The Delian Test

Matt ran the Delian Tomb for a few of us in the office last week. But we weren’t playing fifth edition. We were playing our new RPG.

James Introcaso, MCDM’s Lead Game Designer, here. I know you’ve been following our updates for a bit about the creation of the MCDM RPG. We’ve got a few things to share from the latest playtest, which wasn’t perfect, but was a lot of fun, which means we’re moving in the right direction! To me, fun is probably the most important factor in everything we create. We might make something that works or is even elegant, but if it ain’t fun then we haven’t given you a good reason to engage with it.

The Dice

We are going to use funky dice, AKA dice with unique symbols instead of numbers on their facings. Using our own symbols allows us to control how much the dice swing between extremes and avoid null results and devastating results like, “Well, I rolled max damage on the ogre’s club so your 1st-level PC is dead before you ever got to act.” If you have a die that goes from 1 to 8, you need to account for all that could come of that. It means more hit points for monsters, leading to grindy combat. By using our own original dice, we can keep the design focused on fun. We can also add special symbols to the dice, like Critical Effects, Surges, or law and chaos symbols! More on those below, but they’re awesome.

Just like any board game you buy comes with everything you need to play, our RPG will too. We’re also working on a few other solutions to make it easy for you to possibly print your own dice, make temporary labels to place on dice you own, allow dice makers to sell dice with our symbols, or use digital tools. More on those solutions as we figure them out. It’s all part of the process, but we’re dedicated to making the game, including the dice, accessible.

Right now our system uses four kinds of dice. These could all change, including the names, but this is where they currently stand:

• d6 Proficiency Die. The Proficiency Die represents your training with an attack, skill, save, or piece of equipment. It’s the least swingy and most reliable of the dice, since it represents your training and expertise. Each side of this die has 2 or 3 successes (swords), and one side also includes an explosion symbol, which we’re currently calling a Critical Effect. When you roll a Critical Effect, you can take an extra action on your turn (just once per turn), or activate a cool special ability granted by your class (for PCs) or stat block (for NPCs). Your ancestry, background, etc. may tap into Critical Effects as well, but we haven’t gotten that far into the design yet.
• d8 Attribute Die. Attribute Dice represent the strength of your attributes. Whenever you make an attack, save, or other test, you’re always rolling at least one of these. Every test is tied to an attribute, and you roll a number of these dice equal to that attribute’s score. If you’ve got a Presence of 2 and you’re making a Presence test, roll two Attribute Dice! Each die has 1 to 3 successes on a side and might have a Surge, a special resource used to activate or strengthen special effects granted by your class, spells, equipment, and other features. Surges aren’t as powerful as Critical Effects. They represent a quick boost of strength or flash of adrenaline. For instance, whenever a goblin rolls a Surge, they can move 1 square for each Surge rolled, representing their mobile nature and ability to get out of trouble.
• d12 Impact Die. An Impact Die represents special circumstances or resources being poured into an action. Attacking a prone enemy with a melee attack? Add an Impact Die to the damage roll. A special power up granted to you by the Conduit might give you an Impact Die to use on a future roll. Using a special power that costs a lot of your resources might add Impact Dice to a damage roll you make with it. These dice just have successes and are the swingiest of them all, going from 0 (a blank side) to 5 successes.
• d12 Cosmic Die. The Cosmic Die is a special die with law and chaos symbols on it. It’s generally only used in special circumstances and represents the fickle forces of the universe that can help or hinder a creature! This game takes place in a fantasy world where the gods and forces like luck and fate are real, so we created a die that represents those forces. This isn’t a game about the forces of law battling the forces of chaos. Rather this is a game for those forces that tangibly exist and can influence the action. Everyone rolls the Cosmic Die when their character is knocked unconscious by dropping to 0 hit points to see if the fates give them the will to get back up and keep fighting. There’s a 1 in 12 chance of that happening. In fact, it happened in our test, and it was awesome. This die is also used for cosmic drama (see below)!

Roll for Impact

You may have read in a previous post that in our game you don’t roll to hit another creature with an attack then roll damage. Instead you JUST roll damage. We call this, “rolling for impact,” because you’re rolling not to see if you hit or miss, but to see how much impact your action has on the story. It’s working really well. To quote Matt, “I don’t miss rolling to hit at all.”

When you attack another creature, you roll dice, count up the successes, add any bonus successes you might have from a weapon, then deal damage equal to the number of successes MINUS the target’s Armor Points. A Tactician with a Might score of 2 using a longsword to make a Might attack would roll:

• The proficiency die. because they are proficient in Might attacks
• Two attribute dice, because Might, the attribute they’re using has a score of 2
• Then add 3 to the overall number of successes, because the longsword adds 3 successes to any attack made with it. (Right now our understanding of weapons is pretty basic, so how they influence the game before damage and Surges is still in progress.)

