We played our first session of Acts of Evil yesterday evening, using the first beta draft. How did it go? Well enough to say: this game has potential! Badly enough to say: but perhaps the rules should be rethought and rewritten before we try another session. Perhaps both are revealed by one fact: discussion afterwards led to almost a whole A4 page of criticisms and suggestions - something that wouldn't have happened in gameplay went well, but wouldn't have happened either if the game hadn't intrigued us.

There is a lot to tell, and I plan to use the following structure: first I describe us, the group of players; then I give a bare bones, objective description of what happened during play; then I discuss what we believed to be the weak (and the strong) points of the game; and finally I give an overview of suggestions that were made during the discussion.

Who are Utrecht Evil?

Ok, stupid name, but we're playing in Utrecht and we're playing evil people. We are:

Annette has been roleplaying with me for about a year now, about once per week. We've played Sorcerer, Universalis, My Life with Master, InSpectres, Dogs in the Vineyard, and probably some other things I can't remember. I think Annette has a rare talent for portraying the dark side of humanity in her characters, so she's something of the perfect player for Acts of Evil.

Eva has been roleplaying with me for several years; systems included all of the above, and lots of freeform and quasi-freeform roleplaying we used to do before we discovered indie games.

I've played only a few sessions with Remko: a memorable My Life with Master game in Antwerpen, two sessions of Urge (at its very darkest), and a session of Dogs in the Vineyard. He has a lot of roleplaying background, particularly with World of Darkness (I believe), but recently he has 'converted' to indie-RPGs and is playing Dogs and Sorcerer.

My own roleplaying background can be gathered from the above.

None of us is afraid of portraying evil and gruesome acts in a roleplaying game. But this is not because we are insensitive to it; I guess we just like to go to the very edges of human actions and look into the abyss - perhaps to learn, perhaps merely to experience. Let's not try and analyse this; I'm telling it to show that as a group we are very well suited to Acts of Evil.

Only Remko and I had prior GM-experience; but for this playtest, it was Eva who took on the responsibility of GameMastering.

What happened (objective, sometimes technical description)

We started with one house rule, to solve the problem I had identified in my topic "How I plan to win the game in one round". This problem was basically that a single scene could last indefinitely, because some rolls are so easy you can't lose them, and then you can do it again and again and again, gathering more and more Power (or whatever), without the others ever getting the chance to play. Our house rule was: the GM moves to the next player after every roll. This solves the problem, and also give the game a very nice pace - better than with the textual rules, I think. It does have a tactical effect, though: Status Change becomes a better option, because the fact that it ends the scene is no longer a disadvantage. I do not think this has a major effect on our actual game play.

Our prep consisted of having made lists of locations and transgressions; we had not thought out scenes in advance.

First the characters:

I played Alcibiades, who lived in the time of Socrates and Plato in ancient Greece. The idea was the the Greek pantheon were actually occultists. Flesh 0, Voice 1, Imagination 1, Memory 0, Ambition 4, Rage 2, Clarity 4.

Remko played Vladimir Jazinski, who lives in 2113 CE, in a Russia once again ruled by a communist establishment. Flesh 5, Voice 0, Imagination 0, Memory 0, Ambition 1, Rage 5, Clarity 1. His character died in his first scene, whereupon he created Vladimir Vladimirovitsj, same stats, same time.

Annette played Rita, a woman living in present day Europe. Flesh 1, Voice 1, Imagination 1, Memory 1, Ambition 3, Rage 1, Clarity 4.

Total playing time: about 2,5 hours.

The format of my entries will be thus:

Round: [The number of the round.]
Player: [The player who's turn it was.]
Choice: [Whether the player chose to choose an NPC or to frame the scene]
Roll: [What mechanical roll was made.]
Special: [Whether Power was spent; whether anyone fetishised.]
Outcome: [Success or failure; change in stats.]
Events: [What, fictionally, happened.]

Round: 1
Player: Victor
Choice: Frame the scene
Roll: Resolution against a Nobody
Special: -
Outcome: Success; + 1 Power
Events: Alcibiades told Socrates how the old man couldn't teach him anything anymore, because he was weak and never looked beyond the limits of reality. Socrates was awed by Alcibiades, and struck speechless.

