A Small Update

I haven’t been doing quite as much on the RPG front the past few weeks because I’ve had a lot of other distractions.

Yuuyake Koyake Mail
Today two new Yuuyake Koyake books came in the mail. Kore Kara no Michi (“The Road From Here”) has rules for playing as humans, as promised. Interestingly, they do have Powers, but almost all of them have a cost of 0. There are also 3 pages of Weakness/Additional Power pairs for humans. The Touhou Yuuyake Koyake book has around 80 pages of replays, which apparently has Riko (the raccoon dog girl from YK) visiting Gensoukyou. The rules section has two new character types–shrine maidens and fairies–and also, intriguingly, four pages of powers followed by two pages of weaknesses for “Gensoukyou Residents.” It has writeups for several Touhou characters, and it’s interesting that several of them list more than one character type, like Reisen’s statblock says “Rabbit + Visitor.”

Slime Story Playtest
I’m planning to run my first Slime Story playtest this Sunday. I’ll have quite a bit to say about it later.

NaNoWriMo
I’m doing NaNoWriMo again this year, working on an oddity called “UFO Girl” that I’ve wanted to do for ages. I’m a bit behind right now though.

Neko Machi: A Webcomic
Way back in early 2003 I started a webcomic called Neko Machi (“Cat Town”), about a bunch of catgirls in high school, loosely based on me and my friends. It went on pretty regularly for 3 or 4 years, but I had to stop after a while. I’ve now enlisted my friend C. Ellis to handle the art side of things for a resurrected and reinvented Neko Machi. We’re off to a rocky start in some ways, but I’m really excited to be doing it again. The tools are vastly better than they were 6 years ago, and my writing has improved, and I get to work with a very talented artist this time around. There’s been some talk on Story Games about what indie RPGs can learn from webcomics, and I’m definitely looking forward to seeing where we can go with marketing this comic and what I might glean from the experience for RPGs. (I definitely smell a podcast topic…)

Slime Story: Playtest Version 2

If you’ve been following this blog, then by now you know that Slime Story is my RPG of “teenagers hunting cute monsters for spending money.” Basically, imagine monsters from Ragnarok Online and Maple Story invading American suburbia. I finally have the new playtest document for Slime Story ready to go. It’s very different from–and hopefully altogether better–than the last one.

This game is a weird hybrid of traditional, indie, and Japanese RPG design sensibilities, or to put it another way, Meikyuu Kingdom, D&D4e, and Mouse Guard were all key inspirations (though there’s a long list of others). It has a rigid scene structure (you alternate between encounters and interludes), powers usable depending on the game’s time units, an abstract range map, characters defined by a “class” and “clique,” achievements (kind of like in video games, but a bit free-form), relationship mechanics, and other wacky stuff. It’s also meant to be largely player-led, and protagonists need to define and pursue their own goals.

Playtest Notes
I’m making this playtest draft publicly available so that people can read it and perhaps even try it out. If you do, I want to hear all about it! Tell me what you think, tell me how it plays, and share your war stories! However, it hasn’t been playtested yet AT ALL–I’ll hopefully be rectifying that fairly soon–so some of the stuff that I thought looked good on paper might not work at all.

The playtest version is deliberately incomplete, on account of me not wanting to try to come up with over 100 Talents and 40 or 50 monsters just to wind up having to rewrite them to make up for rules changes. I also left out the supplemental rules chapter (which is meant to have rules for experimental alchemy and quests, amongst other things) because it’s nowhere near ready. There’s enough to sit down and play the game though, and the overall goal at this stage is simply to make sure the basic design is sound.

Tasty, Tasty Files
I’ve put together the necessary materials in PDF form to the best of my ability, though especially for the character sheet I don’t really have the necessary skills to make something great-looking. For action cards, I recommend just using index cards, but most anything will do. Likewise, you can easily substitute miniatures for the battlefield tokens (which at this stage are just a placeholder using dingbat fonts).

Slime Story RPG Rules (Playtest v2) PDF
Protagonist Sheet
Secondary Character Sheets
Battlefield Map
Battlefield Tokens
Rules Quick Reference Sheet

Slime Story Design Journal: Advancement

I got kind of lazy with my original version of the character advancement in Slime Story. I did the thing where characters accumulate points and then spend them piecemeal on whatever they want to improve, like in a White Wolf game. (I also did that with Tokyo Heroes by the way.) There was some neat stuff with how you got those points–a combination of video game style achievements, deepening connections with other characters, invoking characters’ issues, and achieving goals–but the way you used them was still just lazy design.

