Just rip my lungs out, Jim

Massive overhaul on Werewolves of London after the last playtest, and then got to test the new version yesterday.

• New map - focusing on Inner London only, with territories divided up a little more arbitrarily, rather than doing all of the boroughs like I had before.  Fewer territories than before as well.  This was moderately successful both at reducing information overload and at increasing frequency of players fighting over the same territory.
• New end condition - the game now goes for a set number of rounds rather than "until all territories are owned."  I still need to figure out what the right number is, but this is definitely an improvement in any case.
• Cleaner division of each round into "day" and "night" phases.  This made it easier to keep track of what was happening when, and succeeded at reinforcing the werewolf theme a little better.
  
• New income rules - get money for territory that you own and also have the option of pulling money out of one of your investments and multiplying it based on the value of the territory where you invested.  This was good for reinforcing the "business predators by day" side of my game pitch, but had the slight problem of being able to grow insanely wealthy in just a couple of turns with the right investments.  And since wealth translates to control over the map (and maybe also scoring at the end of the game; I'm still fiddling with that), this is pretty important.  Still weighing options for how to solve it.

 

And then there's combat.  I had put something like this into the previous iteration, following from the "not wolfy enough" comments in the first one or two test games, and then for this version I took it further.  When two or more players are trying to hunt in the same territory, they bid a secret amount of Meat, with the winner getting to hunt and the loser(s) licking their wounds and going home empty-handed (and also increasing the risk of tipping off Scotland Yard).  What we got in testing was that this was the core of a good idea, but the way I have it current set up, there's little incentive to bid less than all the Meat you have, unless you really care about the current state of the investigation.  So the challenge now is to find a way to keep the blind bidding system but 1) make you really care about how much you're bidding, 2) not be too punishing to a player who is already too far behind, and 3) not accidentally be too punishing to the player who wins the fight.  And maybe also other unwanted consequences that I haven't bumped into yet.  Hopefully I can get this figured out soon, because I've got less than two months to put together a hard copy for PAX Unplugged...

Cross one off the list

 Neon Knights is now live on DriveThruRPG!!!

That's it, that's the post.  I worked hard over the past couple of weeks, I finished the game, and I posted it. Feeling pretty good about that.  Now I can rest a bit, then back to work on all the other games.

In which the author finds himself to be extremely busy

I may have bitten off more than I can chew here.  Lots going on, and (self-imposed) deadlines adding pressure to it.  At this moment I am working on revisions for Werewolves of London (trying to get it up to where it's worth showing to publishers at PAX Unplugged, even if it's not 100% done at that point), revisions and layout for Neon Knights (I'd really like the flyer I give out at PAXU to list it as "available now" instead of "coming soon" for the third year in a row), and also a surprise round of revisions on Under a Violet Moon (publishers are interested but want to make changes), and with all that I'm still trying not to let Dolomball fall off the radar but it still needs a decent amount of work as well after the last playtest.

And that all has to fit around the day job, and family, and not letting the house fall apart, and whatever else pops up at any moment.  At least I'm not sitting around getting bored...

There wolves

Finally had time to revamp Werewolves of London and bring it out for testing.  Biggest change coming from the previous playtest was that I added rules for border skirmishes with other players - reducing their investments in the contested territories or preventing them from scoring those territories at the end of the game.  I also changed some rules for scoring, for where you can invest money, and for what happens when the police investigation progresses.

Overall conclusion from today's test is that it's moving in the right direction but still has plenty more moving to do.  It does feel more wolfy now, but needs to also feel more businessy, and find the right balance of the two aspects.  The test players gave me some good ideas based on what they were expecting from the pitch, and how that differed from what I actually had, so that gives me a really good sense of what to aim for with the next round of revisions.  We also talked a lot about building around the day/night contrast; I'm kind of kicking myself that I hadn't thought about that more explicitly before since it is rather central to the whole concept of werewolves but again, it does give me some ideas to play with.

And it also led one of them to come up with a new tag line that I'm definitely stealing - "outbid them during the day, outbite them during the night"

Neon Knights - revisiting the basic stats

Recurring feedback that I've gotten from readers is that, since I'm pitching this game as "heavy metal," they want to feel that in the rules.  And in particular, in the PCs' core stats.  The knightly virtues that I have there right now do the job well enough for covering different kinds of actions but not for conveying the desired tone of the game.  After a lot of back and forth, and a lot of beating my head against various proverbial walls, I've maybe finally solved this one.  Here they are:

You act with ...
Passion when your emotional intensity is front and center
Restraint when you carefully collect information and balance risks and rewards before taking action
Instinct when you go with your gut and don't bother waiting for confirmation
Sleight when you use stealth, subterfuge, or misdirection
Accord when you act on your understanding of others around you
Force when you rely on the raw strength of your body or mind

I don't think it makes to continue calling them Virtues.  I could go back to Approaches, which is the default term from Fate Accelerated, but that also lacks flavor.  Maybe this will be the next big annoying thing for me to resolve?

Where wolves?

Werewolves of London playtest today.  I did solve the specific problem of turtling being the optimal strategy, but now there are bigger issues I need to address.  Feedback from both players was that they loved the theme and premise of the game, but it didn't feel vicious enough - not enough meaningful interaction with each other, not enough tension around the police investigation, and, apart from me saying that Meat represents what you get from hunting for humans, nothing that actually felt like being a werewolf.  I have some ideas starting to come together for how to deal with this, but it's definitely going to take some work.  Let's see what happens over the next month or two...

In other news, PAX Unplugged ticket has been purchased.  I will be there that Saturday, in the Unpub room, hopefully with a much improved version of Werewolves of London for people to play.

Allegedly doing some kind of work

I was supposed to have a Neon Knights one-shot (and unofficial playtest) yesterday with a couple of people who had expressed interest in the game.  Spent the week prepping an adventure for them, since our plan was to skip session 0 and get straight into the action.  And then my internet crapped out and we had to cancel (trying to connect to Discord voice chat on my phone was iffy at best, definitely not something we could all tolerate for 2-4 hours).  In the meantime we talked a little about renaming some of the stats to sound more Metal.  I've thought of some terms I could maybe use, and now I'm on the fence between being more thematic vs being easier to understand right away.  I'll get that figured out eventually.

On the other hand, since I couldn't spend my evening running an RPG, I did spend it finally updating Werewolves of London.  In the original playtest only a few of the territories had special abilities, so yesterday I wrote up a bunch more.  And I made sure that some of them overlap or otherwise conflict with each other.  Next step is to redesign the cards so things are easier to see when they're all in your hand instead of neatly laid out on the table.  Hoping to have everything done to be able to run the game again next weekend.