[Kerberos] Playtest Packet #3 Away!

The third Playtest Packet (which includes the first two Playtest Packets in a revised form, plus some new stuff) has gone out, so if you should've received one but didn't, let me know.

One thing the playtesting process has pointed out so far is that while the chargen process isn't necessarily complex, it sure looks complex. This has been kinda frustrating for me, as the barriers to entry seem a lot higher than they actually are. In my head, everyone on my playtest list I haven't heard from has reacted the same way: "Character points? Lists of things? Tables? I'm out."

Overcoming that reaction, real or imagined, has been... a process. And that process has been all about organizing information to make it easier to digest. Take the big list of trappings. It started with putting them in a table, then adding one-line descriptions to each, and finally onto classifying them by function (e.g., Offense, Movement, Perception, etc.). So hopefully that will simplify things for people -- now you can figure out what you want the skill to do and just look at the categories to get the broad strokes. Also, the roadblock of Prohibited trappings has been replaced with the toll-road of Incompatible trappings. Instead of being arbitrarily told, "No, you can't do that -- build the skill a different way," now you can put any collection trappings together under a single skill, and the worst that'll happen is that it'll just cost a ton of points. That's a change in game mechanics, obviously, but the biggest reason it's in there is so people don't have to worry about building a cool Strange skill only to discover that this trapping isn't allowed to co-exist with this other trapping, so back to the drawing board, chump.

There's a lot of other stuff in there, including Ben Baugh's excellent chapter on social class (which meshes with the rest of this effortlessly), so if you're on the list you can look forward to that. If you're not on the list and want to be, get in touch with me on RPG.net or Facebook or something and just say the word.