2G2BT: Gauntlet Con/v0.14

After a couple of playtest sessions at Gauntlet Con 2018, which is still in its last few hours, here's v0.14 of 2G2BT.

2G2BT v0.14.pdf

Apart from minor text clarifications, here's what changed since v0.12:

First of all, armor was way too powerful. That's been trimmed down across the board—everything that was once 2-armor is now 1-armor; everything 1-armor was translated into an extra external damage box or two.

I added a briefing move. I'm still toying with how concrete I want the battlefield to be, but for now this is a placeholder move that lets the company tactician define some of the elements of the battlefield.

Assault and covering fire have a small change, fire is exchanged before the stat roll. I find it anticlimactic to roll damage after we know who has won or lost; I think it's better when this is apparent after the smoke clears.

Also, the weapon fire modifiers were clarified, as I think they were a little confusing before.

Taking cover has an additional 10+ benefit, you get to return fire at -AOF.

The critical repair move is clarified: it's for getting rid of critical repair effects, not clearing critical damage boxes.

Spot their colors now works on familiar faces, not just insignias. This is the small, initial stab at me trying to bring more NPC interaction into the spotlight.

The Lieutenant's xp move now fires when subordinates take critical damage, not just when they're disabled. Also, the shortcut move requires shortcuts be iffy, not daring. (I want them to be risky, not done with panache.)

The Commander's xp move only applies to squaddies, not just anyone.

There was an important change to company advancement: the company now advances on every mission, not just when they achieve milestones. I'm not totally sure about this; some of these are good enough they feel like they should just be cash spends.

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The con feedback (from Daniel, David, Horst and Leandro) was really useful. In short:

• I've had a growing insecurity about the 'two rolls' nature of assault and covering fire, but the gang said they enjoyed that part. I used to like it too, so I'm chalking this up to over-familiarity.
• For players unfamiliar with the genre, even the one-page playbooks are a lot to take in. Lots of boxes to tick off. (I remember feeling this way looking at Blades character sheets.)
• Horst asked for a stress mechanic, which made me chuckle. Removing 'stress' from The Regiment was probably a mis-step; there's a lot of potential for socially focused downtime moves that interact with it.
• Daniel suggested more moves to add SNAFU. Also, restricting SNAFU burn to "small-scale" moves may not be necessary. Why not open this up and (while I'm at it) add playbook-specific  moves to add SNAFU?

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What's really missing? Human interaction. What I'm finding in playtests is that while the combat moves are in the refining stage, the human element is completely missing.

The source inspiration for the game is The Regiment, in which you have vulnerable humans taking deadly weapons fire. When the party is swaddled in high tech mecha, it's much harder to have an organic exchange of emotion in the middle of a mission—you can't lean on your buddy and have a smoke, for example. (This might be less true with longer missions that aren't in/shoot/out, but I haven't run any of those yet.)

Dungeon World-style flags are a great way to get some interaction in a one-shot, I think that would help push the focus back onto the characters and their interactions. I'm tempted to add either that or some drives (or at least make sure that every character has a solid xp move that drives interaction with other PCs).

As I mentioned with the change to spot their colors, I really want to make NPC interaction a much more significant focus. I feel like "life on base" should not be relegated to a few brief downtime moves, it's too much like browsing a shopping list.

There's a lot of interesting potential there, especially as the mission context accumulates. I like having a Darnan liaison NPC, and in the second playtest this weekend I urged a PC to recognize them.

That's all for now!

2G2BT: Cracker Jack Run

I ran a playtest session of 2G2BT tonight, with a reduced group: two players, Tim playing the Rigger, and Stephen playing the Prodigy.

We continued with the Darnan Offensive campaign (the one in the PDF)—this time, they were given a "short notice" mission to go and hit an apparently stranded convoy of Fiedan tanks.

Playtesting a game that I've had on the back burner makes things feel a lot less emotionally charged for me, which is a welcome relief. I'm not delivering a newborn up for judgement, I'm showing my friends this thing I have in the garage so we can kick the tires together.

A number of things went well:

I really like the NPC group traits table, that was useful. The players' mercenary company has recently come into possession of a Troll dropship, which has four slots, and they immediately tried to press some Republic tanks into riding along with their mission.

Rolling on the table got me, 'Favored' and 'Green', which naturally translated into them having dragged long some Republic general's children on a show tour. Woops!

Later, after all the action, the players had some prisoners. The question came up as to whether the prisoners would try to escape, or what. Rolling on the NPC table got me: Locals, Vengeful. Obviously they will!

Also, the establishing roll, SNAFU, all felt very natural in play. Despite the adventure being literally a two-sentence description, it was enough to generate a nice setup. The Prodigy's weird plans move also worked out nicely.

Too Tough!

Less successful was incoming fire—the PC mechs are waaay too tough for the fire that was coming their way, and there was a lot of it. 2-armor means that the Prodigy in his Angel can basically shrug off 4d Direct fire, which isn't right.

