Tag: playtesting

Game Design Brunch 1-19-14

We had a game design brunch on Sunday. This time it was just four of us, thanks to the plague hitting Pittsburgh and taking out multiple members, plus people being busy due to work, etc. I missed people but it was still good to get together and do the business we needed to do.

First up was Clash. I’m taking Clash to Dreamation in February (OMG NERVOUS), which is exciting and challenging all at once! Problem is, I’m terrible at pitching games and explaining what they’re about. Cue me bothering my Game Design Brunchers for phrases, keywords, and the like about Clash.

(the following is not verbatim)

Marc said: It’s a game where you give up what you want in order to get what you need.

Rachel said: It’s a game about relationships and how strained they can be.

Everyone agreed that it really is a game about conflict and that I should zoom in on that, and the sacrifice aspect. I also asked for a few examples of stories that could be told with Clash. Number one, as usual, is Romeo & Juliet. I wish I knew more about the play! Others included our current game-in-progress (the Untouchables vs. the Mob), as well as high school rivalries (which can get surprisingly messy), and John says Eastern Europe during WWII. I know nothing about WWII so I’m not helpful there, but it seems rich for the taking.

Finally, for Clash, I had some thinky time about how the game requires specific things, based on comments at the table. John, Marc, and Rachel said that they noticed that they needed to have time interacting with each other, so it’s hard to do people on distant battlefields, you need people forced together in space. One of the best examples of this in media I can think of is North & South, which I saw multiple times as a kid. I’m sure it’s epically problematic, but I <3 Patrick Swayze and was a big fan. The big thing about the miniseries is that the characters are literally at war with each other but still find themselves in the same places – family gatherings, business meetings, etc. That’s the kind of thing I’m looking at for Clash. Take tons of bad blood and problems, shake ’em up, and put everyone into one place. Bam. Done.

With this in mind, I added a new mechanic to the game. Locations are now like, a thing! And there are mechanical bonuses based on your location, plus some narrative stuff with locations. I’m pretty excited about that.

Up next, we discussed Tabletop Blockbuster and the possibility for going back to positive and negative traits. So far, all of our players have liked the idea, we just need to playtest it now. I think it will work out just fine.

Finally, we did some work with Marc’s Legends of Bardic Distortion game, which he needs to be writing more about. We helped out putting together some new talents for the Kensei tier of talents, and it sounds like we also figured out some stuff that he’d been sitting on. Cool beans.

It was pretty damn productive! I love these brunches.

Clash Playtest 1-11-2014

Yesterday I playtested my in-progress tabletop roleplaying “story game,” Clash. Clash is a game about exploring big conflicts from a small perspective. You fight, you argue, and you look at the moments that change the world. It’s a GM-less, team-based game with a table you roll against to have “The World” act against the players.

Clash has been a big challenge for me. It was put together in a single day and then fiddled with and messed with for about a year before I got the courage to playtest it. I’ve had near-zero luck getting playtesters outside my group to play, but I’ve finally got my group into it. I have a lot of emotional investment in it, as it’s my first solo game, so playtesting was really a tough subject to broach with my group.

Anyway, we finally started playtesting, and this is session 2. We had 4 players and the session was about 3 hours.

The setting is Chicago during the height of prohibition, where one team is playing the Mob and the other team is the Untouchables. We have a pretty nice mix of characters, including a young rookie on one side and the son of the woman mob boss on the other. We’ve fiddled with history a bit in part to allow for some women characters, such as my Untouchable, Penelope Wilson, who is a woman fighting against the Mob and against the discrimination within her own organization.

We had a shoot out, an arrest, threatening notes left on doorsteps, and generally a great time. My biggest goal with Clash is for it to be fun, so that was good to see. Players enjoying themselves, cracking jokes when the time is appropriate (and sometimes inappropriate), getting into the gritty parts of conflict – that part of the game is happening.

The mechanics work. Right now I’m fiddling with some numbers to make it run more smoothly, but it seems to be going pretty much right. I don’t think I’ll have many more changes, honestly, because most of it is rewording or fiddly bits. I haven’t made any big alterations so far, and it seems to be working well. I’m going to keep playtesting for a bit, but more than anything I want to get the game in other people’s hands to see if they run into problems.

The biggest change (addition, really) this time around was to write in rules about how to handle multiple actor conflicts. It was just simply adding some wording and I think the rules I wrote in work great for the narrative and mechanical purposes.

Overall I think the playtest went really well. I’m hoping to do a crunch and play some more but I don’t know how much success I will have there. I just want to play more!