Round: 1
Player: Remko
Choice: Frame the scene
Roll: Resolution against a Teacher
Special: Victor spent 1 Power to hinder Remko.
Outcome: Failure. Victor chose to kill off the character.
Events: Vladimir Jazinski wanted to humiliate his teacher in front of his devoted populace (who were devoted because honouring the Teacher as a god was the only way they could get something to eat) by walking the infamous maze of death. He died when he tripped over the very first obstacle, and was subsequently eaten by the hungry peasants.

Round: 1
Player: Annette
Choice: Frame the scene
Roll: Resolution against a Teacher
Special: -
Outcome: Success. +1 Clarity.
Events: Robert, Rita's teacher, had followed a loving couple into the woods, because he desired to have the woman. He waited until the couple were kissing, then sprang forward and killed the man. Whereupon he embraced the woman to forcefully kiss her, only to taste the blood coming from her mouth as she was stabbed in the back by Rita. As her body fell down and Rite, bearing a knife, was revealed to Robert, Rite said: "Why do you need her? You have me."

Round: 2
Player: Victor
Choice: Choose the NPC
Roll: Resolution against a Nobody
Special: -
Outcome: Success. + 1 Power
Events: Alcibiades went to his fellow pupil Plato, and dared him to a boxing match. Apparently they had often held such matches before, and Plato always beat the crap out of Alcibiades; also, apparently, they weren't good friends. Just as Plato tried to knock Alcibiades senseless, the latter conjured forth a sharp knife from the fabric of reality, and stabbed Plato in the gut. Smiling, Alcibiades walked away.

Round: 2
Player: Remko
Choice: Choose the NPC
Roll: Status Change: Nobody to Victim
Special: -
Outcome: Success; derogation.
Events: Vladimir Vladimirovich met an old woman, carrying a single loaf of bread with which to feed her hungry family. Posing as a religious doer-of-good, he got her to allow him to walk with her to her far-off home, for protection against bandits. She believed his lies, for which weakness he despised her. Trust is weakness.

Round: 2
Player: Annette
Choice: Choose the NPC
Roll: Status Change: Teacher to Rival
Special: -
Outcome: Success; + 1 Capacity.
Events: There was a complicated ritual including a young pair of twins who were forced to have sex with each other before the blood of the boy was to be drunk by Robert in order to increase his Powers. However, Rita managed to drink the blood before Robert could, and took over leadership over the cultist-helpers surrounding them.

Round: 3
Player: Victor
Choice: Choose the NPC
Roll: Status Change: Teacher to Rival
Special: -
Outcome: Success; + 1 Capacity.
Events: Ares, one of Alcibiades' Teachers, took Alcibiades to the local junkyard, where he had buried a little girl six years ago. Tonight she would be magically animated, to serve as a skeleton slave. Alcibiades first had to find her by digging through the local refuse, whereupon he succeeded at animating the skeleton before Ares could.

Round: 3
Player: Remko
Choice: Choose the NPC
Roll: Resolution against a Victim
Special: -
Outcome: Success; + 1 Power.
Events: When they were alone, Remko beat up the old lady, fed up with her religious babbling. Her bread fell in the mud.

Round: 3
Player: Annette
Choice: Choose the NPC
Roll: Status Change: Rival to Underling
Special: -
Outcome: Success.
Events: Rita's then forced Robert to drink the blood of the girl - after she herself had killed her - which had the exact opposite effect of drinking the blood of the boy: Robert became weaker than he was before, and had to accept Rita's rule. She left him, all alone, in the remote location.

Round: 4
Player: Victor
Choice: Choose the NPC
Roll: Resolution against a Rival
Special: -
Outcome: Success; + 1 Imagination.
Events:  The magically strong skeleton held Ares down while Alcibiades took his magical knife and laughed at him. Studying the knife at home, Alcibiades had visions of cosmic events, raising his Imagination.

Round: 4
Player: Remko
Choice: Choose the NPC
Roll: Resolution against a Victim
Special: -
Outcome: Success; + 3 Power.
Events: Having had enough of her already, Vladimir killed the old lady in a gruesome way I can't quite remember.

Round: 4
Player: Annette
Choice: Choose the NPC
Roll: Status Change: Nobody to Victim
Special: -
Outcome: Success; derogation.
Events: Annette scolded her cleaning lady for not working hard enough, and finally bullied her into taking her eldest child with her the next day - because two can do more work than one, and notwithstanding the fact that the little girl thus could not finish her education and lost all hope for a better future. Rita despised the woman for having gotten children, and for loving them - mere biological weaknesses.

