Playtest Report: Against All Kobolds!

We ran another playtest last Friday. I don’t think every playtest will automatically cause an after-action report like this, at some point we’ll be testing too often for that, and sometimes we won't be testing anything new, just “what do new players think?”

But this one was interesting! We tested all of the following

• New initiative
• Stamina
• Weapons
• Negotiation Pillar
• Surges
• Kobolds and the Mage

That seems like a lot! But remember, we’re still running simulations of our classes, not the real thing. We don’t have skills yet, we have no idea how progression (i.e. leveling up) works, and we don’t know how to make a character! So, we still don’t know most things, but we’re also not full-time on this game yet so from where I sit it still seems like we’re making crazy good progress.

Against The Kobolds

We were getting a little bored fighting Nothing But Goblins, so James whipped up some Kobolds and we went at it! I think it’s pretty easy for him to mock up new monsters because they’re just ports of the Flee, Mortals! Monsters. He’s not inventing the idea of kobolds, he’s adapting them from FM.

Now, spoilers, everything we were testing is going to take a lot more than one encounter to test. So there’s not going to be any great revelations in this post. Nothing seemed obviously broken but then nothing seemed obviously awesome either. A lot of stuff, you can’t tell if it’s “working” until it’s been tested under a lot of conditions.

Imagine how healing works in whatever RPG you’re playing. It’s probably pretty straightforward 80% of the time, but then there are these specific situations where “how does healing work?” becomes really important. The system really only matters under those conditions.

So you need to test a lot in order to flush out those critical situations. Most of the stuff we’re testing, we know it’ll work under Ideal Conditions, it’s what happens when players start relying on it and trying to push it to its limits that we discover whether a new rule is working.

The Setup

James set up the scenario by describing a mine the local humans were working. They broke through into a cave system and kobolds came pouring out!

So we’re the heroes the town sent to unfuck the situation. Classic. All the encounters we’re testing are very “classic fantasy RPG” stuff because the game has to work under those conditions. If you can’t fight goblins and kobolds in a mine or cave in this game, we’ve done something very wrong.

This was a good setup as will be demonstrated later.

As you can see, OD joined us on his lunch break. That meant we had to cut things a little short once he had to go back to work but it was fun to play with OD and get his impression of the new system.

It wasn’t obvious to him how your stats related to your abilities, but I think that’s really just a problem of how we failed to explain it. Right now, if an attack says “Damage: Reason” and your Reason is “2” then you roll 2 attribute dice and count how many 🗡️ come up. That doesn’t seem particularly crazy to me but when you’re looking at a character sheet with 0 presentation, literally just a google doc full of text for a game you know nothing about, nothing is perfectly obvious.

If there’s an asterisk next to Reason, that means you’re proficient in all tasks that use Reason and you add the Proficiency die.I’m pretty sure the actual final game won’t work that way? It’s gonna be a little harder to get the Proficiency die. It’s probably not going to be “add the Prof Die to everything that uses this stat.” For instance right now the Tactician has proficiency in Might. So any time they do anything that uses Might they add the Proficiency die. Ok, makes sense. But in the real game you’re going to have Weapon Proficiencies and even though “all these weapons use Might” you only get to add the die to the weapons you’re proficient with.

Skills and magic will probably work the same way.

But otherwise, OD was able to parse his Tactician abilities and do dope shit and I have confidence we’ll get better at explaining and presenting the game, especially considering there is Zero Presentation right now!

Initiative

We’re trying a new initiative system and it was fine. It worked. It wasn’t flashy or particularly exciting, but it did what we wanted and I think it’s a good framework to build on.

The new initiative system is pretty simple. Both sides roll Agility (different classes might modify this) and whichever side’s total is highest goes first. Unless one side is surprised, in which case the other side goes first. Which is how I suspect it’ll work in a lot of battles.

Like in this one, we surprised the Kobolds. I think James had us make rolls to see if we could keep quiet? But however it worked it was just placeholder rolls since we don’t even have skills yet, much less Hide/Sneak/Perecption skills/rolls for that stuff. So we surprised them!

