"I felt like a real hero." (Patreon)

Hello Incredible Patrons,

It’s me, your James Introcaso. We had another playtest of the new MCDM RPG on Friday last week. This time I was the GM, and we had two players new to the RPG, Nick and Grace from our art team. It was my first time running anything longer than a single encounter in our system, and I was surprised at how well things went. It seems (fingers crossed) that the core of our game is pretty solid, at least for battling monsters!

By the way, if you haven’t read Matt’s excellent post on grayboxing yet, you should! It will give you a lot of context for the information presented in this post.

Cosmic Die and Surges

If you read my last post, then you know we were trying out some new rules involving our Cosmic Die being rolled for drama. I don’t have much to report at the moment. This group of players never rolled for drama! That itself is a good point of data. There were two reasons the Cosmic Die was never rolled for drama. First, I think the players felt pretty confident throughout most of the combat encounters, so they never wanted to take the risk. Some of the combat encounters were easy by design, and another was easier than intended because it was our first time testing a group of heroes against a single monster, in this case an enormous spider trained for war like the one in the Flee, Mortals! preview packet. Turns out solo creatures need a little tuning up to really give the heroes a challenge! More on that below.

The second reason I think the cosmic die wasn’t rolled: there was a lot for new players to learn (including for some, a new VTT since we are all in different places), so they were hesitant to complicate things by adding the drama when the risk may not have been worth it. Even the people who played the game before have only done so once, with the exception of Hannah, who has been in every playtest so far. And for all of us, it was our first time using THIS iteration of the rules.

All that said, I do think that there was too much to track in this iteration. The culprit was my implementation of some Surge-activated abilities. We currently have two special symbols you can roll while making an attack, save, or other attribute test. The first is a Critical Effect. This symbol only appears on the Proficiency Die and it represents when a character is really in the zone, doing what they were trained to do. When you roll a Critical Effect in combat on your turn, you get to take an extra action on your turn. It’s a big reliable mechanical bonus that any creature can benefit from. Our other symbol, the Surge, comes up more frequently and because they’re tied to Attribute Dice, you can roll multiple surges at once. These represent burst of adrenaline, magic boosts from a magic item, or quick flashes of inspiration.

Each Surge effect is unique and tied to the ability and equipment you are using in that very moment. For instance, a magic vampiric sword that steals vitality from your foes and gives it to you might heal you 1 hit point for each Surge you roll when you make an attack with it. Since you can roll multiple Surges at once, they need to provide incremental boosts of power that can stack. We don’t want folks to have leftover Surges. For more on Critical Effects and Surges, see my last Patreon post.

There are loads of Surge abilities that worked super well. When the Talent uses the Concussive Slam power to grab a goblin in a telekinetic grip and slide them all over the battlefield, each Surge the Talent rolls lets them move their flailing target another square. When the Conduit uses Angelfire to rain down burning light on a giant spider and heal the Beastheart heroically standing toe-to-toe with the horse-sized arachnid, each Surge restores more of the Beastheart’s hit points. Those effects are instant and satisfying.

The problem is that I got too fancy and created incremental bonuses and penalties that lasted basically a round. I gave the Tactician a Surge ability that allowed them to parry incoming blows with their longsword, giving them 1 bonus Armor Point that lasts until the start of the next hero turn for each Surge rolled. Cool on paper and makes sense. (Swords are good for parrying.) But it was too difficult to track, especially when you had just rolled a single Surge. In my eagerness to give a lot of options for players to spend Surges, I forgot that temporary +1 bonuses and -1 penalties easily fall by the wayside. They seem inconsequential and just aren’t worth tracking to most players. Moving forward, we’re going to leave many of those little bonuses that last a round behind in favor of instant effects that can resolve immediately.

That’s not to say that we won’t have ANY bonuses that last a round. As a group, we never forgot the bonus Impact Die the Tactician granted to allies when they hit an enemy with Leading Strike. That’s a big bonus worth tracking! But big bonuses like that probably won’t come from Surges, since you can roll multiple at once.

Interleaving Actions and Side Initiative

I also talked about interleaving actions in my last post. It worked smoothly for my goblins and for the player characters. It was surprisingly easy to track!

