Playtest #1: Adventures Under the Laughing Moon

We picked up Adventures Under the Laughing Moon - Role-playing Game (Volume 1) at our last comic-con (Las Vegas) and got this one signed by the creator - which is pretty cool. This is our current RPG play test, and we are working through some of the character design rules and how the game works. Design-wise, it is an interesting game.

This is sort of a D&D type game, and the basic set does a good job of laying out the 'basic set' of the first few spells, monsters, and options for building characters. This is a skill-based system without levels, and it also uses sectional hit points and wounding, along with an over-riding stamina system designed to subdue you before your character's limbs are hacked off. Wounds take off body part hits, but all wounds do stamina damage and reduce your character's effectiveness and consciousness.

The big difference with this game is that special combat moves are bought into with skill points, such as sweep, head butt, block, and parry. You have to level up all your tricks, and all combat actions are used with a randomly rolled number of combat "action points" each character determines each turn.

Where some games abstract combat, this one dives into details and reminds me of some ways of the Runequest or Legend systems. The difference between this and those other two is this has a combat-stunt focus, where Legend has more of an abstract and free-form stunting system where the player invents moves (using their skill as the base) and the referee gives it a difficulty. This is point-buy character build melee stunting, and it is interesting from a building characters sort of point of view.

Character generation is straightforward, and there are some omissions that we would like cleared up, but we haven't gotten hung up. We wish there were a few more points to spend during character creation, as we are finding we are ignoring all the neat options that you can buy for just being able to hit or cast magic at a basic (more than 5%) level. It feels tough to get the character you are feeling you want, at least for us, so maybe we are doing something wrong (or characters really are very inexperienced to start).

We wanted a few more world details as well, and yes, we haven't read the books this was based on, so this will be an interesting play test. That said, we wanted some background detail about the world to get us started, like a really cool  starting town with some lore or something along those lines.

Also, pregens! What we would give for some pre-generated characters for use with new players. I can see this game taking 4+ hours to explain to a new group and go through character creations page-by-page, this was our experience with 4th Edition D&D, and this one with a edetailed point-buy system feels like it will be harder for new players to grasp what's important and what they need to perform well with the idea they have in mind.

This looks interesting, and it is a beautiful game - full color throughout. We expect to be having fun with this one and reporting back soon, so stay tuned.