More HoD Playtesting

Or not, actually. I know the last playtest report posted just a few days ago, but truth be told that happened months ago. As in many month. And since then, we've had no end of hitches in getting together for additional play sessions. One player is a father of young children, another is getting married in the fall. In addition, two of the three are avid fishermen, and it's fishing season in a big way here. Facing your destiny in the supernaturally tinted American west has been losing to a lot of competition.

However, I still run a regular Wednesday game, and my hope, once I wrap up the campaign that's been chugging along since we began mid-week play, is to turn that into a playtesting meet. It's a different group, and the scheduling changes the way we play, since we've only got a couple of hours instead of a whole afternoon, but to my mind that's a plus, not a negative. Having only 2-3 hours means that we don't have time for elaborate and complicated resolution mechanics, and seeing as how I'm looking to keep dice simple and fast in this game, the constraints of play time serve as further impetus to get that right.

So, once 7th Sea/Swashbuckler/Vice and Steel/Poison'd (all merged thanks to The Flux) wraps up, I'll see if I can't convince the Wednesday night guys to give Heroes of Destiny a roll. This time I'm not offering it up as a blank slate on which we'll scrawl any campaign of any genre though; I'm making it easier on myself. It was written originally to be fantasy, so we'll play it fantasy. For starters. Let's get that worked out before having to deal with all the complications modern technology can bring to the table (I'm content to ignore most of it, but my players tend to give birth to live cattle if I do that too much, and while I like burgers as much as the next guy, there's only so much room here).

Here's the thing: I've actually got a few fantasy adventures I've been dying to try out for a while. There's the old 2e Illithiad, which pits the party against a secret mind flayer invasion of a coastal region and eventually has them racing to save the sun from death. It's got a techno-horror bent to it, and since much of the initial action occurs in a city, it's opening arc is set in a place with ample opportunity to have lots of recurring characters, i.e. Dream characters.

Then there's the Drow War. I'd like to provide a link to this, but Mongoose doesn't seem to have a page for it anymore. It's a series of 30 individual adventures written for D&D 3e which takes you from scrub to epic hero, and I've tried to run it twice. We never made it all the way through, either time. Now, this campaign is much more classic D&D, with each adventure sending you to a new place with lots of combat, but I have a strong suspicion (without doing any of the work) that it could be made into a good campaign for Heroes of Destiny too. Each player in the campaign is supposed to select a star sign which grants him a small mechanical bonus throughout the campaign. Turning star signs into Ideals and forcing the players to choose between their earthly lives and heavenly power seems like it could be very much in line with the campaign's themes, and works quite well for HoD as well.

Thinking about translating this campaign has me riffing on the idea of redefining Dreams, or providing another way of defining them at least, to make the game more compatible with fantasy that includes a lot of questing. Let's face it, questing is a mainstay of the genre. Listen to Kevin Smith talk about the Rings movies sometime. Questing, however, introduces an element of difficulty in keeping NPCs present, which is important if the nature of their relationship with the PCs is to change and matter. So I'm thinking about ways to expand Dreams to larger things like nations and kingdoms. The relationship with these dreams wouldn't seem to be quite as personal at first, but if a partisan must sacrifice his standing in his country in order to pursue his ideals, it could still have great personal impact.

We'll see how it goes, and naturally I'll keep you posted.

Relationship Health for NPC Tracking

One additional suggestion that came out of the whole stages of relationship health meter idea tied back to formally ending a scene. In addition to ending a scene by consensus, John said he thought it would be neat to include a sort of postlude if anyone's Dreams suffered damage, be it from heeding the Call of Destiny, or temporary damage from endangering your Dreams. He said it should show the repricussions of the change, even if they happen off camera for the PC and he has no way of knowing about it.

In my mind's eye, I picture this as an opportunity for the player to take over in a limited GM capacity for a moment, and narrate what's happening to the NPC that's important to him. He controls that person's fate in a way, and gets him more involved in telling the story of his character through telling a side tale of someone important to his character. It's a marvelous idea, and one I intend to introduce straight away.

Heroes of Destiny: Fourth Playtest

The last playtest blew a huge hole in the mechanical basis of the game, so I had a lot of work ahead of me to get the game in shape to play again, as prior posts attest. Walking into this game, I wasn't sure how the revisions would go over, so I had the train roll into town and got the players into trouble right away.

Non-combat rules changed very little, so people were fine with just rolling along. Destiny worked a little different, what with 10s counting double, but it didn't come up much. No one defended or endangered dreams this session, so despite the fact that those rules underwent a massive rewrite, there wasn't much testing going on there.

