So what did we learn?<\/p>\n
The foundation seems solid. The basic character traits and die mechanics worked well, and most of the players grasped the basics much faster than they did the dice-bumping mechanics from the previous version. There were only a few cases where there was room for debate about which traits or bonuses applied to a particular roll, and most of those were an even enough split that \u201cuse the highest\u201d worked just fine.<\/p>\n
Combat needs some work. We noticed several problems. Fortunately, most of them seem to be more about tweaking than completely reworking. Some of the issues:<\/p>\n
- \n
- Fu is going to have to be explained very carefully. It\u2019s doing a lot of things, and the rules need to clearly define how it fits into combat.<\/li>\n
- Using Fu as a currency that you spend to improve rolls AND a penalty once it drops below zero is confusing and weird. My original idea was just to make it a modifier you always added to combat rolls, but I thought that would make the rolls too high so I went with the weird split system initially. We went back to the \u201calways add Fu\u201d rule in the 10,000 Daggers game and it was a lot easier to keep track of. And since everyone\u2019s adding a Fu bonus early on, they mostly cancelled each other out. Everyone had bigger rolls, but the margins didn\u2019t change much.<\/li>\n
- Consequences need to be based on Margin alone. I\u2019d set it up so you could buy up the level of Consequences (wounds, knockouts, killshots, etc) by spending Raises. Since Raises are based on the tens digit of the margin (meaning the roll with Raises already has a margin high enough to get at least some special effect), allowing a buy-up meant that you could kill (or at least knock out) damn near anything if you rolled sufficiently higher than your opponent. Leighton\u2019s Kong-sized ape in the Sword and Planet game basically went down due to one really good attack roll paired with a crappy defense roll.<\/li>\n
- Characters didn\u2019t take many wounds. Most PCs ended fights with one or two wounds, if any. The low number of wounds also meant that most \u201cKnockout\u201d results were really knockdowns, since the \u201cget back up\u201d roll\u2019s DN is based on wound count. I think this problem (and possibly the previous one) can be solved by making the consequences of each part of the combat roll more focused. Right now there are some effects that can be achieved with either a high margin or raises. I think those need to be separated so that the margin does one thing (probably wounds\/kills) and the raises do something else (special effects and Fu buffs\/debuffs). That will also simplify things from a \u201ckeeping track of my options during combat\u201d perspective.<\/li>\n
- Fu doesn\u2019t make as much sense in ranged combat as it does in melee, particularly when trying to explain why the attacker loses Fu if the defender wins the roll. The solution here probably to either have a special rule for ranged combat (attacker doesn\u2019t lose Fu if he loses) or to make Fu something that usually only affects the Defender (he gains Fu if he wins, loses it if he loses the roll). I\u2019ll have to playtest a few rounds to see which solution works best.<\/li>\n
- Even QAGS has a ganging up rule that causes characters to take penalties if they get attacked multiple times in one round. I thought Fu alleviate the need for one (since a character who gets attacked multiple times would lose Fu), but that didn\u2019t actually work. When one combatant (like a giant ape) is more powerful than the PCs, there\u2019s a good chance he\u2019s going to get a big enough win as defender to counter-attack, which means that attacking the Combat Monster is basically the same as giving him a free attack on you. This is not optimal. I think Fu can still be the answer here if it also serves as an \u201caction point\u201d kind of currency, with characters spending Fu to defend (and probably to attack, just to keep everything consistent).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Overall, I was happy with the initial playtests and at this point I feel like (once again) I\u2019m getting close. It\u2019s mostly a matter of smoothing out combat and figuring out how to explain how it works to other humans. At DieCon we also discussed possibilities for getting a \u201cpowered by Cinemechanix\u201d game out by Archon this year, and currently I\u2019m starting work on both The Six Gun Seven (Weird West) and the first installment of Guardians of Shymeria (which Leighton and Jeffrey helped me finally figure out how to write; I might talk about that more later, but the basic breakthrough was that it\u2019s actually three games instead of one) to see which one I can turn into a publishable game in the next few months. I\u2019ll keep you posted on how that\u2019s going when I have news.<\/p>\n
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