[This AP used the Playtest Verison (0.0.3) of Riskbreaker found here]

So I finally got a chance to get a couple people together to try out the latest version of the rules. I'd actually been hoping for a couple more, but we had some cancellations, so there were only three of us: me, my partner Neil and our friend Dan.

By coincidence, this was precisely the same group that had tried out Moldvay Red Box months ago when we dug up Neil's brother's copy, so I explained the system as trying to be akin to RB insofar as a quick setup and getting Straight to The Adventure, but hopefully with some more interesting tactical opportunities when it came to conflict.

Neil and Dan, never able to take the straight path anywhere, immediately came up with a pair of utter bastards for their characters: a necromancer who posed as a pious priest and his semi-indentured servant, a ranger/assassin who was following only until the necromancer could get powerful enough to raise his dead love.

Character creation was pretty straightforward and I was pretty lienient in what I allowed as skills. Neil ended up with spells like "Create Zombie" that was basically his Fight skill in almost every battle. He either had one trailing behind them, or raised one to fight for him (several of the battles conviently happening in graveyards or temples and ruins full of corpses). He could also wither limbs and cause pain ("Wrack") and he actually ended up having a Heal spell for when his 'priestly' duties called for it. He could also talk to the dead via his Seance skill. Dan's character had Sneak, Bluff, and mostly fought with his Bow.

I asked them for a Goal. They decided the pair was questing for an ancient relic: the mummified hand of a dead Saint, that would give them protection from the undead and the ability to nullify the abilties of the rest of the necromancer's circle, giving them a distinct advantage.

Neil and I had drawn up a map during the Red Box Hack game we'd played, and we decided to use it for this. I'd placed a small village called Two Oaks in the center and far to the east, beyond the mountains, was the Lake of Ash. We set the temple on its shores.

The party started out in Two Oaks, and immediately decided to try gaining Advantage there, using the town as a base. They'd convince the yokels that they were on a holy pilgrimage and get supplies and help.

Neil tried locating and impressing the local religious figure. He failed. I immediately took the Advantage and created an opponent -- Father Fenrik, who didn't think much of the new arrivals.

Dan tried gaining some Advantage at the pub while Neil went to the graveyard to find some useful information from the local dead. Neil did well on his roll, Dan failed. He ended up pissing off some of the local drunken farmers. Rather than fight them in the bar, he ran.

It was the first use of the Move maneuver and it went pretty well. Dan succeeded wildly, they failed miserably (Level 2 Farmers). I told Dan that he could either get away or lead them as he saw fit. He lead them to the graveyard, where he and his partner proceeded to slaughter them and then, to add insult to injury, make them into zombies to dig their own graves.

They then decided to use the information Neil had gained from his seance to their advantage, shifting popular opinion away from the good Father. They succeeded and lead the townsfolk to a hidden cache hidden during an earlier time of trouble. The people were delighted and procured the supplies the party needed, but Father Fenrik remained unimpressed.

The two woke up in the middle of the night to find several burly priests with swords standing over them (failed Observation counter rolls). They were dragged to the graveyard where the Father stood over the newly dug graves.

Unable to receive a sufficient answer for how this had happened, Fenrik nodded, turned to his men and said "Bury them with the others," before walking off.

This is where we ran into our first problem. Using the rules as written, I'd created Fenrick and his followers - all Level 4 characters. Outnumbered two to one and already in a situation which placed them at a disadvantage, the characters were going to get utterly slaughtered.

We talked it over and decided to start over to a certain extent. I'd reset the Goal and we'd narrate that they'd fought a bit and then ran off, leaving almost everything behind. We decided to try two new rules: the GM doesn't start with Advantage from a goal based on its difficulty and Advantage can be spent at a rate of 1 point to 2 Levels of opponents.

Having achieved their goal, Dan immediately asked if we could play another adventure. We realized that we'd only been playing about 2 hours, and set up another 8 point goal: carrying the hand and a willing sacrifice to the Broken Towers (in the forests west of Two Oaks) where they could transfer its power to Neil's character.
The willing sacrifice was the tough part -- Neil and Dan decided that they just couldn't drag someone off.

