The playtest went very well! To start with the whole playing session lasted about 3 and half to four hours. I had three willing monkeywrenchers, each with a very diffrent style of roleplaying. Two had read the system previously, and were bubbling with questions and ideas. The third had not and the evening was his first encounter with them. Overall no one had any trouble understanding the system. There where some minor problems more with my phrasing than any thing else. I had originally planned to run several adventures but ended up only running one, a basic short fantasy. We got a late start and we also had rules discussion breaks.
Character creation was the first discussion of the night. Mainly about attribute points. They felt I had them very low, and sighted some examples of how they could seriously hinder a low level character..so we upped them. The rest of the character creation segment was spent, developing characters. Three very diffrent characters, I might add. One a cutesy almost happy go lucky fey-kin. A fighter with a problem being quiet, and another fighter who was chivilrious and a bit cautious. To answer any questions and finish creating characters took about an hour. I feel that players with an understanding of the rules, can easily create a full character read for play in 15 minutes.
In the game it was the job ofthe characters to help a merchant recover his goods stolen while looking into new trade routes. I twas a very short very quick adventure, with a really light and easy to follow storyline. I also chose to go light on the Power Dice for this one. My goal was to get a base line of how the system is working, so I did not want to toy with too many rule bending mechanics just yet. I did allow everyone to chose I PD to add to their pools and left it at that.
As we got into the game several things became very clear. 1. Since it is a summing method of dice rolling I can definately go by the bell curve! Everything was coming up average. Most of the time the players had attributes at 3 and thus were getting totals of either 10 or 11. The main problem with this reared its ugly head in combat.
I had decided previously before that night, to change the combat system a bit. Now each weapon has a damage level. When attacking you roll your hitting attribute as normal but you cross refrence the weapon's Damage Level with the Total to see what the dice loss of the target is...this was seriously under powered. They just hammered away at each other with no real affect, so we instantly modified it. That lead to problem number 2. I had also underpowered by mooks for the combat, and they where getting whooped good! In fact the big boss had to show up and save their asses.
Other issues confronted was the inept roll. This sparked alot of debate but no real settlement came about, so I will have to tinker with this one. We tossed around breaking it into two rolls: an untrained roll used for skills and other learned and measurable things and a natural talent roll, for potential things like strength, etc. For this game though we used the basic inept roll, which did work well in this scenerio.
Also implimented was reactionary rolls. I allowed the players to take a Dodge Attribute to see how well it worked in play. I had avoided this and still am not a 100% sure how I feel about it. I wanted to avoid reactionary stuff as much as possible I consider them to take up too much time.
Feedback from the players was constructive and positive. They enjoyed the system and the story, they would have enjoyed it more if I had allowed more PDs! Talk is in the works for running another one. I also was lucky enough to find someone willing to help with editting Dice Chucker! A big thanks to Brad, Chris, and Sam, for taking the time to help me run through this..I know you think it is just an excuse to get together but.. Each in turn was great. Brad graciously offered to help edit my blaring inaccuracies. Sam provided me with a new damage chartwhen the otehr one feel short, and Chirs for not reading the rules, letting me see completely how a new user would view the rules, and for his dodge rule. A revision will begin immediately thanks to you guys and I hope they are teh first to again monkeywrench them.
I will have pics of the game up on the website sometime this week as well. I will drop a post when it happens.