Playtest thoughts and other things that are happening right now

Man, never try to write an RPG mid-semester. You'd think I'd have learned that lesson watching poor John Mørke practically kill himself on EX3 but no, I just gotta time everything like a complete idiot.

Playtests so far:

1. My primary in-house, consisting of 3 sessions total. Set in the Demon City fighting the nascent dark prince Rebi Ra, the party has yet to make contact with him directly.
Thus far:

• Biker gangs have been punched down in bloody-knuckled combat
• A meat stall owner was spared a grizzly demise
• A miniboss fallen Golden Lion was put down after a thorough emotional flensing from the party's pet demon
• The rooftop garden slaves were freed
• The party was forced to retreat from the fire-demon guarding the approach to Ra's palace after it summoned a Rank 6 wall of wraithly fire to keep them at bay. Also, they were thoroughly burned by it's ghost meteors.

2. My secondary live playtest, which you can listen to in all its glory right here. 

Stuff that happened:

• Our heroes combined their efforts to leap over the moat leading into the Demon City
• Some evil cultists were Akira-exploded with a gory use of psychic powers
• A kung-fu rivalry sprang up between the party and an invisible psychic prince

3. My tertiary one-off playtest, which also encompassed character generation.

• The only cool thing of note was a kung-fu battle where yet more unfortunate bikers met a fiery end at the hands of Fire God's Breath. 
• Are Radioactive Scorpions a draw for female players? Seems to be the case!

Additional stuff:

A series of videos about solo play are also in existence! Perhaps you'll find them entertaining, perhaps informative! In any event, here they are! 

There's a fourth one too, but the audio is missing so. I'll skip that one!

SO! What have we learned from all this? What's going into the next (and final!) draft?

I've got a few things from the starting-level playtest:

• Character build options are a bit lacking. I mean, past the design intent; I need to finish character equipment options. Some options are a little cloudy (like which Gupt Kala/ Skill Masteries are available to Ronin, for example). Some tightening is called for.
• Movement needs to be split into speed and maneuverability. There's clearly a divide there in the mechanics, but it's not adequately defined or supported.
• Fields are too big, but zones would be too small. More thoughts on this directly.
• Movement and traveling are still too fast.
• There's some cloudiness between attacks, sustained actions, and hazards (what counts as what?).
• The action economy has a lot of central corner-cases, like how many 1-die actions you can take. This is kind of inevitable, but annoying.
• You need more Prana. There, I said it.
• The content rules for how to prep still aren't as table-friendly as I'd like. There's too much asked per field; you just can't go from imagination to content as smoothly as I'd like.
• The crafting and resource rules need some examples. Really, everything does, but these more than the rest because they dangle without support from the rest of the gameplay (Why am I making people mine iron ore again?).
• I need to limit how high non-magic Emotional Imbalances can go Rank-wise; they don't have the same defense infrastructure as typical wounds, making them an easy way to get debilitating imbalances against a foe.

All that and some general tightening of things like the encounter rules and scene transitions would really make the stuff I've tested sing.

There's more to do than what I've been able to cover (god I'm so busy, then I got sick...). For example, I need to know how mid and higher degree characters interact, both with the environment and in terms of single battles and ongoing campaign play (such as linked battles, wars, shadow wars, etc.)

I guess this means I'll need to do some higher-degree testing in the near future: I don't want to overhaul anything really significantly until I see how the higher-level stuff feels in play.

Other notes:

• The Gupt Kala need another pass. Maybe add some more Imbalance-based stuff, certainly add more terraforming stuff. I meant to put it in there but uh. Didn't.
• There's a lot of little errors that an editor would have caught in the current text. I should give it a pass just to face-lift it. Ditto with outdated references (like to the Elephant Board, which doesn't exist since I changed Content) and double ditto for the layout, which is an eyesore.
• Also need to change the font. Times is pretty hard on the eyes for extended reading.
• The art's also pixelated, although I imagine I won't be able to fix that until I do the proper layout since my program for it came free with my computer (not a mark of high quality).
• Even absent additional playtesting, I can tell the higher-level Techniques are going to need the logic of their costing and their place in the game examined more closely. As it stands it looks VERY likely that you'll not be able to access them without charging up significantly, which doesn't reflect their actual utility.

All this stuff is a bit dull, eh? Well, welcome to playtesting! It is a bit marginal and edit-y; that's the point! But I DO have some more exiting stuff to talk about!

For example, Lore are getting finished! And they're shaping up to be very ease, intuitive and modular bits of setting design. They've got lots of places to fit into the rules, what with Stable/ volatile/Dynamic Content and the Web of Masters and Dharmas and such, not to mention the resources, manufacturing and crafting systems. Lores are turning into a comprehensive "chunk of the wuxia setting" style resource, complete with intrigues and scheming masters and places to fight and reasons to war and character motivations and all the trimmings! Which is pretty exciting!

