Tag: Playtesting
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On a mission from O.D.D.
For my new playtest of Agents of the O.D.D., I’m running a series of one-shots and short arcs, linked into a campaign. Some of that is my own material (like the intro adventure from the currently available edition of Agents), but most of it is adapted from published adventures, including several from Michael Prescott’s excellent…
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Collecting magic items with a day job
I love roleplaying games with tons of weird little magic items and strange oddities. They’re the secret sauce in games like Into the Odd, Numenera, and (since I realized what those games were doing that I liked so much) my own in-progress game Odd Luck Charms. I think those sorts of things work even better…
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Metatopia Design Diary: Agents of the O.D.D.
I ran two sessions of Agents of the O.D.D. at Metatopia, a convention geared toward playtesting games in development. The feedback was a mix of things that made me go, “Great, I was planning on doing that already!” and things that made me go, “Hmm, I’m really going to have to think about that.” Some key takeaways: More…
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Metatopia Design Diary: Nighttide
Last weekend, I ran my first playtest of Nighttide (and the Gauge system on which it’s based), a diceless gothic horror game inspired by Bloodborne and Castlevania. It was a lot of fun! Also, it didn’t work. That session did suggest that it could work, though, and that this game may be worth developing into something more detailed than a page-long scenario…
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Playtesting the dullest demonslaying
Yesterday, my group took Grave for a spin for the third time. I knew that they were nearing the end of their journey through the Veins of the Earth, so I prepared a number of other locations for them to visit next, unsure of which they’d pick. An ever surprising lot, they picked the absolute…
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Design Diary: One (more) foot in the Grave
Much to my own surprise, I think I’m about to finish Grave—a variant on Ben Milton’s Knave, built for soulslike games. Today was only the second session I’ve run with these rules, but after the session, the players generally agreed that it’s pretty close to done. I shouldn’t be so surprised, though: The rules don’t…
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Grave: Hacking Knave for soulslike adventure
I’ve been wondering aloud for months about how (and whether) to fix the rules for my soulslike game, Exhumed—but learning that its working title is taken by yet another metal band may have been the final straw. (“Titles that inadvertently turn out to be taken by metal bands” may be the only consistent thing in…
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Exhumed design diary: Action-packed minutiae
I’m still sorting through the trickiest design issues in Exhumed, my soulslike tabletop RPG: how frequently characters act, and the options available to them when they do act, as I wrote awhile back. I got to try some ideas in my last playtest, and have been approaching various problems with different kinds of actions atomically,…
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Lessons from playtesting once in a blue (super wolf blood) moon
When I last wrote about playtesting Exhumed, I lamented that it seemed impossible to deliver a fun experience to my friends and whip my rules into shape. I had been trying to test so many different mechanics across so many sessions that each session was getting bogged down with the fallout of experimental fixes that…
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Designing a Soulslike Action Economy
The greatest design problem I face with my soulslike tabletop RPG, Exhumed, is getting the feel right for the action economy—that is, the rules for how frequently each character can act, and what they can use those actions to do. When I showed readers online the initial approach, the most common reaction was doubt that…
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Playtesting Perils
My soulslike RPG playtest has hit a bit of a road block. As I described in a recent playtest review, Exhumed is already technically a playable game, and my free time is at a premium, so I jumped right into running a campaign to test every system. Unsurprisingly, this has indeed revealed some issues, which…
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Playtest Review: Exhumed
Every time I’ve run Exhumed—an RPG built on the Into the Odd rules, and inspired by Dark Souls—it seems to have worked more or less like I intended. Playtesters familiar with soulslike games tell me it manages to evoke the same feel, and players new to the genre assure me it’s still interesting and accessible for them too. The…
Pretendo Games 