Yesterday, I was able to gather five volunteers for my first full playtesting session. My primary objective for the session was to test whether the systems were adequately supporting the "caper" tropes that come up in every Batman episode: a Villain sets up an unnecessarily complicated plot for fame or fortune, and the heroes need to unravel it to lead up to an epic showdown. Everyone had a great time, and I was overall pleased with how the story and systems worked together.
I know that for you, dear readers, the rest of this post will appear like I have my cart in front of my horse, because what I wanted to write up this morning are some of my concrete playtesting notes. I want to capture my main observations and provide a little bit of context while they are fresh in my head. It will also give me something concrete to reference when I write up my summary post at the end of November.
Without further ado, then, here are some notes and action items for myself.
- Each hero has a contact, but the articulation of how they know each other is not clear. Also, I did not include in the playbooks that the contacts had to be introduced, but during the introduction phase, the Narrator really needs those names. Perhaps one way to deal with this is for each playbook to also have a "secrets" sheet that is filled out and shared only with the Narrator.
- Having stock options for real names, occupations, and contact options would speed up character creation, especially for those who are new to or uncomfortable with tabletop RPGs. This may take a significant amount of my time to assemble, but could be worth it, especially for one-offs.
- A player pointed out that secret identity names should be alliterative. Yes, they should, unless they are both first names. This should go into the rules.
- The Enigma playbook could instruct them not to share their real name at all to make them a mystery to the players, or it could acknowledge that the camera knows their real name, and so the players do also, even though their characters do not.
- I definitely do need some kind of "undercover" rules for exposing secret identities, since this was one of the first disagreements the players had. This would keep with the Batman-style genre. An alternative is to let the players choose this in the Team intro: do they have secret identities (Batman) or are they simply known as who they are (Johnny Quest)? I need to be careful here that the number of rules does not snowball out of control, since this is a one-month design project!
- At the last minute, I changed Nimble to Focused, and this change worked well. However, the earlier change from Charming to Amazing didn't go so well. The players wondered why Amazing was used for influencing people and why it was not used for a heroic feat. "Amazing" is too metaphorical; I should return to something like "Charming" that implies social savvy. Hm, "Savvy" is a nice word.
- The Second Wind ability on the Tough may be redundant since he already has so much Endurance.
- At the end of the session, they pointed out that the Investigate move, although described as being for "situations or locations", is really more for locations. We discussed having a selection such as "What is out of the ordinary here?" or "What is an important clue?" They really wanted an option like "Where should we go next?" but the problem I had with this—which they understood when I explained—is that this could too easily remove the mystery of the villain's caper. I need to consider the balance here; there may be a role for Contacts.
- Most players did not use their Contacts, but one player used the Contact almost too much, to the point where the Contact was basically a member of the team. I should consider making the Contact option only usable once per session, or risk losing them as a contact.
- I forgot for half the game to tell them to mark Experience when failing a roll, so I probably need some kind of visible reminder on the character sheet about this.
- Similar to the above, I should add reminders on the character sheet about which attribute goes with which basic action, like Apocalypse World does, so that they don't have to scan the whole Basic Moves sheet so often.
- Also, I forgot to tell them about the new "use the scenery" and "onomatopoeia" options for brawling, which need to be on the basic moves overview sheet and not just in the rulebook. However, brawling was also one of the least interesting parts of the game, although this could have been because of the lack of those rules. (Also, we went over time, so the big battle at the end turned slightly perfunctory.)
- One of the impediments to the story was my own discomfort with PbtA-style gamesmastering. I had never done this before, so I was learning along with them. I struggled with the idea of what Apocalypse World calls "announcing off-screen badness." In fact, I think one of the reasons Apocalypse World caught my attention is that this concept is something I didn't understand when I DMed regularly (decades ago) and still struggle with occasionally in my handful of gamesmastering opportunities per year. One of my players was very familiar with PbtA, and he encouraged thinking of it like a movie, quickly describing a scene for the players that their characters know nothing about, but that moves the action forward, such as "A car door slams and the car speeds away from the hotel." I do not know if I need to more prescriptive in the rules about this, practice it myself, or both.
And now, hopefully, a quiet Saturday with lots of work on the rulebook.
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