Another fun thing: Magic item examples are in the works. Right now they're largely refinements of things that exist within Techniques (has anyone noticed I changed the name of these to the Yuddhukhala? No? I like that better). But there's an additional layer I'm working in: magic items allow you to take magical things you find in the setting and turn them into sustained advantages. For example, if you happen across one of those "cures any ailment but only blooms once every century" style flowers, you could use it as an ingredient in a "cure-any-ailment-every-time-you-use-this" style magic item!

Doesn't stop there, though! As I work up content examples, I'm realizing that individual places and magical architecture features are extensions of this principle. Maybe there's an all-curing sauna that incorporated that flower in it's design, or a demon chained into a room where it has to answer riddles or grant wishes.

This is a great place for imagination to seep into the game; I need to do another, cleaner and more platested draft of the content preparation rules to bring that element to the forefront and give GMs confidence in doing it.


NEW KUNG FU

Yeah I'm gonna be making seven-ish more styles. Why? Few reasons:

• Both of the precursor games have about that many styles, so it's a tradition
• Most of the games in this genre have about that many individual powers total
• I want to further clarify the design method of creating your own styles for nascent GMs and this is best done through considerable amounts of example
• It makes me happy

What I'd ideally like to do is seven additional styles (one per clan) which are "full" with 10 Techniques apiece. Additionally, I'd like to do some "broken styles" with only the lower bounds of Techniques which can be encountered as fun easter eggs while exploring the wastes (like maybe there's some fallen clan that whip out an unknown style on you, or a lone master with a bunch of secret forgotten moves, or maybe the remains of the style are written in hieroglyphs on a forgotten temple wall).

I did some rabble-rousing and asked for style ideas. Here are some of my favorite candidates for inspiration/development:

• A style where you gain the strength and characteristics (both real and mythical) of the woolly mammoth
• A style based on Edgeless Blade from Thunderbolt Fantasy
• A style that serves as a descended of Fox Spirit Song from Legends of the Wulin
• A style internalizing the playstyle of classic "Suicide Black" decks from Magic:The Gathering

Clearly I need at least 3 more, but that's a solid start. Feel free to toss some ideas at me on our Discord and I'll absolutely steal them without paying you Listen!

YOU SAID SOMETHING ABOUT NEW FIELD RULES?

Oh yeah, I forgot I typed that.

Playtesting has revealed a design gap between my intention and the at-the-table experience: Fields are too vast for the kind of movement nuance the game has been designed for: there's a missing gulf between exploring an area and strategically moving within one.

So I need something smaller than Fields, but I'm having an issue because creating sub-fields defeats the purpose of making them that big in the first place. Let me demonstrate their development.

Here's the King's Road:

If you were to place tokens representing the character's position onto this map, they'd fit neatly into the squares. You'd track movement as taking a number of squares. This is familiar to most of us; it's what 3.5 D&D and Pathfinder use as their movement system. It's high-fidelity and gives every participant an exact measure of the tactical positions of every participant in a combat at any given moment in time.

It's extremely cumbersome to use this model though for a few reasons:

• you need tokens representing every participant, which makes big crowds nearly impossible to model. 
• It's also self-defeatingly static; characters don't actually move, then stop, then wait for their opponents to move, then stop, before moving again. They're constantly moving in a way that the "freeze frame" of this model doesn't adequately model. 
• They kill imaginative description: why should I describe my guy moving and darting around, doing cool backflips and generally Jackie-Chaning their way across obstacles and terrain when you can SEE that your little token is just, doing a normal "move across the squares" move?
• It punishes players for interacting with the interesting terrain: those bushes, ocks, all the remotely interesting stuff to interact with? Movement penalty, ranged attack penalty, attack of opportunity to approach a foe bunkered in it... It's all negative or, even worse, positive if you're doing the least interesting thing (which is squatting on it). This leads to tactically staid battles where behaving dynamically is punished and turtling and conservative movement is king (note that the vast majority of this "battlemap" is a ROAD or  featureless FIELD).
• You need to onerously map every five square feet of an otherwise unremarkable landscape to allow any encounter to take place. The best-case scenario for this rings the death knell for any non-scripted fights, while the WORST case requires you to map entire cities in five-foot-square grids.

Basically it's a lot of work to use the squares model for ultimately uninteresting combats. I mean, just look at this monstrosity: it's legit a road in a field, but every painstaking inch has been placed on this (necessary?) map, so that all the tiny, niggling details of strategic movement which so much of Pathfinder's class system balance depends on can manifest and function. 