We did see several combats though. That's right, several. The new rules allowed us to engage in multiple altercations and have time left over for not ony more game, but more combat. Needless to say, it went much more smoothly. I found information much easier to track on my end with NPCs reduced to series of target numbers, and not once did a player stop to ask what the hell he was doing.

New recovery rules proved intuitive, and while I still wonder if they make a person a little too tough, hard opposition can still put plenty of hurt on a PC. Players found the entire system far easier to track than the bloodied/bruised system in place previously, so there's a win. I think it bears more watching/testing, but it's a step in the right direction.

Damage, special damage that is, needs some work though. The whole damage = margin thing is cool and it works, but having all weapons provide bonuses to the attack pool isn't translating into harder hits the way I hoped it would, and it puts our spellcasters at something of a disadvantage when compared to gunslingers. I haven't worked out how to make it work instead (players are pushing for a straight damage bonus, but that feels wrong to me for no reason I can articulate), so that's grist for the design mill. The short of it is, there needs to be ways of making special attacks more potent, ideally without adding a while separate damage score to the whole thing.

Which brings us to the other major complaint of the game: potencies suck. Okay, no, they don't suck, but they're not, well, potent enough. The general feeling was that for abilities that cost extra successes to activate, they should have a lot more oomph than they do now. Some of the design suggestions made them into quasi-feat chains ala D&D, which was a real turn off for me. I don't hate D&D, but I want to avoid the design methodology that created that system as much as I can, given the playstyle it engenders and that I've experienced. I want to avoid a power grab system that turns characters into compilations of special abilities. That said, if people aren't feeling their potencies matter much mechanically, that absolutely does need work. Throw that on the pile I guess.

Next up, some possible solutions... I hope.

Ideals, take 3

In thinking over the 10s are double successes idea, I've decided that a 10% chance per die of getting a bonus isn't good enough. There needs to be a more compelling reason for hewing to your ideals. Destiny dice need to be that much better when you're following the true calling of your heart instead of just being a big damn hero in general.

The double success idea is a good one. I like it. It's still simple and prevents dice overload. It just doesn't get triggered often enough.

So why not just take out the trigger and make it automatic? Act in accordance to your ideals, and any successes you roll on Destiny dice count as double, up to the rating of your ideals in play. Roll those dice over to 10 if it helps you keep track of them.

I think that's the version of the rules that's going to hit the next playtest session.

New Use for Ideals

With Dreams squared away, we now turn to the action side of the pool: Ideals. Again, no additional dice, so what whole double dice spent thing doesn't cut it anymore. However, my solution for this is much simpler than the whole rigamarole required to fix Dreams (probably because Dreams required that recovery be fixed first, where this is based on action resolution, which required no adjustments).

In short, every 10 you roll on a Destiny die counts as 2 successes, up to the rating of the Ideal, assuming you're acting in accordance to your ideals, of course.

It's simple. It works a lot like talents and trainings. It doesn't add dice. It doesn't require any additional rerolling. In fact the only concern I have with it at the moment is whether it's a significant enough benefit. After all, you only have a 10% chance of getting a 10 on any d10, and that means that there will be plenty of times when you roll in accordance to your ideals and get no benefit. And even if you do get a benefit, will it be powerful enough to make a real difference?

I could say that we need to play it to find out, and that's true, but this is one I think I want to spend a little more time on. It might need another revision before the next testing session.

New Use for Dreams

With damage and recovery worked out, I feel there's enough new ground laid to take a look at Dreams. Dreams are, in the definition of the game, a way to keep the character going. He can persevere because he still has something to live for.

Well, the old rules lost sight of that, sort of. They could certainly boost your damage capacity by adding Hope dice to your pool, but they were semi-action oriented in the same breath. With the new 10 die maximum mandate, adding dice is no longer an option, so we need some other way of representing hopes.

John, for whom this game is written, gave a fantastic idea: Dreams, when either being defended or endangered, act as trainings for recovery checks, meaning that dice up to the invoked Dream can recover on a 4 instead of a 5. That's some awesome stuff right there. It's simple. It's thematic. It uses the existing rules. We're going with that.

I'm going to throw in one additional bonus for defeding your Dreams: you can recover for free as long as your Dreams are directly in peril. So if your wife is being attacked by crazy cultists, and you're fighting them off her, you can recover for free every single exchange with no need to set aside a success from your pool to activate the ability.