They arrived back in Halfway and tried fleecing the locals again. However, the angel's curse must of held because things went horribly. Fredrick had returned to his family with weird stories about the "pilgrims" and Silas would have nothing more to do with Dan. In the meantime, Neil managed to accidentally kill someone he was trying to heal. The sequence ended with the Neil fleeing from an angry mob towards Dan who was standing on the outskirts of town with their horses.

I used some of the Advantage I'd gained through this to throw a set of Dracoids (dinosaur-looking Kobold-like creatures we'd invented during our Red Box Hack game) at them as they fled across the fields beyond the mountains. They handled them well, clearly getting used to the combat system. Neil, for example, immediately started directing Dan on when they should try Skill versus Kill Damage attacks and when one was more useful than the other.

It was during this fight that they both noticed that fights tended to be all or nothing -- either they were barely holding on for dear life or they felt like there was no way they could lose. We talked it over and decided that we'd try a new rule variant: Advantage would be gained for the difference in skill level between sides only once at the start of the battle. This ended up working much better, with more balanced battles that still contained swings in Advantage.

They left the last Dracoid alive and Dan used his Bluff skill with an Advance maneuver to convince the thing that by coming with them and sacrificing itself at the Broken Towers it would be saving its village.

The Dracoid lead them north of Two Oaks through the forest towards the towers. On the way, they were harassed again by Cherubim. After killing them off, Dan announced that he was going to try drawing blood from one of them and asked Neil if he could somehow use it to enhance his weapons. Neil spent some of the Advantage they gained from winning the fight to do a Find Maneuver to dip one of Dan's arrows in the blood, which could then be used to gain 3 Advantage during a fight against a supernatural creature. It was the first time we'd used the Create Item rules and it seemed to work well: open enough that it could support anything Dan wanted to do, but specific enough with regards to cost.

They eventually reached the Towers and I threw a couple of other obstacles in their way including a neat little sequence where they had to climb one tower and then cross its broken top, which leaned against the tower they were trying to reach.

They found the chamber they needed at the top of the tallest tower. As they entered, Neil noticed something moving out of the corner of his eye -- there was a figure in one of the mirrored walls of the room that he recognized: Cornelius, the dead priest of the temple he'd spoken to. Dan noticed another figure in the opposing mirror: the melted skull/face of Koriel.

The final battle involved the ghost of Cornelius, the half-deformed Koriel, and a small fleet of Cherubim against Neil and Dan. This was probably the best battle of the whole game.

At one point, the ghost of Cornelius tried a big move - a Kill Damage Area of Effect Lightning spell risking 6 Advantage. He failed the roll. It was the turning point of the battle. Having such a huge influx of Advantage, the players went crazy on the Angel with Skill Damage attacks, completely taking him out of battle with regards to his Muscle and Agility (until he could no longer effectively use his flaming sword or golden net), which means he basically had to fly back and Intimidate them while trying to heal.

The party ended up killing the angel and then shattering the mirror that Cornelius had emerged from. Dan narrated that he picked up a piece of the mirror and they could see Cornelius's face looking out, yelling at them. He planned on using it with a Find maneuver next adventure.

We ended with Neil completing the ritual and gaining the power of the hand as the Dracoid killed himself with Koriel's flaming sword. I narrated that after it died, it suddenly stood again, wings shooting out of its back. It grabbed the flaming sword, looked at them both for a moment, and then shot out of the broken top of the tower.

Sounds great! Any time the players are clamoring about playing the next time, I think that says a lot about how much fun they had.

Oh, Czege Principle is the one you're looking for. Where players create their own adversity and resolve it (Lumpley is about the definition of system).

I'd really love to hear how this works for other groups.

Question: When you did the "Cloverfield Maneuver" crossing from tower to tower, was that handled as an obstacle? Generally speaking it sounds like you engaged the system quite a lot. Is that impression accurate?

Mike

Hey Dan, Mike, and anyone else who might be reading this...

