Wordplay

When players are clutching big handfuls of dice they feel invincible. Nothing can stop them wining the challenge and looking really cool. Watch the face drop as they behold a sea of 1,2,3 results smeared over the table! Meanwhile their challenge opponent looks down at a huge pile of sixes and starts the process of counting up all those challenge winning successes. Glee.

Here’s an optional rule:

Hero Points give player and Guide a chance to come back from the brink or stack the odds yet further in their favour. PCs get 2 HPs at start of play.Further HPs are granted for fun and imaginative play as rewards

Here are some ideas as to how they might work When you spend a HP you can:

• Gain 4d into your hand if it is spent before a challenge roll OR
• Reroll your dice if you don’t like the result (you can’t do this if you’ve taken the +4d)
• Improve a Victory Level by one
• Turn any sort of defeat into a tie

I’ll come up with more. How about you?!

I ran another playtest of Wordplay today which, on the whole went very well. It was another sword and sorcery set in the world of Conan. The game was well received and a lot of fun. Here’s a summary of the feedback taken form the feedback forms I handed out at the end.

• Mileage  in having a grey area where dice rolls are close (+/- 1d) instead of just for exact ties?
• Having helping dice from companions is a very good idea.
• “Touchy-feelyness” of the game is great - rather than it being overly rule bound.
• Extended campaign would be interesting.
• Is there any Trait atrophy effect in addition to Tait morphing and building.
• Like goals and the effect they can have. Perhaps too easy to invoke them - maybe something to qualify this?
• Challenges great but dice pools can be too easy to build up with harsh consequences.
• Quite easy to be knocked out of the game very quickly. Some kind of ‘life’ may be nice like fate points of something.
• Feels very like HeroQuest.
• Challenges feel fast and furious, although very brutal.
• Outcomes see very random at times. Seem,ed to swing easily from overwhelming victory to crushing defeat.
• Some traits might be difficult to find alternative uses for.
• Goals best in an extended campaign rather than a one off.
• Character sheet doesn’t need ‘D’ next to dice as redundant.
• I like the momentum rules.
• Bennies or Hero Points? Maybe as an optional rule for a cinematic game. Or maybe eacxh player just gets 6d from the pool each session to use as helping dice.

The bit that I need to give some thought to is the ‘brutality’ of the combat or the high variance in results especially when characters are facing off with 11+ dice. It only takes a high number of sixes in the roll and you could be racking up a Victory Level of six or more. We were a bit surprised by this and hence the request for some sort of Hero Point get out of jail card.

I don’t think anything is broken, but has given me some food for thought. The game was quite combat intensive and gave a good test of how that plays out.

Payback challenges for magic were also used. The sorcerer quickly realised how dangerous it was to use magic and found it difficult to win those challenges. I think they will need some fine tuning.

It has been commented that the Challenge chapter has become a bit of a beast. It is the engine room of the game, now has some examples in and is quite a lot of words! There follow a sizable amount of text that looks at the outcomes of challenges, including sections on Defeat, Fatigue and Experience. It all adds up and makes the thing a bit indigestible, even though it is all fairly straightforward.

Present planned solution is to create an Outcomes chapter. This will follow the Challenges chapter. The outcome table, defeat, damage Traits, and healing sections will all go in there.

Scale will stay in the Challenge chapter.

Experience will either stay in Outcomes or move into the Guide’s chapter.

I must rename the ‘Guide for Guides’ chapter as it sounds too much like ‘Scouting for Boys’…

This rationalisation will all be in the June release of the text.

Thoughts?

I have this idea about Traits, I think they need to morph and change, malleable they are, swaying in the breeze of experience. So, how’s about this for something to include in the experience section of the game:

Trait Morphing
Traits can change almost imperceptibly over time. As a character develops in light of experience, the nature of their already expressed Traits will subtly change. At the end of any game session a player can choose, or a Guide can suggest, that one of a character’s traits should be re-written. Traits will keep their numeric value when morphed.

Part of the reason for this is that a player uses Trait words to form a description of their character’s actions in a challenge. By morphing the description of Traits around, those descriptions can stay fresh. Perhaps a Thesaurus should be recommended at any Wordplay session?!

example
A character has ‘Watchful’ as a Mind Trait. At the end of a session a player changes this to ‘Ever Vigilant’. No real material change to the Trait, well not much, but a slight change in emphasis.

Welcome to the Wordplay Blog.

This is a shared digital scrapbook of development ideas and thoughts on the Wordplay roleplaying game that is due to be published in Spring 2009. Wordplay is a rules light descriptive roleplaying game that uses a fun d6 dice pool building mechanic. A generic ruleset that will come with six starter mini games to get going straight away.

I’ll be posting ideas and development updates on here. Be sure to pop by and give me some help.