Hello everyone!

So I'm making the jump from lurking to posting.  Hopefully I don't hit my head on a rock. :)

I've been working on an RPG for a while now.  Some of the highlights of which are:

1.  It's licensed under a Creative Commons license, and is a "free" system.
2.  It is designed to be modular, with a small core rules set that "plug-ins" can be built against.
3.  It is easy to learn, easy to run and uses familiar concepts and metaphors whenever possible.
4.  The element of randomness is less of a factor in this game than in some others, though it certainly isn't without it.

My fundamental design considerations have been simplicity and consistency, although I do not believe I have sacrificed much in the way of realism.

You can find the system here:  http://www.chaosphere.com/genesys/

Apart from the obvious request for feedback and related input, I do have a some questions with regard to methods of play-testing.  Up to this point, my play-testing strategy has been to get some friends together whenever possible and play the game as you would any typical RPG.

What I'm looking for now are the play-testing strategies of others.  How do you structure your play-test sessions to make sure they are productive?  Do you write up a list of mechanics you are going to test and just run through them with a group of players?  Do you have any specific "attack patterns" you take when going through your rules?  And, perhaps most important, how do you know that you've done enough play-testing?

I'd greatly appreciate any feedback you have on these topics or the system in general!

First of all, kudos on having a Cinematic Plug-In ready to go. :D That's the sort of consideration that draws me into a game pretty quickly.

Second, someone said it somewhere (here, RPGnet? I don't know)... A good way to gauge when your play testing phase is completed is when you realize that you haven't tweaked the game after a session. I'd say make sure this happens more than once though... Furthermore, try to push players to explore all aspects of the game. Especially if you have something different going on in your system, not everyone is curious enough to grab hold of things by themselves. :)

MacLeod wrote:
First of all, kudos on having a Cinematic Plug-In ready to go. :D That's the sort of consideration that draws me into a game pretty quickly.

Second, someone said it somewhere (here, RPGnet? I don't know)... A good way to gauge when your play testing phase is completed is when you realize that you haven't tweaked the game after a session. I'd say make sure this happens more than once though... Furthermore, try to push players to explore all aspects of the game. Especially if you have something different going on in your system, not everyone is curious enough to grab hold of things by themselves. :)

Indeed. :D

The only thing that makes a whole lot of sense outside of what I mentioned previously... is seeing whether or not you and the players are having fun. This isn't a very good reference point though unless you know a lot about the players and their styles. If one of them is unhappy, that may have absolutely nothing to do with how you've designed the game and more to do with how he likes to play a game.
I have a stingy group of uninspired hack 'n' slashers... but I intend on at least taking a look at your system later today. :)

This thread belongs in the Playtesting forums, but moderators fear to tread in First Thoughts. Muahahhahh!

Anyways, playtesting is hard. If you're not weeping after your playtests, you're doing something wrong.

Present the rules to the players before the game.
Play by those rules. Do not change the rules midsession no matter how broken. Do not EVER let a player whine/weasel his way into a rules change during a playtest.
After your session, review your rules. Make changes as you see fit.
Repeat above.
Once you're running a reasonably smooth session, sign up to run games an your local game store/convention. If you can't do that, play with your friends' friends. Run your games with as many different groups as possible.

When playing, watch how the players interact with the rules. Watch their faces. When do they smile? When do they grimace? When are they confused? When do they complain but do it anyway? When do they outright rebel? What do they easily understand? What do they clearly misunderstand?

When they ask questions, make them read you the rule. Make them use the text. Watch and see how long it takes them to find a rule. Listen to them as they read it. Does it make sense to you from another perspective?

And, if the rule doesn't make sense as written, and you have to explain it, listen to yourself as you do. Take note of what it is you have to say in order to get someone to understand. THAT, most likely, should be how the rule is written.

Good luck.
-Luke

Luke wrote:
This thread belongs in the Playtesting forums, but moderators fear to tread in First Thoughts. Muahahhahh!

Luke wrote:
Anyways, playtesting is hard. If you're not weeping after your playtests, you're doing something wrong.

Present the rules to the players before the game.
Play by those rules. Do not change the rules midsession no matter how broken. Do not EVER let a player whine/weasel his way into a rules change during a playtest.
After your session, review your rules. Make changes as you see fit.
Repeat above.
Once you're running a reasonably smooth session, sign up to run games an your local game store/convention. If you can't do that, play with your friends' friends. Run your games with as many different groups as possible.