Okay, so I'm one of Dan's (Peccable) friends that wasn't able to show up to that first playtest. I blame this on work. In any case, our mutual friend Dan (confusing, I know) did grab a copy of Riskbreaker and brought it over my place last night. We got into a good, chunky three hour playtest of the game, some one-on-one stuff. I'm afraid that I'm not terribly conversant in the system's language so I'm not so sure that my observations would be all that helpful. Still, I'll reproduce some of my notes from that session here and maybe you'll find them helpful.

Different Combat Types
In our game we would often get into social combats. I spent a lot of time trying to convince other characters of the greatness of my own, Sir Geralt Devonshire. We wound up treating these just like regular combats but with no long-lasting repercussions (i.e.: death). We also got into plenty of regular old combats when NPCs didn't recognize how great Sir Geralt actually was. Through these combats I noted that it wasn't terribly useful to just go for a regular attack. Skill damage was so much more useful. It decreases your opponent's ability to attack you and, if enough skill damage is done, removes him from the fight entirely. Also, it's easier to do a skill attack than it is a regular one. The presence of both killing damage and skill damage felt redundant.

Whiff Factor
Sir Geralt, despite being the greatest Knight of the entire land, failed. A lot. My strongest attribute, which was above average, was a five. Meaning that should I be attacking someone with my sword skill I have only a fifty percent chance of succeeding on every attempt. My other attributes put me at either a forty or thirty percent chance of being successful. Because of the nature of the system each roll is isolated, meaning that further attempts at finding success do not actually increase my chance of success at all. Dan had the same problem. We would spend fifteen minutes or more on some conflicts simply exchanging our Advantage tokens back and forth between each other as we went back and forth failing our rolls.

We wound up resolving this at our table by changing the type of dice we were using. We switched the dice types from d10s over to three fudge dice that we used to modify our attribute scores in an attempt to hit a constant target of five. When we did this conflicts moved much, much faster and felt more satisfying. We also said that using an appropriate skill gave you one bonus dice, a la Shadow of Yesterday.

Mooks
Dan wanted mooks. He just wanted little guys that worked together and equalled out to a level two or four opponent. Just a notice of something you might want to think of including. Or do you think mooks don't fit?

Also, just a note from another playtesting guy, you should boil up character sheets that have all of the relevant abilities and combat options that the players have on them. During our game I would often ask Dan what I was capable of doing, and then ask him the same question twenty minutes later. The tactical abilities in the game are really interesting, but I wanted an easy way to reference them. Considering the tiny footprint of the character information (which is awesome) you could really cram a lot of information about those tactical options on to a character sheet with no problem.

I really do hope that this was helpful, Peccable. I really liked the experience we had playing, though it did have the occasional hiccup. Mind you, those might have come up simply because we were playing the game incorrectly. I think Dan might come along later and bring more mechanical information from the session to be mulled over. Also, and obviously, I'd be hapy to answer any questions you might have about our session.

-m

Posted By: MPOSullivanSir Geralt, despite being the greatest Knight of the entire land, failed. A lot. My strongest attribute, which was above average, was a five. Meaning that should I be attacking someone with my sword skill I have only a fifty percent chance of succeeding on every attempt.

Then Sir Geralt (have you been playing The Witcher, by the way?) shouldn't have been Level 4. :)

I don't know if this is clear enough in the current version, but PCs who are Level 4 are the equivalent of Level 1 in D&D and other systems -- beginning adventurers. Certainly a cut above the local farmers and blacksmiths (Levels 2-3) and certainly better than utter mooks (Level 1), but definitely not at the level of the greatest knight in the land. :)

A coin flip (50%) for your best stat at the equivalent of level 1 was exactly what I was aiming for. Whether that works or not is another question...

Posted By: MPOSullivanDan wanted mooks. He just wanted little guys that worked together and equalled out to a level two or four opponent. Just a notice of something you might want to think of including. Or do you think mooks don't fit?

No, there's mooks. They're Level 1, starting with 20 points (10*1 + 10).

