maximum again, you roll yet again and add all three results. Keep rolling until you don't get a maximum. So let's say that Harad rolls an 8 on an 8-sided die. That's max, so he rolls again. He gets another 8. That's max, so he rolls again. He gets a 3. His total for the roll is now 8 + 8 +3 = 19.

There are two reasons why I'm leery of exploding dice. First, math turns some people off. Even what many gamers would consider simple addition is a turn-off for many other gamers. Not to mention that it slows play, at least a little bit. Comparing the numbers rolled on dice is faster and doesn't require math. So I prefer comparisons to addition. My second issue with exploding dice is that it feels weird that the die explodes less often as you get better. That is, an attack that is rated at d8 is a more powerful attack than one rated at d4, but the d8 explodes less often. Mathematically, it is still always better to roll the higher die. But it doesn't always feel that way. Sometimes it's more fun to explode a 4-sider than to roll a single 8-sider. But I definitely want to reward players for rolling high.

[Creatures of Destiny]

What do you mean by "Whose Line is it anyway"? Like the TV show? So the players get given a style and play that for the scene? How do the rolls tie to the conversation?

Daniel

[FrankBrunner]

Yep, it's like the TV show. The style and theme are set by a variety of factors including the location (dungeon, castle, zeppelin, submersible, tepui of the sun goddess,etc.), the stakes of the scene (humiliation, a fortune in gems, the mummy of the last elf, reputation, the queen's arm at the ball), the moods of the participants (mood is a characteristic akin to hit points), the motifs of the story arc (fugitives, cherry blossoms, blood), and the genre (epic, comedy, tragedy, caper, adventure, etc.). So I wouldn't say that the players are given a style. The GM is not Drew Carey. The players themselves have more control over the "rules" for a dialogue than the GM does, unless it is a scene that the GM is creating. In SK, all players, including the GM, take turns creating scenes, similar to MLWM.

The rolls tie into the conversation through a dialogue battlemat and your character's abilities. So dialogue has an improv type feel. It's been a lot of fun in playtest. I recommend Graham Walmsley's rpg-improv blog... but I can't seem to find the link anywhere atm. Maybe someone can help out?