7dRPG Core: Dungeon Playtest I

You need to go through these exercises when you design a game, so last night we kicked up a 7dRPG playtest as a dungeon game. Yes, 7dRPG will be a Steampunk game at heart, but the core will be used as the SBRPG2 engine. The game needs to work on the board, so play-tests like this help solidify the rules. Once we get all the tabletop rules worked out, these will be rolled into the base rules, and 7dRPG will benefit as well.

You do find a lot of little things you forget to write down in these tests, little things you assume but don't write down, and you go through the rules making notes, adding sections, and clarifying rules to be how they were used on the board. Play-tests like these are a cleansing exercise, and they help tighten the game experience. We cleaned up a lot of little strange rules last night, and I will be making changes to the core document today.

One thing we discovered is the importance of non-generic monster designs. We have this concept of 'generic monsters' where you can ballpark a monster based on a generic toughness level. Here, we spun our monsters up as generic characters, and they suffered two problems, being too tough and being too easy. These monsters were very bland as well, with no special skills, powers, or special attacks. Having a system where you can ballpark monsters to get them into a general toughness area is important, but you need to have a power list for them, and also a list of specific designs so you can have monsters with fun attacks and defenses to play with.

We did nearly have a TPK party-wipe on the first play through, our group of three generic spiders were way too strong for our initial 3-person group. We adjusted things a little, but kept the strong monsters because we like the lower-level challenge to be high. If you start out a superhero, you never get that feeling of dramatic improvement when you start getting powers unlocked, and you become a capable fighting machine. In this session, only one character had magic, and the healer did not have any, relying on units of bandages and medical skill to keep the front line fighters alive. Cool stuff, and it gives you a really good benchmark to start from once your healing magic kicks in.

Some of the assumptions you make in your initial design will be 100% wrong when you play it on the board, and we encountered this as well for some of the minor fiddly rules. You will sit there and write one thing, play it, and the obvious answer will be right there. You can't be too attached to a special rule, and you always need to be willing to throw rules overboard if they just slow down or confuse play.

Oh yes, those are D&D Dungeon Command tiles with Pathfinder minis on them, along with some of our painted metal ones. Those dice are just incredible too, George's set of clears he just loves because they sparkle under the light. We throw together bits of random games to make ours, we do follow a BYOB styles of mash-up when it comes to tabletop gaming, and believe the tabletop game you play should support whatever random figures and bits you have at your house.

If you have a party of 4 metal figures, a pack of skeletons, and a container of plastic spiders and ants, you should be able to play games with those pieces, make things up, and enjoy yourself without needing hundreds of dollars of 'official' figures and playing pieces. You should be able to mod those pieces to higher-level or specialized units, should your characters get experience and level-up. It's part of the reason our games have such a strong design and creation element to them, we are 100% believers in supporting your creativity and the playing pieces you have.