Recovery without Die Status

Chucking the whole healthy to bloody and then back to bruised thing for dice means the entire way that health is measured in Heroes of Destiny is up for grabs. Not just health, but damage, damage recovery, and no small number of potencies. There's a whole web of interconnected concepts that need to change together.

Today, I'm dealing with the matter of getting your dice back. Wounding seems pretty simple. You take damage, dice drop out of your pool. That part can stay the same. 2 points knocks loose a Hope die, while a single point bloodies a Destiny die.

The question is, what happens then? How do you get them back, in the middle of things I mean? And make no mistake, you need some manner of recovery, otherwise this is just another death spiral game, and I know of few people who enjoy death spirals.

So, first things first: all dice of a type are the same. This means that all d6s in play act the same, just as all d10s in play are the same. What this means is that a die is in play or it isn't. If you recover a die, it's a full fledged member of your pool. You can roll it, but you can also use it to take more damage. Recovery means you're getting some of your damage capacity back too.

Now that we've got that, how do you get those dice back into your pool? An idea that one of my players had was to roll your injury dice (the ones knocked out of your play, bloodied to use the old nomenclature). For every die that comes up a success, you return it to your pool. Anything that doesn't come up 5 or better stays where it is.

I like that. It's pretty simple, and it uses the existing rules. Yeah, okay, there's an additional die roll in that, but it's not too bad, is it? Bears testing to find out; I'd like to keep additional rolling to a minimum, but this particular roll might work out. However, I'd like to add one wrinkle to this: recovery isn't automatic. You need to expend a little effort. So, on any given round you can allocate a single success from your pool to recovery. That lets you recover at the end of the exchange, and those dice return to your pool for use at the beginning of the next exchange.

That's complete enough to begin play again. I'll let you know how it works out.

A Few Rules For The Other NPCs

One of the characters in our playtest is a former lawman who's given up the badge and moved out west in order to start a new, more pedestrian life with his wife and child. His ideal is Champion, which he defines as standing up for other people when they're in trouble, while his Dreams include his wife, child, and a new, quiter life.


In the train ride out to Redemption, AZ, our family of east coast transplants ran into no small amount of trouble when something possessed a passenger and turned him into a near unkillable creature that was doing awful things to the rest of the people. You can read all about it in the prior playtest reports to Heroes of Destiny.

As you might imagine, our lawman found himself called into action again, and the player found he really hit a groove with the character taking control of situations on the verge of panic and enforcing order while wrangling posses to hunt down the supernatural terror. He found a joy and a sense of purpose in it that he imagined his character had as well, and said that's clearly why he became a lawman.

This put him in conflict with his wife, who he described as nervous and clingy. She was always asking him not to get involved, to stay with her and protect her, just her. In the process of saving the train, he endangered his relationship with her quite a bit and heeded destiny's call just as much. Every time he lost Hope, he dropped his Dream rating for his wife. By the time they rolled into Redemption, she'd gone from a 3 to a 1, and that 1 was damaged down to a temproary 0.

So when he arrived home at one point, she greeted him by throwing crockery at his head. He was confused at first, until I explained to him that their relationship had been damaged both in the long term and short term, at which point he perked up and made the following suggestion:
In addition to providing some personality notes about each NPC that's a Dream, all Dreams should have a health status of sorts. This has nothing to do with combat and everything to do with their relationship to the character. At each rating in Dream, make a note of some change in the relationship. So if your wife is one of your Dreams at rating 3, define a telling point of the relationship at ratings 3, 2, 1, and 0. If your dream is a business, define what your relationship to the business is at each point rating.

Another fantastic idea. I think I'll have a hard time getting the guys to make those charts up mid-play, but for future tests, it's totally on.

Scene Structure in Heroes of Destiny

One suggestion that came out of the last playtest was to add a formal finish to any scene. Most time, play just flows from one person to another, one locaiton to the next, and from scene to scene. That's all well and good, but given that certain mechanics apply for one scene, he asked that we formally declare the end of a scene to clear up any ambiguity.

It's a small thing, but I like it. I think the appealing part of it is that by asking for scene close by consensus, it gets the players thinking about story structure and pulls them into more of a director stance, even if subtly. Anything that helps bridge that divide between players and GM is a good thing in my opinion. Many games have suffered when players show up with no sense of responsibility beyond attendence and playing their own character in a vacuum, and the GM runs games and plots with no eye toward engaging the players, instead looking at their characters as his own playthings. It's gone bad from both ends. Meeting in the middle, even in small ways like this, brings everyone closer together, and I really look forward to seeing how this easily implimented practice changes play.

