Observations from My First Few Rounds of Playtesting

So I have been able to complete my first few rounds of play testing over the past month for my game and I am happy to say that the play-testing for the most part has been a positive experience to open up my eyes on some blindspots in my game design. 

I've been running a highly modified version of the Crossroads of Chalden. I decided to run a pre-made adventure mainly to get a baseline of where my assumptions were for math and encounters in AD&D, since that is the primary baseline that using for OSR compatibility. I liked this adventure concept because it had several opportunities for social encounters in addition to combat and some dungeon delving. 

So here are some of the initial observations and feedback that I have received from the first few play-tests so far. 

Traits and Characteristics

My system of using Traits and Characteristics seem to be generally well received and I think the players I have played with like the idea that relevant traits can be stacked to improve information or rolls in a situation. There is some negotiation that is required because the Traits are generally very ambiguous in their nature. That is by design, but I think the players did not expect to have to negotiate that in play. 

I was originally doing an exercise where characters had two scores for each of their Characteristics. One would be for their Difficulty Checks (DC) and the other would be for their Saving Throws (ST). This proved to be too confusing for players, especially when they needed to adjust the scores when they took damage, so I made a change to opt to a single score value. The players will roll under their score for their save and over for checks. This proved to be much better received over all and less confusing. 

It has made me think a bit more about the stats as health mechanic though. I was taking this concept from Into the Odd and Cairn, because I really liked the idea. The issue I am finding from the 2-3 combats we have run so far, is that players haven't really been coming out of the combat with decreased stats that would challenge them later in the adventure. More often than not they come out unscathed (taking only Breath damage) or going down completely from combat. I'm not quite sure what this means. I'm using straight 3d6 Characteristic (i.e. stat) creation and the idea is that as players adventure, the wilderness will take its toll on them, making them weary and making checks and saves harder as time passes. I'm not quite sure if I need to boost this roll to a 4d6 drop the lowest to give a bit more meat to the stat, especially because the save results in them become incapacitated if they fail? I mean a 1st level Basic and AD&D character only has between 1 and 8 hp right?

(Side note: I am quite bummed to get rid of my concept since I thought it was an elegant solution to the DC/ST problem in many games, but it just is incongruent to the idea of damage passing through to the skills. I might seriously discontinue the damage passthrough idea and think of another way to do "health".)

Combat

My combat system is also mostly received well so far. The group of players I have been testing the game with are definitely more combat type D&D players (as opposed to role-play) so I think they generally have taken to the sort of tactical nature of the combat. 

I did a major simplification of the weapons and armor to simplify the roll tables and have less confusion. I was surprised to find that some players really struggled with not having specific weapons listed out for them (i.e. sword, spear, axe, crossbow). I just have a weapon weight like light, medium, heavy, and then the damage type with the intent to allow characters the freedom to designate whatever weapon type they wanted. I thought this would be a good balance between the randomly rolled characters and creating something they could call their own. I don't think I'm gonna change anything here, but it was just an interesting observation. 

I definitely need to do some work on combat stances a bit more. I am not super happy with the "Called Shot" mechanic since it doesn't make sense from a math point of view and it also sucks to not take an action during your turn. Just doubling the dice and being able to hit a hidden enemy isn't accomplishing what I want it to do. 

I've noticed that almost everyone takes the Aggressive stance to get that +2 to their damage whenever they can. 

The Rally ability needs some tweaking, but I am not quite sure what to do with it yet. Since combat on both sides is resolving "simultaneously" does the 1d4 rolled on the Rally become a "temporary HP" if the character has full Breath at the start of the round? That makes sense mechanically, but doesn't quite sit right with me since it adds another level of stat tracking? I'm trying to keep stat tracking minimal for mental load. I need to think about that more. 

I"ve noticed that my system uses a lot of d4 rolls. Enhancements are +d4, the Rally is a d4, and some weapons are even a d4. Rolling a d4 just doesn't feel good. Do I boost it all up to a d6? That makes sense, but that will immediately increase the number scaling by a significant amount, especially when I am trying to keep all of the number totals and calculations under 20. I also wanted to avoid situations where we have stat or flat bonuses to rolls. 