That’s why I’ve wound up giving it a level-based mechanic, which is a bit Savage Worlds and a bit D&D4e. There are one or two other uses for Character Points, so characters don’t level up automatically, but instead spend points to gain levels between episodes. Having what characters gain at what level be predefined makes character growth a little more interesting. There was a time when I disdained classes and levels as artificially limiting, but just throwing points around more or less like in character creation is really boring and lazy (if functional). Levels aren’t the only way to go–not by a long shot–but they seem to be a good fit for Slime Story.

Anyway, this was another one of those things I thought up in the middle of the night and implemented right away. At this point a playtest draft (albeit a simplified one without many Talents or monsters included) will just be a matter of filling in some necessary details, more equipment and such than rules per se. If I don’t get distracted by other stuff (which is a very distinct possibility) I’ll be posting it up in the next week or two and hopefully doing some playtesting myself in the near future.

And Some Other Stuff

• Guy Shalev has a blog called Geekorner-Geekulture which deals mainly with anime/otaku stuff, including regular features on anime/game/etc. figures (and his obsession with Saber from Fate/Stay Night). Not wanting to start up yet another blog myself, I’ve started contributing posts there, which will all be under the “Ewen’s Corner” tag. Most of these will be reviews of strange manga I’ve read, but my first post is about my experiences commissioning custom plushies.
• I’ve started a second podcast, called Trapped Inside the Dream Forever. It’s all recordings of my bizarre fiction writing (and probably some of my poetry too at some point). So far it’s updating every Friday, but that’s because I still have a big backlog of stories to record. If anyone thinks they can do better recordings than me and wants to do so, let me know.
• I may have inspired Ben Lehman to make a new game, for a second time.

Yaruki Zero Podcast #11: RPGs For Anime Fans

In this episode I’m joined by Jake Richmond–one of the designers of Panty Explosion and other great games–to discuss anime fans as a potential market for RPGs. We discuss our experiences running games at anime conventions (particularly his experiences at Kumoricon in Portland, Oregon), and how best to design games that can appeal to anime fans.

Yaruki Zero Podcast #11 (46 minutes, 57 seconds)

Show Notes

1. Introductions
• See games by Jake (and Matt and Nick!) at the Atarashi Games website
• Jake Richmond Interview on Geekorner Part 1 and Part 2
2. RPGs at Anime Cons
• Kumoricon, a local anime con in Portland, Oregon
• GameStorm, a local gaming con in Washington.
• Go Play Northwest
3. Designing For Anime Fans
• High School Debut, one of Jake’s favorite manga.
• Tales from the Floating Vagabond
• Mike Holmes talks (rants) about combat systems and photographers.
• Playtest doc for Ewen’s Azumanga Daioh-inspired Raspberry Heaven game.
• SaiKano (Saishuu Heiki Kanojo/She, The Ultimate Weapon)

This podcast uses selections from the song “Click Click” by Grünemusik, available for free from Jamendo.com. If you like the song, consider buying some CDs from Nankado’s website.

Very awesome caricature of Ewen courtesy of the talented C. Ellis.

Anime Fans and RPGs

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Recently Jake Richmond, Ben Lehman, and some other story gamers from the area went to Kumoricon (a local anime con with attendance of a bit under 5,000) to run various anime-themed RPGs. Ben and Jake have both posted about their experiences, and they’re encouraging to say the least. Between them they ran seven different sessions of a wide range of games–the Atarashi Games line, plus Bliss Stage and Maid RPG–and all were a resounding success. At a relatively small con, and with minimal promotion for their anime RPG track, they still had sessions overflowing with enthusiastic players. Not only that, but these folks were in many ways more open-minded than typical tabletop RPG players. No one was turning their noses up at playing anime maids or Japanese schoolgirls, or at having sexual content in Bliss Stage, much less getting turned off by anime/manga style art.

I haven’t been nearly as ambitious as those folks, but I did run sessions of Maid RPG at FanimeCon and Anime Expo last year, and they were likewise met with enthusiasm. At Fanime, even the guys who came off at first as being run of the mill D&D players jumped into playing maids without any hesitation. One gentleman was already a fan with a copy of the book who’d been talking it up on DeviantArt, and a couple more went ahead and ordered the book online before the con was even over. At Anime Expo I got an enthusiastic group, a first-time role-player, and one guy even went so far as to commission Persona to do a sketch of the PCs.