When one side acts, they pick a character who hasn’t acted this turn, and that character takes their turn. After that character takes their turn, the other side picks a character who hasn’t acted this turn, and they take their turn.

If one team runs out of “characters who haven’t acted this turn” and the other side still has characters waiting to act, those characters all get to go. Then the turn ends and you start again.

That’s it. Eventually we may have abilities that use the “end of turn” mechanic, but right now it’s just a formality. And we may develop rules for “squads” of enemies, especially when dealing with things like kobolds or goblins where “these goblins are all the same and they all act together” makes sense. And you can imagine rules for the Heroes that let them break these rules in interesting ways. Like the Shadow may have an “I also go now” ability that lets them act WITH another PC.

What this means is; it’s up to us who goes next. Which means every time it’s our turn, right up until there’s only one character left to act, we talk about what we should do.

This may seem like a minor point and it’s not like it produced some life-changing difference in the experience of play compared to other games but, from my point of view (I’m only one player!) it did its job. Every time it was our turn, we talked about what we should do next.

That’s planning and tactics and teamwork. All that from one simple rule. And it seemed to work! It was usually just two players talking about “should I …? Or should you….?” Because it was usually sort of obvious: among who’s left, who should act next? Even when five players could all go, not all five argued that they SHOULD go.

Like for instance, I was playing the Talent. Usually I waited to go until “me acting now” would make a difference and I rarely thought it would. So I wasn’t engaging in the “who should go next” discussion usually. My brain can fry a kobold anytime, doesn't have to be right this second.

Then OD’s tactician wanted to attack a Kobold Discipulus who was standing on a level above us tossing explosives down on us. Well getting up to the second level of this mine was gonna take a little work and probably leave OD exposed once he got up there, so I made a suggestion.

“If I move forward [to get in range] I could use concussive slam to damage that Discipulus and pull it off the edge of the second level, down onto the floor with us. Then OD can attack him!” Also, he took an impact die’s worth of damage when he fell, so that was nice.

This worked! Everyone agreed it was a good idea, and I did it!

This is a very simple example of our initiative system and sure, it COULD result in players not agreeing and arguing and we’ll see how often that happens and whether we need rules to handle it, but my attitude has always been; if the players are arguing over the rules? They’re wasting time; make a ruling and move on.

But if they’re arguing about “what should we do?” They’re playing the game. Let them fight. Within reason!

At the end of my little maneuver, I realized “shit, now I’m up here with the kobolds!” I had used both my maneuver (to get into range) and my action (to attack) which means I really wanted a second maneuver!

Maneuvers

My Talent is very squishy and being up in the front rank was not awesome, and I wanted to run back to the rear. But I had already used my maneuver!

The way this works is; on your turn you get an Action and a Maneuver and you can do them in any order. Most of your abilities require using your action.

But everyone has a bunch of simple things they can do in combat involving positioning. Here’s the current list James wrote up. This does not cover everything you WILL be able to do, just the stuff he came up with that made sense and gave us examples to use in testing;

[Where you see “equal to your Might score” that literally means the number listed after Might. So Might 2 means you can climb two squares for free, and if you want to climb more, roll your might which means rolling 2 attribute dice.]

Maneuvers

Climb: You can climb a number of squares equal to your Might score. If you wish to climb further, make a Might test as part of this maneuver. You can climb one additional square per success up to a maximum of your speed.

Jump: You can climb a number of squares equal to your Might score. If you wish to jump further, make a Might test as part of this maneuver. You can jump one additional square per success up to a maximum of your speed.

Move: Move up to your speed. You can move some of your speed, take an action, then move the rest.

Shift: Shift up to half your speed (rounded down). [Shifting doesn’t provoke opportunity attacks.]

Stand Up: You stand up from prone. You can also move up to half your speed as part of standing up.

Push: You can push an adjacent creature up to a number of squares equal to your Might score. As part of pushing the creature, you can shift up to half your speed, moving in the same direction as the target. You can’t push a creature whose size is greater than yours.

