The Mushroom Press Design Blog

To give you guys a little insight into the creative process, I herein present a playtest I recently ran with my friend and my lovely wife. there are some design notes to the team at the end as well.

The Playtest

As I suspected, characters were compact enough to fit on note cards. So everybody got a note card with the following stats:

Action Pool 3

Focus 1

Chakra: Recovery 1/ Pool 10

Health Levels: 3

Then they got to pick an entire style from the current style and technique list.

My friend Ryan decided to do a “Vash-esque” character like on Trigun. He took Bullet Kata.

My lovely wife combined Vegeta with the post apocolyptia to make Vegatahawk, the Saiyan Biker. She opted for the Sand Demon techniques.

I set the thing in a post-apocalyptic wasteland halfway between the Road Warrior and Fist of the North Star.

The first combat was with Monev the Gail, who here was a little bit Kaneda and a little bit Vulcan Raven. Here’s his stats and the stats of his followers:

Monev

AP 3

Foc: 1

Chakra: R1/P10

Hlth: 3

Techniques: Focused fire (8) 2 Die facing 6-8, Spread fire (8) Roll 2 dice, generating 2 Facings

Goons 1-4

AP: 1

Hlth: 3

Him and his 4-man biker gang rolled up to the heroes in a canyon filled with ancient, derelict buildings. He posed dramatically and demanded they pay the toll: IN BLOOD. Vegetahawk mocked him and then Initiative got rolled.

Round 1

Immediately we realized that pools of 3 dice were not going to work well with initiative bids. You take a significant chunk of your resources to bid when all you have are 3 dice.

Vash got a set and a high roll, which coupled with his style to give him an absurd boost to both initiative and the set. He wound up going first by a margin of like twenty and generated a 48 result with his attack. Yikes!

Monev had a set too, but he had to use it to soften that man stopper so he wound up on the ground with two wound levels down and a rank-2 Imbalance from his lungs filling up with blood.

Vegetahawk went next, but she rolled like garbage. After bidding for initiative, she couldn’t do much more than put a die into her Focus and use her 1 to steal Monev’s bike. In her defense, she stole it though.

Monev did manage to scrape together a set by emptying his Prana into Focused Fire. He winged the helpless Vash for two HL’s, giving him an injured shoulder Imbalance.

The thugs went last. Since they only had AP1 each, they could either bid for initiative, attack, or defend. They chose attacks. All of them curb-stomped Vegatahawk for stealing the bike and piled up two HL’s of damage! She got an Imbalance causing her to rant incoherently or suffer -2 AP. There was a lot of ranting as a result of this Imbalance.

Round 2

Everybody was pretty fucked up this round. Nobody bid on initiative because things had gotten real ugly real fast. So it was a three-way die-off to determine who got initiative. Weirdly, we got exactly the same initiative roster as last time. Freaky.

Trembling from trauma and blood loss, Vash tried a weird tactic for generating results. He took a technique that gave him 2 dice of different facings and added them together. I ruled that this was a nebulous enough point that he could do so. Unfortunately it wasn’t quite enough: Monev was able to muster enough defense to survive his attack, although it did drain his Action die reserves.

Vegetahawk was done with this shit and ran Monev over with his own bike. Harsh.

The thugs spilt 50/50 and did some minor damage to the party. We staggered into the next round.

Round 3

Man things were grim at this point. Vash and Vegetahawk managed between the both of them to take out 1 thug and injure another. As an added bonus, the thugs could only muster enough offense for 1 attack, which was thwarted easily.

As a point in the design, additive offense VS single-set defense almost guarantees that you can’t hurt the defender without a significant advantage. So that’s noteworthy.

Final Round

This round got nuts. Increasingly desperate and with a newly refreshed pool of Prana, Vash went all out with a technique that granted him multiple attacks. He played it like he was going berserk and blasted his guns until he was dry-firing them. He managed to take out the remaining goons, but he also injured Vegetahawk and blasted most of the bikes to smithereens.

I ruled that the Imbalances had healed up after they spent the night in the ruins of the ancient buildings. So the next morning they were all patched up. Then, a freak appeared!