At this point we decided that success was achieved far too easily. We all changed our Resistance from 1 to 3.

Round: 5
Player: Victor
Choice: Choose the NPC
Roll: Status Change: Nobody to Victim
Special: -
Outcome: Success; derogation.
Events: By showing him his vast powers of life and death, that is, the animated skeleton, Alcibiades got his friend Xenophon so far as to kiss his feet.

Round: 5
Player: Remko
Choice: Choose the NPC
Roll: Status Change: Teacher to Rival
Special: Remko used 1 Power to boost his roll.
Outcome: Success; + 1 Capacity
Events: At a VIP-party of the Russian government, some fool got very drunk and vomited all over a statue of Lenin. Upon this, one of Vladimir's teachers stepped up and called for the death of the fool. Vladimir then told him that the Teacher was as weak as the fool, and gave him a very heavy blow in the stomach - promptly, the Teacher vomitted all over the statue too, and Vladimir pressed the ex-Teacher's head into the vomit to let him learn the lesson of his own humility.

Round: 5
Player: Annette
Choice: Choose the NPC
Roll: Status Change: Nobody to Victim
Special: -
Outcome: Success; derogation.
Events: The daughter of the cleaning lady came around to help her mother, but broke a vase - and some red liquid spilled all over the floor. Rita first forced the girl to clean the floor using her school uniform, and when she didn't do it well enough gave her a sound thrashing.

Things that need to be clarified

First, some minor points that should be clarified in the rules.

1. When Power is bigger than 0, but smaller than Used Capacity, and one must pay down Used capacity: should one use all Power available and still humanise a human? (Or should one humanise a human, and not spend any Power?)
2. Can the GM give traits to nobodies and victims? If so, under what circumstances?

General impression

The game wasn't very gripping. Even though a lot was happening, and all of it was over the top, most scenes were bland and felt inconsequential. Personally, I think this was the case for all of my scenes, all of Remko's scenes, and the first three scenes (at least the second and the third) of Annette. However, the last two scenes of Annette, where she was slowly victimising her household personel, were powerful. Her character was very evil, we were in mild shock as the events unfolded, and the NPCs that were victimised quickly came to life. Please note: making a girl clean the floor with her own clothes can appear much more evil, can make a much bigger impression, than killing an old, defenseless lady.

Why did most scenes feel bland and inconsequential? All the characters were just so flat; you didn't care what was happening one way or the other. The NPCs meant nothing. Maybe this would have solved itself as the game went on, but you just don't want a game where the first hours are something you've got to fight yourself through in order to arrive at the goodness. Nor do I think it will solve itself. Nobodies and Victims die too fast, because the only strategic choice is to victimise them in the first round and kill them in the second; Teachers, Rivals and Underlings are just too evil and pathetic to become tragic characters, characters you care about.

Another thing that was immediatelly obvious was that at the start of the game, you cannot ever lose - especially if you have 4 or 5 dice in Clarity. Your target number is never higher than two, which is hard to loose against, and most of the time it is one, which is impossible to lose against. The result of this is that every scene is an automatic success, which ensures that there is no opposition. You are going through the moves, but you already know what the result will be. And man, who gives a damn about teachers when they do not even have the chance to oppose you?

So most scenes a) involved only characters you didn't care about, and b) contained no significant opposition. It is no surprise that the game wasn't gripping. What is needed is adversity - either from the mechanics, or from the other players - and characters one actually cares about. We have some ideas about that, which I'll talk about more below.

Maybe it's a good idea if I describe some problems we identified, and discuss those together with possible solutions we thought up.

Too little opposition

At the start of the game, as described above, it is almost impossible to lose a roll; this is especially true if your clarity is high. This is a problem, because without opposition, the game is too predictable and frankly too boring. There are several related problems. First, that this problem is never going to solve itself. Almost the only way it becomes harder to succeed is when Resistance goes up, but Resistance only goes up when you lose some rolls - which is never going to happen. Second, it means that not only Victims and Nobodies are losers who can't do anything against you, but the same holds for Teachers, Rivals and Underlings. They'll always lose against you, so they aren't interesting opponents. This leaves the player character in a power vaccuum: he is just trying to get his scores higher, but nobody opposes him. (And if another player gets enough Power to make life difficult for you, you just start gathering Power yourself, with which no risk is associated, until you can defend yourself again.)