Interactivity at Anime Cons
There are a lot of different things at work here, which I’m trying to unravel a little. There is a very definite overlap between RPG and anime fandoms, but as is often the case, gamers on the whole are very mixed (and in some cases outright hostile) in terms of their opinions of anime. No game can please everyone of course, but while anime art is a turn-off to many gamers, good anime art is a huge draw for anime fans. Most cons have an Artists Alley where artists have tables to sell prints and commissions and such, and they’re generally packed. At conventions especially, anime fans are always looking for things to do. Every anime con has a big schedule of anime showings, but apart from stuff like the AMV contest, Anime Hell, etc. that you can’t get off of BitTorrent, they aren’t the real draw. Things like karaoke contests, maid cafes, panels, workshops, and, yes, tabletop gaming rooms, are what get people interested.

One major issue I’m pondering in all this is how to go about making things happen. Running games is relatively easy, though even where an anime con has a bustling tabletop gaming room, it’s likely to be dominated by CCG tournaments. The folks who ran games at Kumoricon lamented that they could’ve easily sold 10 or 20 copies of each game if they’d had them, but for the larger cons a dealers room booth costs something like $600 to $1,000. For a smaller con it’d be closer to $200, though I’m not entirely sure how the costs would line up with the money made in either case. I do have a contact with a local anime store that goes to what seems like every con ever (“Didn’t I see you last week in California? Why are you in Texas?”), but I’m not sure that having some Maid RPG books getting lost in a sea of plushies and trading figures would be all that effective. On the other hand, it might be possible to persuade a con to let people sell self-published RPG books through Artist’s Alley, which is dramatically cheaper, but not something I would expect to be able to do consistently, depending on each con’s policies and the attitude of whoever’s running their Artist’s Alley.

Expanding to Other Realms
This is also just one example of how RPGs can potentially reach a new (and more targeted) audience. People were also running games at PAX, and I can’t really think of a nerdy subculture that doesn’t have at least some room for tabletop gaming. The only thing that makes anime fandom a bit different is that in terms of published RPGs it’s one of the more underserved, especially considering just how big it is. Companies are having a hard time monetizing the actual anime content–not a few DVD publishers have closed their doors over the past few years–but sales of just about everything else to do with anime are still relatively strong (even if the state of the economy has been a problem for those dealers like everyone else).

Although this goes without saying, I’m talking about small press/indie RPG stuff here too. I would be more than a little surprised to hear that anime RPGs are catching on so much that Wizards of the Coast needs to take notice, but as I’ve said before, if Maid RPG is any indication, by small press standards a good anime-themed RPG can be a resounding success. Maid RPG’s sales have been competitive with the very top tier of indie RPGs, on par with the likes of Vincent Baker and Evil Hat. While it does have its share of adherents from among the indie gaming crowd, I highly doubt it would’ve been so successful without the anime fandom demographic. On the other hand, that makes me a little nervous in that without anything resembling a marketing plan we’ve still had a hell of a time keeping Maid RPG in stock. While turning a profit, however modest, is nice, not being able to consistently get the books to people who want them just bugs me, and I don’t really feel I have the tools to properly gauge the extent to which addressing this new fanbase will elevate demand. Being able to print books in greater volume has benefits for everyone involved of course (cheaper per-unit cost, and at a certain point traditional rather than POD printing becomes more feasible), but the up-front investment from the publisher can still get impractically large. I know Gregor Hutton has said that it was basically a financially fortunate situation that let him print enough copies of 3:16 to meet the unexpectedly high demand.

Conclusion
Regardless, I definitely intend to work more on promoting the RPGs I like through anime conventions. At the very least, I know for sure that the con closest to me (FanimeCon) has an ambitious tabletop gaming department as a decent number of role-players. Admittedly, my skills and personality are better suited to the writing/translating side of things, but wherever one falls in the equation, there could be exciting times ahead.

In any case, in the near future I’m going to be recording a podcast with Jake Richmond to discuss these issues, his experiences at Kumoricon, and more.

