TtSR playtest report

Made some more changes over the past week, had a playtest today, and both players were clamoring for more at the end.  Comments included "I was getting into it and I was a little sad at how quickly it ended - I could have gladly played more rounds" and "there were many moments in this game where I felt super smart, and like I was really a great commander."  So I think I've got the core of it figured out pretty well.  The players had amazing luck with the dice and the AI cards, which helped, but even with that they were doing a lot of careful planning and strategizing to maximize their advantage.  Overall they felt like the challenge level was good.

Next big challenge for me - figuring out a more satisfying and bossfighty way to destroy the mothership rather than just getting lucky on a really good attack roll.  I'm sure I'll figure that out sooner or later... 

Successful streamlining

I think I got TtSR figured out - the harvesters move automatically after every player turn like before (though with a simpler movement path with fewer decision points), and the fighters start in the middle of the board but don't get automatic moves unless a player ends their turn in an adjacent space.

I did a solo test today with this, plus a simplified decision tree for which AI deck to draw from for the aliens, plus tech advancement being based on shooting down alien ships instead of spending actions and energy (these were both suggestions from players in last week's test game).  To really stress test it, I used all five player factions, which I haven't done before.  And it worked.  There was a lot less work at the end of each player turn, but the aliens still felt threatening since they were hovering in the middle of the board instead of all the way back by the mothership.  There were tough decisions around what "players" should do at different times because addressing one threat would mean letting another one go, and around what order the players should go in so the aliens wouldn't be playing a long string of Attack cards at the end of the round (which hurt a lot when it did happen).  And there were interesting opportunities to strategize around the new rules, like when I was able to pull a lone fighter into a ridiculous trap.  The game ended with a human victory after four full rounds, which felt like enough.  During that time there were enough ups and downs that it felt tense more often than not and the victory felt well earned.  So yeah, I'm pretty happy with the core structure of the game now.

I still have a lot of fine tuning to do though.  Biggest things that stood out to me today were that I don't love the current rule for how the mothership defends itself from attacks, and I need to change how random direction of movement gets decided (at least rearranging the icons on the board that I'm currently using, but maybe I'll even think of something better than that).  Probably also going to want to make some more tweaks to the tech options.  And I'll see what else pops out at me with further testing with other people.  But for now I think I'm in a good place to commit to making a physical copy, as soon as I update the image files to match what I did today.  PAXU is only 14½ weeks away...

Back in action (kind of)

Finally got Tonight the Stars Revolt in shape for another public playtest, after several rounds of solo testing and various revisions coming off of that.  Overall reaction was positive, but I couldn't get into the specifics as much as I wanted because all of the between-turn maintenance slowed it down and we only got through two full rounds of play.  So that's definitely one thing for me to work on next, is finding ways to streamline that without losing the sense of threat.  The other big challenge, also connected with between-turn maintenance, is that the action economy is pretty lopsided and it forces the players to be on defense pretty much constantly, while the theme of the game (and also the victory condition) is really crying out for them to be on offense more.

Something that I noticed in solo testing, and which also came up in today's test, is that there are a lot of cool tech upgrades and never enough time to get more than one or maybe two of them.  One of the players had a cool idea though - upgrades are earned by shooting down alien ships instead of by spending energy and action points.  I love this idea, I think it'll work well to reduce some of those opportunity costs and actually allow the players to be more aggressive.  It feels a little more video gamey, but I'm okay with that; there's no attempt at even faux-realism in this game.  Now I just need to work out the details of how to implement it.

And then maybe I can get one more test in if I move quickly on this, and then it's time to commit it to hard copy for Unpub at PAXU... 

TtSR: recent updates

I've been making incremental changes and then solo testing for Tonight the Stars Revolt! over the last few weeks.  It took me this long to get around to it because one of the changes I needed to make (again) was to the board layout, and for some reason I find that one to be a big barrier for me.  And I'm just solo testing for now because I want the game to be more clearly improved before I bring it out to a group again.  I do feel confident that I'm moving in the right direction, though it's still tough to find the right balance.  In today's test I had a few turns where the aliens did feel more threatening without it being a quick sweep like I've run into before, but also they were tough enough that the game dragged longer than it should have.  I've also found that the AI system is not as smart as I'd like, since it responds to player actions but not to board states (for example, making a decision based on players attacking alien ships without caring how many alien ships are left on the board after that attack).  I can't get too detailed with this because that will bog the game down more than I want, but I do want to mess around with it at least to some extent.  There were also a couple of turns where, by coincidence, it felt like the AI was getting more cunning as the game went on, so I want to see if I can make that happen by design in the future.