It might be that the Tactician rolls 5 successes plus another 3 for the longsword for a total of 8 damage. The goblin they’re attacking has 3 Armor Points, so the Tactician deals a total of 5 damage to the goblin. The Tactician’s player can just announce the damage total, and the GM can just then subtract the goblin’s armor points from the damage. There is no stopping to check to see if you hit or not.

Oh, and the Tactician wasn’t just making any old longsword attack. They were using Leading Strike, a unique signature attack they can do at will. So it’s a longsword attack, and it means that the next ally to hit that goblin deals extra damage in the form of a bonus Impact Die.

And the Tactician also rolled a surge on this attack! They spend the Surge to activate their shield’s special feature and push the goblin 1 square away. Awesome. All of that action was resolved in a single roll and took less than 30 seconds. The goblin was damaged, marked for more, and pushed away.

There are times a creature’s Armor Points can reduce all incoming damage to 0. When that happens, the creature can use their reaction to make a counterattack against their foe! Thanks to these rules, there was never a “nothing happens” turn during our test. That felt really, really good.

First Adventure

Right now we’re trying to nail down fighting monsters. We want this pillar of the game to be fun before we start constructing the politics and negotiation pillars of the game and then layering more goodness onto those supports. To that end, we’ve basically only played single combat encounters in some relatively sparse areas. This was the first time we tried a miniadventure, and with that came some new insights.

For instance, when a player needed to jump across a pit, Matt improvised some rules for how far you’re able to jump without rolling any dice and what sort of attribute test needed to be made to try to jump further. “You can jump a number of squares equal to your Might score,” seems very reasonable, as all our characters had a Might of 1 or 2. You get that for free. But if you want to go further, “Roll a number of Attribute Dice equal to your Might score, and jump additional squares equal to the number of successes.” That’s another 1 to 3 squares per die! It meant most of us would clear 3 squares across the pit, but for the characters with a Might score of 1, there was some risk. The fact that Matt was able to create rules that made sense so quickly off the top of his head means that our core design is working pretty well. There might be a cap on how far you can jump overall as we tune this rule.

And of course, someone DID fall in the pit, which meant we needed to improvise falling rules too! There were a few other examples of this, but those also worked well, but that’s another blog post.

New Classes

This was the first time we ran a test with four players and one GM. It meant that revised versions of the Beastheart and the Tactician were there, but we needed two new-to-the-MCDM-RPG classes for the other players. I wrote up an MCDM version of the Talent and a totally new class, the Conduit.

The Conduit is our version of a priest. They manage two resources: virtue and wrath. These resources are meant to be dramatic and evocative, but still easy and fun to imagine for anyone serving a god or saint, or elder power or nature spirit. Even a forest defender who serves the Wode and doesn’t worship the gods holds some things sacred and gets really angry at other behaviors. At the start of the Conduit’s turn in combat, they roll the Cosmic Die. Law symbols generate virtue, which is used to heal and buff allies. Chaos symbols generate wrath, which is used to smite enemies. The person playing the Conduit was fairly new to RPGs in general and not a fan of D&D … and they really loved playing the class and game. To me, that is a GIANT win.

The Talent, similar to our fifth edition version of the class, builds strain as they manifest powers that harm and move enemies and allies. Strain debuffs you as you gain it (and it can actually kill you if you take too much… something that can only happen voluntarily), so it means the talent plays a little differently than other classes at the moment. The Talent’s resource hinders them as they build it, so they can do cool stuff at the start of an encounter and need to use weaker powers toward the end. That’s not the gameplay loop we’re going for right now. We want you to build up to your best abilities so longer battles or adventuring days get more exciting and don’t become slogs.

But I have plans to address this issue with the Talent. Right now the Talent has a way to lose strain in combat. For the next round, I want to try that when they lose the strain it turns into another resource. Maybe called clarity? I dunno. Name TBA. And clarity can be used to do your COOLEST talent stuff. That way the talent can still play in a unique way, have strain to manage (something our testers really like in the 5e version), and have a unique resource building up. That’s just one way to do it, so things could change! Might be too many resources.

Movement Matters

In a way that hasn’t ever mattered when I’ve played other RPGs, movement mattered a lot during our test. I played the beastheart and there was never a turn when my companion or hero just stood in place. A tactical and cinematic RPG should have a lot of movement!

So how can we move so much?

• Special Actions That Move You. Many of our PCs and NPCs have actions that allow them to move themself or other creatures around the battlefield. The talent can move friend and foe alike with their mind. The tactician offers free movement to allies. The beastheart has a power that lets them (and their companion) move before or after attacking. The goblin cursespitter can teleport, and all goblins can get free movement from Surges.
• Normal Actions that Move You. Right now on your turn you have a move and an action. But you can use your move to move your speed, or move up to half your speed without provoking opportunity attacks (yep, we got OAs), or to push another creature (including willing allies) a distance equal to your Might score.