NPC Special Abilities

Now that I've got the new way potencies work, in a general sense, I can return to NPC spceial abilities. I still don't want resources to manage on the NPC side. We've seen how well that worked. However, creating interesting opposition requires something that can do more than deal damage. No, this game isn't super-meaty in terms of combat, but still, you do want to mix up the violence now and again. Descriptions are great, and I intend to use them quite a bit, but since a player experiences a game in large part through how it affects his character sheet, I want to put in a few special abilities, similar to potencies, that NPCs can use to make them stand out as different from one another.

In the interest of keeping all the calculations on the player's side, however, I'm staying away from the idea of activating them on my own somehow though. I'm not sure if I'll keep the encounter pool, or how it'll work if I do, but I do know that's not going to be the way that I'm going to invoke their abilities.

So how to do it? The same way we're trying to do everything else in this game: margin of success/failure on the player's roll. Since an NPC's stats are the target numbers for attack and defense rolls made by the players, the special abiltiies can things that trigger when certain margins are hit.

For example, a brilliant swordsman NPC might have a riposte abilitiy that kicks off with a margin of 3. He has a defense of 5. A player takes a swing at him, but only comes up with 2 successes for the roll. That triggers the swordsman's riposte ability, which means he gets an automatic, free attack against the player. This happens whenever anyone misses him by 3.

Like potencies, these can be tiered as well, with greater effects triggered by greater margins. And there's nothing that says a player has to utterly fail in order for a special condition to kick off.

For example, a cultist has a special ability that allows him to call for aid from others in the crowd when he's in trouble. When a PC makes a successful attack with a margin of 3 or less, the cultist successfully calls another member to his side to stand against the PC.

Now, I thought Gifts as NPC stats was a good idea too, so this sounds nice in theory, but the only way to be sure is to test it. I'd like to say I'm confident, but the last idea worked out so poorly I'm instead going to say I'm cautiously optimistic.

Potencies Redeux

With the idea of splitting your main pool into tinier ones and then rolling them separately, potencies need a rework. However, the new combat method does lend itself for a pretty easy conversion. Instead of allocating dice pre-roll to a potency, you allocate successes from your roll to potencies in order to activate them. In fact, this allows for more robust potencies that exist in tiers. For one success, you can get X benefit, but for two successes, you get Y, and for three you get Z.

That's all nice and vague, so let's slap some examples down on the page.

• Flashing Blades - you can make an additional attack against a target in the same exchange. This action costs 3 successes. Upon activation, you can apply an attack you've already made a second time against the target. In effect, you deal damage two times from a single attack.
• Pain Rage - the pain of your injuries burns red, granting you furious strength. This action costs 2 successes. Upon activation, you may add any current damage you are suffering (in dice, not points) to the damage of an attack.
• Wild Aggression - you throw yourself on your opponent, heedless of danger to yourself. This action costs 1 success. Upon activation, you can apply an attack you've already made against the target. You may not defend or recover this exchange.
• Take It - you steel yourself to take a hit. This action costs 1 success per level; there is no limit to the number of successes you can give to this potency. For each level, you steel a single die by increasing the amount of damage required to knock it out of your pool. Thus it takes 2 points to knock out a Destiny die and 3 points to knock out a Hope die. You can only apply this potency once to a since die, but may apply it to multiple dice.
• Berserker - you throw yourself into a howling rage, allowing you to temporarily overcome your injuries. This action costs 1 success. Next exchange, you may roll all your dice, including the injured ones. However, you may not recover or defend in that exchange.

This does make the decision to use potencies something that happens after the roll rather than before, but while that might take a little of the risk out of it, it also breaks up the number of decisions that need to be made at one time, and I think that'll lead to a better play experience. People can roll, figure out how many successes they have, and then decide if they've got the slack to bust out the special moves. Some rolls might make that decision for them, making it a faster process. It's certainly worth testing, anyway.

The New Combat Procedure

In theory, combat already works the same way that non-combat checks do. In our playtest, however, the players never tried to do more than one thing at a time when making non-combat checks, so that similarity never appeared. However, once we got into combat, people were splitting their pools and rolling all over the place, which was exactly how it was supposed to work.

Fluidity was a problem though, so this is an attempt to make it a faster, simpler resolution system. Here's the new proposed combat procedure:

1. Declare your actions
2. Roll your Pool
3. Apply modifiers for talents and trainings
4. Sort out your successes
5. Allocate your successes toward your declared actions
6. Compare them to your target numbers
7. Record the consequences based on margins of success and/or failure

Seven steps seems like a pretty involved process, I know, but have a look at that list again. It's pretty granular (I'm a technical writer by trade; I'm trained to write instructions in a highly detailed fashion and leave little in the realm of assumed user knowledge). In a nutchell, you're rolling like you would for any other check, the only difference here is that you might be splitting your successes among multiple actions like attack and defense. Otherwise it's identical to a standard roll, and playtesting has showed the standard roll works beautifully.