How could this be solved? One possibility is to let players start with higher Resistance: this makes all rolls more difficult, and hence it re-introduces opposition. However, all the player has to do is lower his Resistance back to 1 or 0 with Resolutions against an Underling, and the problem re-emerges.

Another possibility is to require a roll be higher than the target number, instead of higher than or equal to. But the use of this strategy is limited, especially since a player will just get his Resistance to 0 and once again have no opposition.

There may be some other solution. But Remko and I, at least, suspect that the dice system is fundamentally broken. Rolling the greatest difference in a dice pool against a changable target number doesn't work because there is always a point above which you cannot win any roll anymore; and there always is a point where all difficulty will vanish and become negligible. Whenever your Resistance becomes 6, you're lost forever; whenever it falls below 2, you're safe forever. We suspect that an opposed or non-opposed dice pool system (as in The Pool; or as in My Life with Masters; or as in Universalis) works much better, because the chances of winning and losing do not have cut-off points. They never become 1 or 0, and don't fall or rise very quickly either. So we actually suspect that changing the dice system will solve many problems - identified and unidentified - of the current system. If executed well, it would solve the 'too little opposition' problem.

Capacity at the start of the game

Just a suggestion. Capacity equals Temptation, so much is certain. Capacity is the Temptation to meddle with forces you do not really control. And this is especially tempting at the start of the game, when you don't have a store of Power... so why not let the player start with 1 or 2 or even more Capacity? Tales about apprentices who try too much too soon abound - let the players struggle with the same temptation!

Traits and derogation

When you derogate a human, he or she gets a trait. Derogation happens when a Nobody becomes a Victim. Yet the traits of victims never influence the game, only the traits of Nobodies do; so giving a trait when derogating is, mechanically speaking, utterly and totally useless. It has no effect at all.

Death and winning

What we really liked about the game, and what you should definitely keep, is that dying doesn't mean you can't win anymore. Remko died in the first scene, but his new character could still win by becoming God and killing off all other characters; it just became a little bit harder, but not impossible. At all times, everyone is still in the game; very good!

There's a lot more, but it will have to wait. I'm getting tired, and still have some other things to do tonight.

By the way, I suggest that discussions about problems or suggestions that are likely to take up some space are taken to new threads. This will make everything more accessible and more transparent.

Awesome write-up. And awesome scenes. (Particularly Annette's later scenes.) Thank you.

Lots to think about regarding NPCs and adversity. But you're right, discussion of problems/solutions to new threads.

Thanks. All of you.

Paul

I will go on with describing problems and suggestions, all based on the first playtest session and our discussion afterwards. As before, use what you find interesting, disregard the rest.

When things get really evil...

There is a kind of 'step on up' feeling when it comes to telling really evil things. That is what you want and what you need, players trying to outdo each other in describing evil acts. However, there is no mechanical reward for telling something really evil. All of us felt that it would be great if the other players / the GM could reward a player for telling an outstandingly evil act.

Currently, there is a rule where telling a murder gives you more Power than telling other kinds of evil. But this doesn't work, because a murder does not have to be shocking. As I said above, forcing a little girl to clean the floor with her own school uniform can be much more callous and evil than killing.

It was suggested that something akin to the Chamber/Vampires mechanic where people vote on how bad narration made them feel in order to determine the rewards for the narration might be incorporated. This could be too cumbersome and too unfriendly, though. But perhaps some milder and more easy way for the other players to reward comfort-transcending narration could be incorporated. "You get one bonus Power if a majority of the players votes in favour of it, the GM acting as tie breaker."

The difference between Resolution scenes and Status Change scenes

In practice, it was very hard to distinguish narration that led up to a Status Change from narration that led up to simple Resolution. We weren't very sure what kind of acts could make a Rival an Underling, and what acts against a Rival wouldn't - for instance. If you can give some clear guidelines and examples for all the possible rolls as to what events would lead up to them, that would be great. (If you cannot and the distinction between Resolution and SC is inherently vague, maybe they shouldn't be distinguished - even mechanically.)

The Nobody-Victim-Power cycle

As long as you have a reasonable chance to succeed at changing a Nobody into a Victim, it is:

* Never useful to get your Power from a Nobody.
* No nobody ever lives longer than two rolls.

The only viable tactic is to change a Nobody to a Victim, then kill him/her. That gives you 3 Power in 2 rolls; all other tactics grant less. (This may not be the case if one allows multiple rolls per scene, but then the original infinite-roll problem must be addressed in some other way.)

