Using the updated rules, we had a second playtest yesterday evening. Was it better? Certainly. Was it good enough? Not yet. We did manage to play the game to official completion, though perhaps not in the most satisfying way.

This time, there were five of us: the previous players (Eva, Annette, Remko and I) as well as a new player who had only once roleplayed before, Maartje. We all made new characters: Annette a hippie called Deirde, Remko a Dutch 17th century seafaring trader called Radebout Corneliszoon - Radebout, son of Cornelis -, Maartje an Aztec king called Dezar, and I a medieval abbot called Father Benedictus.

Deirdre had 1 Flesh, 1 Voice, 3 Imagination, 1 Memory; 4 Ambition, 0 Rage, 2 Clarity.
Dezar had 2 Flesh, 1 Voice, 0 Imagination, 0 Memory, 1 Ambition, 4 Rage, 4 Clarity.
Benedictus had 1 Flesh, 3 Voice, 1 Imagination, 1 Memory, 1 Ambition, 1 Rage, 3 Clarity.
Radebout - unfortunately, I took the wrong sheet home with me and do not know what his stats were.

Eva was the GameMaster, and the order of play was: Remko, Annette, Victor, Maartje. However, after the scenes with Remko and Annette I said: "Look, this is taking far too long. The scenes are pretty long, and waiting for three entire scenes in which you cannot interact at all, with NPCs you'll be sure not to meet this evening, is rather boring. What if I start co-GMing, and Eva and I alternate GMing a scene? That means that everyone will be busy at least once every three scenes, instead of once every four." Everybody heartily agreed, and that is how we played the rest of the game. Afterwards, we agreed that this had been a good decision.

This is a problem. The dynamics of the game call for many occultists, preferably at least four, but because there are several roles in each scene and the characters start out utterly disconnected, people have to wait for a long time listening to scenes they have no real investment in. The scarce moment where you might spend Power are not enough to spice this up.

[Next post: the actual scenes.]

Radebout had 0 Flesh, 4 Voice, 0 Imagination, 0 Memory, 3 Ambition, 2 Rage, 3 Clarity.

First notes:

1. It isn't quite clear when to use which Aspect. Still the same problem here.
2. The Dice pool-system works far better than the original TN system. Still, the first scene with a teacher isn't really 'rewarding' since one can tell of the great power the teacher has, but with this system, he still only rolls one die for Resistance, which, most of the time, isn't any resistance (I think this is also a side effect of note #1). Teachers don't feel like Teachers... Perhaps there is a solution in letting teachers roll d6s, ordinary resistance d8s and Misanthropes d10s?
3. I fanatically agree with Victor about the different time starting thing. You should EITHER choose to let players begin in the same time span and choose to use something like a Flashback scene in which players can play without other players interfere with their business OR make transcendence a really quick thing. It's simply too boring to listen to other players stories in which you haven't got any stake except the little power thing.

Let me start by saying that we forgot fetishising. Also, this time around, players were more often choosing to frame the scene instead of choosing the NPC. I don't know why, and I'm not sure it's a reliable result.

The schematic for the scenes:

Round: [The number of the round.]
Player: [The player who's turn it was.]
Rolls: [What mechanical rolls were made.]
Special: [Whether Power was spent, for each of the rolls.]
Outcome: [Success or failure, for each of the rolls.]
Events: [What, fictionally, happened.]

Round: 1
Player: Remko
Rolls: Resolution against teacher; resolution against nobody; resolution against teacher.
Special: -
Outcome: Success, success, failure.
Events: In the jungle of the Dutch Indies, Radebout followed his teacher searching for an occult tribe, but ensured that he got lost. (First roll.) The Radebout found the tribe, practicing a sick ritual involving burning a child alive. There was another child, a little girl, in a cage, and Radebout stepped into the open, beat the girl, and bellowed something like: "You are forgetting this girl!" (Second roll.) The tribe shaman then managed to ensorcel Radebout and led him to the pyre.

Round: 1
Player: Annette
Rolls: Resolution against nobody; resolution against nobody; SC: nobody -> Victim.
Special: -
Outcome: Success, success, failure.
Events: Following a girl she particularly hated through the dunes - they were both at some hippie party - Deirdre saw that the girl had a bad trip. She purposefully told the girl about the little green men all around her, inducing severe paranoia and making her almost break down. (First and second roll.) She then tried to make everything a lot worse by offering a 'special' pill to the girl, who however ran away, after which Deirdre took the pill herself and went almost out of her mind.

