Yesterday I playtested my in-progress tabletop roleplaying “story game,” Clash. Clash<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n
Clash<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n
Anyway, we finally started playtesting, and this is session 2. We had 4 players and the session was about 3 hours.<\/p>\n
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<\/i> against the discrimination within her own organization.<\/p>\n
We had a shoot out, an arrest, threatening notes left on doorsteps, and generally a great time. My biggest goal with Clash<\/i> is for it to be fun<\/i>, 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"