The 10 Die Limit

One of the things all three playtesters wound up begging for in unison pretty quickly when we got into discussing what worked and didn't in our playtest was a cap on The Pool. 10 dice, they said. 10 dice was a great number. Don't mess with it. Take away from it for injury if you like; that's okay, but please, dear G-d please, no more. Between endangering dreams, seeing your dreams in actual harm, and acting according to your ideals, you could wind up with a mountain of dice. Mountains of dice are nice in theory, because everyone loves powerful characters, but in actual play mountains of dice suck. They're too much to manage, and the game becomes more about moving dice around than playng the game.

Please, Cliff, they begged, keep a hard cap of 10 dice for The Pool, and find another use for all that other stuff.

A rough rule I've picked up for evaluating playtest feedback is that if one person says something needs to change, but the other two seem not to care, I'll make a note about it but won't necessarily do anything right away. If two people seem to think there's something wrong, however, it needs to change. When all three agree there's a problem, it's a big problem.

Thus, without any further hint of consideration, there's now a 10 die limit on The Pool. You don't add to it. Nothing grants bonus dice. Maybe some things can grant bonus successes, meaning it's still possible to score more than 10 successes in a single roll, but you will never have more than 10 dice in your pool. Ever.

Diceless NPCs, Done Better

In the last playtest report of Heroes of Destiny, I noted that the method by which I set up NPCs to not use dice wasn't effective. Upon reflection, I believe a large part of this is because while I did remove the physical act of rolling dice, I didn't substantively remove the need to manage resources enough from NPCs. In effect, I took out the time required to generate the resource, but the real work in running NPCs remained. Thus in play they weren't any easier to adjudicate.

So, in redesigning them, what I really need to do is take the work out of running the NPCs, not the dice. They're not the same thing. How to do that? Well, if my goal is to make combat roll just like non-combat actions, it means they need to work like any other obstacle. That is, NPCs aren't lists of stats, but target numbers that the PCs need to hit. An NPC's attack score is really just the TN the player needs to make on his defense roll, and his defense score is the difficulty for a PC's attack roll.

In theory, this removes the resource management problem from NPCs. Instead, the GM just needs to get the roll tallies from each player in turn, compare them to the target numbers that are the NPC's stats, and give back the information. Damage is based on how much the PC fails his defense roll.

What about special abilities? Well, I don't know yet. I'll get back to that. Not forgotten, but not for now. That's a little detailed given that there's a lot of basic system work that still needs rework.

Heroes of Destiny: Third Playtest

The third playtest of Heroes of Destiny was the first one that involved a multi-sessions campaign. Our very first test was a one shot run at the rules in a swashbuckling setting, and the second one was largely a character generation session. Now, we got to sit down with player-generated characters and have a full game session dedicated to gaming.

The rules are still rough, very rough, in places, but I'm happy to report that when this system works, it works.

The game picked up with our group of old west heroes on board a train headed out to Redemption Colorado from the east coast, each for reasons of his own. The three are brothers, and the ties of blood pull them together even though their pasts might otherwise drive them apart. One is a former law man, the other two of more shady occupations, all looking to set up life in the west through a shared stake in an area supposedly rich in gold.

Last game, one of the passengers went crazy, half ate two others, and then proceeded to fight the three of them. He lost to a small hail of gunfire that sent him tumbling off the roof of a train car, falling into the rushing darkness.

We picked up pretty much right there. The session that proceeded was very heavy on role playing and non-combat die resolution. The latter went amazingly smoothly. Despite the long hiatus between sessions, people picked up on the basic roll really quickly. That's not too surprising, as there's not a lot to it. Pick up some dice, roll them, and look for 5s. If that took a long time to figure out, we'd be neck deep in a whole other set of problems.

What was really exciting, however, was how talents and trainings affected play. Without any prompting from me, people would throw their dice, look at their sheet, and then alter their role playing so that they could leverage those bonuses that allowed them to manipulate the pool results. Characters really came to life early in the game, and while good players will always bring that kind of spark to their play (and this group had at least one such player), it happened early in the game, without much of a warm up period.

