Playtest Log - 9/21/19

Our heroes against the Hellmouth and his minions!

We played a 4 player game on Saturday. This was the first time playing for two of the players. Our party composition was:

• Knight-Errant

• Peacekeeper

• Firebrand

• Austringer

We played the introductory Expedition and completed it in about 2.5 hours (lots of socializing/kid interruptions), but it felt like the pacing was fine.

Action Items

• An observation was made that it felt like rank 4 was very safe for the players. Many foes just can’t target rank 4 - including the big boss for this Expedition, the Night Hatchet. We talked about it at length for a bit - I think it comes down to the imperfect AI targeting rules still in place. A suggestion was made to use custom dice for targeting, which I really liked. I’m going to try something like this:

  • 3 or 4 different colored dice have different target distributions on them. Each foe’s attack shows one or more of these colored dice. When they take their action, you look at the foe position to still determine which ability they use. From there you look at which colored dice you roll to be the target for the ability. Some dice are more focused on the front ranks and others can hit the whole party. This should add some interesting randomness to the game, with spikiness coming from more “focused” colored dice. It also allows me to do multi-strike, like a foe’s attack has 1 Green Die and 1 Yellow Die for the targets.

• Take The Initiative was not as meaningful this session. We very rarely swapped numbers after the first round of combat. There was one moment where we realized we should have swapped, but it wasn’t disastrous to the experience.

• Critical damage - I’d like to try +1 DAMAGE/+1 STRESS on a critical hit instead of just +2 DAMAGE

• The Firebrand got 1 Wound during the game, but then promptly removed it with her healing ability.

• Everyone used their powers - both the Knight-Errant and the Firebrand were forced to use theirs fairly early in the expedition.

• Colony Changes

  • Dock

    • Focused it all around the Exchanging and Buying of Colony resources

  • Wagon

    • New Idea: Sell potions or add more provisions to the deck

    • Increases Relic value when sold by +5/+10/+20