The first playtest Retrospective
Lessons learned and good ideas we had.
For the last many months, me and my brother-in-law have been designing a Tabletop RPG called The Northern Lights RPG. Last Saturday we playtested it for the first time. I had my family gather around the table and learn the game from the Ruleset we made. We decided to have my mom explain how the game works from the document we wrote to allow us to judge if the rules were written well. After character creation, the game went smoothly. We didn’t have to make any changes on the fly, and while there are still some issues. I wanted to share some successes and some failures from the game.
Things the players liked:
The Dice
My dice system was fairly simple and easy to understand. We only used two dice, the d10 for all skill rolls, and the d6 for all damage. The simple duality kept the dice separate, while allowing skill checks to have a wider range of variability and keeping damage more consistent. This was the simple base we started upon.
One of my biggest complaints when I played D&D for many years was the inconsistencies in skilled character failing in situations they should never fail. My solution to that was to add more dice. Also, more dice is more fun. After reaching certain skill total milestones, characters gain Easy Modifiers to skill rolls. Each Easy Mod added another die to rolls. This mechanic was well received, although the rules had explained it poorly. During play, all the characters were Tier 1 characters, and had only 1 Easy Modifier in a single skill of their choice. Whenever the GM called for a roll of that skill, the player who had chosen expertise in that skill would pipe up and attempt to either help, or roll the dice themselves. The specializations allows us to create unique characters, despite two players choosing to both take Explorer as their tier 1 selection.
The Feature Tree
The main draw to my game I hope will be this Feature Tree. As characters advance they gain more skill points, and as those skill points hit certain milestones characters gain features. Each character will grow and expand, and as they specialize they gain abilities. This hopefully will allow characters to gain abilities from different trees, without diminishing their power in another.
In reality, my playtesters thought it looked cool and had them thinking about the paths their characters would take through the leveling process, so I’m adding it here.
Backgrounds and Equipment
One thing that received praise was the way I implemented backgrounds and equipment. When creating a character, you choose a background(we may change background to origin in the future). The background you choose comes with a set of related equipment. The Anarchist comes with firecrackers, the Militiaman comes with weapons and armor, and the Burglar comes with lockpicks and a disguise. One of my playtesters told me they like the backgrounds coming with the equipment, and it made the character feel like they were someone before they were written down onto the character sheet. This is a direct distinction to how D&D does things. Your background in the flagship TTRPG has very little effect on your character at any level. The backgrounds coming with equipment sets broke down this habit immediately. Each background starts as a full character who just needs a name and motivation (Character Motivation is crucial to Roleplay in Northern Lights RPG, but it wasn’t used heavily in the playtest so details will come in a future post).
Things that went poorly
Of course we expected the game to not run 100% smoothly. Here are a few things that needed work and reworking.
The rules document
Our document of the rules somehow (we both know how) did not get a full read through front to back. This lead to rules being repeated and not being the same in every place. For example Focus Points, the key mechanic for doing cool things, was determined differently in the rules in two different places. One being twice the number of Easy Mods, and the other being your total skill points divided by 5. Another complaint was the way the rules were ordered. Crucial information was given in the back of the document. and hyperspecific information took up space in the middle of character creation rules.
This will be a hopefully easy fix, but I have been wrong before. We were told to move backgrounds and the Feature Tree up to the beginning. Basically to order elements used in character creation in the order they are referenced in character creation.
The Feature Tree
I know, this is listed twice. If the previous tree looked a bit confusing or overwhelming, it was to my playtesters as well. They found it hard to follow and recommended color coding. So this is the second edition of our Feature Tree:
While the colors may not be completely final. This was one of the versions we edited the tree to.
Another version we thought of using was this one:
It is a fair bit busier, but the colors show the tiers better. Let us know in the comments which one you think is better.
Skill selection
In our game we have 21 skills to choose from. 5 Combat skills, 9 Exploration skills, and 7 Academic skills. We had assumed our skill selection would cover nearly every scenario, but they did not. Despite this selection, we were still missing a clear skill for animal interactions. And Endurance felt like a complete overlap with Athletics. Survival was used for far too many situations, and a lot of the academic skills felt extremely situational. This was something that caught us by surprise and my brother-in-law and I have decided to do a lot of evening one shot playtests to test out a lot of these intricacies. Some of the skills you see in the Feature Trees will probably be changed, renamed, or removed.
Going forward
All in all I think this playtest was a success. Our core design was well received, and the improvements we need to make are largely balance and organizational changes. For now we will apply our feedback, and continue to expand on the list of backgrounds and items in the game.
If you would like to play…
Stay tuned to this blog. I will be posting retrospectives for each playtest, and eventually release this game on itch.io and maybe a few other platforms.
If you know anyone else who might find this interesting, please give my blog a share.
My brother-in-law streams on Twitch. Come support him over there too at twitch.tv/ktaxangel . He streams weekly and is incredibly interactive with his viewers.