Tuesday, June 21, 2022

TGE playtest notes

 No, I'm not going to dump everything here, just sharing some thoughts that are going to feed into upcoming revisions (and also providing evidence that I am actually still working on this game).  I've had a hard enough time getting other people to help me test the game out, but yesterday I did have someone and we ran a 2-player session, which highlighted the need for some modifications when running the game with only two players.  The main issue is that it's very easy for both players to just strike out in different directions and never interact with each other for the rest of the game.  In theory that's okay if that's what they want to do, but then it's harder to adjust if circumstances change (as in yesterday's game where a powerful Threat suddenly showed up and we were too far apart to help each other with it).  The solution I'm thinking of for right now is that for any ability which depends on another player being nearby, including the basic option to give a bonus or penalty on another player's roll, the distance that counts as "nearby" will increase when there are only two players.

One other problem that reasserted itself during this test session was that of Fight being the god stat.  The other player and I had both chosen teams which start with low Fight scores, and as a result we both had a hard time collecting Loot with which to buy upgrades.  A player who started with more Fight would have quickly surpassed both of us, unless they got really unlucky with the dice and/or cards.  So the other biggest change that I have planned right now is to give out some Loot on any successful roll, while still having the chance to get more with a good Fight or Escape* roll (but not as much as under the current setup).

*oh, and Escape might get renamed to Sneak or something like that - I'm not 100% sure yet but it's sounding better the more I think about it

Sunday, June 12, 2022

Whatever I'm rolling, it certainly isn't Quick

 Well I said I was using this blog to document whatever work I'm doing on my games, so I guess I might as well document the little bit that I did today.  Main thing was copying over the milestone rules from FAE and translating them into my prose and tone.  I was hoping that would turn into momentum for more of the stuff I'm actually coming up with myself, but no luck - only other thing I managed to add before I ran out of steam was a short paragraph about Steeds, and a note to myself to maybe add an option for a Steed bonus of some sort when you hit milestones.  At least I'm more or less done with the part that's getting copied from FAE, except that I still haven't decided if I'm keeping the approaches from that book or coming up with my own.  I'd like to do my own for this but I'm having a hell of a time thinking of anything that isn't covered better by the basic six in FAE.  Maybe I'll get some 11th-hour inspiration for that.  In the meantime I'll keep plugging away with what I have so far.  Right now I'm thinking the next part will be just focusing on the Steed rules until they look good, but we'll see what happens.

The nice thing about having too many projects at once is bouncing between them

Violet Moon has started going out to publishers, I need a break from revising Neon Knights , so today's work was focused on Dolomball ....