Reload: Reload a crossbow.

Hopefully you can see how the system is shaping up. If you want to do something primarily concerning positioning, either yours or an enemy’s, that’s a maneuver. If you want to attack someone, that’s an action.

Right now we only have generic maneuvers, but you can imagine how some classes could have unique maneuvers! I love the idea that pushing someone is not an action. So you can attack someone AND push them! As long as you were already in position. 😀

Well, I was very much NOT in position. I had used my maneuver to get into range of the Kobold Discipulus and now I was basically in the front rank.

So it was time to test Stamina!

Stamina

We’d all been dancing around the idea of a Second Health Bar or something like it for a few weeks, and I suggested basically combining all our ideas into one thing and testing it. So if this falls apart in testing, that’s on me.

But Stamina is basically a second, independent pool of hit points that you deplete first before taking real damage and lowering your actual hit points. Think “temporary hit points” from 5E except everyone starts every battle with some.

The trick is, you regain ALL your stamina at the end of an encounter. Automatically. I think of it like the Halo shield bar. And it does the same thing.

It encourages you to take risks and put yourself in harm's way up to a point. Because you know; sure I'ma take some hits for this, but I’m going to get all my stamina back at the end of this fight anyway. I might as well use it! As Aimsley Pinwhistle says “no point in dying with your bag of tricks half-full.”

Compare this with actual hit points which do NOT automatically refresh unless…well, actually we don’t know how you recover hit points yet but we expect it’s going to be like this; they recover slowly over time, or can be magically healed quickly at the expense of some long-term resource. And there will probably be milestones where they DO auto-refresh because it’s the end of the adventure, for instance.

We like the idea of a Recovery action, but right now I think we think it gets you some Stamina back based on your Endurance stat. That feels real good to me, because it means that stat now matters in a new and interesting way. We might have some Self Healing like 4E’s Healing Surge, but we really haven’t talked a lot about that. I suspect it would be a Between Combat thing anyway. If you want to recover real damage, i.e. hit points, in combat, you’re gonna need magical healing.

This also helps us understand “how does healing work?” You can have characters like the Tactician who might have a “shout at someone” ability that refreshes some Stamina (“ON YOUR FEET SOLDIER!”) whereas the Conduit or the Censor might have prayers that restore real actual hit points. Then we just gotta figure out how you recover hit points between fights.

Stamina = More Maneuvers

Yeah ok that sounds cool but WHAT IF, right, what IF stamina was ALSO a resource you could SPEND?

Hear me out.

Stamina is not intended to JUST be a temp hp pool, it’s meant to represent your ability to push yourself and keep fighting. Which is one of the things we associate with hit points. But in this system you can also SPEND stamina to take another maneuver. Not another action that’s too useful a thing to earn just by spending stamina (hence why it’s the default result for the crit). Just a maneuver.

I think I started with 6 stamina and 6 hp? And it costs 3 stamina to take another maneuver on your turn. I suggested the Stamina concept, James mathed it out and decided “three stamina to take a second maneuver” was about right and it seemed to work!

Knowing this was how Stamina worked, and seeing that “running up there and telekinetically grabbing that kobold” was going to leave my Squishy Talent in the front rank, I said;

“Could I use my maneuver to run up there, then use my action to grab the kobold, then spend some stamina to get a second maneuver and run my ass back to the rear?”

I asked this because A: I was pretty sure this was how it worked, but James was the GM and he’s the designer who implemented this idea so, best to check with him first but also B: this way the other players would see my thought process, and maybe learn how stamina worked along the way.

James confirmed yes, that is legal, so I did it!

As you can see, being Far Away meant I didn’t get knocked on my ass when the Kobold Warbeast erupted out of the ground.

Explaining it just now took way longer than actually doing it. I ran up, grabbed the kobold with MY MIND, slid him off the ledge he was on, and then I spent 3 stamina to get the hell out of Dodge. Simple. I was now down three Virtual Hit Points, but I was pretty sure that was a worthy trade since it meant I was way safer in the rear.

