Playtest Evolution #1

Welcome back to The Crossblog!

Sorry for the delay but, there has been a  few pretty drastic changes that are happening with Crossroads: The Yzyrra Chronicles. All of them are things that will make the game more exciting to play over the long haul. I will go into a couple of them in the next Crossblog. I've conducted several sessions of the playtest but due to life events, holidays, and such, I had to put the Third Act of the playtest on indefinite hiatus. I will be working to arrange another, more than likely to be played using Roll20 augmented with Discord. I also have a face-to-face playtest on the horizon with some really good friends I've played all kinds of games with over the span of 20+ years. I just wanted to keep those reading this aware of the state of things. Without further adieu, we move forward...

Last time we took a look at the concept of Heat and how it works, allowing enhanced performance at the cost of increased stress. We also looked at how when a character is overcome by this stress, their action completes, they immediately end their turn and they are left in a "Reckless" state, leaving themselves prone to opportunistic attackers, as well as a few other actions that trigger the reckless state.

This time, I will be musing over some of the tweaks and design concerns that have come to light because of the playtest I have been running. Like the saying goes, "The best laid battle plans often don't survive first contact with the enemy". I've learned this with my playtesters. They have been trying to actively break the game while working through the adventure. I'd like to send a special shout out Alex, Lance, and Mike for allowing me to try and kill their characters off!

INTRODUCTIONS
For the first playtest, I gave the players no restrictions on their Race or Crossroad choice. I only asked that they overlap as little as possible on their Crossroads component Paths. They took to the iconic MMO "Holy Trinity" of Tank/Healer/DPS but in a different way.

Lance: I had the honor of presenting him with his first roleplaying game experience. His perspective is VERY important. If he has difficulty understanding the game as a new player, I have to adjust how I explain things to make things easy to understand. Lance decided to play a Dracconé (dragon-human hybrid) Assassin named Scout. The Assassin's component Paths are Destroyer and Ninja. Scout's role as an assassin is to debuff and crank up the damage when he is not stealthing ahead for reconnaissance. (Work in progress, pictured at left. Done by me as a thank you for participating in the initial playtest.)

Alex: Alex chose to play a Human Wizard named Wolffie. The Wizard's component Paths are Devoteé and Priest. Wolffie's role in the party was to stick to the back dealing magic damage at range and control the battlefield through area of denial abilities. He while trying to work on the party's objective, was actively trying to figure out a way to stir up his own trouble. He took some actions that DID catch me off guard but his antics DID remind me that I'd have to figure out how to deal with corner case scenarios. Boy did I deal with it!

Mike: Possibly the most experienced of the trio, he decided to play a Dwarf Cleric named Balderk. The Cleric's component Paths are Fighter and Priest. Balderk's role in the party was to be the aggression magnet, soak up attacks, and try to keep everyone healed up. In essence, the tank was also the healer.

SETUP
Without giving away too many specific details about the adventure that I am running them through (seeing as they could potentially read this), they were given their first assignment to travel to a quirky rural resort town with the assignment of stopping an undead problem that they were having. They arrived in the town to ultimately discover that they were not the only group assigned to come to the same town. There were two other parties that were on their own assignments, that were vaguely related merely in the fact that these problems all started sort of around the same time. Once they resolved the assignment, they were to return to the Academy to receive their rewards to commemorate their certification as adventurers.

Also this playtest is being executed using the Roll20 Virtual Tabletop. Voice chat was handled by my Discord server. Character Sheets were a series of individually filled out, semi-automated spreadsheets as a Google Drive document, that they have permission to edit. When I say series, I mean that they could see each others character sheets as well as a blank master that I can Copy/Paste as needed. I went through character creation with them at the same time so that they could kind of compare and contrast so that they could pick starting abilities that would allow them to set themselves apart from their comrades. In terms of power level, they started as Level 4 characters with 2 Levels in both of their component Paths, granting them access to their first ability of both Paths.

As gameplay ensued and the storyline developed, they reached their first encounter. They knew they were supposed to be dealing with skeletons, but they discovered that there were also zombies as well. Wolffie quickly learned his role was to hang back and work from range. He got hit for more damage than he expected and realized that he was going to have to alter his tactics. You could see there was a reaction of "I thought they were harmless, but I was wrong." That was something I wanted.

