Genrenauts RPG first playtest notes (Patreon)

Last night I ran the first playtest for the Genrenauts Forged in the Dark ttrpg with my regular gaming group and it went MARVELOUSLY. The players bought all the way in on the premise (it helps that they knew the books), and it felt very singularly itself. I had the big advantage that my players knew the books and had an easier time wrapping their heads around the premise. Conveying that to new audiences will be one of my biggest challenges, but I knew that going in.

One of the biggest wins was the players balancing between them being the protagonists of the game while trying to foreground someone else as the protagonist of the story they were creating to fix the breach. This is another area I'm going to need to cover well in the game text. This difference between PCs as protagonist of the game vs. other characters as the protagonists of the story within the genre worlds is a big departure from how a lot of ttrpgs operate, but it's not unheard of. My players had fun finding their "white hat" hero to rise to the challenge and getting him into the position to fill the vacuum created by the story breach (ala Genrenauts The Shootout Solution).

I'm running another playtest with a different group this weekend, and after that, I'll take stock and figure out what changes to make before I try a miniseries-length playtest to use more of the between-mission design elements that will really deliver on the thematic elements of the Genrenauts premise.

TTRPG tends to be a long process, often multiple years. It's not likely to be my top creative priority, but I think it's one that will be easier to keep going on a back burner, running playtests here and there, tweaking rules to better fit my design intent, and maybe eventually figuring out how to get it into the world more broadly. Y'all will get the inside track of information, naturally. I hope for that to include playtest documents at some point when I'm satisfied with the proof of concept framework.