So, our first test of Stamina as a dual resource worked! But like I said, we knew it would work like that. What we don’t know is; are we overburdening one resource with too much functionality? Do we have the right amount of stamina, does an extra maneuver cost the right amount? What happens when you have someone who can refresh your stamina for you? Do the bad guys all have Stamina? How is it for the GM tracking all that? Do only NAMED enemies have stamina?

Lots more to learn, lots more to test! Some of the things we’re testing are gonna require longer tests with more encounters, so we can see how recovery and healing work.

This might all sound real noodly, and it is. You got successes (🗡️), crits (💥), surges (⚡), hit points, stamina, actions, and maneuvers. That’s a lot! Maybe too much? But this is our Big Tent RPG, it’s designed to model an enormous variety of characters and scenarios and do all that robustly. That means we need a lot of design to grab on to. I think of it as “surface area.”

And it may be we don’t like Stamina as a resource you can spend to get maneuvers, because our game is about battles getting MORE epic as they go, and obviously the longer a battle goes, the less Stamina you’re gonna have.

But I think it’ll work because A: an extra maneuver is probably more useful at the beginning of the battle than the end anyway and B: the stuff you can do with your Class Resource (focus, ferocity, fury…other things beginning with ‘f’) is gonna be way cooler than taking an extra move.

But also I think there’ll be lots of ways to recover stamina during the battle. It’s that kind of resource. Spending and gaining stamina should be common, taking and healing damage should be less common.

Finally, we don’t want to lose that “out of ammunition, fixing bayonets, God Save the King” feeling of desperation, back against the wall gameplay. Being out of stamina, but full of ferocity, should get us that, I think.

“Beaten, broken, outnumbered and outmatched. Forced to rely on cheats and dirty fighting. Situation normal for the Chain of Acheron.”

Weapons

This was also the first test of our new weapon rules. Again, it was fine, I think. Weapons all have properties, you’d recognize most or all of them, and these properties are designed to differentiate between many different weapons.

These properties are all cool! When you see what different weapons can all do, it looks neat. The question is; is it too much? Does everyone remember what their weapons do in the heat of combat?

Here’s what I mocked up…

Overwhelmed is our version of Flanked. According to the rules, you are Overwhelmed when there are three or more enemies adjacent to you. While overwhelmed, adjacent enemies gain +1 impact die on their weapon attacks against you. Impact dice on average add 2.5 success which is the same average as the Proficiency die, but the standard deviation is way higher. The Impact die (a d12) is intended to be the MOST volatile, and so has a Zero Successes facing and a FIVE successes facing and no other die has those.

So on paper it's not a huge deal since the average is just 2.5 but in practice, the fact that it COULD be +5 feels like a big deal, and so getting to roll more impact dice means you feel like you’re doing something epic.

Wounded and Bleeding are both conditions that persist and so they are much more rare than either a crit 💥 or a surge ⚡. But the odds of getting both those symbols are 1:24 which is not THAT far off from getting a crit in a d20 system.

In fact that’s really what I wanted to test with those abilities. I dunno if wounding someone on a 💥 ⚡ is a good idea, I dunno if the Wounded debuff is a good idea, but I liked the idea of SOME abilities firing on a 💥 ⚡, so I thought this was as good a place to test that as any.

You can see me trying to support different archetypes of melee warriors. Like the character who uses Only A Rapier. Okay that sounds cool but what’s the advantage there?

Well a rapier is a light weapon, so if you’re wielding only a rapier you have One Hand Free so it’s harder to overwhelm you (because your weapon is light and you’re not carrying anything else so you can defend against more enemies more easily) AND since it’s light, surges gain you free movement. That feels like a good reward for the player who wants to play a swashbuckling, highly mobile, dueling hero.