I would love to get some insight from anyone willing to share. I have another play test coming up up in February with another group who has a totally different play style, much less combat and stat focused, so I am curious what I will come away with from those sessions. 

v0.1 - Adventuring

Let's start to get into the meat of the system a little bit more. I am going to break down the next few posts/chapters to cover the general flow of the game including Adventuring, Delving (going into dungeons), and Encounters. These three chapters are hierarchical in a way, with Adventuring covering the most broad strokes and then each subsequent item will cover smaller and smaller gameplay scopes. 

Why OSR(ish)?

If you have played any OSR based games before, then most of what you will read in the Adventuring chapter will be generally familiar. I've tried to take the general concepts and ideas that are common amongst various OSR systems and distill them down into simplified rules. 

Why am I focusing on this OSR concept though? Well, this is my first game design, and I am new to this. I might as well start from a solid foundation, but it is mainly because there is a breadth of content out there for these system and play settings already. This is a passion project for me and I can fully recognize that I am not going to be able to write dozens of adventures, supplements, and random generation tables. Those are already being made and have been made for nearly fifty years. I'm aiming for general OSR compatibility to leverage that content that is already out there. 

The OSR (and NSR) communities have really caught my attention over the past year or two since the OGL debacle. I find the approach to play in those games is really appealing to me and I appreciate how the math is structured, and how general play is approached. The emphasis in many of those systems on resource management, compromise, "low number" math, and "rulings over rules" really appeals to me and I think it is really conducive to a West Marches style game. 

Now, I don't think what I have below is inherently a "rulings over rules" approach, as there are plenty of rules here, but I wanted to break things down into what I felt were the most logical terms and conditions that relate generally back to our own world when trying to develop rules. I wanted to create enough rules to make sure everyone could easily understand the game, but at the same time, not need to go back and look something up back in the book. 

This is perhaps most clearly represented in the adventuring phases in a day. 

Phases

Phases of the adventuring day is something that is very common in many OSR systems. Some systems use hours, some use varying phases. I broke this down into the four most common terms that we use in our natural world:  Morning, Afternoon, Evening, Night. 

I also wanted to make sure that I do not reference time in any more specific detail than those four phases. I've found in most cases getting into any finer detail (for traveling)  just adds unnecessary complexity that bogs down the gameplay at the table. 

Refuges

One idea that I am developing to my game is the concept of a "Refuge", a set of secure supplies and a safe place in the wilderness where players can rest and recuperate. As I mentioned in the Principles and Concepts post, the world is dangerous and managing risk and reward is a strong component of this game. It is hard to heal and players in fact won't be able to heal when they are in the wilderness adventuring, unless they can find a safe harbor that has a bed (i.e. a town) or a refuge. A Refuge is an expendable resource that players can setups a key strategic points in the world that might be the different between life and death. 

It costs a lot of time and resources to setup a Refuge so characters will have to determine how to best deploy one.

Player Roles

Finally, another idea I am trying to play around with is the Player Roles. This is not a new concept for many classic games. Many will designate a player at the table to draw the dungeon map or to summarize the adventure. The more administrative work I can offload from the GM to the players I think is good, as it will incentivize players to remain engaged with the game even if their character is not active. This is a problem that I have seen across game tables, so I am hoping i can "kill two birds with one stone" here to offload some responsibility from the GM and also give something to the players. 

I want to bring this into the game world though as well, to possibly incentivize players who may not want to do something like that. The preliminary set of roles I have defined can also apply to the characters as well as the players. It is the hope that this will provide a small bonus in the game that will encourage players to want to take on these roles at the table. 

Google Docs - v0.1 - Adventuring

GitHub - v0.1 - Adventuring 

Read more »

v0.1 - Town Creation

Let's begin our look of the play system with what I think is one of the starting points for a West Marches campaign, the Town. When I envision play in a WM campaign I picture the game centering around the home base that the players will be basing their adventures out of. I would like to have the town develop as a character unto itself as the game progresses. Characters will come and go in the town, some will die from adventuring or living on the frontier and I want that to be reflected in the story that is told. 

I've gone back on forth on a bunch of different town creation ideas over the past several months on my internal documents. I've toyed with some pretty in-depth ideas on creating a town, applying a layout to the town and having that recorded by someone in the player party. After some internal play-testing of some concepts, I found that what I was originally going for ended up being way to complex and crunchy for town creation. As much as I want the town to be an integral part of the gameplay experience, I came to realize that players don't want to spend a ton of time setting up the town, its denizens and all of the relationships. I also realized that all of that stuff doesn't have to happen before the game starts. One of my core tenants with character creation is that your characters aren't heroes before they start this game and to a large extent, who they were and their backstory before this town doesn't matter. Your character will be made through their adventures. That same concept needs to apply to the town itself, that the makeup of the town, the flavor of it will all be determined from the play that occurs moving forward, not from before hand. 

