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.

Dolomball: hitting me with the curveball

Dolomball playtest today.  The new "speed" mechanic worked out well - that was the change I made after last time to replace the rock-paper-scissor system for resolving ties.  Cards are still played simultaneously, but now they resolve in speed order instead of simultaneously, so that takes care of figuring out who gets to the ball first, or who can block someone else's movement.  Besides that, the other players today liked the core of the game but felt like it was more complex than it should be for the kind of game that it is, and that scoring is too slow (I'll refrain from making any soccer jokes here).  Also, they both wanted to be able to plan further ahead and be able to make better predictions about opponents' actions.  Suggestions for me to play around with included making the board smaller and separating movement from action cards.  Need some time to decide what I'm actually going to do with that, but I think it is worth exploring.  Let's see what the next few weeks bring...

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In other news, this week I started doing layout work for Neon Knights.  It is simultaneously tedious and exciting.  But I think this is going to end with a book that makes me look only 50% amateur instead of 100%.  Maybe even only 25%, especially if I get in-document hyperlinks to work correctly.

Werewolves of London: first playtest

Had my first test game today, me plus two other players.  It went... okay.  They liked the premise and the core loop, and quickly found some significant flaws in the current design (which is to be expected when it's the first draft, but still a bit disheartening).  Biggest things I need to work on are giving players who aren't currently in the lead a reason to care about the investigation, strengthening the feeling of engine-building as you acquire more territory, and anything else I can do to increase the gameplay value of spreading your territory as opposed to picking a few lucrative territories and turtling there.  The test players did like the "set collection" abilities that a few of the territories have (i.e. that they give you bonuses if you also have specific other territories), and we talked about having more of those and building in some overlap so it gives people a reason to go after each other's territory.

As far as the investigation, I have some ideas starting to come together about how to fix that problem, though I'm also noticing how they could lead to other potentially broken strategies, so I'll need to play around with that more.  Maybe I'll have it ready for another playtest next month, maybe I'll alternate with Dolomball, I don't know.  We'll find out in the next post, maybe?

Neon Knights update

 Just finished the latest round of revisions (I feel like it's not the first time I've said that).  Biggest thing was fleshing out the setting description.  I got some good advice about that from readers a couple months ago, with things to add to the setting chapter but also ideas about weaving in bits of implied setting into artifact and adversary descriptions, so I did that.  Seems pretty good right now, maybe actually ready to start moving into layout sometime.  Sure would be nice it the flyers I bring to PAX Unplugged this year can say "available on DriveThru" instead of "coming soon."