So we’ve given you a lot of ways to move yourself and your foes, but we need to give you REASONS to do it. Right now there are three reasons why people were moving all over the place on the map:

• Shorter Ranges. Getting into or out of the range of someone else’s attack is a big deal in any RPG. Most of our current weapons, powers, spells, and abilities have a range of 5 or 10 squares (a few have longer ranges). By keeping the ranges relatively short, it means that archers and mages can’t just post up in one spot for an entire fight. It also means that their targets can keep their distance to avoid being hit, drawing foes into the fray, and that the Tactician or Beastheart might be tossing enemies back towards the Talent so that their foes get riddled with mind darts.
• Overwhelmed. When a creature is surrounded by several foes, they are overwhelmed. A melee attack against an overwhelmed creature deals an extra Impact Die of damage. So you want to both overwhelm other creatures and AVOID being overwhelmed. We’re still playing around with what the right number of foes to overwhelm a creature is. In the test we used the creature’s highest ability score plus their level (which meant that it was three for all the PCs and most NPCs). Why the highest ability score? Because I can see Might, Agility, Endurance, Reasons, Intuition, and Presence all playing a part in helping a creature NOT become overwhelmed. That may be too weird or noodly an equation though, so we may instead do something more straightforward like Agility score plus level creatures.
• Bouncing Off the Walls. Another rule was improvised during our playtest when Hannah’s Talent knocked a goblin against the wall of the Delian Tomb with her Concussive Slam signature action. She thought this should do extra damage to the goblin and Matt agreed. Pushing a creature into a wall deals extra damage to them. Makes sense to me! You deal 1 extra damage to the creature for every square’s worth of movement you have left when you push them into a wall or other obstacle like a pillar. It means putting your foes against the wall or a pillar is a good idea, while also avoiding such structures yourself.

These three things kept the game moving and dynamic, which was a real pleasure to see.

Side Initiative

We used side initiative in the playtest and that seemed to work well. This means that the PCs go and then the NPCs (or vice versa). If one side surprises the other, they get to act first. If no one has surprise, roll to see who goes first.

In early testing, side initiative seemed to show that whichever side went first TROUNCED the other. So I tweaked a lot of the math, and now it works much better. It never felt like a cakewalk for the heroes if they got to go first, but it was still a decent advantage.

Side initiative allowed the players to strategize, but it was noted by some that they still felt like they didn’t feel like they had much reason to pay attention to other players’ turns. To combat this, we’re going to try interleaving actions in our next test. Basically when your side goes, you can take your move or action, then allow the other players to do the same, then finish your turns. This can keep players engaged during each other’s turns and allows for even more granular strategies.

With interleaving actions, creatures can do things like move into position to overwhelm another creature and then all attack and get the benefit of overwhelmed (instead of just the third attacker to join the fray). We think we can easily track which actions you’ve taken on a turn with coins, index cards, or some other tool. It might be a mess, but we’re going to give it a shot!

Cosmic Drama!

If you read our previous posts, you know that the Cosmic Die can be rolled at any point during the game to beseech the forces of the timescape to aid you when the chips are down. We internally refer to this as “rolling for drama!” When the die is rolled, the results allow creatures tuned to law or chaos to take very special actions. In our test, the rule was that each PC could roll for drama once during the session. Turns out that is too often.

We only had two of our four PCs roll the Cosmic Die. The first time the result was just a single chaos symbol, which meant all the goblins and the beastheart got to act. Basically, a little more than half a round of combat happened in the middle of a round. The second time the Cosmic Die was rolled, it showed one law and one chaos symbol, which meant EVERY creature got to do something. It was like having a whole round of combat shoved into the middle of a round. Sometimes the result on a die is three symbols, and I can only imagine how that would affect the pacing of combat.

Now, don’t get me wrong, AWESOME stuff happened when we rolled for Drama! The Talent picked up the Conduit WITH HER MIND and carried him 10 squares over a pit and into the fray. Goblins shot many arrows and cleaved many foes! The Beastheart and companion got to move and attack in a synchronized pounce! But it took a long time to resolve it all and ultimately left us confused about where we were in initiative after resolving the drama.

I think we need to adjust two things to make drama happen faster. First, rolling for drama is something that should happen less often. It should be special, not something that happens every combat. I think we may make it so the players can do it once per session or thereabouts and the GM can do it once per session. We may tie a dramatic recharge to it as well, like maybe after a certain number of encounters everyone can roll again.

The second adjustment is that we need these actions to happen quickly. A talent moving someone 10 squares is dramatic, fun, and resolves quickly. A beastheart and companion both getting to move and attack takes a lot more time and is basically something they’re already doing on their turns. These effects should be special but simple, because they’re basically interrupts and there are going to be some rolls for drama where everyone gets in on the action.

Little Changes, Many Tests

We don’t want to change TOO much in our next test, though we absolutely could. Changing cosmic drama, adding in interleaving actions, and making a few tweaks to each class and the goblins should be plenty for now. If we change a lot, it can be difficult to identify what exactly made the difference between the Delian Test and whatever we do next.

In the meantime, we’ve got Mortals to make Flee and an ARC to ADIA. Hopefully we’ll have another playtest and more to report to you all soon!

—James