A generic Longsword is a Medium weapon and those grant you a little defense, since unlike a dagger or a rapier, it’s heavy enough to block incoming damage and it’s easier to get your sword into position to block incoming damage since it’s not a big heavy War Maul or whatever. And I think there’s some historical precedent there, I did some research on Actual Swordfighting for my novels and they were used as much to block as to attack.

I like it when design ends up mimicking reality but I have zero problem with design that ignores reality in order to satisfy the expectations of fantasy readers and gamers.

Like for instance I wrote up a crossbow’s properties and it included “does not require proficiency” which I did not bother to explain. One team member asked “what does this mean?” and another answered “I think it means you ALWAYS roll the proficiency die even if you’re not trained with it?” And I said “That is exactly what it means!”

Now, that is not great language to express that idea, but it’s a cool idea! And it represents what real crossbows were about. They hit hard and did not require training like a longbow. But, gotta reload them, which takes t i m e.

Weapons also add a flat number of successes to your damage. Previous tests had fake weapon damage built in, but now we had Real Weapon Rules (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) so we stripped all the damage info out of the character sheets and let everyone pick weapons and armor for their characters.

We don’t even have proficiencies yet, we don’t even know how Dual Wielding works, but in spite of this it all seemed to work.

For instance, I could have taken Heavy Armor for my Talent, but I wanted to be highly mobile and so took No Armor and that worked really well for me. Without intending this, it meant I had enough movement to stay in the back, then run all the way up to the front rank and use my action. If I’d taken any armor, I would not have been able to stay safely in the rear AND have enough movement to get into the front rank.

So far it seems to be working, but I don’t know if everyone remembered all their weapon properties? I don’t know if anyone forgot. I just don’t know either way, as I was paying attention to other stuff.

I think it’d all be clearer if we were playing in person with pen-and-paper character sheets. Right now your character lives only in Google Docs and when you just start typing in there, it doesn’t feel like you’re “adding a note” it feels like you’re editing your character class which is a subtle but meaningful difference.

And I don’t even really believe in this weapon design! I think there’s a better version of this same idea, but I couldn’t see it starting from zero, so I did enough work to have something to test, confident that we have smart people who will discover problems and solving those problems will result in the real design.

That’s the process.

We also tested giving everyone something they can do on a surge, since surges are on the Attribute die and could come up anytime. Right now you get to shift 1 square per surge and that seems about right. But, like this other stuff, it’s hard to tell from one test whether that’s the ‘right’ design. If you have abilities or items that use a surge, it’s up to you how you spend them.

We like that “it’s your resource, do what you want with it” design, but that means we need multiple uses for these things and that means the design gets a little more complex. It’s a trade-off.

NEGOTIATION

Hello, this is the debut of the prototype of our Second Design Pillar. Like everything else, it went okay. 😀

The premise here is that there are often times in a Fantasy RPG where negotiating with someone, be they an enemy leader, an enemy lieutenant, a shopkeeper, an inamorata’s parents, the Director of Antiquities at the Royal College of Sorcery, becomes a critical and dramatic moment in the adventure. Either in-combat or out-of-combat.

And a kind of binary, pass-fail system doesn’t seem robust enough for the kinds of outcomes we want to simulate. We want the following range of results;

• Yes.
• Yes, and…
• Yes, but…
• No
• No, but…
• No, and…!

And that means we need something with a little more teeth than a simple pass/fail skill check. Even if not every NPC and not every encounter supports all those potential results.

The basic premise of the current system is thuslywise;

Anyone you’d be likely to negotiate with (most NPCs, enemy leaders and lieutenants, but NOT other PCs, that’s verboten) has an Attitude, like Hostile, Suspicious (of YOU), Neutral, Friendly, Allied etc… We don’t know how granular this particular thermometer is, but you get the idea.

And if you want to negotiate with them to adjust their attitude, you need to A: make an argument and B: roll. Actual adventures will tell you what these attitudes mean for this NPC. Like “If you get Queen Bargnot to Neutral, she’ll call off her gobbos. If you get her to Friendly she’ll loan you a unit of Goblin Light Infantry. If you get her to Allied she’ll loan you her elite Goblin Sappers.”