It was with that in mind that I scaled back my town creation concept quite a bit. I wanted to create something that was fun, quick, but still gave the players a general concept of how their town would be laid out and who the people in the town would be. 

With that in mind, players will basically throw their dice set onto the table and assign houses/backgrounds from there. Someone at the table can quickly transfer that idea over to a piece of paper for tracking purposes. Over time as the town grows, denizens change and things change, that town layout and detail can change. Ultimately, I plan to design a town "tracking" sheet that will allow someone to easily track the denizens 

Things can be loose here and not all of the townspeople need a name or need to have their profession fully fleshed out. All of that can happen later when/if a character comes into the story that is being told. 


Read more »

v0.1 - Principles and Concepts

I am proud to to say that I have my first nearly complete version of Beyond the Torchlight written up and I think it is time I start to share the information to begin the feedback and review process. Over the next week or so, I'll begin to share portions of the files for review and comment. 

I welcome feedback and comments either on this blog post, over on Github or in the Good docs link below: 


Design Concept: Health, Breath and Characteristics

I'm getting close to my first draft of the character creation mechanics and I think it is worth outlining some of my ideas around "health", skills and traits in my system. 


Breath (Health)

The characters in BTTL won't have a hit point or health counter as you might see in other rpg system. A player's overall "health" is instead tied to a stat called Breath and their Characteristics. 

Breath is  your character's  ability to act during intense situations. Damage taken by the character is first applied to their Breath before it is subtracted from the appropriate Characteristic. Characters may choose to spend their breath to take more drastic actions during combat, use combat abilities, or to cast spells. 

Once a player reaches zero (0) breath, any additional damage is applied to the appropriate characteristics. 

At the conclusion of combat or a strenuous activity, characters may rest for ten minutes to "Catch their breath" and restore their points.


Characteristics

Characteristics represent a character's innate abilities, their physical capability, and mental acuteness. Characteristics are comprised of two numbers, which when added will total 20. If you are familiar with games like Call of Cthulhu or D&D, then this would be the closets representation to a Skill in one of those systems. 

The purpose of the two number system is to be able to establish a Difficulty Check (DC) score for characters to roll against yours as well as a Saving Through score for a character to roll against themselves. Characters will only roll dice if they are the ones taking an action. They will either roll to beat another character’s DC or roll a ST roll if there is a risk to themselves.

You might be asking why, for these two numbers? The reason is to maintain a "roll above" system while maintaining some sort of target number that is directly tied to the character in the challenge. I could have kept the math simpler by having players roll under for one type of stat and roll above for another, but while doing a quick survey with my personal play groups, my players just didn't like roll under systems. They wanted to "roll 20" for success. 

The example below will exaplain a common example of how the system is expected to work. 

Example

Player 1 rolls 3d6 for their character Elsa's Strength, Dexterity and Fortitude with the following results: 11, 13 and 5. 

Characteristic DC Check Saving Throw
Str 11 9
Dex 13 7
Frt 5 15

A thief is trying to pickpocket Elsa, but Elsa is pretty dextrous meaning that she has a high chance of detecting the thief trying to pickpocket her. The thief will roll 1d20 and must beat Elsa’s DC of 13 in order to be successful. The thief rolls a 9 and is caught by Elsa. The thief turns and makes a run for it sprinting across a roof top and jumping to the next building. 

Elsa pursues the thief and makes a jump across the gap between the buildings. This is a dangerous jump so Elsa will need to make a Saving Throw to see if she makes it. She needs to roll a 7 or higher on her Dex to successfully make the jump. She rolls an 11 and successfully jumps over the gap.

Combat Mechanics v0.1

Over the winter holiday I had a chance to sit-down and really crank through some of the ideas I had in my head and complete my first draft of the combat system. 

You can find the complete v0.1 document over on Github and Google Drive, but I'll try to summarize some of the concepts and what I am trying to do with combat. 

General Concept: The Battle Grid


One of the things that will immediately jump out to you when you read through the design document is the Combat Grid. I have been pondering on this concept for a few months, trying to figure out how to combine a few different ideas into a single system. 