The above leads to the following problems:

* Resolution against Nobodies is never used; hence, Ambition is utterly and completely useless.
* The Nobody-Victim scenes are too predictable.
* Each normal human dies too soon to become an interesting character in the story.

I actually believe that the whole thing about killing the Victims in order to get Power makes things too easy for the players. Killing is not something you don't want to do, but are tempted to do because of the Power; it is rather easy, actually. It is so much more uncomfortable to describe the slow degradation and (physical and psychological) agony of a Victim in the course of many scenes then it is to describe the death of a personage you hardly know. I don't think the killing rule achieves what you want it to achieve. You should encourage reuse of the same Victims, over and over again.

The Occult is... missing

Remko stated at the end of the game that the occult didn't have big enough a place in the game. It hardly appeared in our narration. And when it did, it were meaningless, disconnected bits of colour: a walking skeleton here, a ritual there, a rune-covered knife and so on. They didn't add up to anything.

Partly, this may just be our own failure. But I think the disconnectedness of the scenes, which is encouraged by the game, will easily lead to only fragmented mentions of the occult that never coalesce into something interesting.

Maybe, we thought, it would be good if the GM thought up some kind of occult mission for the occultists to embark on; (s)he can also think up some tasks that might be necessary to complete it. All of this would merely be colour, but it would be integrating colour in the sense that all mentions of the occult would now be bound together by a common backstory. "You are searching for the lost city of Atlantis" - and suddenly, there is something you can tie all your occult scenes to. "I want to learn the secret of breathing under water from my Teacher." "I wish to steal the secret map from my Rival." And so forth.

This might clash with the original idea of creating a scene by rolling locale and transgression. I'm not sure. Also, I'm not sure what you want to achieve with the original scheme. Personally, transgressions not perpetrated by one of the player characters seems somewhat uninteresting; they might even come to overshadow the actual Acts of Evil committed by the PCs, which is certainly not intended. This may not be criticism, but merely a failure to understand on my part.

The pace of advancement

It is slow. Getting all Aspects to 4, while at the same time generating enough Power to protect yourself, is not a matter of a single session, and not of two, three or even four sessions either, I suppose. Perhaps it is part of your design goal that a game lasts very long (hm - I'm already thinking of 6+ sessions as 'very long'!), but if not, some way of speeding up the process would be good. During our first session, even though we won every roll, we still felt as if we made almost no progress.

(Perhaps there are simply too many stats? I'm not sure, this is merely a question.)

There is no progression of crime

Maybe this is not what you want with the game, but we though it might be good if there was some progression in the evilness of the acts of evil. You already start with murder and whatnot, and will remain on the same level of evilness all through the game. (Only fetishising has progression, but that has nothing to do with evil per se.) Characters slowly spiralling towards more and more evil acts all the time might be more fun. (Well, fun... interesing.)

Dependence / Competition

Remko already started a thread about this, but I'll just mention it again. We felt that in some way, it should be encouraged to reuse the same Victims again and again. One way to do this would be to incorporate something like the Love-mechanic of Vampires as a Dependence-mechanic. But you already expressed doubts about this.

Now one good consequence of this mechanic, which can of course also be reached in other ways, is that the occultists could compete for Victims. The total Dependence of a Victim would have a maximum, and making a Victim more dependent on you would go at the cost of the Dependence of another occultist. This works especially well if there is a limited number of Victims. (See my 'Wild idea' below.)

Competition of the occultists for victims is, in whatever way it may be achieved, almost certainyl a good thing.

On the disconnectedness of the characters

Unanimously, we said at the end of the game that it would have been much cooler if we had actually started in the same time and place.

Don't get me wrong, I understand and like the idea behind the Temporal Path. But it is not available at the start of the game.

And while you haven't transcended time, you are constantly listening to scenes invloving character you cannot meet, places you cannot go to, and so forth. All the stories are completely disconnected. Where in My life with Master the Master, the setting and sometimes the NPCs bind the tales together even if the minions do not meet each other, in Acts of Evil the disconnection is total. This makes listening to the other tales much less interesting, and it also means that you have to create much more NPCs and scenery because their reusability is less. And the player characters cannot be in real competition, at least not for the (very long) first part of the game.

