Playtester-types: I welcome your comments. You'll have talked to me or your duly appointed ARRPG GM about your feelings on the game, but if you want to say anything else, good or bad, this is a place to do so.
Everyone else: You can just read this and, I dunno, be jealous, I guess.
4 comments:
Well folks. I played in one of the 2pm playtests on Saturday, and I had a blast with this game.
Going in I was not very familiar with the source material, but it rings through in the way characters are constructed, and other players were able to establish enough of a tone to key off of.
A particularly interesting new play mechanic in this version of fate is the hypothesis test. The idea that a couple of scientists can be off to the side arguing about the nature of some phenomena while atomic robo is battling the big bad is extremely appealing to me.
The "build your character in play" seemed to work quite well. I was not clear on all the types of "upgrades" that were available, but in the one shot it was not necessary to hit on all of them.
People, if you have any doubts about this game, know that one of our action scientists was afflicted with the aspect, "Covered in Monkey," twice. Need I say more?
I'm not 100% sure the challeng mechanic is gonna work. Although I have a small sample size. But the time I used it in my playtest, the player had absolutely no problem getting three successes.
Another problem, that may be more indicative of me as a GM than it is of the system, is that I had a hard time doing the failure = success with a major cost thing. And my players were more apt to just take the failure too.
The Hypothesis Challenge rules have already gotten a revamp, including how difficulties are set and the consequences of failure. Hopefully we'll see how they work out at Gateway.
In any event, it's less about whether the PCs succeed at the challenge than the hypothesis they come up with at the end. There's the risk of failure, but ultimately it's a way to lend a scientific confab some mechanical teeth.
As for the success-at-a-cost thing, that's straight from Fate Core; whatever clarification it gets there (and it will) will be ported over to ARRPG.
Well I didn't use the Hypothesis Contest. I just used the Challenge. I.e. 3 successes in 5 tries otherwise you run out of time. I think I just need to use the mechanic more often.
I knew the success at a cost thing came straight from Fate Core. But figured I'd comment anyway since we were sorta playtesting both ARRPG and FC at the same time. I'd like some examples of what that would be, both narratively and mechanically.
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