That's some agonizing over-design there, and it encourages a GMing model where you only have a fight if it's part of an "adventure path", rather than something that organically arises from the workings of the world. In other words, it's antithesis to the kind of game I'm trying to make here.

Clearly, I needed a different model.

Legends of the Wulin was a good place to start, obviously; so, I did. They used Zones from Fate, which are certainly better but still have drawbacks. Let me show you an example:

The organic, uneven lines here are a lot closer to the kind of battle-mapping is appropriate for spontaneous combats. You could sketch a hexagonal "wheat field" in seconds and surround it with irregular zones representing copses of trees, or houses, or adjoining fields. That comes with some hefty advantages:

• You can define an area not by it's exact dimensions, but by it's tactical significance: the Hayloft Zone's precise size is less important than it being Above the Barn Zone and having the characteristic of being Full of Flammable Hay
• As mentioned, you can sketch this out on a napkin in a manner of seconds, so spontaneous and emergent combat is preserved
• It still allows both tracking of position and of tactical interaction based on positioning, but without the time-and-resource consuming fidelity demanded by the square grid
• Movement within and between a Zone can be described dynamically and have a real game impact; in this case, the lack of clear boundaries and the presence of "fuzzy" edges defining them gives players a crack to wriggle through for tactically influential descriptions.

A better fit, certainly. But not a perfect one:

• The lack of standardized boundaries is a recipe for tactical frustration; why can my spear reach into and through the houses, road and tree in that fat Zone in the middle, but fail to reach across the well in that tiny one in the dead center of the map? You have to torture logic to justify this kind of space-bending.
• Describing a method for creating these organic areas is incredibly difficult; why are some Zones big enough to contain entire houses, while others are rooms within those houses, even different parts of the same room? Where do you draw the line between the apartment and the balcony? 
• Worse, what about characters moving along the Z axis? Is the Side of a structure it's own Zone?
• Abstracting the movement within a Zone has problems too; what's the mechanical distinction between a fast and slow character if they're both moving within the same Zone? The fidelity of the square grid allows a marginal advantage to accrue to the speedier character, but the abstraction of Zones erases this small but significant difference.
• Positioning is also problematic; what's the mechanic difference between holing up within that house or standing in the open street in that fat Zone in the middle there? Clearly there need to be more lines, but again, where? Does it cost 0 movement to enter the house there, but 1 to move through the line that bisects the house in the adjoining zone? Why?

Although you may be able to individually resolve each one of these things, they each require their own, uniquely crafted logic to sustain the veracity of this model's internal reality; the second you forget one of these rulings, the model won't provide the answer any more. That's a big cognitive load, big enough to shoot the utility of this model right in the foot each time I tested it.

Enter the current model: Fields.

Fields are the current rule's attempt to find it's own battlefield space that solves the problems of the previous models.

• They're big enough that they allow the kind of descriptive movement freedom that the genre requires; they also don't distinguish a Z axis, leaving that up to the relative positioning of characters in the Tactical Infinity
• The abstraction of their separating lines aligns with both a descriptive and strategic difference: when city becomes wilderness, or when swamp becomes forest. This is top solve the "abstract boundaries" problem mentioned earlier: their boundaries contain the logic-answer as to why their imagined game-distance exists ("Your sword can't reach all the way from the neighboring building to to grassy field, you haven't left the building yet!")
• Although unclear (missing, currently?) in the text, the advantage of occupying a piece of terrain is a modifier to actions: -1 Rank to you foe's attacks (effectively +1 Rank to your defense) if you've got a sizable advantage and  -2 Ranks if you've got  an overwhelming one (difference between the being in the high ground and being on the other edge of a concrete wall)
• They're easy to prep and allow for any number of spontaneous combats to manifest in them due to their ease of use

You might I kind of threw my hands up at the whole "abstract but strategically sophisticated" angle; I leaned towards abstract because, at their core, these are places where you describe awesome thing happening. Lots of the tactical nuance of the game isn't so much in the moment-to-moment freeze-frames of characters caught in a specified XYZ coordinate, but in the interplay of Effort Pools, Prana and Technique loadout. The freedom of description was simply much more important than whatever imagined advantage I could grasp from refining movement and positioning with any deeper specificity.

At least, that was the idea.

The truth is my reach was exceeding my grasp here: modeling the complex 3-dimensional movement of characters WAS tactically important to gameplay in much deeper detail than this level of abstraction permitted. I just didn't know where to draw those lines that:

• Allowed ease of prep and mapping, so both imagination and spontaneity were encouraged
• Satisfactorily charted the positioning of characters in a complex 3-dimensional world (so that the nuance of speed and positing was preserved)
• Upheld the tactical reality of that world without bogging down the system in undesirable minutia, so players and GMs could intuitively use positioning and movement based tactics to enhance play and fully engage the existing rules

That's a tall order for a set of rules. It also wasn't immediately clear which parts of the movement rules to work on to even begin solving any of that; should I work on the Effect Chart for Agility first? Should I put more development into Fields? How? Where? Where was I drawing the lines for Fields? How do you move between them, within them? What even is "moving within a Field", like what does that do?

