Fear the Dark Playtest - What Did I Learn?
I ran my early playtest version of Fear the Dark three times at Forge Midwest last weekend, using Michael Prescott's The Sky-Blind Spire and A Litany in Scratches as the test dungeons. There's a few bits of rules that I haven't put up here on the blog yet, but if you read the other Fear the Dark posts you'll have a pretty good picture of what I was working with. I'm going to break down what worked and what didn't while laying out some of the feedback I got from my playtesters. I'd love to give them a shoutout here, but since I haven't explicitly asked for permission, I will hold off on crediting them by name.
the friction pool
The friction pool did pretty much everything I wanted it to. It introduced slowly building tension that the players could see as dice were added to it. It added interesting events to the dungeon crawls. Players cheered when a respite was rolled. Most importantly, even in the relatively small sample size of three sessions, it produced multiple events that the players had to deal with on top of each other. The continued accrual of the friction pool within combats worked particularly well; one of the defining moments of the weekend for me was when an encounter was rolled in the middle of an already large combat. This is definitely something that is going to stick around as I design the game; I might even go so far as to call it the core of what I'm trying to accomplish.
That said, it did not achieve its goals perfectly. While I didn't have any mechanics attached to most of the conditions on the Grind entry of the friction table, they tended to accrue far quicker than I would like. If there are mechanical effects slowing the characters down as they accrue these conditions, it could very quickly lead to a death spiral that the players have little control over. I want this to be something that adds pressure to dungeoneering, not something that makes it nearly impossible.
I've considered simply slowing the rate at which the pool increases, but I don't think that's the real problem here. Encounters and spoor were happening at a reasonable pace. I think the real problem here is the Grind and the inventory mishap events (though I didn't roll those as often during the playtest, purely due to luck). When I did roll inventory mishaps, I tended to use the situation at hand to force one of the players to make a choice - lose or break a piece of gear or try something risky and face potentially larger consequences. That worked well, but I don't think it's the right approach for the grind. Getting slowly worn down isn't something that calls for a moment of action to focus on.
I have a few solutions I'm currently thinking about. One is allowing players to make saves against the grind, avoiding advancing it on a success. This would mean that more advanced characters also feel the grind less than fresher ones. It makes sense on a few levels, but I'm not sure it's the feel I'm looking for. Another is making it easier to remove conditions during breathers, possibly allowing more than one to come off at a time. This could work, but I don't want it to be easy to shed conditions. A third option is to have the grind strike its targets randomly, meaning that not everyone in the party gets hit every time the grind strikes. A final option is to have something like Torchbearer's rations which can be used to easily remove the Hungry and Thirsty condition, allowing players who have appropriate supplies to avoid the grind assigning harsher conditions so long as they don't run out.
Finally, as I alluded to above, I need a good way to select who inventory mishaps and other events that target one specific character should be happening to. I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about this one yet - I went with whoever was a logical choice based on who was acting at the time while playtesting. That might be good enough, but time will tell.
breathers
These rules worked pretty well, but a lot of the options I've listed link into sections of the rules I haven't written yet. Since I didn't have the detailed inventory rules ready, I just told the players at the beginning of each dungeon that the party had enough supplies to take four breathers during their time in the dungeon. This meant that breathers got used to replenish guard, to perform first aid, and to remove conditions. I think this will be more interesting once the other options have things to hang on.
combat
The combat rules were functional. We were able to get through action scenes with no problem and they definitely generated some cool moments; however, they did not work perfectly and this is where I got the most feedback from my players.
One of the first comments that I got was that it was hard for the players to track whether they should be looking at the high die or low die on any given roll. At present, that's based on whether the target of an attack is armored or not. It's something that could probably be solved with familiarity and perhaps tokens indicating armor that could be flipped to show broken armor, but I definitely want to keep it in mind.
Another issue that was raised is that when players have two actions per round and the anti-dogpiling rules, which prevent any combatant from being hit by more than one attack in a round, are in effect, the players were often left with nothing to do with their second action or even no good choices with their first if they were not facing an enemy attack and not in a good position to use a maneuver. The rules started with players each getting two actions per turn because I didn't want them to feel overwhelmed and always on the defensive, especially if they were outnumbered by enemies, but I think I clearly have to pare back on the player action economy to keep things interesting. The combats that were the most exciting were those in which the players were clearly outnumbered because all the players got to fully contribute in every round, but this made a combat much more difficult to keep track of for me. I'd need to design more play aids to keep track of large combats like that.
Maneuvers were another problem. There were a lot of very cool moments, like a character hanging from a chain letting go of the chain to drop to a new position and completely avoid a dire pelican attack, but their random cost made players hesitant to use them unless they would be extremely effective. More than once a player ended up with their character getting an injury due to a bad maneuver roll. With as freeform as the rules are for maneuvers right now, sometimes a maneuver could basically solve the battle by itself if the player had a great idea, while at others a player did a maneuver just so they could do something on their turn and got very little gain out of it for the damage they did to themselves.
The temptation here is to add more regimented rules to lock down the issues with combat, but the most fun for me (and, I think, for the players) was when the combat was at its most freewheeling and narrative. Clayton Notestine's The 1 HP Dragon is informative here. I want combat to act more like actions in the rest of the game and less like a separate subsystem. I enjoy Burning Wheel's Fight and tactical combat systems like D&D 4e, but that's not the direction I want to go in a game that's about exploring a dungeon or wilderness. Combat should be a real risk, but I want to keep it fast and get back to the exploring.
This, however, conflicts with another of my goals. I want to put characters at real risk. They should be getting seriously injured and dying occasionally, but when running a more freeform combat, I worry that a character going down has more to do with me choosing to hurt or kill them rather than the impartial results of the dice. I've run and played a decent amount of Dungeon World (which is definitely a touchstone for this type of combat) and if a character goes down there, I often feel like it happens because the GM chose it to happen despite the intervening dice rolls. This may be something I need to get over, because I still found DW a lot of fun on both sides of the screen.
I also got some complaints about the lack of unified mechanics. This isn't something I feel as strongly about, since picking up difference dice in different situations helps lend them a different feel and reinforces the situation. It feels worse to pick up a single d20 to save than it does to pick up 2d20 to roll a check! That said, some of the revisions I'm considering do eliminate the d6 on the player side of the screen.
conclusion
Wow, it turns out that putting something on the table and actually running it will teach you a lot! None of the designs I've noodled on (other than house rules for other games) have made it to this stage before. This will definitely help direct my design moving forward and I hope I'm able to run more playtest sessions soon, at Gencon if I don't manage to get anything in before then.