They should probably fight in groups, with a leader doing the rolls for them (acting as a group -- as noted in the Risk spending rules). I've been thinking that with the dropping of the "Advantage every turn" rule, there should be some balance for groups like this -- something like each additional guy in a group can increase the skill of leader +1 for a max of +3.

Posted By: MPOSullivanAlso, just a note from another playtesting guy, you should boil up character sheets that have all of the relevant abilities and combat options that the players have on them. ... The tactical abilities in the game are really interesting, but I wanted an easy way to reference them.

This is exactly what the Maneuver Cards are for. :) I don't know if Dan cut them out, but they're printed double-sided such that they have the effect, cost, and skills on one side and consequences for success and failure on the other side.

I'm glad you had fun with the system. Did you think it fit the goal of a sit-down-and-play-like-a-boardgame feel I was going for? Something like Descent, only more freeform, story-driven, and with an easier setup. I'd love to hear what Dan thought of the session.

It feels like you had the same experience we did: the core concepts seem to work pretty well -- it's a matter of the specifics: dice probabilities, usefulness of skills/maneuvers, costs, etc.

Thanks for the playtest and all the great feedback! :)

-d-

Posted By: Mike HolmesI think Michael is saying, and I think he's got a point, that having to take an action to get out of the fight, and then another to recover, is simply too costly to make recovery often effective.

I'm realizing this more and more. As my partner pointed out, in the rules as written combining Agility Skill Damage with any other kind can basically wipe out your effectiveness, since you can't fight back and you can't run away to recover.

I've decided that in the new playtest version, I'm going to simply allow Recover to be used while you're still in combat. I'd still say that Rescue (Killing Damage heal) requires being out of combat, though.

Posted By: Mike HolmesWhat's interesting is that both sides might choose to recover inside the fight, and then you get the cool narration of circling each other.

Right. You've both given up a maneuver to recover.

Posted By: Mike HolmesThis leads me to an observation about recovery. I always hate it when I am penalized in recovery for having high levels of ability. Why does a "Cure Light Wounds" help that first level guy proportionally so much more than me when I'm tenth level? Balance? OK, but it doesn't make a lot of sense.

I've thought about this -- the idea of making healing proportional to damage. One possibility I'm playing with is that you can heal up to half your current damage in an ability while in a fight and full if you manage to get away for a moment.

I don't think this is totally unbalancing, either, since you can only heal in one stat at a time.

Posted By: Mike HolmesGenerally speaking, how much lattitude to characters have in ability use, and changing them? What if, instead of resting, while I'm circling you, I'm actually using my tactics skill to try to find an opening (represented by advantage shift)?

This is actually already in the rules. :)

Check out the card for Recover: "When making a Recover Maneuver, you may either make a supplementary Gain Advantage or Decrease Advantage Maneuver using *only Wit or Personality skills*." If you choose not to take that additional maneuver, you heal 1 extra point.

Actually, now that I think about it, that rule doesn't quite work. The bolded part should read "using a Stat other than the one you're healing."

Posted By: Mike HolmesWhat if, my agility having been reduced to nothing, I decided to fall back on trying to convince my opponents that they ought to join my side!

It's always an option. During our playtest, Dan's "killing" move against the Angel was, in fact, a Bluff.

Posted By: Mike HolmesCan you switch tactics in a fight, such that you can use other stats? If so, then the skill damage becomes more pressurizing, and less a winning move. Maybe I can prevent physical harm, but then I might be subject to being convinced to stop attacking with words?

Absolutely you can switch tactics. It was the only way at certain points that Koriel stayed in the fight. They took out his Muscle and his Agility so he could use neither his net nor his sword, so he pulled back and Recovered while using Inspire and Intimidate (his Personality hadn't been hit...that is, until Neil melted his face off).

Posted By: Mike HolmesI'm not seeing how Michael's use of FUDGE dice solved his problem... didn't he still whif close to 50% of the time? (The bell curve on fudge dice only slants things slightly to zero in the overall curve). In any case, a rough, but simple solution to this, is to roll two dice, and take the lowest.

I don't realy see it either. Mike? Did the dice change help at all?