It was a lot to think about. And it was a cognitive load on top of school and the rest of the bloody system. So yeah, I tossed my hands up and moved on. It was... Functional, if imperfect. Hell, that's more than a lot of games and enough to playtest.

So I defend my laziness in this case, while admitting that yeah, I did back away here.

And I followed through and playtested it. Sure enough, the Fields need more. Here's my current thinking.

1. Fields are largely functional as bigger "areas" that represent unique tactical "situations", terrain-wise. A tangle of twisting back-alleys and a bustling city square are defined cleanly both descriptively and in the tactical movement situation that they present to characters. In this regard, they're a triumph on the purely strategic level. No change needed there.

2. However, they fail to take to mechanically account for positioning, utilization of terrain for advantage, or the vertical axis.

3. Further, areas within the Field need enough definition that moving between them is necessary mechanically, not merely descriptively (although yes, you should be able to do both: there needs to be BLEED). Moving from the market stalls to the open area between them, leaping from that to the park area and splashing into the fountain there needs to be an exercise in boundaries that are crossed in mechanical and descriptive terms.

So I think, as part of the creation of a Field as Stable Content, I'm going to require the list of the Field's composite Zones. Let's take a gander at what THAT might look like by giving you an example of a Field from my Demon City playtest:

CURRENT FIELD: Aqrabuamelu's Territory

Description: Blood-streaked banners festoon the looming grey buildings here. They depict the crescent-claw of the scorpion. Blood-red lanterns, the stink of burning flesh and heavy incense invade the streets like a bright red tumor while the screams of human sacrifice echo across the concrete labyrinth. Occasionally, an inhuman voice will boom out, demanding tribute.
Terrain: Body-choked streets and 12-story buildings with macabre decorations.
Elements: Piles of bodies, burning censors, "x" crosses with human sacrifices writhing on them.
Inhabitants: Gasmask-wearing cultists of Aqrabuamelu (100 fanatics), sacrificial slaves (150 victims), Aqrabuamelu the Scorpion-demon and self-styled god.
Secrets: An entry to the subway leads underground

Pretty lovely, eh? What I've found though is that I'm not getting either the exploration I typically enjoy from dungeons nor the tactical decision-making that the described terrain implies. People aren't really spider-manning across buildings or anything neat, beyond a very superficial level. It's also not entirely clear where things are in relation to one another; I have yet to have the Scorpion Demon actually show up, despite being ostensibly "here".

What I'm thinking is that I can subdivide the broader Terrain description into Zones to solve these problems. My thinking is, I can capture the function of a map without requiring one to be modeled in complex 3-dimensional space (which would also be a nightmare to try to track in play)

Zones would work like this:

• They would be separated by their Z-axis into tiers, one on top of (or below!) the other. 
• Each tier would have it's own list of elements and terrain, with mechanics implied through it's description (by reference to the scene-actions and Effect Charts). 
• The specific layout of the elements in a given tier would be descriptive, rather than mapped, with the default that all segments are "adjacent". 
• Moving from one Element/Terrain to an adjacent one is free, but additional moves require Agility actions. 
• Ditto with moving between Zones. 

FIELD UPGRADED WITH ZONES

Add the following to the bottom of the above Field

Zones
Ground: Bodies tied to crosses (various states of living), piles of hollow sacrifices, burning dumpsters, outlying streets, central podium with sacrificial altar
1st-7th tier: Blood and body-filled office building floors
8th-11 tier: Partially intact office building floors, broken windows lead to wires and hangings that link the outside in a spiderweb of steel and filth
12 tier: Rooftops

Look at how much more area is implied by the addition of a few simple Zones. They're more relationship-based than mapped, but there's a clear implication that, for example, you can't see the central podium (where I'll set Aqrabuamelu and his priests) from the outlying streets (where players will enter the Field). However, you probably can see the central podium form high enough in the buildings, even tightrope-walk above it for some Batman-esque shenanigans.

This isn't done; I need to run through the logic and see if there's more harm than good done by requiring the additional work, if this makes combat movement too muddy and unintuitive to track, what other parts of the rules need tweaking to make the change work (and decide if it's just way easier to do something else instead) etc. etc.

But I offer it to you, gentle readers, for your edification and enjoyment. If you've got some feedback, Come on over to our Discord where I happily read all of it and reply as often as I can. Until then, True Believers!