Even better still, I got to see first hand what it was like to watch a system fade into the background. We played for several hours without anyone stopping to puzzle something out. What questions there were became routine (mostly asking if a particular talent or training could apply to a situation/approach), which left the game wholly uninterrupted by the rules. We played, people occassionally tossed dice with complete confidence, read the results without any difficulty, and we proceeded with play.

One hang up we hit a little early was a question of cooperation, as in how to do it? The on the fly ruling I made was that the primary actor rolled his pool, but all participants could modify that roll with their talents, trainings, and gifts. However, if any participant wanted to include his Destiny dice, he could swap those out for any of the pool's Hope dice. That kept die rolling down while letting everyone participate. The group came up with the little flourish that you still rolled your own Destiny dice, which turned out to be a nice touch. This ruling went over big, and it's become part of the baseline rules from now on.

The play about erodiing Hope and burgeoning Destiny is also growing on people. One player lost almost all connection to his wife during play as he stood up and took over as lawman more and more throughout the session. He remarked at one point that it felt right, both in terms of his character and how it was coming off in play. His wife wanted him to put away the badge and live the simple life, but his ideals were calling him back to action, and he was consistently choosing them over her, and it was straining their relationship. He said there was a small story playing in his head about such things, even though we weren't playing them as part of the game, and that made the whole experience richer for him. I can't say that would happen to everyone, but it was really nice to hear about.

Then we closed in on the end of the adventure and hit combat. Combat hit back too. Even though they were supposed to sprout from a common root, combat was everything basic resolution wasn't: it was difficult, intrusive, slow, confusing, and ground play to a halt. No one was happy with it.

There were several large categories of problems when it came to combat:

• Too Many Dice - Despite my assumption that the creation of multiple effort pools would make people die hungry, it turned out not to be the case, and all the various options that granted additional dice turned some people's pools into veritable seas. They had so many ways of drumming up more dice upon more dice that they literally had too many options and didn't know what to do with them all. This means that Dreams and Ideals need a complete overhaul, since playtesting showed they were important to play and populat as a concepts, but their mechanical implications need wholesale replacement.
• Hope Limits on Potencies - The idea that only the extraordinary can really let rip with potencies is a good one. Representing this by placing a semi-flexible cap on the amount of Hope you can put into a potency is not. It created confusion and the need to perform a calculation every time someone wanted to roll a potency.
• NPCs Are Hard - I'd designed NPCs to be diceless in order to speed and simplify their resolutions. I did this by listing the automatic successes they had toward several kinds of actions by way of assigning them gifts. Nice theory. In fact, it didn't work so well. The fact that NPCs have gifts means they still have resources that need management. Removing the dice meant that I didn't even have the physical tracking aid to use. I started using dice to help out halfway through, but it still was far more complicated than it was supposed to be.
• Damage - Damage is all kinds of screwed up. People either miss or commit grievous wounds on their opponents. Each time a player took a hit he went from fine to half dead. I wanted injuries to matter in this game, but this is too deadly for the kind of experience I'm trying to create. It needs to be scaled WAY back.
• Different Die Statuses - We've tried it several times now, and the whole fine/bloodied/bruised thing is just not working. Even though everyone gets how it works, people don't like them. The general consensus is that a die should be in play, or not. But having some that can do something when others can't, when they're otherwise identical, is unpopular. Wounding, and by extension recovery, needs new rules that simplify this.

Despite the rash of problems that came up, however, the game was seen in a positive light overall. People loved the basic resolution, and even those who were skeptical about dropping skills and using more descriptive traits like talents and trainings are 100% sold on the idea now. They love them, and they love using them. The goal is to make combat work much more like basic resolution, ideally to the point where combat is no different from any other kind of die rolling.

The ways I try to make this happen follow in later posts.

Heroes of Destiny: Second Playtest

Our second playtest for Heroes of Destiny was rough. There were a bunch of scheduling snafus that lead some, but not all, of us to gather. Since this was supposed to be the beginning of a short campaign, and a test of the character creation system, I wanted everyone there at once. Not only did I want to avoid having to schedule a second time to walk those absent through the process, but I wanted everyone together to see if they could work out the rules amongst themselves. In that way it was a test of the text as much as the system.

Since we were a man down, I instead decided I'd take the opportunity to run another game from the menagerie of "I'd like to try this" titles I have. I took a few so we'd have options, and headed on over...

...only to learn that we were indeed going to have a full crew, just a hour later than normal.

Well, hell. I hadn't prepped anything. Sure, I had some story notes, but no numbers. That meant play was more than a little halting. But I'm getting ahead of myself, because we started with character generation.