Now, “making an argument” doesn’t mean you have to roleplay the whole thing in character. You CAN do that but you can also just…describe to the GM how you’re trying to convince this person.

What you CAN’T do is just roll. Sorry, you need to actually think about A: what does this person want and B: how can I use that to convince them to help us? This is always how I’ve run negotiations. Some players, especially those coming from video games with dialog trees where there is always a Best Answer and you just gotta figure out which button to push, don’t like this. They get frustrated that they actually have to think about this stuff because yeah, you might have a dumb idea. That should be less likely to move the needle than a good idea.

A lot of new players who haven’t experienced this before get angry that “do what we say or we’ll kill you!” isn’t a good way to get someone to trust you. My rule is; you can’t use the dice to avoid playing the game. If you want Queen Bargnot to stand down, and maybe help, you need to figure out what she wants, and then formulate an argument.

Now “figuring out what this NPC wants” is a big deal! If you’ve read The Siege of Castle Rend in Strongholds & Followers you saw that every major NPC has a “motivation” section describing what they actually want. Specifically, what is motivating them to do the things they’re doing?

We added a bunch of sample dialog the GM can either use at the table, or just read to get a feel of how this person talks. Between just those two features, not anything like a system, we saw a LOT of players and GMs who were stoked because the players actually negotiated with Bonebreaker Dorokor! And each negotiation was unique! It was super cool reading players’ after-action reports of that adventure, mostly because of the ways the negotiation went (or didn’t go!).

Our goal is just to give those ideas some teeth. With the right system, you’d get bonuses for stuff like “do you speak this person’s native language? How well?” People are pretty impressed if you can negotiate with them in their own tongue, and you’re less likely to be misunderstood. It’s ALSO much easier to figure out “what do these kobolds want?” If you can understand them while eavesdropping, or just understand what they’re saying to each other in combat.

If all this works, suddenly there’s a reason to speak different languages, and even support for different levels of fluency!

After we’d pounded on these kobolds for a couple of rounds and thinned their numbers quite dramatically, a Special Kobold came out and waved a white flag. They want to take us to their Fleet Captain! It was time to negotiate!

Well, in point of fact, I think the battle was basically over already. James was advancing the plot and skipping a bunch of stuff because we had to wrap it up and he wanted to try Negotiation.

Once your enemy is surrendering the time for negotiation is usually past. But we knew there were a BUNCH of kobolds back in that warren so the idea was we were negotiating now to avoid fighting the rest of their century.

I jumped at this! “Well, my Talent watched the Original Star Trek episode Devil In The Dark and so suggests the humans and kobolds could work together.” The humans will work the mine and share the proceeds, in either cash or forged weapons, and the kobolds will help defend the mine and their warren.”

This seems like a reasonable offer which means it’s an Appeal To Logic. 😀

Along with an Attitude, each NPC has three negotiation defenses. Three ways they can be convinced. Logos, Ethos, and Pathos.

Logos is an Appeal to Reason (i.e. Logic) like my offer to the Kobold Centurion.

Ethos is an Appeal to Ethics. I.e. “this is the right thing to do.”

Pathos is an Appeal to Emotion. Basically making someone feel bad. Or really, feel whatever emotion you need them to feel. Guilt, love, anger. Whatever. Making an enemy lieutenant angry at the villain they’re working for is just as effective as convincing them what they’re doing is illogical.

Now, two things should be obvious. A: it should be clear how each of these work and you probably already have ideas about how you might use them but also B: there’s a lot of overlap between these! Often, the right thing to do IS the logical thing to do! Well, that’s a feature, it’s by design. We want the system to be flexible and it’s a good thing if you can come up with an argument and see maybe two different ways it could be used. Because then you get to pick your best stat (or, more likely, your skill).

My Talent had the idea but Hannah’s Mage actually speaks Kobold, so I beamed my idea into her brain and let her do the negotiating.