Kyawaii RPG #5: Monday Afternoon Blues

I got the Norwegian Style book in the mail the other day, so naturally I got inspired to make a role-playing poem, which is to say a mostly freeform role-playing thing meant to be played in 15 minutes. Monday Afternoon Blues is a bit derivative of Stoke-Birmingham 0-0, only it’s about the aftermath of a big anime convention.

Click here to download.

Slime Story Design Journal: Bits and Pieces

Since Slime Story has become a very ambitious project that I’m very determined to complete (i.e., turn into a complete, playable, and fun RPG), I’ve decided to start posting “Design Journal” entries so that folks can see the process and maybe get a little more excited about the game. (And maybe offer suggestions too.) I do kind of feel like I’ve been piling lots of bells and whistles onto the game, and I’m wondering if I won’t have to just get rid of some of them depending on how they work out in playtesting, but that’s how it goes, I guess. Here are the major things with the game that are on my mind at the moment:

Encounters

Image via Wikipedia

Slime Story’s encounter rules are meant to be a relatively simple tactical game that players can enjoy on its own merits. It’s turned into a sort of D&D4e-light, mixed with bits of Meikyuu Kingdom and a few other things. Characters take turns and can do one Full Action (attacking and other involved stuff) and one Maneuver Action (moving and other actions that help indirectly) per turn.

The Action Stack is a set of cards representing each participant in an encounter. The GM simply shuffles the cards, and that’s the initiative order. (Certain conditions will let characters shift their card up or down in the stack.) The GM simply flips through the cards, and whoever’s card is on top gets to act.

The Battlefield Map is an abstract map with seven spaces arranged vertically. Characters can attack enemies that fall are within a number of spaces based on the Range of their attacks (a typical melee weapon has a range of 0-1, so it can hit enemies in the same area or an adjacent one), and can use a Maneuver Action to move from one area to an adjacent one.

To make both elements work more smoothly, I’m thinking of having a PDF with three sets of generic action cards and battlefield tokens/pawns for monsters (numbers, letters, and symbols), which you can use rather than having to prepare them for each type of monster you want to include in advance.

Right now the main boondoggle with encounters is that I want to have some way for characters to try to get a positional advantage, but I’m not sure how to go about that without having it be too time-consuming or giving too overwhelming of an advantage.

Achievements
Achievements are probably one of my favorite things about the game. Achievements are very much like the things from Xbox 360 and other video game platforms, in that they archive a character’s accomplishments and contribute to his or her overall reputation. In Slime Story, the GM hands them out to players where appropriate during play, and everyone can suggest achievements after the session is over. Characters can “cash in” achievements for Character Points (to improve attributes and buy new abilities) and/or Influence (to buy stuff with).

I have a notion of having achievements cause characters to gradually build up a Renown rating, but I’m not sure what it would actually do in the game.

Happenings
This is the newest thing, which wound up being a combination of a couple different things that were rattling around inside my head. During Interludes (the stuff that goes between encounters, where characters can quarrel, bond, make items, etc.), players have a limited number of Action Points (they get one per Interlude, and each gets one extra AP per episode) to spend on doing stuff. I’ve been wanting to have some mechanism for players to earn more AP if they want/need to. I also had a vague idea of having rules for random events, which the GM would periodically throw in to make things more interesting (so the monster hunters might run into a dead deer, get caught in a sudden downpour, bump into a police officer, get a call from home, etc.). It occurs to me that inconvenient “Happenings,” whether rolled randomly, devised by the GM in advance, or suggested by the people at the table, make an excellent way to both make protagonists’ lives more interesting and give an appropriate “fee” for awarding Action Points.

Analog DLC?

Image via Wikipedia

This started as an offhand comment on Twitter, which ballooned into a discussion (even though Twitter isn’t a good medium for discussion), so I’m expanding it into a blog post to unpack some. In video games downloadable content (or DLC) has become at turns a buzzword, a thing fans demand, and a source of controversy. It’s getting to be a pretty common thing, though it’s obvious that some developers are better than others at figuring out what the heck to do with the possibilities it affords. I’m wondering if RPGs could benefit from something resembling video game DLC. Needless to say, this line of discussion presupposes that someone is actually going to do it right, providing useful, quality content at a reasonable price, without gimping the primary product. And we’re talking about something at a scale where it would in fact be different from merely offering sourcebooks and adventure modules, since the RPG industry is already well-acquainted with that (and in a sense was way ahead of video games).