Round: 1
Player: Maartje
Rolls: Resolution against nobody; SC: nobody -> victim.
Special: -
Outcome: Success, success.
Events: A poor farmer was brought to the king accused of not having paid enough taxes. Dezar than gave him the choice between paying half of his food as taxes next year, or losing three fingers. (First roll.) The farmer begged for mercy, claiming that in both cases his poor family of fifteen children would starve. Dezar than told him to bring his oldest son and his three youngest daughters to the palace as hostages for his subsequent good behaviour.

Round: 2
Player: Remko
Rolls: SC: teacher to rival.
Special: -
Outcome: Success.
Events: Something concerning the leader of the tribe, of course, but I can't remember the details.

Round: 2
Player: Annette
Rolls: SC: teacher to rival.
Special: -
Outcome: Success.
Events: At the camp fire, Deirdre met her teacher Herbert, who denigrated her. She defied him, at which point he asked her to walk through the fire - if she thought she were such a great occultist. Deirdre then used her powers to make the fire ten times higher, impressing everyone including Herbert, who challenged her to a duel.

Round: 2
Player: Maartje
Rolls: Resolution against a nobody; resolution against a nobody.
Special: -
Outcome: Success, failure.
Events: The farmer's youngest daughter, three years old, was running through the palace, laughing. But Dezar, involved in sick rituals, hates laughing. So he took the girl to his temple, and showed her a collection of torture devices and rotting corpses. (First roll.) He then tried to impress the importance of not laughing on her, but she managed a weak smile before escaping - which sent Dezar into an incredible rage, smashing up one of the doors of his own temple.

Round: 3
Player: Remko
Rolls: Resolution against teacher.
Special: Annette spent one Power against Remko.
Outcome: Failure. Death.
Events: Radebout went to an old teacher of his in Venice, and tried to trade his own new knowledge with that of the teacher. The teacher said: "You can't teach me anything; everything you know, I know." "Not true!," protested Radebout, and agreed to a contest to find out who was stronger. They would both try to walk through fire, or something. Radebout cast a spell in his teacher which would make him vulnerable to fire, but the spell rebounded and Radebout himself was slowly and incredibly painfully consumed by fire. (He slowly turned to ashes.)

Round: 3
Player: Annette
Rolls: SC: rival to underling.
Special: Maartje spent one Power against Annette.
Outcome: Failure. Death.
Events: Herbert and Deirdre had some kind of contest involving the girl who had a bad trip. Deirdre tried to change the grass around her into little snakes, but unfortunately turned the girl into a huge snake and was subsequently swallowed.

Round: 3
Player: Maartje
Rolls: SC: teacher to rival.
Special: -
Outcome: Success.
Events: Dezar went to see his oldest priest, the really powerful occultist in the palace, who was just slowly killing a man bound to a table. Dezar told the priest that he would no longer listen to him, and used his brute force to disrupt the old man's spells.

Round: 4
Player: Remko
Rolls: Resolution against nobody; resolution against nobody; SC: nobody to victim.
Special: -
Outcome: Success, success, failure.
Events: Cornelis Radeboutszoon, the son of his former character, was riding through a peat bog (according to my dictionary) with his wife. He then first trapped her on a small island (first roll), after which he set the peat on fire (second roll), so she had to beg him for help and he could rescue her (third roll). Unfortunately, he was too weak to stop the fire, and they were both trapped in the bog.

Round: 4
Player: Annette
Rolls: Resolution against nobody; resolution against nobody; SC: nobody to victim.
Special: -
Outcome: Success, success, success.
Events: Father Benedictus (my original character) was visited by a young monk who wanted to repent for sinful thoughts. Benedictus told him to whip himself before Benedictus' eyes, which the monk promptly did. (First roll.) He then told the young man to tie pieces of iron to the whip and continue. (Second roll.) "Good. Come back whenever you have had sinful thoughts." (Third roll.) The monk promised he would.

Round: 4
Player: Maartje
Rolls: SC: rival to underling.
Special: Remko spent 2 Power to hinder Maartje; Annette spent 2 Power to do the same.
Outcome: Failure. Death.
Events: Dezar tried to outperform his former teacher, but was woefully killed in the attempt. The last he saw was how his teacher, after binding him to an altar, open his chest and took out his still beating heart.

Now, on to the discussion. (Oh, side remark: we forgot to use the random tables for scene generation. I don't think this impaired gameplay at all. Rather the opposite.) My notes say:

Small questions

Is it possible, as happened in Remko's first scene, to have rolls against different (types of) NPCs in one scene?

Can Resistance go below 1?

As happened in Maartje's last scene, when two players spend an equal amount of Power on a roll and neither is the active player, who gets to decide what happens?

The SIS-difference between resolution and Status Change

From the fictional stuff people tell, it is often very hard indeed to find out whether they want to make a resolution roll or a status change roll. Some clear guidelines would really be appreciated, because now it feels as if it is merely a tactical choice not connected to the SIS which of the two rolls you make.