In kobold, she made a peace offering and it included not only a reason to stop fighting, but a way forward that could be profitable for their century. It’s always important, in a fight, to give your opponent a way to cease hostilities without losing face. Sun Tzu called it “building a golden bridge for your opponent to retreat across.” This is the rare instance of me quoting Sun Tzu rather than von Clausewitz. 😀

So it was time for a roll! Reason is used against Logos, Insight (formerly Intuition) is used against Ethos, and Presence helps you manipulate your opponent’s emotions, which is Pathos,

• Reason vs Logos
• Insight vs Ethos
• Presence vs Pathos

I feel like this is both straightforward and powerful. But it’ll take a lot more than this one test to determine that. This is the recurring theme of this update. One test can prove something broken, but it can’t prove something balanced. That takes many testings.

Anyway, Hannah rolled well, and we got a deal! Yay!

This was pretty good, not because I think it made a huge difference in the encounter (it DID save us fighting several more encounters full of kobolds) but because the system seemed to make sense to all the players, even those who had never heard this idea before and weren’t negotiating.

To me, the great success of this moment was that it really very closely simulated a lot of the fiction that inspires our fantasy gaming in the first place. It's actually pretty rare in the movies and TV shows and comics and novels that we read and watch that both sides just fight to the death. Usually the heroes giving their enemies a chance to stand down and negotiate is what makes them heroes. It's what separates them from the villains.

Of course, If this isn't your group's style, there's no requirement to use these rules. We could have just kept fighting the kobolds no problem. Or even just accepted their surrender and dictated terms like in any other campaign.

But the fact that we had the tools to not only give them an out, so we didn't have to keep fighting, but also "end the episode" like that meant I felt a lot more like Captain Kirk or Captain Picard than I normally do playing fantasy RPGs.

Kobolds & The Mage

Lastly, this was the first test of our Kobolds. They seemed to do their thing. They are intended to be easier to kill than Goblins, but much more organized and coordinated and therefore not something you can ignore. That all seemed to work as expected.

After much discussion about “what is magic in this world?” And “what is the fantasy of playing a Wizard” we came up with the idea that magic is powerful, it breaks the rules, but it is unpredictable. Now, that’s just one fantasy of being a Wizard, we may end up with more than one way to be “someone who casts spells.” That’s fine!

But armed with this specific archetype, Hannah came up with a mechanic that included both spells and a Side Effect Chart. Now, this is not my design and I was not playing the Mage so I dunno how much fun it was to play? But it seemed cool! Hannah managed to ‘encourage’ all the kobolds forward into our choke point by lighting a 10’ square of the mine on fire.

This had the Unintended Side Effect of causing her to levitate for a round. Mages roll the Cosmic Die and look the result up on the Side Effects chart. The idea is; the more you do stuff the less chance of a side effect. But also your most powerful stuff is probably whatever you just learned. So at 1st level, you got some spells you just learned, very risky. But eventually they become rote and there’s no risk. But by then you’ll have leveled up and now you know new more powerful spells! But you’ve never cast them before so there’s a good chance of a side-effect. Literally a learning curve!

Now, is this how mages work in this game? We have no idea! But it seemed cool? Might require dialing in the side effects, we don’t want it to feel like Wild Magic or a Wand of Wonder where suddenly your team’s Tactician turns into a potted plant. (although…) We think it’ll be mostly stuff related to the spell itself—ways in which the spell works but differently than intended or at more of a cost. Unpredictability balancing power.

We probably have at least two different ideas of how spellcasters might work, and that’s separate from the Talent which has its own system of Strain and Clarity.

That’s about it! We tested a lot of new shit! None of it seemed obviously broken but it’s gonna be a LOT of testing before we know how exactly to dial all these things in.

Next playtest? No idea! Flee, Mortals might mean we don’t do a test this week, that’s fine.

In the meantime, I ain’t got to make one of these cool classes yet, so I’m going to mock up a version of the MCDM Barbarian, aka The Fury. Stay tuned!

This report written while listening to Soft Music To Do Nothing To II by Red Means Recording.