I think the game will truly shine when you are constantly imposing status changes on the other player characters, trying to foil their plans (just colour, but good colour), and interacting with the same Victims. (The very idea of some Victim begging you to help them against one of the other players, something which you'll ruthlessly exploit, makes my blood run cold.) So in fact I think it is at least worth careful thought whether the players should not be focred to start in the same time at the same location.

Humanising, traits

First, humanising doesn't happen enough. Only when you have to pay down your Used Capacity and can't - that's not going to be very often. It never happened in our session. Yet it is crucial to the game! So one way or another, it should happen more often.

I don't think you have to impose it as a penalty. Perhaps you could use it as a carrot: humanising a human gives a bonus on a subsequent attempt to drain Power from the human? Or one must always do it after draining Power. And perhaps, just perhaps, it would be great to let the humanising be done by another player. What could be greater than being allowed to show the humanity of one of your fellow player's victims, and thereby saying to him/her: "Look here, don't close your eyes: this is what you've done!" But it may not align well with your basic design goal. (Or does it?) (And maybe it does more if players use the same victims.)

The trait system doesn't really seem to work. Nobody really cared about the traits. I think this was to be expected: what people care about are the fictional events that portray the victims as truly human. You want to encourage such scenes. But it is far less important to try to summarise such a scene by writing down a 'trait' afterwards. And they don't actually seem to be doing anything important mechanically either. (Certainly not until the Victim/Nobody economy is changed.)

Setting creation

We thought the creating a table of locations and transgressions together, with the entire group, might be a brilliant way to start the game. It is setting creation, it brings everyone in the same mood, and you can draw the lines and veils by discussing which transgression you want to include and which you do not wish to include.

Progression of crime - revisited

The previous point about setting creation and the earlier points about the progression of crime and about how we were unsure what the 'transgressions' were meant to add to the game, led to the following idea. Perhaps it would be great if you rolled randomly for each occultist scene on the premade table of locations and transgressions. But: the transgression doesn't show what has been done there, it doesn't set the scene - rather, it states what you will have to do in order to be able to make a roll and perhaps win the scene. If you've rolled theft, you must steal something; if you've rolled murder, you must kill someone; and so forth. (I also think it is essential not to use such a table in scenes with victims and nobodies, where the sickness of one's own imagination is of the essence.)

Now the table with transgressions can be used for a 'progression of crime'. Suppose you have 20 transgression, sorted from the least to the most transgressive. If some number goes up from 0 to 10 during play (this is merely an example, I'm not sure what stat you'd want to use for this), you could choose the transgression by taking 10 + the number. Thus, as the game progresses, the things you have to do in order to get higher in the occultist tradition become more and more gruesome.

You never frame the scene

This is a simple one: after the first round, we never chose, nor ever even thought about choosing, to let the GM decide the NPC. Why would we? It's some mechanical effect you want, and framing the scene is far less important.

Wild idea

OK, this is merely that: a wild idea. It probably strays too far from your concept to be a useful comment or suggestion. But it tempts me, and I want to write it down. It is this: let all the occultists begin in one location. They cannot leave this location. There is a cast of NPCs that never changes during the game: some other occultists, at least one among whom is a Teacher (perhaps there is only a Teacher); and several Nobodies/Victims, a limited number. Now watch the PCs scheme against each other and impose SCs all the time. (It should come with some kind of bonus if you've made someone your underling.) Watch them slowly destroy the lives of the trapped victims (who should only very rarely die). Watch them try and be the first to find whatever they are looking for. And watch them try to become god. And all of this in the course of one evening of play.

Final note

I just want to say this again, because of the amount of comments we produced: none of the suggestions above is more than that. They are certainly not attempts to tell you how to change your game, but merely ideas tossed off to be used or discarded - and discarding them does not need a justification.

Huh, you're doing a good job of playtesting. So good, in fact, that I'd like to ask Paul: should I even try to push for a playtest of the game this coming weekend, when I meet with some guys, or should we give you some time to rework the rules based on Victor's comments? If you feel the need for a second opinion now, I'll try to arrange for it, but otherwise the effort could be better spent after you give some thought to Victor's suggestions. I'm thinking mainly about the victimizing mechanics and character interaction, here.

Eero,

I agree. The Utrecht playtest is everything a designer could hope for. So I need to mentally process the feedback. Don't rush a playtest. Minimally I first need to deal with the adversity (lack of uncertainty to dice rolls) issue before it would be worthwhile.

Thanks,

Paul