(Header photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash)

Historically I have been a skeptic of playtesting games. Early on in my college days I had a game designer friend that often would rope us in to play his bafflingly complex card games. You know the game: “It’s just like ‘hand and foot’ but you remove all the diamonds and jacks, aces are high, but the 7 of clubs is the trump. If you are the third player in a round, you get to play a magic card from the original ‘Ravnica’ set without paying its mana cost.”

They tended to end with him winning and the rest of us confused. I am hoping he has improved since but those long evenings left a bad taste in my mouth for years. I have politely declined every play test invitation until just this last month, and I am now realizing that I have been seriously missing out.

RPG playtests are better!

One of my favorite experiences roleplaying was a session of roll for shoes, a microrpg with maybe five lines of rules. I played a depressed ambulance mechanic in a late-stage capitalist cyberpunk world who was deeply in love with his AI supervisor. It was delightful.

I bring it up to outline the fact that rules are not required to make a session fun in the same way that they are needed to make a board game work. If rules are missing from the game, you have a gm there to massage things and keep the story moving.

Unlike competitive board games, the whole table is working together to make a fun story. Rules issues may lead to some confusion, but no one is going to lose a game because they misunderstood a rule, or it was poorly explained. Everyone wins if the game is fun, and with the right people, I am going to have fun no matter what the game is.

Rapid playtests!

I played two games recently, each in vastly different stages of development. The first was “In the Night” by Seren Briar, a horror game that focuses on the intense emotions and themes surrounding classic gothic monsters. The game was in its early stages, Seren had just finished the first draft of basic and class abilities a few days prior to the session.

(When I say early stages, they had 5-6 very cool archetypes, each with multiple specialties, and I was hard pressed to choose just one character. This was a completely playable game, and frankly I was blown away by how quickly they put this together. )

Playing at this stage was an incredibly efficient way to find pain points in the rules and pressure test mechanics. We quickly identified where the fun was, how the game was pushing us to play in its current form, and watched as Seren did some game design on the fly. It was fast, Seren got good insight into their game, and I got a very fun 2 hour session. Rapid playtests are a win-win for everyone. Join early/rapid play test sessions!

Quick aside: I am not going to fully review the games now since they are in playtest, but I do love this game’s core conceit. I fell in love with classic monsters while reading the original Dracula, and I think the constant reuse and refactoring has made them too commonplace and more campy than horrific. This game was a return to form in a way I deeply enjoyed. The dramatic irony was genuinely scary: I knew my character was a simple priest with no super powers entering the den of 1920’s New York vampires, but my character just thought it was a fun, albeit sinful, party. At every turn I expected him to be drained dry and was very nearly proven right.

Late stage playtests!

The following week I got the opportunity to play Blightfall by Matthew Ayers, a zero-prep, player-driven, dark power fantasy where mutated villagers must risk corrupting themselves further for the power needed to defend their home. My understanding is that the game mechanics are largely complete, with the monumental task of layout being the next mountain for Matt to climb.

In many ways, this felt just like playing any other new indie ttrpg, but I got to play it with the designer. We never had to wonder about how an ability worked, or how priority worked between two potentially conflicting abilities because the creator was right there.

The game ran like a song! No awkward pauses to flip through rules, and only the occasional question to clear up confusion, and Matt knew how to push us towards the fun in the system. It was one of the cleanest rpg experiences I have had to date. It is rare to get to play with someone who has as much system mastery as the person who made the game. Play late stage playtests!

I am certain I will review Blightfall in full at a later date, so I will leave all the details until then. It affected me so deeply that I plan to run it at the upcoming Dragoncon if I get the chance, so if you want to play it too, feel free to hit me up there.

-birdmilk

Acknowledgments

Huge thanks to the designers that let me play their cool game. Thanks to Seren Briar, designer of “In the Night,” who gave me a chance to play a priest gaining a newfound love for heady wine (that was likely at least part blood), and Matthew Ayers, designer of “Blightfall,” who empowered me to be my best fancy boy self.

Thanks to the players of “In the Night”: TundraFundra, the juggernaut sculptor terrified of destroying their own fragile creation, and Jordan Schaeffer, the self important socialite who ended up mere moments away from being willfully drained by a beautiful vampire in a heavy necking situation (pun intended).

Thanks to the players of “Blightfall”: Gemelli, who played the worst gravekeeper, that coined the term “nose-docking” which I very much would like to unhear. Raggadorr, a tree man who dropped a tree upon everything that could have a tree dropped upon it. And Liz, who played the freakiest teen girl with the power to permanently change one’s demeanor and psychology by reverting the flow of blood in their brain. Eesh.

As always, thank you to kraftpaperhat for designing the Secret Sunday Sampler brand and logos.

No AI was used in the making of this blog (which is pretty obvious based on the poor quality of the writing).

P.S. If you are thinking you should play more rpgs, you should. There are people out there who want to play more rpgs to, and will play them with you and all of you will have a lot of fun, you just need to find them.

P.P.S. If you are thinking about designing a game, you should. You don’t need to be a game designer to make a game. That term is made up and does not have any required qualifications. If you design a game, you are a game designer. There is nothing else standing in your way (besides time and effort.) You don’t need anyone’s permission. Start today.