So, the idea is to do “micro-supplements” for an RPG, preferably electronic. This probably makes more sense for a game that has relatively little supplemental material in the first place, since it can actually stand out more from the rest of the product line. If Wizards of the Coast releases a new race as a $3 PDF, it’s going to get lost in the shuffle of their dozens of hardback supplements and monthly truckload of D&D Insider content (which is more the niche something like a single race fills in their business), but if an indie publisher does one or two of these, they could be the one or two supplemental things that exist for the game in total. On the one hand, supplements inevitably sell less than core rulebooks, but on the other hand a PDF micro-supplement that costs $4 or less is squarely in impulse buy range, gives the customer nigh-instant gratification (rather than waiting for shipping or making a trip to a store), and doesn’t take a huge investment on the part of the publisher to create. Although Microsoft’s implementation hasn’t been perfect, part of the success of their “marketplace” stuff is simply that you can buy stuff using your Xbox 360 controller sitting on a couch, and use it right away. Now all three major game consoles have that going for them.

One Bad Egg’s 4e micro-supplements range from about $2.49 to $8.99, with the right amount of heft for the price, and really distinctive content for a game with minimal third-party support. Ronin Arts literally has over 200 PDF products out there, and they have dozens of d20 OGL PDFs for sale, starting at $1.50. I don’t know all that much about Ronin Arts’ offerings, but OBE seems to be the #1 producer of 3rd-Party D&D4e content, and their stuff stands out both in terms of quality (with Green Ronin and others skipping 4e, a lot of the other GSL offerings are the kind of stuff that remind me of the lameness of the 3e OGL glut[1]) and creativity (since they’ve tended towards a very gonzo pulp flavor of D&D).

It would also be a mistake to assume this only applies to things that cost money. 3:16 has two free supplements as part of free electronic magazines (the Collective Endeavor Journal and Page XX), and it’s not hard to see how this both gets 3:16 fans looking at the magazine and gets the people reading the magazine for other things looking at 3:16. Likewise (although I wish we could’ve gotten it out sooner) the free bonus scenarios for Maid RPG hopefully are not only letting people who have the game do a little more with it, but also letting people who don’t have it get a taste of what it’s like. (Which comes back to the whole thing about selling an experience we talked about in the last podcast.)

Now, the flipside to all that is that with both video game DLC and RPG micro-supplements people have generally had a hard time figuring out what the hell they were doing. Video game DLC has at times included unbridled attempts to squeeze more money out of gamers (such as charging to unlock content already on the disc), or just kind of lame and slow to come along (anyone remember the map packs for Unreal Championship?). Mongoose’s “Power Classes” pamphlets likewise seem to have gotten onto FLGS shelves only to be greeted with an emphatic (and probably well-deserved) “meh.” Content needs to be compelling to the user/customer, no matter what format you’re offering it in. If it’s crappy, or for a game they’ve already moved on from, no one’s going to be interested, but that’s just common sense.

White Wolf is in fact doing something in the way of mini-supplements with their “Storytelling Adventure System.”[2] These are very much like adventure modules for their various games, but they’re sold as inexpensive PDFs (ranging from $1.49 to $8.99, but $6.99 seems to be the standard price). This isn’t quite what I’ve been blathering about here, but it’s interesting in its own right in that it’s something of a solution to the question of how publishers can continue to offer actual adventure scenarios. Good pre-written adventures are very useful to the people playing the games, but their profitability is not generally commensurate with that. WotC’s solution to this is elaborate modules with glossy color maps (which are useful in general for D&D) that list for $24.95. If the Amazon book sales rankings are any indication, these do indeed sell an order of magnitude less than core products, to say nothing of the Player’s Handbook, but they are apparently selling enough to justify their continued publication. Of course, especially for something like Exalted (which has fewer tangible components to pack in), it makes sense for the players to have an adventure be a PDF you can print out, run, and recycle afterward (or just keep on a laptop, with no need for a hardcopy).

The thing that probably best exemplifies what I’m getting at here is, unsurprisingly, from Ryo Kamiya. Tsugihagi Honbo occasionally does very short doujinshi things for 100 yen, and one of them had rules for creating mouse henge in Yuuyake Koyake. This involves a mere 4 pages of material in all (with one illustration) and while the game doesn’t need a seventh type of henge, adding in mice adds some really interesting new possibilities to the game. As a huge fan of Yuuyake Koyake and something of a completist, it bugs me a little that I don’t have a copy. ^_^; Although Tsugihagi does these on paper, particularly in the American market it’d make more sense to have something like that be a PDF.

