A Tale of Two Play Tests

Yesterday, I was involved in two play tests. 

The first was my own game, Flying Swordsmen 2E. It was a focused affair, and I think I received some valuable feedback.

The second was for Jeremy's new Supers game that he's been working on. It was my third time testing out his system and while there is progress on that system, the session was a bit...meh.

So first off, for my Flying Swordsmen play test, I had four players: Flynn and Steven (my boys, age 17 and almost 11), Denis, and Charles. They've all played in my Star Wars campaign, so they're familiar with the basics at least of the Open d6 System. 

My goal for the session was to have the players each make a PC using a template, then have them each make a PC using custom design. I thought it would be a quick session. Turns out, it took most of the time to get the template PCs completed mechanically (we didn't create NPC Sifu, organizations, or important NPC relationships since I don't have my starting campaign setting ideas worked out yet). And instead of then turning to custom PCs (which we wouldn't have had time to finish anyway), we ran a practice combat, two-on-two. 

Denis had gone through the character templates the night before. He even called to tell me that he found around seven of them really interesting. That was a good sign. He hadn't read through the player rules packet, though. He ended up using the Beggar template.

Charles had at least skimmed the player rules, and had a few questions about them when we started. I don't think he had looked through the templates yet. He went with a Drunken Boxer template.

My boys were given a basic overview, and I explained the templates to them before we left to meet up with Denis and Charles. Flynn chose the Demonist Shaman template, and Steven went with the Street Fighter template. 

Denis took a bit of time to understand the difference between the suggested skills on the template and the skill dice that could be distributed. Charles had lots of questions about taking specializations of skills. There are a couple of skills that I might need to rename. I went with "Stance" as the name of what Star Wars calls Dodge, and this was confusing for them. I'll probably edit it to Dodge so it's easier to notice...but I like the flavor of the name Stance. 

Denis suggested that instead of walls of text, I could make a visual diagram of character creation, and that's a good idea. I'll get to work on that soon. Color coding a character sheet and putting notes in a sidebar with number references on the sheet should be fairly easy to do. 

My boys didn't have many problems. They've each made multiple Star Wars PCs, so they picked their templates, selected their skills, and were ready to go. 

In the combat, we found that for novice martial artists, it's fairly easy to get knocked out or wounded. Denis' Beggar went down first, then Flynn's Shaman was wounded. Charles' Drunken Boxer took a minor wound, then Steven's Street Fighter knocked him out, ending the combat. I want to run more combats like this, and put them up against some NPCs and monsters as well, at different power levels to see how things go. They had fun with this fight. Everyone had good things to say about FS2E afterwards. 

Later, after dinner, Flynn and I logged on to Jeremy's Discord to play test his Supers game. This was the third time, and I decided just before we joined the game (well, about 30 minutes before) to make a new character with different powers just to try out a few things. Most of the powers I chose weren't really relevant to the adventure he had us play through, but that's alright. He had no idea I was going to switch from a magic sword-wielding Thor/Warlord/Black Knight type to a technomancer. 

Flynn played Nova, the plasma-wielding hero from the previous session. Dustie played Maya, the gravity-manipulator she had played in the previous session. Jeff and Scott couldn't make it.

Jeremy has been struggling with a few elements of the design. In particular, he wants Stunts -- special or unusual uses of a power -- to be a big part of the game. But he's been struggling with how to model them. I still find the resolution a little unsatisfying, and I think Jeremy is starting to see where I'm coming from. He also has a very slow and painful advancement mechanic, but I can't seem to convince him that it needs to change. He did add in a new way to gain points towards advancement, but is keeping the glacial pace. 

Mechanics aside, the session was dull. In the first game, we had a mystery to solve (although it was mostly just RP, and didn't involve much mechanics), then a bunch of monster fights. Session Two was a bit of exploration (again mostly RP, a bit of mechanics for that), and a bunch of monster fights. Session three was ONLY a series of monster fights. 

The good thing about that was, as we mopped up all of the monsters except for the "Level 4 Psychic Entity" that was only there to monologue, Jeremy seemed to start to realize that 2d10 plus an ability score that is probably going to range from 30 to 60 (and could be more) isn't the best mechanic. Unless we roll snake-eyes, we're not going to fail much. Or the difficulties are going to be so crazy that a character like Jeff made, who has a lot of powers in the 10 to 20 range, is going to find it impossible.  

The bad thing was, we were just going through the motions. Jeremy started us out with the NPC bosses telling us to guard the area monsters would appear. Then he seemed to be fishing for us to do something else, but when we tried doing other things, we were discouraged from that. Then, when we had a break in the monster fighting, we tried doing something unexpected, and Jeremy had us quickly returned to what we had been told to do by his "Dr. Alchemical" NPC. And a few more monster fights took place. 

So yeah, a railroad adventure. 

Now, since it's a play test, I don't mind the railroad so much. What bothers me is that Jeremy was still trying to give us an illusion of freedom, then yanking it away. I'd have been happier if he'd just straight up ran us through the series of monster fights without pretending we had a choice in the matter. 

That's less a problem with the rule set, and more with Jeremy's skills as a GM. I know there are plenty of monsters in supers comics, but when I think Supers RPG, I want to face villains. Street-level bank or tech lab robbers. Teams of colorful weirdos like the Sinster Six or Flash's Rogue's Gallery. Organizations like the Brotherhood of Mutants, Lexcorp, Hydra, or the Injustice League. 

Sure, throw in a few monsters here and there. But where are the ticking time bombs in school buses? The choice to save your girlfriend or the group of civilians from certain death? The pair of nuclear missiles aimed at opposite ends of the country and only time to stop one of them? The crazy non-linear fun-house gladiatorial combat for an extra-dimensional TV personality? The choice between going out to stop crime or attending Grandma's dinner party? Having to make ends meet at a day job while constantly getting pulled away by villains causing chaos? 

OK, had to vent. Three sessions of nothing but fighting Lovecraftian monsters (if you know Jeremy's OSR monster/art books, you know what I mean) gets old.