Just Finished My First Playtest Of My Wild West Horror Game, And My Biggest Takeaway Is This:

Just finished my first playtest of my wild west horror game, and my biggest takeaway is this:

It is equally important to be good at communicating your rules as it is to have fun an interesting rules.

Now, this is an obvious token of advice that any game designer worth their salt should be aware of, but it's not until I sat down to playtest that I understood the GRAVITY of it.

Because my poor players, my dearest friends who were willing to take time out of their day to understand my game and play it through, read the rulebook up and down multiple times. And each and every one of them came to the table with a sheepish admittance of guilt that they didn't understand the rules.

But they shouldn't feel guilty for that, that's MY fault as a communicator of the game's rules. See, I initially wrote the rules of my game for myself, as a designer. I made a step-by-step list of the procedures between the GM and the Player. But to someone that isn't a designer, my rules were described in a way that was positively USELESS.

My point is, it's very difficult as a game designer to communicate your mechanics to non-designers without hands-on demonstration. But you don't have that luxury when selling that game to strangers once the playtest is over. It's a skill you have to develop, a skill where you need to view your game from the perspective of someone who has never encountered it before. That's difficult.

Now, once the Players understood the mechanics, they actually got really into my game. And for that I'm very proud, and even more so relieved. I was worried I would have to rewrite my rules from scratch because the game wouldn't be fun.

Turns out I will be rewriting my rules from scratch, but not because the rules were bad, but because my communication was bad!

At some point in time, a man used a deer antler to knock walnuts out of a tree.

That time was 2024. That man was me. I am the weirdo in the park.

I also don't pay corporations for walnuts. It's all about perspective.

Sword and sorcery tabletop RPG which includes a long, rambling list of magic spells with weirdly specific affects and annoyingly particular casting requirements, kind of like if Dungeons & Dragons decided to be about 40% more precious about its magic system, except it's a group worldbuilding game, and one of the first steps is for the group to collectively choose exactly seven of those spells to be the only ones anyone still knows how to cast. All of the spells that didn't get picked might be spoken of in legend, but the knowledge of them has been lost over time. The remainder of the group worldbuilding phase consists principally of brainstorming what a society built around these seven annoyingly specific spells would look like; for example, perhaps the knowledge of their working is jealously guarded, with each of the setting's great nations constructing their entire cultural identity around Their Spell, or perhaps the setting's industrial base is dependent on combining these spells in increasingly unintended ways to form a sort of sorcerous Rube Goldberg machine of production.

(One of the default campaign premises for this hypothetical game would, of course, cast the player characters as a gang of mercenary scholars on a quest to rediscover an eighth spell. Depending on what sort of setting the group initially brainstormed, keeping their intentions under wraps may be strongly advisable.)

Played the board game Arcs for the first time yesterday! There are a lot of good things to say about this game's design. The turns are snappy, the trick-taking action system is genius, and declaring/scoring ambitions makes you think long and hard on the hand of cards you're given. But I wanted to draw attention to one specific design choice that likely went unnoticed by many, but is invaluable in my eyes.

The design choice in question is the way which HP is tracked on buildings and units! For those of you who have never played a war game before, HP can be a pain to track for individual units, and Arc's entire design philosophy is to deliver the war game experience while minimizing the busywork. And when you have up to a dozen individual pieces on the board per-faction, that can become a real problem.

How Arcs solves this is to use the geometry of the game pieces. Every ship can either be upright (2 HP), on its side (1 HP), or removed from the board (0 HP).

Likewise, every building token is double sided, having both "healthy" and "damaged" sides which you can flip over when taking damage. This also simplifies the math in the game to mere counting. No need to use a calculator here!

Choices like this, while not particularly impactful with how players interact with the rules of the game, are vital to how players interact with the experience of the game.

Simply put, when making a game, keep in mind the physical space your players will be playing in. It might alert you to some problems, and if you're wise, might even offer you some solutions!

TTRPG where instead of levelling up to get new abilities you can just yell and new abilities appear on your character sheet.

Will they be good abilities? Not always. But they will certainly be new abilities.