[sic] Shattered Souls - Final Version(s)

[Vulpinoid]

Hi Everyone,

As requested, the final submission feedback thread.

Name: Michael Wenman
Title of Game: Shattered Souls
Chosen Set: Set D - Setting: sword-and-sorcery/cyberpunk. Theme: religious conversion/flight-of-fancy story.
PDF Link: http://www.angelfire.com/psy/vulpinoid/Shattered_Souls_1_6.pdf

Game Description: Millenia ago, the war of heaven was waged, the forces of light were victorious, but they understood that there needed to be balance in the universe or else it simply couldn't exist. Instead of destroying the forces of darkness they joined with mortals to create the Order of St. Uriel, and together they built huge trans-dimensional prisons to keep their enemies in exile. As a final act, the forces of light knew that they too would have to leave the world to maintain the balance. Time passed, and the memory of the great war was reduced to legend and myth; doorways to the great prisons were forgotten, and the exiled beings lost contact with their followers. Both light and dark gradually lost their grip on reality and sanity. Hidden in the dark corners of the world are the doorways leading to the ancient realms and time has started to erode the magic that has kept them sealed. Only the Order of St. Uriel stands in the way of the ancient immortals as they struggle to return to the mortal world, yet petty infighting and deadly intrigue from other shadowy factions stop the Order of St. Uriel from being the effective force it once was.

Archive: If people think this game is worthy of being in the archive then I have no objections to it.

Feedback: I tried to offer a bit of feedback where I thought I could be helpful in as many of the games as I could. In those few games where I didn't think I could contribute something helpful, I tried to offer a bit of encouragement and tried to let the author know that I thought they were onto a good thing. I'm pretty sure I accounted for everyone who participated in the challenge.

PDF Link to Alternate Version: http://www.angelfire.com/psy/vulpinoid/Shattered_Souls_1_5.pdf
This is an alternate version which I developed along the way. I feel that the multi-faction aspect of this versions lends itself better to the genre of "wargame roleplaying", and adds a versatility to the system that had to be sacrificed in the final version. Feel free to comment on this version as well, or to provide your own input as to which version is more playable.

V

[Filip Luszczyk]

Well, my final feedback will be rather short.

The game looks solid, and I don't think it's actually possible to say more without playtesting it. Playtesting has this bad habit of killing games and taking their stuff, unfortunately

I like the presentation, even though I'm not a fan of 3D art. It sure is appealing.

You could consider posting the game on some forum devoted specifically to board games, I think.

[Anders Larsen]

First I have to admit that I am not really a big fan of board games, and this game is more a board game than a role-playing game, so I am not really able to give it fair critique. This is mostly because I an not familiar with this types of games, and then it is hard for me to judge what is fun and what it not fun. So I will mostly point out stuff that was hard for me to understand, and things I found weird.

It was a bit hard for me to find who was the leaders and who was the troupes. I would suggest that you refer to them more directly and to where they can be found.

For the secondary objective the second: "objective point for every objective reached after the first", does not really seem seconder. There you just get more objective point for something you would have done anyway.

I like this "ticking clock" where the die on the nexus is slowly decreased, but I was a little disappointed when I read what happen when the nexus opens. I wanted some "point of no return" where all hell break loose, and everyone is forced to face some unpleasant encounters. As it is now you could have a situation where every one just went back to their starting point without facing the shattered avatar (though, it is probably very unlikely), which would be a kind of a anticlimax.

I do not know why, but it just seem strange to me that here is no randomness in dealing damage.

Does there happen anything special if the leader is taken out? And what about if a player lose all his troops, is he then out of the game?

Some problem with the skills:
How long does Berserk last?
Bombing seems useless. Why would you ever distribute you damage on two or more victims? You then have to subtract armour two or more times.
Is there a time limit on Evasive? Can you go back to the combat again?
In Faction Tactics, how do you determined what trait to choose?

I have a general problem with "psychic" attack (attack which damage essence). Why would you ever use that? It seems to me to be better to just focus on damaging the hit points, instead of distributing it on two scores.

For such a small game, I think there are too many number for each troop. Stuff like Moral, Conning and Resonance are only used one or two places. I think you could very easily drop some of these score, and thereby make the game simpler.


Well that about it. You seem to have some nice ideas, but as I said, I am not really qualified to give any real good feedback.

- Anders

[Vulpinoid]

Yeah, you're right Anders.

There was a whole lot more that I've been trying to work on, and I thought this might be a suitable challenge to try and refine my ideas into a simple and streamlined version of my game. I guess there are plenty of points that I overlooked, and quite a few other points where I oversimplified and made things confusing in context with the rest of the rules.

It was still a good challenge to get my thoughts in order regarding the basic mechanics of the system.

I guess that even if it looks polished and well presented, there is still quite a bit more work to do on it.

I'm actually trying to develop a similar concept from a completely different direction now. 

As this game was dramatically cut from a much larger system, there are a few things that probably seem crazy and useless...but in the bigger scheme, these make a bit more sense.

Attributes
In the bigger version of the game there are more skills and effects that play with these as a game mechanic. The behind these was to pull roleplaying aspects into the game, and bring in types of characters who might be savage warriors, but might easily be victim to tricks or mystical effects. Splitting the attributes up this way allows a bit more diversity in troop types (which you really don't see in this version of the game)

In other words, for a 4 page challenge, they really aren't necessary and probably could have been removed to make a more streamlined and less confusing game.

Hit Points and Essence Points
The idea of having two separate scores here was the concept that some troops might be physically tough, so there should be a way to get around this. There needs to be some kind of balancing mechanism that can be exploited through careful selections of troop types. No type of troop should be all-powerful.

Non Random Damage
I've tried to keep the game pretty fast with alternating actions between the players. The less die rolling, the more fluid the game is.

If it makes you feel better, there is a random chance of whether troops come back at the end of each turn, and this reflects how bad the damage was that took them out during a combat.

Ticking Clock
That's not a bad idea, about making hell break loose once the clock reaches zero. It's triggered a few possibilities in my mind where different scenario based effects can detonate when the "clock" reaches zero.

Loss of Leader
This was one of those bits where I just couldn't decide what to do when a leader was taken out, so I just chose to write nothing at all. I'll have to keep thinking on this though.

Skills
Maybe these need a bit more clarification.

Bombing: Only the highest damage dealing troops would pick this up. For example, the bombardier does six damage, which is enough to deal three damage to two separate targets (which could easily take out two lesser troops).

Faction Tactics: This was a holdover from the larger game, where I had at least half a dozen factions and two or three traits describing each troop. The concept here is that certain troops will tend to follow the same types of tactics, and other groups have learnt them. In the larger games, there are dozens of troop types who are automatically assigned this skill to reflect their knowledge of their enemies.

Berserk, Evasive (Skill Durations)
Unless otherwise specified, each skill lasts until the end of the combat. But this probably needs a bit more work too.

Thanks for the feedback.

V