Anyway, I’m not really going anywhere in particular with this, just throwing out an idea and places it might lead.

[1]I do really like Alea Publishing Group’s Feudal Characters: Noble though.
[2]There’s also something called ExXxalted: Scroll of Swallowed Darkness that costs 99 cents for the full version, but we won’t dwell on it.

Yaruki Zero Podcast #10: Wild Blue Yonder

In this episode I’m joined again by my friend Jon Baumgardner to talk about Blue Ocean Strategy and how it might be applied to designing and marketing small-press RPGs.

Yaruki Zero Podcast #10 (43 minutes, 14 seconds)

Show Notes

1. What is Blue Ocean Strategy?
• Tom Peters
• Red Ocean vs. Blue Ocean; existing vs. untapped market space.
• Joe Pine & Jim Gilmore
• Blue Ocean Thoughts: Sell Me On…, a post from this blog on “fair process.”
2. Innovating the Medium
• Serial Homicide Unit (and the mp3 demo)
• D&D Podcast on WotC’s structure for selling miniatures, an example of Dungeon Tiles, and the Dungeon Delve supplement that explicitly references Dungeon Tiles.
• Disposable Heroes paper miniatures from Precis Intermedia
• Joe McDonald’s Ribbon Drive
3. Innovating in Marketing
• Evil Hat’s PDF Policy, and the episode of That’s How We Roll where Fred talks about his views on PDFs.
4. Addendum: Overcoming Objections
• Natural 20 Podcast
5. Any questions you’d like us to discuss in the future? Please comment!

This podcast uses selections from the song “Click Click” by Grünemusik, available for free from Jamendo.com. If you like the song, consider buying some CDs from Nankado’s website.

Slime Story: Conflicts Redux

A combination of reading Agon, re-reading Meikyuu Kingdom, and thinking about some of the little tricks we’ve come up with in my group’s D&D4e campaign have inspired me to get back to work on Slime Story at long last. The major stumbling block was getting the conflict rules to work how I wanted them to, and I think I’ve got that about figured out.

Before I had a “footing” system, where each character in a conflict is in Forward, Middle, or Rear footing (or in some special circumstances Off-Balance or Ambush footing), which was basically a trade-off of offense for defense or vice-versa. The thing is, once you’ve set your footing, there’s not much motivation to change it, which kind of defeats the purpose of having a map and character tokens and such. Meikyuu Kingdom and Agon both use abstract range maps. MK calls it the “battlefield,” while Agon has a “range strip“. (And apparently Traveller had something similar too, so it’s a much older idea than I’d originally believed.) This lets me do some neat stuff with range, movement, and positioning, and in particular, outnumbering the enemy within a given position on the map gives characters an advantage. I think this will help provide about the right level of tactical elements, enough to make encounters interesting in their own right, but not so much that they eat up too much time.

And, straight from Agon, the social conflict rules are basically the combat rules but with the map/positioning elements taken out completely. Much simpler and IMO altogether better, since having positioning in a social conflict is getting a little too abstract for my tastes.

The other important thing I’ve come up with is the “action stack.” This is my attempt at doing something more interesting with initiative, an area that has seen surprisingly little innovation over the years. In order to simplify combat in my group’s D&D campaign, we’ve taken to having a combat card for each character and monster with the relevant stats on it. Once the initiative rolls are in, the DM just arranges the cards in order and cycles through the stack of cards as needed. This in turn lets me do interesting things with the stack of cards that would be awkward otherwise, including meta-effects that change a character’s spot in the initiative order. It’s also made it easier to keep track of “reactions,” a class of actions that interrupt regular actions; your card gets turned face-down in the stack, and when it comes up again it’s righted, but you don’t get to go until it comes around face-up again.

On the whole, I’m feeling a lot better about how all of this stuff is coming together, though of course it’s continuing the pattern of tearing out some bits of the system and keeping others. (But, the bits getting discarded are becoming smaller and smaller.) On paper, it looks like it’s achieving the right balance of tactically interesting and intuitive to play, even if it does involve a lot of fiddly bits. But, if I can get the encounter and conflict rules straightened out, I can finally write up the talents and get the game ready to properly playtest.