#xb1101

Second Play Test

 The second play test consisted of polishing out weapon requirements and removing a character pre-set.

Weapon requirements seemed unfair as a character would not need a maxed-out Strength stat to use a high tier dagger considering its weight doesn’t vary that much. Some commented on how weapon requirements encourage to stay behind and train instead of venturing with the rest of the squad. So as to make the gameplay more interactive and less grind focused, I removed weapon requirements except for Staffs, for similar reasons to the one’s I stated before, it would make Mages far too powerful considering armour doesn’t mitigate it.

A class that was also quite overpowered was my first pre-set character, Nox. He worked differently to the rest of characters, Nox himself was weak due to sacrificing his strength and faith to summon a spirit that now follows him everywhere he goes and obeys him. Essentially, the spirit was immortal but could be debilitated for a couple of turns, it also gained strength from Nox, meaning if he was in peril and died, so would the spirit.  

The early stages of my ideas for the game were fairly messy and disconnected, to fix this, many elements had to be made simpler or removed completely. One of the first problems I noticed is that I had far too many Stats involved for the players that they didn't really need, such as Sneak, Faith and ''Notorious-ness''. 

Once I tidied the stats, I play tested it with some friends, it ran fairly well, except in terms of number balancing. The first critique was that the damage scale for a Staff user was too high, at first it combined the player’s Staff damage, the damage from the Robes and their Atonement level, this combined with not being able to dodge magic, made it really frustrating to play against and far too easy to play as.

For this assignment we had to create our own Role-Playing Game Handbook. In order to achieve experience in this genre we played a couple of games in class to get to know various combat systems, different story types (from intergalactic stories to classic medieval stories) and different character archetypes to draw inspiration from.

Additionally to playing different RPG’s, we also visited three different museums, all of them conveyed a possible game theme around their exhibitions. One of the museums being centred more around science and technology, while the other two were more focused around history, armour, weapons and taxidermy.

Changes made through playtesting:

Straight away the first problem that playtesting revealed was the lack of variety in the story since I had initially written out an entire plot where the players would be in an American PoW camp and would be escaping while securing some intelligence from there, so with some suggestions I decided to take away the “GM” role from the captain character and make this into its own separate roll that would have another player who wasn’t taking part assume the role of what was essentially a narrator for the story. Straight away with some playtests this provided a much more exciting experience for the game (provided the player who was acting as the GM was creative enough to make it so) and there was loads of crazy stories starting to develop from my game. One example that was one of my favorites was when the players were face to face with an enemy bunker and the GM created an allied air strike to happen on their position which destroyed the entire building.

Variety remained the main theme for changes that I should make as with more playtests my friends began to tell me that if you were escaping from a British prison there was only so much that you could create, even with a GM. So bearing this in mind I decided to take inspiration from playing another tabletop game from one of my classmates and added in the ability for players to roll to select their scenario/mission and also to provide them each with an item to have on their character’s person at the start of the game.

Another initial plan that I had chosen was to give each of the squad members a simple role, for example one would be a sniper and one would be a medic. However after taking parts in play tests myself I began to realise that there was no real connection that the players could make to their characters. I wanted to see anyone who was playing really start to understand how their character would act in that situation so I decided to add a bit more of a descriptive “story” almost to each of the characters. This was by far my favorite change I made because it was great to see one of my friends really assuming the role of Hans Beckermann or “The Butcher” as he also known. He would play through all situations thinking “What would my character do here?” and he began to take absolutely no mercy on these imaginary NPCs that were being thrown at him.

So we were assigned to make a 10 page rule book for a tabletop RPG, much in the same style as dungeons and dragons. We also had to make sure that we had a lot of play test runs of the game done so that we could adjust and make sure things all worked correctly.

Tasked with creating my own Simple World game, I originally began with a clear game in mind; a dating simulator. The plan was to create it in the parody style of shows like The Bachelor and Take Me Out, allowing players to be as weird and wacky as possible in order to create funny and unique game play experiences in each campaign. However, a simple dating simulator seemed too vanilla for my taste, so I tried to mix it up a bit and change the overall goal of the players, so instead of wanting to win the heart of their Bachelor (controlled and acted by the GM), they instead wanted to ensure their loss because he’s actually a bit of an ass hole. This, in theory, would allow players to attempt funnier actions in play than just “seduce him” as they attempt to make themselves as unattractive as possible. It also meant that the sabotage element would still be in the game, but instead of trying to ruin the chances of the competition with the Bachelor, they were instead trying to make them out as the better woman. The hope of these ideas were that they would create a fun and interesting game that would result in wackier outcomes for everyone in each play through, but when it came to testing I discovered that throughout the multiple instalments I tried to design (i.e. changing the ‘combat’ mechanics, altering the narrative structure, editing the dating format) it just didn’t produce the desired outcome I was hoping to gain from the game play. I toyed with the idea of trying to change the format to a more fantasy-esque world in the hopes of encouraging players to attempt more outlandish actions, but it eventually proved to over complicate existing mechanics and game structure to the point I decided it was best to give up on the idea and try again. The overall game proved too difficult to balance, and I found that the fun of the game was almost being forced onto players and it never created quite the reaction that I had wanted. 

For my second idea, I decided to try to keep the wackiness of my previous game (or at the very least, to keep the aim of creating it) with a newly inspired game idea; Escape and survive IKEA. IKEA is well known for being a maze of rooms that take almost hours to get through, as well as being a well known brand that everyone knows for it’s weirdly named furniture (even if it is just Swedish). I thought it would be funny to take this, and mix it in with something like Doom which features hordes of demons that you have to beat up and kill in over the top violence that can’t help but satisfy the player. I figured this would mixture between well known reality and completely over the top fantasy would creating an interesting contrast and an even more interesting concept. So with this new idea in mind, I began developing the game and testing it on whoever I could convince to play. 

Now originally, I began with only one set of monsters that would appear in every room, which would later be replaced by unique and individual monsters that I mostly tailored to the room they were found in (i.e. Possessed toys in the Children's Room). Throughout the testing process, I tried to base the combat system around the Generic Universal Role-Playing System (GURPS), not quite following it to the T, instead opting to try and simplify it down because I wanted my game to focus more on the wackiness of roles and not be limited as much for player actions. As the testing process went on, and various mechanics were developed to create more difficult game play, the combat system eventually developed into something more similar to the Yogsquest style of mechanics, but with the skills simplified again so that the players can focus more on the moves they want to perform than what they would have to use in order to be able to achieve it.