As the battle continued, I started realizing how I had the monsters built and how Balderk the Cleric was built, it was something off in terms of balance. It was SO hard for the zombies to really hurt him because of the fact that his Overload value was so high. They were only able to do half damage to him. This was, in part, due to the fact that he took the Steel Skin ability as it was originally written, when it just granted the Fighter a static bonus to their Defense (the term I used before Overload was settled upon). I told Mike that the ability was going to need to be tweaked. I was not happy that it was an ability that was nothing more than a passive ability. I had to figure out how to balance things so that it was possible to be tough but required the player to do something to be awesome. As such, I took inspiration from Lord of the Rings Online which I played countless hours of with Mike. I tanked as Guardian and he healed as a Minstrel. I then realized what I needed to do...

I remembered Guardians had a low level ability that was a simple attack that when successful granted the Guardian a defensive bonus for a short time. I realized that Steel Skin would get replaced with Warding Strike, which basically allows Balderk to make a quick attack that, if successful, does light psychic damage but allows him to raise his Overload value until the start of his next turn. I felt that this was a reasonable compromise. If he doesn't need to move into melee, he can Warding Strike as a lead-in attack, and get a defensive boost if successful. This would make the ability something active, allowed the tank to do a little more damage, and give the chance to be harder to hurt. I think if you want to be a beast of a tank, you should have to put some kind of effort into it.

Another thing that came up was that Balderk, for his Priest ability, he took Soothing Winds which allowed him to target himself and an ally. One of them gets a heal effect and the other gets to reduce their Heat value. How I originally imagined it was not taking into account the possibility of the tank being the healer. As the original text of the ability read, the party was virtually unstoppable if they could get maybe 2 minutes of downtime. They would NEVER run out of healing and the healer would already be reducing his Heat. That meant that there was no real danger to the party. There were no stakes. There needed to be a way to force the party to ask the question, "Is it necessary to cast a Heal right now?". I needed a way to organically cap how much healing could be done. It took me about a week and a half to finally think about sliding in a familiar element that would do what I needed.

I decided that while Heat is going to work as it always does, casting Healing spells builds Heat, but rather it builds the caster's MINIMUM Heat. This means that while Heat may fluctuate, Minimum Heat persists until one has rested. Heat can never drop below Minimum Heat. Any ability that could manipulate one's Heat value has no effect on one's Minimum Heat value. The caster still can choose to dedicate to healing as much as they want to (like my "Dedication Wall" principle dictates), but they will eventually raise their Heat so high that they won't be able to function and they will keep triggering the reckless state. The character is in charge of deciding when they need to rest.

Enough about Balderk! Time to talk about the most unusual elements to come under consideration. Alex was playing Wolffie specifically to see if he could murder hobo an NPC and try to break mechanically. Well, while he never really concocted a successful ruse to facilitate the NPC murder, he DID do something completely and utterly unexpected...

Wolffie, Balderk, and Scout had just resolved a combat against a venomous creature. Scout decided to try and be Ninja-like and harvest some venom from these creatures. He was successful and gathered 3 vials of this neon greenish fluid. Wolffie asks Scout if he could have one of the vials. I thought it was odd because Wolffie is a Wizard. Scout passed over a vial without hesitation. It was then at that point that Alex decided that Wolffie would ingest the venom, but not in a conventional manner. There was a pause where I laughed and asked him what Wolffie was doing. He described how Wolffie would perform the action and created a very bizarre picture that made me wonder if Balderk and Scout really wondered about Wolffie's well-being.

I was completely baffled as to why a Wizard would do... this, but I was the GM and I had to come up with a response to his action... I realized that there needed to be repercussions appropriate for the severity of disregard for the gravity of the physics of the world. Ultimately there was some internal damage to his digestive system. I decided not only was there social repercussions (he was forced to leave the residence of a subquest giver), but he also suffered mechanical damage. Not only was his maximum hit points reduced by half, but he was also under perpetual stress meaning his Minimum Heat was raised from 2 to 5. This means that he was going to have to play extra conservatively to make sure he kept his extra fragile being out of danger and remain very measured in how hard pushed his magical offense.

They got to about the 75% mark of the storyline for the playtest adventure I wrote up. They are aware of who may be causing their problems but that confrontation will remain in stasis for the time being. In the meantime, I'll continuing work on the changes. Should the party get to reach resolution of the adventure, I will be sure to update that.

If you have made it to this point, I'm hoping that something has piqued your interests and curiosities for Crossroads: The Yzyrra Chronicles. If you would like to keep learning more about it, I implore you to Subscribe and should it compel you, Share it as well! Until the next post...

This is Darrick Herring, signing off.

Good Fortunes be with you!