I wanted to use Legado (since we were doing a kind-of Trigun thing) so I made this jerk:

Legado

AP: 5

Foc: 2

Chakra: R2/P10

Chakra: R2/P10

Hlth: 5

Soul-Chilling Strike- Generates a single offensive die of facings 4-8. 3 Chi.

Shadow Waltz- Roll a die, generating a facing. Counts as both a defensive technique and a roll to establish stealth. 3 Chi.

He was a real motherfucker, because I wanted to see what a “standard” character looked like compared to these “rookie” characters.

He showed up with the sunrise to his back. The characters woke up and of course started making fun of him (I described him as having one dialated eye. They mocked him for putting his contacts in wrong).

He muttered a disturbing non-sequitur into their minds with telepathy and the party decided to take the better part of valor and get the hell out of there.

Round 1

Because of his superior die pool, Legado won initiative. He used his psychic powers to throw one of the working bikes into a building, which exploded. He also grabbed Vash by the throat with a pretty punshing set and choked a health level out of him.

Vegathawk made a great comeback by punching him into the next zone with her knockback attack. I thought that was pretty awesome, but we don’t currently have any rules for moving between zones, so…. I just ad-lib ruled that it took him a total of 10+ to move between zones with a quick dash. It ate his die pool, but he had rolled a 9 and a 1 so he caught up to them pretty quickly.

Vash just added to his Focus pool after softening the blow from the chokehold.

With the current rules, if you declare that you are fleeing, you escape and end the scene. Since I wanted to make sure there was a sense of continuity, I bent the rules a little and allowed the next round to play out as the same scene. However, I did rule that Legado was trailing way behind, flying with his powers, and that they had a big lead on their getaway across the desert.

Round 2

Vash won initiative this time and unfurled his fivefold tactical mastery technique. It gave him a lot of boosts: he actually managed to snap off a shot that went through Legado’s damaged health level and one more, so he got to declare two rank-1 Imbalances, injuring his arm and side. He could have lumped for a rank-2 Imbalance, but I think he had a plan?

Legado had to roll 3 sets of 20+ to catch up within 3 rolls because of their lead. He had a set of three 3’s, but he couldn’t further upgrade it, and he couldn’t attack because he was trailing so far. So, I used it as a set of 23 and floated the remaining 3 into his Focus. He was able to use shadow waltz to hide in the dust cloud. As a design note, I think if I had it to do over again I would say a set of 30+ would count as two of the three needed sets.

Vegatahawk added together all of her dice and coupled it with the activation of a technique (again, the point was nebulous as to whether this was possible, but I had already let Vash do something similar so I let it slide). In total she got around a 32, which I ruled widened her lead.

In addition, her technique allowed the roll to be counted as an action to change the scenery. She decided to bury Legado in a huge sandstorm to ensure their getaway.

Between his wounds, the cover and their lead, I ruled that they had escaped from his clutches and they rode off into the sunset.

Conclusions

The core purpose of this test was to determine if low-die pools became more playable with the die adding in addition to sets. I can say pretty conclusively that they do not.

In nearly every case that wasn’t me flagrantly bending the rules, we would have been better served simply allowing a single-die set to be used as the character’s action, once per turn.

Die adding has to many grey, nebulous and confusing areas. We should excise it and replace it with the above-suggested rule.

In addition, this playtest gave us some evidence of the following:

We’re on the right track with the new wound system. It was clean and easy and fun.

Expanding the low-AP levels of playability is more a question of cheap techniques or other things that elevate single dice into actions.

There was a VAST power gap between Legado and the PCs. It was a very gameable gap, as you guys saw. This is good news! It means we can have “boss” characters!

Initiative might need a more robust secondary system for resolution in the absence of bids. I propose that characters have a “standing #” between 0-9 that is their unbid initiative, and that would reduce die-offs between those who do not bid.

Zones need rules for moving between them. We might want to consider thinking about movement and speed rules. No suggestions yet.

Imbalances work great! My wife suggested that we look into dividing all of the rules into “dramatic” and “mechanical”, and I think she might be on to something. I’m percolating an idea which I’ll send in a future email.

Finally, I think the bedrock character would work fine with a 2-die Action Pool.