When playing, watch how the players interact with the rules. Watch their faces. When do they smile? When do they grimace? When are they confused? When do they complain but do it anyway? When do they outright rebel? What do they easily understand? What do they clearly misunderstand?

When they ask questions, make them read you the rule. Make them use the text. Watch and see how long it takes them to find a rule. Listen to them as they read it. Does it make sense to you from another perspective?

And, if the rule doesn't make sense as written, and you have to explain it, listen to yourself as you do. Take note of what it is you have to say in order to get someone to understand. THAT, most likely, should be how the rule is written.

Good luck.
-Luke

Have you considered using Starblazer Adventures' method of dice rolling? It is like a less weird version of SotC and Fudge... Uses two six-sided dice, one is a negative die and the other is the positive die. When you roll, you subtract the negative die from the positive die. Creates outcomes anywhere from -5 to +5. I like it tons better than the normal Fudge method, personally.

MacLeod wrote:
[snip]
Uses two six-sided dice, one is a negative die and the other is the positive die. When you roll, you subtract the negative die from the positive die. Creates outcomes anywhere from -5 to +5. I like it tons better than the normal Fudge method, personally.

You are looking for less randomness, right now you have seven outcomes, yeah? -3, -2, -1, 0, +1, +2 and +3. You could just use a plain ol' six-sided die and have six different outcomes instead. Isn't it nearly 17% across the board for each outcome on a six-sided die? Are the negatives integral to the experience? I think people generally perform addition faster anyways, right? :)
I apologize, I'm strictly against those Fudge dice... it is hard for me to get past them. O_O I'm not sure how other people react to them but that has always been my stance.

MacLeod wrote:
I apologize, I'm strictly against those Fudge dice... it is hard for me to get past them. O_O I'm not sure how other people react to them but that has always been my stance.

Would I be right in saying that you have passive an active stat pairs for each of physical, mental and social? I ask this because that could be way more obvious in your rules. If so, have you considered having a stat of "cool"? I like it mainly because it covers both composure and appearance. The two stats cool and charisma seem to embody your dichotomy better than charisma and presence. Ask someone what someone with high cool and low charisma looks like, and it's a classic fit for the mysterious stranger, if you ask them low cool high charisma, then it's the local crazy party guy, if you ask for high both, then it's probably Obama or someone!

But I haven't seen how the passive stats are actually used: Is "will" mentioned anywhere? I can't find it in a search.

If not how would they be used? Convincing people could run off the will mechanic, being presence verses will. It could be a continued action against the stat, with you trying to break down their will on the subject, a slow process with a single health-bar per objective. Interestingly in an interrogation context there could be people who keep being replaced, as the person being interrogated also tries to break down the will of their interrogators.

But what about cool? What would be the result of loosing your cool in a social situation? You could have the possibility of showing yourself up by shouting at someone or some other emotional outburst. Now how would that actually be done in the rules? It could lead to social breakdown where you can't do any social actions successfully until you regain cool, unless you take as a penalty making some outburst or inappropriate remark related to the action you are trying to achieve. So trying to ingratiate yourself with someone when on zero cool is pretty impossible, but also intimidating someone would be pretty hard too, you'd pretty much only be able to do less relationship based conversation, which seems appropriate.

JoyWriter wrote:
Would I be right in saying that you have passive an active stat pairs for each of physical, mental and social?

Vordark wrote:
...(and a similar conflation of intelligence and perception), it seems like I'm the only one who actually liked this. :)

Well the difficulty with making some of the changes people expect from convention is that you recreate storyteller, with defence/power/finesse in three fields.

This is too much like convergent evolution for white-wolf to object, but I still wonder whether that division should be questioned. What people want from such a system is a way to make their characters different, so two people who focus on physical combat can compare their skills and see that they have not made the same character, at least as far as the numbers go. Now excluding the possibility of relationship stats or made to order traits, which are a huge source of differentiation, you will want to insure that the "obvious" choices are spread around, so you don't just have a million people with dodge and firearms. How could this be done? Well one way to do it is to fold the dodge skill into other skills, like acrobatics (flip out the way), drive ("jink" when in a car), bluff (throw off their aim with faked movements), unarmed combat (for blocking) or even firearms, if you can have a wild west style shootout. In this way people don't have to buy skills that tell you little about their characters background, and so you hopefully maximise characterisation in the skill system.