All in all, I think this miscalibration comes from me treating mechs in the game like main battle tanks. In The Regiment, troops are mostly unarmored (they only get armor late in the game). They're going to die quickly if they take the full brunt of enemy weapons. They need to really make use of the battlefield cover, the squad's heavy weapons, and suppression fire to achieve their goals.

The way I've written up the mechs, they're like tanks, but better all around. I think they make more sense as a high-tech way to protect very highly trained elite infantry; tough, compact, responsive, and deadly. But still, they'd definitely avoid head-on shootouts with heavy tanks.

So, I think I need to reduce armor (tough mechs should have a few more damage boxes, with 1-armor being pretty rare).

Theatre of the—wait, where was group B?

The other thing is subtler, and may involve more extensive changes. Tim's fondness for the Firefight mechanic from Burning Empires is starting to rub off on me, and I think building out the moves so they are creating battlefield terrain would be sensible. Spotting useful positions (and naming them), sites of tactical advantages, that sort of thing gives a very concrete context for the ground-taking moves like assault. If I can do that without making the battlefield overly player-authored, I think it's worth exploring.

Similarly, doing damage to large number of NPC vehicles feels unsatisfying. They're anonymous, and individually not that fictionally interesting.. when they don't have a concrete position. I suppose a chess pawn is a useful analogy: all of its tactical significance comes from its exact placement.

This makes me think that the weapon systems in PC hands can be simplified a bit. There's no need to obsess over the precise AOF and cover damage dice all to find out you do 3 points of damage to tank #2 out of 6. The player engagement and fictional payoffs don't seem that great. (I remember feeling this way about The Regiment.)

I'm wondering if weapons systems could be reduced to much simpler things, mechanically. I may actually take a page from Fortnite, which I think does a nice job of making its weapons feel distinct, yet balanced. It's really handy to have a shotgun (great damage at short range, but it falls off very quickly) vs. an SMG (also deadly at short range, but the recoil makes them no use at range), vs. assault rifles (modest ROF, but accurate enough to dish it out at medium range), vs. sniper weapons (slow, awkward, require aiming, but highly damaging and able to reach at long ranges).

Also, the current damage mechanics don't do much in terms of letting players engage with the salvage rules. Salvage is important to the grind (earning cash, buying upgrades). Taking enemies relatively intact with careful disabling shots seems a thing to bring into the game.

Much thinking to do!

2G2BT v0.12

No huge news on the 2G2BT front, but the game has accumulated a small number of clarifications and very minor changes, and it seems silly that the last word on this game is a few versions out of date.

2G2BT Playtest

We squeezed a quick 2G2BT playtest after tonight's session of Blades, and it was fun, weird, and very informative.

There was only an hour or so to knock it out, but the group had all read the rules beforehand and had a good idea of what playbooks they wanted, so setup was lightning quick.

They named their new mercenary company the Hammer of the Gods, and since nobody picked up the Commander playbook, they wound up with a Favored but Vengeful NPC commander, 'Thor'.  His connections with the Darnan Republic (their first deployment) meant he could pull strings when the company is in trouble, but tends to pursue revenge side objectives.

The whole crew chose Dendrite-native sim-babies as heritages (pilots whose experience is primary in simulations), and decided to be triplets. They had a Lieutenant (Mike), a Rigger (Tim) and a weirdo Prodigy (Stephen), but with a Veteran (Sean) as their connection to actual battlefield experience.

Holy crap did I put a lot of shit in this game. It's a weird experience when writing outpaces the play by so far.  Playbooks means the players can actually take a lot of responsibility for bringing it in, which is fantastic, but the surprises kept coming.

Stephen: Okay, turns out I did my stats wrong. The Prodigy's stats are randomly assigned during play, as I use them.
Me: Wtf?! I wrote that?
Mike: I love that!

Things like that kept happening. It was pretty delightful, actually.

We chose to play the branching campaign, the Darnan Offensive.  The players didn't like the sound of being shot to pieces by Exo in City 31, so they chose mission 'B', "Last Train from RHF".

Stimulus Overload
Normally I'm pretty good at providing a sense of place with lots of ad libbed details, but I was a little overwhelmed by first playtest syndrome to be my creative best while getting my head around an unfamiliar set of basic moves - the net effect was that the scenario was a little too simple.

Part of that was just the nature of the time we had. The players had rolled a starting "SNAFU" of 2, which gave me plenty of opportunity to bring in enemy reinforcements or other fuckery, but I chose not to for time.  As a result, the mission was basically a one-location mission, which is too simple for an abstract, theatre-of-the-mind battlefield.

Despite that, the mechanics worked basically as expected. (That's not too surprising, as the basic core is pretty familiar from our games of The Regiment.)

Turns out that four York 6A tanks are a speed bump against TL IV mechs. :)

Some lessons and likely changes.

Downtime Procedure
The crew managed to roll a Dropship For Sale as their post-mission opportunity, which immediately kicked off a frenzied shell game of trying to figure out what they could sell in order to make it work. They had a fat-bellied Regent dropship as their starting gear, but they cashed it all in for a zeroed-out Troll, which has enough capacity that they won't have to depend on Republic VTOLs.