As I noted earlier, the group decided on a fantasy western. One of them was looking for D&D in the wild west, but wasn't very clear about it. Someone else wanted Deadlands with different rules, which is what I trended toward. Our world is less Brisco County than Deadlands, but the idea is similar: rising sorcey and grim magic have made a mess of the United States.

The players all came in with some idea of what they wanted for their characters, some more detailed than others, so we sat down and got to work. Even though there's not many points to spend in character generation, I was astounded at the agony of expenditure. It took a loooooong time to get those points spent. Normally I'd be demoralized, but in this case it wasn't because the rules were too complicated or unclear; they simply gave a lot of thought to point distribution. Hey, some people put a lot of thought into that. It wasn't a failing of text or system, so we rolled with it.

Talents and trainings were a problem, or the concept of them was a problem. One of the players still kept going to skills as a reference, and kept coming up with terms that were too grounded in game mechanics as opposed to descriptive text, and were in general too limiting. However, over the course of about two hours, we had a good list among them all. Some stars of the bunch included:

• Small Town Sheriff - you're used to being the law in small communities. This means you know how to dig up information, throw your weight around to get what you want, intimidate those under your authority, and gather up a posse when the need arises. However, you're totally lost in cities, where the red tape and "proper channels" just baffle you.
• I Work Alone - running dusty trails solo to avoid authorities almost all your life has made you very comfortable with adapting your abilities to any situation. Whatever it is, you have a knack for bending your skills to the task, but your mind has no place for others; their presence tends to foul up your instincts.
• I Used to Be a Bad Guy - you've come west to get away from your criminal past, but some of it still lingers. Despite your best efforts, there are going to be people who have heard of you, and while that can be a problem with bounty hunters, it gives you extra leverage when convincing folk they don't want to cross you. Plus, having plied the bandit trade yourself, you have insight into how they think and act.

One of the suggestions that John (the person for whom the game was written) had was "Lucky with the Order," from Unforgiven, in which Eddie Munny describes always hitting the most dangerous gunman in a fight first, just because he does. It's a great name, but getting lucky with the order doesn't fit with how talents and trainings work. Get the bonus when hitting the right guy? Get the bonus when determining which guy to hit? I couldn't find a way to make it work, but I really want to because the name sounds perfect.

The big suggestion that came out of this is that the game needs a standardized list of talents and trainings. I resisted this initially. If these are supposed to be bits of description that really display the core elements of the character, picking them from aa pregenerted list seemed counter to their purpose. My players insisted, however, and one pointed out that some people will just pick from the list and that'll be that, but others will eventually make their own, using the list as examples. And he's right. Given that I want to keep the rules themselves genre neutral though, what I'm likely to do is create a list of example talents and trainings that have emerged in our various playtests. People can  pick from them if the campaign's appropriate, and they should provide a solid guide to help people make their own.

Okay, so we got our crew together and then had to take a break as I got my hands on some files, and I began scribbling notes and making stats on the fly. As I said, play was kind of halting, and the initial session had a lot of role playing and not much die rolling. That's okay. I do like those kinds of sessions, and given that this game is ultimately about having to make deeply personal choices and scrifices in character, the heavy role play is just as essential as checking the dice.

What die rolling we did see showed that the basic resolution mechanics are fine. They were a little slow at first, mostly on the differences between potencies and everything else, and the idea that your talents, trainings, and gifts applied to your entire pool once per exhange, not to each effort made. The latter only took a couple to tosses of the dice to work out; I suspect potencies will take just a little longer.

As we didn't really get into much heavy stuff, I noticed people were leaving Destiny out of their rolls, which sat just fine with me. Determining if someone was cheating at cards isn't the kind of high stakes risk that calls for the risk of Destiny. All fine.

XP is a little problematic, as players are having a hard time remembering to write it down, and I've missed reminding them a few times. I still like the idea though, so I'm going to hang onto it and hope that we'll grow into that mechanic.

The one combat we had involved guns, brawling, and some dangerous athleticism (a gunfight moved to the roof of a moving train, where it changed to knives and guns). People called on Destiny, risked Dreams, and invoked ideals. It was pretty cool. Damage sounds high when you deal it out, but given that starting characters have so many Hope dice, they take it pretty well. We didn't get a chance to try out healing at all, so that'll be next time.

What did I learn about the mechanics? Not much, I'm afraid. I spent so much time making numbers up on the fly on my end becaus I hadn't statted anything out that I didn't pay much attention to analysis at the time. I know it felt like more work than I intended to run a fight, but NPCs already only have a few stats and don't roll dice, so I can't simplify it much more. We'll just have to try it again with more organized notes. After all, low prep doesn't mean no prep.

