Ultrablamtacular!

So. The long-awaited brother-inclusive playtest #3 happened on Friday. My immediate reaction was that it was awful – that everything that had been broken was still broken and that some things were getting worse. A little bit of time between me and the event has softened that impression considerably. So, with that in mind, I’m going to lay out first what I think went right.

• Setting creation – This was actually pretty great. A bunch of different ideas floated by players sort of bounced around and coalesced like a planet forming from cosmic gas and debris. It became a multi-genre game of dimension-hopping special agents. And nobody suggested that to start with, it grew from the group, which I think was awesome. I now see that I need to provide more tools and instructions for this phase of the game.
• Character Generation – This went really well, too. As noted above, it was a pretty challenging setting. We had two aliens (one of them a hive-construct), a cowboy, a 1920’s moll, and an aspiring pirate queen. The system handled the huge variety and disparity of characters and character elements with what I would humbly submit to be aplomb. There was one rough spot in chargen…the selection of the Weakness half of Strength / Weakness pairs. It caused friction with the lovely Jona complaining that I never accepted her Weaknesses. I almost got defensive and started  to explain the requirements again, when I realized that she was totally right – that system was broken. The idea of having your fellow players assign the Weakness half was suggested, and it worked great. I frankly don’t remember who’s idea that was. I hope that it was mine.
• Attempts – I think everyone was more comfortable conducting Attempts, the core of the whole system. Adding up a Score, determining a Pool from it, and rolling for Success became second nature pretty quickly, at least from my point of view. Even for the never-played-an-RPG-before member of the session.
• Narrating facts from extra Successes. That went a lot better than last time.
• Complication – A player finally took a Complication in order to turn Failure into Success. It worked and she spent the rest of the session looking for a chance to get rid of it, but always decided that the other player’s Attempt was more important. That’s the sort of choice I wanted Complications to spur.
• A name was suggested. It fit really well and made me very excited. But it’s already taken by a number of RPGs and RPG-related things like websites and companies, so I’m looking for a variant that’s unclaimed. Or at least, less claimed. Props to Jona for discovering the obvious name for this creature I’m building.
• Experience – Once at the end of Character Creation and at least once during play, Experience was traded in for Properties. It worked, proceeding smoothly, quickly, and to everyone’s satisfaction.

And that’s the good. But I started this post declaring that it was some sort of disaster, which it wasn’t, but there were things that made it seem that way. Some of those things include:

• Trust vs. Confidence – The concept of Trust as a piece of Confidence was confusing. Players were adding the Trust and Confidence scores and putting that many counters on their sheets. This requires both a better diagram of the concept on the sheet, and a better explanation in the rules.
• Confidence tracking – The idea that the number in the Confidence box is for storing your Confidence between sessions – that it’s sort of like your max hit points – while the number of counters on your sheet is your current Confidence, no matter what the sheet says.
• Trust in combat. It was glaringly wrong, but I think I have the way to make it simply right.
• Overall complexity – I’ve had a good reason to put in every rule I’ve got, but they seem to be creating unexpected consequences. I started this game with one mechanic and one table, and I’d really like it to stay about that simple. Look for a post soon about complexity, emergent complexities, and such. This was what made things feel broken, what made me cut things short, why we only had a single fight and no Minions. I think I can get the real rules without all the examples and explanations onto a sheet or two, and that’s something that needs to happen now.

I welcome the comments of participants and non-participants alike below. Honest is better than kind, but kind doesn’t suck.