About Me

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Seattle, Washington, United States
I'm an old time roleplayer who became a soldier who became a veteran who became a developer who became a dba who became a manager who never gave up his dream of a better world. Even if I have to create it myself.

Saturday, March 29, 2014

Playtesting today...

Finally doing another Stellar playtest later today - this one focused on ground assault. I've prepared three characters for the players, as the creation protocols are not yet ready for them.

Still, while working through the fledgling process, I've already realized there's some things I don't quite like. It was a sort of character creation playtest on my own.

Mostly, I do like the Background Ratings approach, but I think instead of trying to be vague I should just go ahead and specify the background itself. For instance: Academics, Military, Criminal Enterprise, etc. It seems more relatable that way.

I also need to think more about how characters without the Ground Assault skill will perform in combat. I'm content with a trained military guy being better in general combat, but from a game design perspective, the other characters still need to feel useful, since combat is a reasonably large part of most RPGs. I could come up with alternate approaches for each major grouping (engineers use turrets and droids?), but something tells me that won't work out well in the end and ends up creating massive number of class-equivalent mechanics. Too unwieldy.

For now, though, I just gave every character some ground assault training, because the point of today's test is to see if the ground assault rules hold up mechanically.

Meanwhile, here's an inspirational image about the future of space travel.


photo credit: AGeekMom via photopin cc

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