Teachers are losers

You almost always defeat them, right from the beginning. Just start your roll with a Status Change, have some Clarity, and chances are very high that you'll win. They're not scare. Not a bad thing per se, but it is if you want them to be scary.

The increasing dice pool

It is great. Seriously, really great. It naturally limits the length of scenes.

However, especially concerning Victims...

We didn't actually have a chance to find this out, but, suppose I have 4 in one Aspect and 4 Rage. Resolution against a Victim gives me eight dice, and chances are that I'll get - oh, I don't know - at least 5 Power from the victim before failure hits. What does failure do? Increase my Rage... so, next round, I get to roll 9 dice, and get perhaps as much as 6 Power. Then I fail, and lo and behold, my Rage increases again. And so forth - the length of scenes increases almost linearly, as does the amount of Power I can drain from my victims.

One solution that was proposed was to create a roll that immediately gives you 1 + X power from a victim, only, you have to roll against a die pool X higher than normal. The player sets X. I'm not sure I'm happy about this idea, myself.

Early death

I think we have shown that it's very easy to die long before you're even going to advance to Scourge. Now, if you want AoE to be a game that slowly builds up across multiple sessions, you should somehow ensure that this doesn't happen. If you want AoE to be a game that can be played in one sessions, it's fine, only the progression of the characters should be much faster.

Investment and disconnection

What was most lacking in the game was a sense of investment. First, a sense of investment of the players in the NPCs in their own stories. Since the scenes are often quite disconnected, taking place in all kind of locations, many NPCs will probably never appear again. Nobody cared about the leader of the tribe in Remko's earlier scenes, for instance. Keeping things more local, the protagonist's story more internally connected, leads to greater investment.

But most importantly, there was a severe lack of investment of players in the stories of the others. You know that you're never going to meet the guy, or meet the NPCs. Not if you're playing the game for only one evening. (And even if you might meet them in a later session, well, it's hard to gather up interest for something so far away.) And especially the scenes with other occultist aren't even emotionally interesting, because there are no sympathetic characters in them.

So, I argue again - but I do think you should find out whether other playtesters agree with us - that the occultists should start out at the same location, in the same time. Have them meet the same NPCs. Make sure that the status changes are generally against the other players. Get the players together and let their dynamics govern the game - not just the dynamics of Power spending, which are too weak to be up to the task - but SIS-dynamics, shared victims and the actual struggle for Power against each other.

And just to be clear, this is not merely my opinion, the entire group voiced this as their greatest concern.

Length of the game

Advancement is really, really slow. We played with the idea of just reducing the four Aspects to one Aspect - how the different Aspects are used in the game isn't very clear anyway, people always choose their highest one and the other three are doing nothing; perhaps you should just make the descriptors, a la Sorcerer - perhaps also taking out one of the three motivations, and using that much simpler system to play a fast-paced game of horror, madness, struggle and (in)humanity, where advancement comes relatively quickly. But this is, of course, not the only way you could develop the game. If you want a longer game, I believe you have to think carefully about how to make that rewarding and not make it a "well, I have to do another 7 scenes against rivals in order to get my stats high enough"-chore.

The problem of characters being in different eras has been cited several times... Are the only options really complete separateness and same time, same place? I should think that the problem could be fixed with an array of rules concerning interaction during the Misanthrope stage. Namely, something like the following ideas:
- Teachers can take characters to other dimensions and times, perhaps to meet others of their stature (other PCs).
- Characters can communicate through occult means; perhaps they need to, for some reason?
- Characters can snatch bodies through time and space, interfering with each other's plans for a cost. (Perhaps make this the Power spending rule; for each point you spend, you get to play one character in the scene.)
The problem, of course, is that if the essential separateness is breached, then the characters might as well be together in the same time. But maybe it's possible to balance it so that the players have to care about the actions of others, but also primarily concern themselves with their masters, rivals etc. in their own timeframe.

System-wise, we're looking at new resolution formulas, I should think. Something where players roll against one another. Perhaps, to make it interesting, the relationship of the characters through time could be dependent on their chronological position? Characters who are in the future are Secret Chiefs (yeah, it's a slight misuse of the term) for characters in the past, while past characters are Ancestral memories for the future ones. The former could instruct (and lie) to the past occultists based on their historical knowledge of the past (thus helping or hindering them), while the latter could set up traps or boons for the occultists to come in the future (perhaps gaining scene framing rights in the process). The idea would be that the characters would hunt each other through the proxy of history, the future ones researching the actions of the past ones and the past ones trying to second-guess the future ones. I don't know, just brainstorming here.