Regarding percentages, as I said, it seemed "right" to me that a total Level 4 Adventurer Noob has a 50% chance to succeed using his/her strongest skill. Whether or not that actually works is another question entirely. :)

I'm hoping to make a new playtest version (0.0.4) with the changes to Recover noted above, along with some clarifications about Mooks and the like that Mike and Dan had problems with.

-d-

Posted By: Mike HolmesHmm.... you're thinking of recovery as a physical thing... I can do something mental while I recover physical stats. But... if I'm fighting, I'm not using my mental ability... doesn't that imply that I should be able to recover those? Basically every character gets to recover one stat (at half or whatever) each turn, so long as he's not currently using it?

That's the practical upshot of the rule, yes. You do a Recover maneuver, and declare a supplementary maneuver that's not in the stat that you're healing. You get back half of the damage done to that stat.

Posted By: Mike HolmesThat seems elegant. How about the player can forgo the roll, and get a full recovery of one stat? The half-recovery only occurs if the character also does something else.

Currently as written you get +1, but going full-heal sounds fairer and more interesting.

As a note on balacing and cost: inflicting damage of any kind costs Advantage and an action. Healing Skill damage costs no Advantage, and possibly not even an action (in this new version). Healing Kill damage costs both. That seems to work for me: there's a point of diminishing returns on inflicting Skill damage, since your opponent can heal while still fighting you (though they may be favoring stats that aren't their strongest).

Posted By: Mike HolmesYes, definitely killing damage needs to have the character out of conflict to resolve. This is to make it a more important goal. But I fear that it makes stat damage too weak.

I don't think so. I'll have to test it, but lowering stats make those opponents necessarily slower (since initiative is based on the stat you're using). Hit them with skill damage in one round, slow them down and then set them up for killing damage the next.

Posted By: Mike HolmesAgain, what if you have long-term and short-term stat damage? That is, whenever you recover in a fight, you can only at best recover up to stat -1 (that one irreparable point representing longer lasting effects of the damage). To get back that last point, like healing killing damage, you have to get out of the conflict, and have some ability that can take care of that damage.

That's kind of how it works now. Since Rescue has to be done out of conflict, and costs Advantage (I just noticed it's not this way in 0.0.3, but it's how we played it and it works), it becomes an interesting choice: do we wait and heal up for do we press forward? The first choice saves Advantage and saves you a roll that might give even more Advantage to the GM. The second choice is 'safer' in the near-term, but in the long term can give the other side more power to use against you.

It sounds like exactly the sort of choices I wanted a party playing Riskbreaker to face.

In your example, you're expanding it to Skill damage, but since (as written) such damage doesn't cost advantage, the idea of 'long term' skill damage doesn't really work. I could, of course, change the rules to support this, but I think having to stop and heal Kill damage seems enough.

Posted By: Mike HolmesThe issue now with "switching tactics" is that as you have it... is there ever any reason for a character to use anything but his highest ability? Is there any penalty for using words in a sword-fight? Or for trying to use a sword in an debate? Are certain goals only achievable with certain abities?

Well, an obvious reason not to use your highest ability is that it's been hit with Skill Damage such that it's no longer your highest ability. :) Another is that skill/stat use has narrative consequences, at least that's how I play it. Pulling out a sword on your opponent during an empassioned debate in front of the emperor is much more likely to land you in the dungeons than sway the court.

Also, in the end, it leads to more interesting play, which is worth a bit of min-maxing in my opinion. Dan using his Bluff skill because he was good at it to finish off the adventure was fine. On top of this, I got to keep Koriel alive for the next adventure.

Also, certain goals are absolutely only achieveable with certain abilities. I tend to be pretty open, but if a player's trying to use their Bluff skill in a sword fight to inflict Kill damage ("I utterly crush his self-esteem!"), I'm probably going to say "Uhm, no."

I've been making a list from this thread of changes I need to make for 0.0.4. I'm hoping to throw it together today, with the possibility of inflicting it upon some unsuspecting friends this evening. I'll keep you posted. ;)

-d-