This was pretty fun - watching the players toss everything aside to try to take up a rare opportunity was golden, and very much in-genre.

On the other hand, I'm wary of shell games, as they can lead to a lot of fiddling and possibly analysis paralysis. I think a much clearer downtime procedure would be helpful, something like:

1. Make the opportunity roll to see what's up
2. Apply theater employment terms, in order
3. Repair should come before purchase - there's no time to broker a deal for a new dropship, obtain it and use the base techs to patch it up before next mission. The suspense is probably more fun that way.
4. Rearming should probably be last, because you might have changed mechs.

Technology Level Set
One of the problems that both magic and sci-fi technology suffer from in rules light systems is that there are no real-world expectations to calibrate against. I know roughly what a guy with a sword can accomplish, not so someone with 'shadow magic'. Do mech optics see heat signatures through buildings? Can an Iguana's railgun shoot straight through the skeleton of a nuked office tower? How big are mechs, anyways?

Not enough ways to spend SNAFU
I'm not 100% sure about this one, since there was only the one engagement, but the Veteran was complaining that there wasn't really a great way for him to apply his special xp move, burning two SNAFU on a roll.

Maybe this isn't necessary when we're doing something other than toy missions: in a two- or three-encounter mission, there are at least four SNAFU opportunities (five if there's a briefing roll too).

Briefing Tables
Since RPGs are very low bandwidth, one of the challenging situations is when players stumble on a huge vista - you now have to convey quite a lot of information all at once. One idea that seems very promising is a set of briefing tables, to do a few useful things:

• Give another opportunity to spend SNAFU - cash one in to get a really shite briefing
• Give the GM and players some shared opportunity to add texture to the battlefield. Okay, we know there's AA, or we don't, but know we're all at least thinking about AA as something to consider when deciding where we're
• Give a few named places on the battlefield - a candidate LZ, an easy to reach spot, a tactically useful spot, a likely location for enemy reinforcements, a place with lots of cover, etc.

Assess
I think it's useful to bring the time complication up to the 7-9 option.

Patrons
What makes way more sense than an NPC commander is an NPC patron for the deployment theater. I think that would provide a much more economical way to expose players to the fuckery of the Darnan Republic, and keeps the NPC commander from being an intermediary that shields players from that.


Healing
I think pilots should wear out. Getting hurt should be scarier.  Health shouldn't feel like hit points that recover easily after each mission, but jarring concussions that stop you sleeping and eventually give you really bad stuff like Parkinson's.

Complicated weapon is complicated
The Hellhound's 2x 1d Twin 15mm AC is unnecessarily fiddly. Just making it 2d is fine.

Armor and Criticals
The rules as written don't quite work - you roll dice all at once, not one at a time, so there needs to be a clearer procedure on how you determine whether your 1-armor blocks the D or C damage. One idea thrown out was that 1-armor might actually convert C to D. That does mean that under some circumstances armor doesn't do anything (when all your D boxes are ticked, converting C to D doesn't help). Not sure if the complexity pays for itself over just letting players choose which hit to absorb.

Disabled
Somehow at the table we misinterpreted 'disabled' (the new dropship purchase) as just having the last damage box ticked.. but of course it means the whole damage track is ticked.

Interruptions
I miss the 'turn sequence is clockwise but there's a rule for interrupting' from my fantasy heartbreaker. I think that's extremely functional for sharing out spotlight. Not sure how to squeeze that in, as the economies are totally different.

Mech Escalation
I'm thinking the starting mechs might be a little too versatile, and might have too much potential. Tim rolled well on his chargen roll, and got a Weiler to start with.

I don't have a vast tech readout of mechs to choose from, but it feels to me that the starting mechs should be:

1. Useful but fairly simple
2. Have a few upgrade options, but nothing so exciting that it's the mech you want to end the game with
3. Have critical options that aren't awesome. A few bad hits and you're looking at pilot-lethal damage, so you start to really want to upgrade, swap out for a backup mech (even exo), or pray for an overhaul opportunity
4. Leave you lots of room to drool when you see something better on the battlefield

On the other hand, it's early days. It could be that upgrade opportunities are rare enough that it's not a problem.

Anyways.. it was a lot of fun, and it feels like a promising start.

2GTBT 0.10 - Mecha RPG

For a few weeks now, I've been noodling on a mecha RPG, a mash-up of The Regiment and Battletech. It's just reached first alpha draft stage, version 0.10.

I absolutely adore the Battletech 3025 tech readout, it's one of the most evocative gaming supplements I own. I wanted to capture that high-tech-but-rusting, zero sum feeling, where players are mercenaries using battlefield technology that can no longer be manufactured.

Design-wise, the main inspirations is John Harper's WWII RPG, The Regiment. I love the theatre-of-the-mind approach to combat, the absence of a turn order, and the squad-level resolution rules that make combat move along so briskly.

Like other Powered by the Apocalypse games, the characters are pre-made archetypes with a bit of wiggle room to make them individual.

It's meant to be fast enough to play as written for one-shots, but there's advancement for both the individual pilots and the company.

It hasn't been playtested, so there are probably all sorts of potholes to fall into.