However, we are rethinking side initiative. Our test against the giant spider revealed that side initiative allows a solo creature to get trounced. At first, I thought Marrowgnaw the Many-Legged might really give the players a run for their money as she skittered over to the Beastheart’s Sporeling companion, sunk her mandibles into his fungi flesh, and carried him off to the other side of her web-filled den. But then the heroes took their turn and strategized the best way to spend their hard-won resources and pile on the pain. Before I knew it, my poor, sweet Marrowgnaw was dazed, frightened, and restrained. She couldn’t reach anything to attack on her turn.

After seeing this, we realized that side initiative could create some issues in other types of encounters. Matt pointed out that while side initiative worked fine with low-level goblins, in a fight against a highly competent group of evil NPCs, like the Black Iron Pact, it could be devastating. Each member of the Black Iron Pact can change the battlefield dramatically in a single turn, just like a high-level character. All of them acting at once would be destructive chaos, and if they win initiative it could spell doom for the characters.

We’re kicking around some ideas for how side initiative might change. We want players to be able to strategize, but we also want there to be surprises that keep people on their toes and force those plans to be adjusted. We still want players and the GM to choose the order in which their characters act so they can plan and work together as a team. We don’t want to lock one side into an initiative order that is the same each round. But we also want each side to be able to disrupt the tactics of the other while rolling out their own strategy and avoid one group piling on the other.

So the next thing I’d like to try is actually rather straightforward. Without locking anyone into a specific order, one player character takes a turn, then one enemy NPC takes a turn (or vice versa, depending on a start of combat initiative roll where the winning side chooses if they or the other side act first). This continues until all creatures have acted in a round. Each round, you can pick a new order for your creatures to act in, but you know that you’ll always have an enemy acting between those your side’s turns. If one side has more creatures than the other, they get extra turns at the end of the round so all their creatures can act. Creatures meant to be fought alone, like Marrowgnaw, get to take three or four turns each round. Other creatures, like minions or the Beastheart and their companion, act on the same turn and can interleave their actions and moves.

This new system should be easy to track, allow for tactical teamwork, and give each side a chance to promptly react to a changing battlefield. We’ll see if it actually works that way and if the rest of the dev team likes it.

Custom Ally Reactions

After our last test, I wanted to give players a reason to pay attention during the turns of other creatures. I gave the Conduit, Talent, and Tactician each a custom reaction they could use to aid their friends. The Conduit could pray for her friends, adding an extra Impact Die to any roll. The Talent could yank a friend out harm’s way with her mind! The Tactician could parry incoming blows, giving extra armor points to themself or an adjacent ally. All of these reactions were used regularly and praised by the players as elements that helped them feel heroic and stay engaged when it wasn’t their turn. The reactions also didn’t slow down play because they didn’t involve extra die rolls. Nor did they require tracking anything, because they were immediate effects. For now, we’re going to keep the idea and implementation of these custom reactions, though their exact details could change.

Heroic Fantasy

Whenever we make something at MCDM, we’re always asking, “What is the fantasy we’re trying to emulate with this product?” The answer to that question is our northstar. Every decision we make about the rules and narrative for that product are in service to the fantasy.

The fantasy we’re trying to support in this RPG is that the player characters are heroic. From 1st level, they can do incredible things beyond the means of ordinary folks in the world, be it igniting their fists into fire with magic, hurling a goblin through the air with telekinetic powers, or swinging a greataxe in an arc so wide it cuts down every bandit within 10 feet.

After our test Nick said, “I’ve never played a game like this. My character was so cool. I loved that I had options and that I could do so much more than swing my sword. I felt like a real hero.” I knew we were on the right track. Nick is a member of our incredible and hardworking art team, so he didn’t know about the conversations Matt, Hannah, and I had about what this game’s fantasy should be. Grace agreed that having a lot of options for problem solving, helping your friends, and kicking butt made her character feel like a big darn hero. We’re going to keep anything that reinforces that feeling in the game.

What’s Next?

We need to try a new initiative system, but combat is starting to feel great. We also need to figure out how weapons and spells work. Once we nail those things, it’s time to start working on the other pillars of the game: politics and negotiation.

—James