One option is to deal with the non-investment through role-setting, for instance the co-GMing technique Victor's group used. I don't think this is a very good solution for the core problem, though; if the stories of the characters really are separate and meaningless to one another, do we really want to tell them all side-by-side and at the same time? Wouldn't it be better to have some kind of prologues for each character in turn, climaxing in their attaining Scourge status, and to start the actual game from that point?

However, especially concerning Victims...

We didn't actually have a chance to find this out, but, suppose I have 4 in one Aspect and 4 Rage. Resolution against a Victim gives me eight dice, and chances are that I'll get - oh, I don't know - at least 5 Power from the victim before failure hits. What does failure do? Increase my Rage... so, next round, I get to roll 9 dice, and get perhaps as much as 6 Power. Then I fail, and lo and behold, my Rage increases again. And so forth - the length of scenes increases almost linearly, as does the amount of Power I can drain from my victims.

One solution that was proposed was to create a roll that immediately gives you 1 + X power from a victim, only, you have to roll against a die pool X higher than normal. The player sets X. I'm not sure I'm happy about this idea, myself.

Round: 2
Player: Remko
Rolls: SC: teacher to rival.
Special: -
Outcome: Success.
Events: Something concerning the leader of the tribe, of course, but I can't remember the details.

A little calculation:
[pre]
X  1.2  1.5    2
1    1    1    1
2    2    3    4
3    4    5    9
4    5    8  16
5    7  11  25
6    9  15  36
7  10  19  49
[/pre]

I think 1.5 looks nice (1.2 is to much stepwise due to rounding)

One thing I forgot: humanising still doesn't happen often enough.

I expanded my table a bit. What factor to use is a matter of taste, but the power of the trick should be that doing two rolls (thus spreading the risk) should yield (somewhat) less power. Be careful though with too high factors, as this might lead to very big differences in how fast different players can gain power.

A little calculation:
[pre]
X    1.2      1.5      2        1.3      1.4      1.6
-------------------------------------------------------------
1    1 (+0)    1 (+0)    1 (+0)    1 (+0)  1 (+0)  1 (+0)
2    2 (+0)    3 (+1)    4 (+2)    2 (+0)  3 (+1)  3 (+1)
3    4 (+1)    5 (+2)    9 (+6)    4 (+1)  5 (+2)  6 (+3)
4    5 (+1)    8 (+4)  16 (+12)    6 (+2)  7 (+3)  9 (+5)
5    7 (+2)  11 (+6)  25 (+20)    8 (+3)  10 (+5)  13 (+8)
6    9 (+3)  15 (+9)  36 (+30)  10 (+4)  12 (+6)  18 (+12)
7  10 (+3)  19 (+12)  49 (+42)  13 (+6)  15 (+8)  23 (+15)
[/pre]

Victor, Eva, Remko, Annette, Maartje,

Thank you, for such incredible playtesting...and particularly for such strongly advocated suggestions. Here's what I'm thinking:

I need to make Teachers more effective as antagonists in the early game.

I need to increase the frequency of Humanizing across the whole universe of formulae, and think also about the mechanical effects of Traits.

I need to consider ways of inter-weaving the storylines of the individual characters (particularly in the early game). But because Acts of Evil has a competitive component, I need to do this in a way that doesn't shorten gameplay by making the player characters too vulnerable to each other. (I'm quite hesitant of solving this by starting all the characters in the same time and place, because I think starting at the cosmic scale is one of the main things that makes the game compelling. I can say that I'm totally sold on Eero's suggestion that Teachers can take player characters to other times and places. It would require a successful Resolution Against Teachers. And it could be a big part of inter-weaving the storylines. But I'm not sure it's enough.)

I'm leaning toward the "wash out of the tradition" solution for characters whose Clarity hits zero. But even so, I need to determine if there are other dead ends in the formulae, where attribute values trap a player with no way to progress, and resolve them.

Do I have that right?

Paul

Sounds good Paul. I'm looking forward to seeing the changes; I certainly think the game has potential.

One more point Victor came up with:
In resolution against victims, you roll Rage plus Flesh/Voice/Imagination/Memory against Resistance plus Used Capacity, increased by one die for each prior Resolution Against Victims roll by the player in the current scene.
Failure output is increase in Rage. This means failure simply increases chances of succes for all next tries and has no adverse effects.

I think, one solution might be to put a certain risk of killing the victim by accident, with higher chance with increasing rage (compared to aspect). Though on the other hand it could make victims pretty short-lived later on in the game. Think about it :).

Paul,

Yeah, definitely those points. Overall, I still think the game could be really great, but those points severely hamper the gameplay at this moment.

I'm really looking forward towards your new mechanics.

Yours,