An Actual Fantasy Core Playtest 8-31-13

[We’re temporarily suspending the Jianghu Setting posts for this important announcement.]

Okay, I’ve finally managed to playtest the Fantasy Core rules.  The short answer is that they seem to work.  Granted it was one test with first level characters, but the principles seemed more or less sound. 

My crashtest dummies, err. . . I mean victims, err . . . I mean playtesters were my co-worker Evan and his friend Victor.  Given that Evan has been reading these posts, I couldn’t use any of my posted adventure material.  Since this was on short notice, all I could do was use somebody else’s mega-dungeon and read encounters off a page.  Frankly, not my preferred style, and I quickly got bored with kicking in doors and raiding chambers.  For playtesting purposes though, this fit the bill.  Evan and Victor seemed to enjoy the play anyway, in spite of my lack of preparation and imagination.

The big question was about the spell use.  Doing away with Vancian spellcasting and having Wizards roll to cast a spell and giving their targets saving throws on just about everything was on trial.  Victor had some terrible luck with the dice, but the system seemed to work correctly.  Even with luckier rolling, things seemed tempered enough with the saving throws and reduced spell damage.  But importantly, the wizard could try to cast spells in every encounter and be a actual wizard.  At higher levels, the low-level spells will be easier to cast with elevated damage, while more potent spells will be harder to cast, with the potential of exhausting their power from repeated failures.  Still, it did seem that only needing a turn’s rest to regain full potency was too light a penalty. 

That resting penalty was a recurring problem.  Unlike Old School, the low-level party didn’t have to exit the dungeon after one trying encounter.  But this was replaced with taking a turn rest after EVERY encounter, to heal and reset powers.  This might not be as much as a problem as I think.  It could just be a function of not setting up chained encounters so that resting wouldn’t be possible.  In the real world (not that RPG combat really mirrors such a thing), combatants will want to rest after any fight anyway.  Still, it was a lot of stop and start dungeon crawling, with all Wandering Monster rolls during the rests coming up negative.  I hate Wandering Monsters, but was forced to do something during all these rests.  It seems like there should be some game-related, non-narrative penalty for excessive resting.

The guys doubled up and ran two characters.  Besides the Wizard, there was a Thief, a Barbarian, and a Paladin.  Briefly, the Rage rules didn’t seem to work well, in that they were easy to forget.  That might have been from playing two characters at once.  The Paladin’s Divine Light ability was highly abused in this dungeon full of undead, necessitating a recharge rest between encounters.  The Thief never seemed to get to shine, except as a sniper.  This was a function of the type of encounters, so more variety needs to be used.  I’m not sure if the Sneak and Surprise Attacks were used correctly either.

Though it’s been a long time since I’ve instructed anybody on character creation, but it seemed to go fairly quickly.  Thankfully, Evan and Victor already knew the basics of RPG’s.  The characters were probably above average from your typical D&D character, but I had them roll the stats in order, rather than choice, to make it interesting. 

Combat moved along quickly.  I think we went through about five encounters in an hour or so.  The guys weren’t putting up with any encounters with any chatty monsters, so that certainly sped things up.  Things seemed fairly balanced.  I wasn’t going for any TPK’s, but the easy encounters were pretty easy and the tough encounters did cause some sweat.  Those max damage attacks, like Paladin Smite, really kept combat with higher HP creatures from going long.  I’d still like those “minions” to disappear a little quicker, possibly so I could use more of them in an encounter. 

Given that the Knight and the Ranger, with multiple attacks (and parry) weren’t used, I wonder if that would have slowed combat down or sped it up.  Would the multiple attacks or parrys be forgotten in the heat of combat?  One of the monsters they faced had three attacks.  It didn’t slow anything down, but it was by itself.

No major changes will be in store for the next playtest, but I need to brush up on my own rules.