An Alternate Take on Getting Bloody

The other thing that my playtesters for this new game hated was the wounding mechanics. One of them struggled mightily to understand how bloodying Hope points worked, especially the half bloodied points. He eventually got angry over the matter and began suggesting a return to hit points because they were simple and easy to grasp. Everyone eventually got it, but few liked it.

So, in the interest of simplicity, I'm chucking chips as a tracking tool. They're gone. The introduction of ideals into the game gets rid of the need to track dice and points separately, so we can just put a pool of dice in front of each player and they'll grab additional d10s for rolling with their ideals as needed.

But a return to an all dice tracking method brings us back to that issue of half-bloodied hope dice, doesn't it? It would, except I'm getting rid of that too. Now, a die is either clean, bloody, or bruised. None of this half stuff. Now it takes 2 points of damage to bloody a hope die and 1 point to bloody a destiny die. If you've got an odd point and no destiny dice available to take the damage, you ignore the hit. This removes the confusion of having chips AND dice and puts the tracking all in one place.

A New-ish XP Idea

I'm putting together a playtesting group to give Heroes of Destiny (which, given the last post, may require a new name now...) a thorough trial. The first session wasn't any actual play, but just involved a tour of the system and an agreement as to what we'd play. They chose western.

But more than that, they hated some of the things about this game. I mean hated. The biggest thing? No experience points. Oh, the gnashing of teeth over this. Every argument in the world was levied against GM fiat awards. That single idea was so overwhelmingly despised, it was the one thing no one wanted to even try. Can it. Replace it. Give us points we can spend and plan to spend. Already I could conjure hours of endless point distribution discussions.

I compromised. I wrote an experience system into the game and assigned point costs to everything. You can now plan out how you'll spend your points for years to come. However, I deviated from the standard practice of the GM awarding points at the end of every session or adventure. That's gone. The GM now has no role in handing out experience unless he chooses to make one for himself.

Instead, you gain experience points by taking actions that are important to your character .Whenever you make a roll that ties into one of your dreams, you get 2xp. If you make the roll, you get 3xp instead. Likewise, whenever you make a roll that ties into one of your ideals, you get 1xp. If you succeed, you get 2xp instead.

Under this method, you still obviously accumulate points and spend them on increasing your various character traits, but in order to get that experience you need to continually play up what's important to your character. I think, in the final analysis, this is a better system than what I had before. Much as I resisted it at first, my guys were right in a lot of the arguments they raised. Putting advancement to points relieves the GM of a lot of responsibility and makes it feel like a fair and even system. However, tying this into how the character is played, instead of putting it on the GM to assess individual player performance, or ignore it in the interest of equality, keeps the attention on the character as a character, at least at the table. We'll see how it works out.

Introducing Ideals

In an ongoing refinement of Heroes of Destiny, I took a hard look at the conversion from Destiny points to dice. The 1.5x conversion rate didn't seem hard to me, but every playtester I showed it to was left utterly baffled, and even those who got it didn't like it. I thought maybe it was a learning curve issue, but it remained a distinctly unpopular mechanic.

I still wanted some kind of way to get more Destiny dice though. So I started thinking about that idea I'd looked at way back at the beginning of this project, some way to give a player different flavors of destiny for his character. What I came up with are ideals.

Ideals are to Destiny what dreams.are to Hope. Each Destiny point you have gets assigned to an ideal. It's something you believe in strongly, and when you spend Destiny toward accomplishing or upholding one of your ideas, you get 2 dice instead of 1, up to the ideal's rating. This cuts out the weird math while maintaining an ability to coax more dice from your pool.

More than that, though, it transforms the game in a fundamental way. Instead of playing heroes who are continually compelled by some nebulous force of fate, the characters in this game now continually face the question of choosing between what they love and what they believe in.

What do you believe in strongly enough to choose over that which you love?

New Use for Dreams

I wanted to make players dice hungry in this system, and I've certainly done that, but it looks like they're a little too hungry. There needs to be something else that can snag them dice. So I decided to leverage a character's dreams (which is what I'm now calling hopes, since having hopes and hope points was getting confusing) in order to give them an additional bonus.

You can still endanger your dreams to get dice, but now whenever you act to directly protect any of your dreams from danger, you automatically get that dream's rating in Hope with no risk of becoming estranged from it like normal. It's that adrenaline rush you hear about that lets a mother lift a car off her kid.