I knew from the outset that I didn't want to use the common battle-mat and map layout that you see in D&D. This is partially attributed to the fact that I very frequently play those games so I am personally just sick of that mechanic. I also wanted to explore another way to represent the characters in combat. I have played "theater of the mind" in several RPG systems and more often than not, I have found that my players never are able to full grasp the concept. They always lose track of whom is engaged with whom, and the distances characters are from each other.

How could I find some way to get in-between both systems? How could I have something that is simple and streamlined at the table but at the same time could give some sort of visual representation of where characters are in relation to each other? 

The solution actually came from chess, which several of my regular players are really involved in. I knew from the outset that my combat was going to have players all take their actions at once and then have enemies all take their actions at once. This provided for a common mechanic similar to chess that just seemed to "click" for me. Once I had that idea down, I was able to expand from there to allow for a fairly tactical system that doesn't get bogged down in measuring combat distances in feet. 

Characters can act in combat lanes and can have their "stance" represented by the column they are in. I think there is enough information provided her to give people an idea of where and what they are doing in combat without having to spend five minutes on each of their turns trying to measure out 60 feet of movement. Playtesting I suppose will see if my assumptions play out as much as I hope. 

I would love to get some feedback from anyone who would like to provide a comment either on Github or on the Google Doc linked above. 

Design Concept: Specific Skills, Not Broad Skills

I'm taking some heavy influence with this statement from the OSR (Old School Renaissance) community and the concept of "Your Sheet Has No Answers". The idea of specific skills revolves around the discussion about where is the line drawn between the character and the player. If you look at some modern game designs such as 5e, Pathfinder, or even Call of Cthulhu, the character sheets are filled with skills and abilities. In my experience players will often approach a situation, assess it, and then ask their GM if they can roll some dice to gather information or do a task. 

That approach to game design works pretty well. It ensures that the character in the scene is acting based upon the skills they have and that their player might not. For example, if I were playing a traditional cleric, I would presume to have in-depth religious knowledge about the game world. As a player I might have very little knowledge of the in-game religions. To expand further, I might not be a religious person at all to even have the proper frame of reference to a apply those concepts to a character. 

What I don't like about these systems is that they often have the player "give up" their investment into the scene too early. Perception checks in D&D are one of my most frustrating and hated mechanics. Too often my players walk into a room and immediately ask for a perception check. Checks for skills in general are good and should be used in games, but when you have certain checks dominate scenarios you then have a poorly designed system. Perception checks themselves are too broad and too encompassing. How many times in a game are you making a perception check versus a nature check for example?

Instead I would like to see players describe to me what they want to do in the room, what they are looking for, and how they want to look for it. It doesn't have to be specific. They can state that they are looking for traps, or they want to smell the air for gun powder, etc. But, if they ask the right questions, they shouldn't even need to roll anything at all. I can give them the answer.

The perception check problem rears its head again when players ask to roll and fail. Let's say the party enters a room and they need to find the hidden door down to the dungeon. If they roll a perception or investigation check and they all fail, the GM is now left having to manage how to keep the story moving forward. Do they convey any information? Do you have the party roll again? If there is no failure state with risk the roll becomes completely useless. 

How do we fix this then? I feel the answer is specificity. Create roll situations that gives information that only that character can obtain. Create abilities, checks, skills, traits, etc. that are specific and unique to the character and can be applied to specific situations. The payoff then is much more rewarding. If for example, you walk into a room and you have a chef in your party, they might have a skill to specifically smell the air or identify ingredients in a dish, or know why that wine's color is slightly off because of the poison in it. 

Specificity creates a much more rewarding experience at the table, where everyone playing gets a moment of enlightenment and excitement because the right tool was used at the right time. 

Design Concept: Classless Game Design

Let's open our conversation for "Beyond the Torchlight" by walking through some of the design concepts that I am using as my basis for this project. I have not designed an RPG system before, but as with any project I believe you have to start out answering the question, "What problem am I trying to solve"?

The problems I am trying to solve stem largely from my time playing D&D 5e. It is after all the most popular play system, and both of the groups that I DM for prefer it over other systems.