There's one other thing I would watch out for: I'm not sure of how your numbers work yet, but there is a danger when dealing with balancing health stats and skill stats in the same mechanic; as the numbers don't mean the same things, what happens if someone dump-stats their will in order to increase their mind? What does that actually do to the game? How fast does damage of various kinds recover? If you do go with something like my idea for the other two "health" stats, I would have social be a single value that recovers quickly, mind be a multi-value that recovers at medium speed, and body be your existing triple pool with slow recharge. Why?

Because body damage has serious consequences when it is low, (especially at 0!) so that drama should be underlined by not making recovery easy. But also there is strong synergy between the attack types, so that it is easy when starting with low health to make it lower. Basically I'm using your existing system as the baseline, but with one adjustment; it seems like there could be harder surgeries when the damage total is higher, and larger recovery times.

Mind is different, as the way I defined it, you take damage on different tracks for different things; almost no synergy between different people of different objectives, so one conflict can be separate to another. So it can be easier to take serious amounts of damage and still continue without resting in some way. I'm not really sure what would make a good recovery time, as convincing someone to do something should be a proper combat, with proper effects. I suspect it should be of the same order  for recovery difficulty as body damage.

As for "cool", well that would not feel right as any lasting injury, so it should be possible to recover it just be going off, calming down and sorting your hair out! But like body this should be open to many synergistic attacks, so encouraging people to take a break between social combats in order to recover, so it doesn't turn into a soap opera (or if it does, there is lots of shouting, which seems appropriate!). I also like this because it makes it very possible to loose a social encounter.

Also, on the subject of skill checks, have you considered set-up rolls? For example if the difficulty of surgery is higher than they can reasonably get to (and this applies to many things too) what do you think about adding in a perpetration system so that you can get larger circumstance bonuses from direct specific action than from things falling your way? They could cover anything from specialised equipment to "preparing your story" to blackmail evidence to all sorts of other things. Insuring there is support for such actions in the rules should be pretty helpful, especially if there is a division between what you can get from GM gift and what you have to play out.

In response to some great feedback I've received, I have put together a new beta version of the system here:

http://www.chaosphere.com/genesys/

Hopefully the feedback will continue coming in and help me make the system even better.

JoyWriter:  Thanks for another post!  I'm going to take some time to absorb it and its relationship to the "new" attribute scheme I'm working with.

I am interested in connecting with people that are willing to play-test Genesys in their own groups, but I'm at a bit of a loss to figure out where I should post such a call at The Forge.

The Playtesting forum's stickies seems to direct people to the Connections forum.

The Connections forum's stickies seems to direct people to First Thoughts.

The First Thoughts forum's sticky offers no guidance or mention concerning play-testing.

So...

If I was a designer of an RPG and I wanted to say "Hey!  I'd be supremely happy if some of you were interested in play-testing my system, please contact me with your play-test reports or suggestions!", where might I say it? :)

Vordark wrote:
I am interested in connecting with people that are willing to play-test Genesys in their own groups, but I'm at a bit of a loss to figure out where I should post such a call at The Forge.

The Playtesting forum's stickies seems to direct people to the Connections forum.

The Connections forum's stickies seems to direct people to First Thoughts.

The First Thoughts forum's sticky offers no guidance or mention concerning play-testing.

So...

If I was a designer of an RPG and I wanted to say "Hey!  I'd be supremely happy if some of you were interested in play-testing my system, please contact me with your play-test reports or suggestions!", where might I say it? :)

Looking for playtesters seems to currently be done on the "Connections" forum, whereas the playtest reports and discussions go on the "Playtesting" forum.

The description under "Connections" even says "Find playtesters,...", but the "Using this forum" thread clearly says it shouldn't be used for that. I dunno. I think I remember seeing Ron say he needs to address this, but my memory is fuzzy.

Also, cool on the modular design, I've been doing some stuff regarding such lately, will post something of the sort now.

Thunder_God wrote:
Looking for playtesters seems to currently be done on the "Connections" forum, whereas the playtest reports and discussions go on the "Playtesting" forum.

The description under "Connections" even says "Find playtesters,...", but the "Using this forum" thread clearly says it shouldn't be used for that. I dunno. I think I remember seeing Ron say he needs to address this, but my memory is fuzzy.

Thunder_God wrote:
Also, cool on the modular design, I've been doing some stuff regarding such lately, will post something of the sort now.