TTSR playtest report

Finally got to bring Tonight the Stars Revolt! to another playtest with other people besides myself.  Maybe I swung too hard the other way on adjusting the difficulty, or maybe I just suck at strategy during solo testing, but either way they destroyed the mothership with very little difficulty in only a few rounds.  Biggest points of feedback were that the combat dice are an improvement over the static numbers from before but should have more options for using the "special" faces, and that I should streamline the alien stuff so there's less effort involved in managing their actions.  I also want to make some more changes to the board, which... I don't know, for some reason that particular task feels really hard for me to do even half-competently.  Still gonna do it if it needs to get done, I just probably need to plan more ahead of time for how I should even approach it to get what I want.

TTSR - some serious overcorrecting

Made some updates to Tonight the Stars Revolt based on the playtest a couple weeks ago.  Biggest thing is that combat is based on dice now instead of flat numbers.  Besides just generally making combat more unpredictable (and hopefully more exciting as a result), this is giving me another tool to work with for interesting options over the course of the game - the dice have a couple of "special" sides that normally don't do anything, but can have different effects depending on tech upgrades that you might get over the course of the game.  And of course the aliens will be able to take advantage of those as well, though that will likely be single-turn effects based on the AI cards rather than permanent upgrades like with player tech.

The other big change was making the aliens more aggressive.   In my test a couple of weeks ago they mostly just sat there and let the players shoot them, so the new rule I put in was that all alien ships move after each player turn, or attack if they are already in the same space as player ships.  And wow did this turn out to be too much.  I ran a solo test just now to see how the updates worked out, and the result with this one was that it felt like an overwhelming Zerg rush before the humans even had a chance to get ready.  Granted, this could be mitigated to some extent by letting players start with more ships on the board, and by making the board itself bigger so it takes longer for ships to reach each other (I probably will do this eventually, but it's a lower-priority change right now).  But even so, it felt like a lot of extra work to move every alien ship every turn, it made the AI cards feel a lot less important, and I didn't love the feeling when, through a combination of horde tactics and bad dice luck, the aliens had wiped out two out of three human fleets by the end of two rounds.  So I'm going to be scaling this one back for next time - maybe just automatic movement at the beginning of the aliens' turn, before revealing AI cards, rather than after every single player turn.  Hopefully that strikes the right balance.

But despite all that it still feels like this game is moving in the right direction overall.  I don't know if I'll have it ready for any of the usual design competitions when it's time for them (I'm already missing Cardboard Edison as we speak) but I'm feeling pretty good about what I might be bringing with me to PAX Unplugged next year.

ADDENDUM: and after another day of thinking about how to use those dice, I have now changed the system for tech upgrades, with some common ones that anyone can buy and also some unique ones for each player.  Hopefully they're relatively balanced against each other.  Now I need to update some of the AI cards like I mentioned earlier, and then we'll see how the next playtest goes... 

The Sorcerer's Apocalypse

Got inspired for something new this weekend, was hoping it would be one of those things that I could blast through in the span of a good weekend but I was also fighting off a cold so that slowed me down.  So now I have a rough outline of a new RPG setting, and maybe enough of the details figured out, but definitely still a lot of actual writing to do.

The Sorcerer's Apocalypse is set in present-day Earth, except that magic suddenly appeared one day and now we are in the middle of the whole world falling apart as everyone struggles to deal with this.  There's random wild magic happening everywhere, and also some people have developed the ability to use magic but haven't yet figured out how to control it very well.  The PCs are all new magic users and are working to help their communities survive through the current chaos while trying to control their new powers and keeping themselves safe from the various anti-magic factions around them.

Probably no surprise to anyone, I'm doing this in Fate (although the full system this time, rather than Accelerated Edition).  Current plan for working magic into the rules is to add it as its own skill, which everyone has at 0 at the start of the game, and also that everyone has to take an Aspect that describes what kind of magic they can do (and gives an idea of what kinds of unwanted effects they'll get on a compel).  Still need to reread the relevant Fate materials to see what other ideas this might give me.

So that's that in a nutshell.  I'm aiming for the finished product to be 5-10 pages.  Might be done in a month, realistically?  Of course I'll post again here when it's up on DriveThru.