After now playing the same system for almost ten years and having to manage the various skills and builds across dozens of books, I have found that D&D puts an unreasonable burden upon the DM to try and run a game with any sort of balance. D&D by its nature tends to lean into this concept of the "optimal build" and we have all seen the Reddit or forum posts with people asking how to build their next character. While that is fine, it tends to be a bit of an exhausting exercise. It also presents an inherent imbalance at the play table in two specific areas:
  1. It creates an unreasonable unbalance between the players and the DM. If you have both experienced and unexperienced players at the table, you will inevitably have a situation where the unexperienced players feel frustration because they are not "effective". Worse, they will not understand why they aren't effective.
  2. The optimization mindset also tends to reward combat focused character creation. There are entire feats or classes in D&D that don't get used because they are not "optimal", and you are once again left with an imbalance in the gameplay. Generally I feel that combat and roleplay should be equally represented in a TTRPG.
So the starting point for this design concept is to eliminate classes and races in the system. Players can choose to play as a dwarf, an alien, a cowboy gunslinger, or any other race they can imagine, but those races and classes do not provide any distinction over another.

The design goal is to tell your character's story through the campaign and not have the story of your character brought to the campaign. The adventures, gear, scars and stories made at the table will be what ultimately differentiates your character from another player's. 
    Now, there is some importance to be placed on where your character came from. They aren't nameless blank slates. Backgrounds are important and we are playing an RPG after all. We do need to create a character, and there should be tools in place to allow players to develop the character. Those character creation tools will ultimately help to define a character and their roll within the town that is created. That creation process will also provide guidance for the player on how their character may act in certain situations or determine what sort of skills they have available to them. The goal though is to have that background matter more in adventuring and social situations and less in combat. 

    This system will be designed to encourage a "West Marches" style of play and your character's background will be influential in establishing your "non-adventuring" life inside the town. Your character for example could be a blacksmith, a baker, a cleric, or anything else that may be found within the functioning world of a town.

    The classless system doesn't by itself solve any of the problems that I have with various RPG systems, but I do think it does avoid creating some problems from the outset, namely the "optimal build". I am hoping that by removing classes and races the players can have a narrative thread to start their character not from "who their character was", but rather on "who their character will become".


    Welcome to Beyond the Torchlight

    Welcome to this blog. I don't know exactly how you found your way here, but I hope you have come to this place to find out a little bit more about this little RPG project.

    This blog will be where I will post ideas, thoughts, and struggles as someone who thought it would be fun to design a RPG system, having never done so before. 

    What Will Beyond the Torchlight Be? 

    So, let's open up this blog and start with what I am trying to do and what this blog might be about. Beyond the Torchlight was born out of a discussion with my Friday night game group. Coming off of the OGL controversy this past winter, I was able to finally convince my players to break their D&D 5e obsession and play something else. I was getting burned out on D&D, and the amount of preparation it required as a GM, so we had a lot of conversations about different types of games, that we might want to try. My interests leaned towards OSR games if in part only for the fact that they seemed like they could be learned and played very quickly. I finally settled on playing a game called Cairn, which captured my attention based upon its simplicity. There are no classes, no races and no leveling up. While it technically isn't an OSR game, it fit the bill of something that I wanted to transition to for a short campaign.

    I have been playing that system for a few months now and it has been a nice change of pace. There have been some great roleplay moments that we have had, but there are also ideas that I would like to explore that Cairn doesn't address.

    Adding to this, is the fact that I can tell that my players aren't entirely captured by Cairn. I have found it to be a very refreshing way to GM a game, but I can see that some my play group needs a bit more crunch and depth, specifically in the combat system.

    Around this same time, during one of our game sessions the phrase "Beyond the Torchlight" emerged from someone's mouth. I can't recall the exact circumstance, but it definitely was borne from a conversation on how the Cairn system does not have any sort of Darkvision. Immediately after that phrase was uttered, we all agreed that someone had to grab that domain name.

    Design Concepts

    So let's close out this first blog post with a quick outline of the design concepts that I am hoping to explore and build upon while completing this experiment. I'll elaborate a bit more on these as we continue this process, but there are ideas that I have immediately latched onto from the OSR and NSR games that have stuck with me.
    • Simple rulebook and fast character creation.
    • Designed for a West Marches style of play.
    • Compatible with a variety of game systems with quick conversion guidelines.
    • A "magic" system that can be applied to various settings, including futuristic settings.
    • Invest in a roleplay.
    • Classless.
    • Single currency.
    • Downtime/non-adventuring rules for growth and character development.