Hellbenders Third Session Report
I didn't blog about our second playtest session last month because it mainly consisted of bringing a fourth player into the group and rolling up his character, but tonight's session was fun and helped me to mull over some sticking points that I've had.
The players are about halfway through the second day of the youth pastor conference in "The Pharoah of Phillippi" and so far they have managed to put on a rousing puppet show, take over the security guard duties for the ski resort, and snoop around Reverend Frank Chenevix's room. Enough good trouble that I need to do more thorough review of the game state before next session!
So far, the things that have felt best at the table are the social complication spark tables (to the point that I may expand them even further) and the overloaded blackjack tables for travel/exploration/investigation. The players really enjoy the gamefeel of playing a hand of blackjack as a resolution mechanic, to the point where the sort of simple "draw-under" Save mechanic felt like it was standing in the way of the more entertaining subsystem. Saves work really well in the Oddlike games because the goal is to maintain momentum; I feel like I would rather have a slower mechanism that is invoked less frequently than have two separate mechanics that sort of accomplish the same thing. I think there will be a time and a place for something like a luck check, at the table I did the equivalent of a d4 luck check by just asking the player to call a suit and then draw a card and it worked about as well as a "Save" would have.
The next extension of that thought is that it may be fun to introduce more wagering and ante-ing into the travel/exploration/investigation checks. In the current playtest rules, Reserves mostly function as Stamina/HP. In theory they could also be spent in order to represent spending effort, but that use case hasn't come up yet in the playtest adventure. If we moved away from poker chips as HP (more on that in a second) then we could recontextualize chips to better support a betting mechanic in both the "Excursion" frame and in combat. I haven't let this idea cook yet, but my initial concept is that a successful bet adds wagered chips to a positive resource pool and a failed bet adds wagered chips to a negative resource pool, almost like an expanded version of Chaos in Triangle Agency. Maybe the pool of positive resources can be used by the players to affect the game state and the pool of negative resources is used by the GM to advance hostile NPC clocks and introduce more dangerous encounters. Then the minimum bet for travel actions can be set based on stakes or difficulty. This also opens the door for playing just against the overloaded outcome table or playing against the house.
For the record I still have a lot of faith in the poker hand combat system, combat just hasn't come up yet!
Meanwhile, if we move away from Reserves as HP, then we could move toward a condition-based PC health like His Majesty the Worm where adventurers are Staggered, Injured, or at Death's Door depending on the wounds that they have received. I just need to think about how this all interacts with our vision of session and adventure pacing.
The last thought before my brain melts is that I should probably take another pass at character abilities to make sure that everyone has unique ways to interact with the combat and exploration mechanics. It's been nearly six weeks since we revisited Past Life abilities; Creditor abilities have gotten some love since we rewrote our progression rules but we are still at version 1 of past lives.
Thanks for reading, this one is mostly for me but I think it shook out some cobwebs!