Play Test #1

We had our first real playtest session using the new rules. Wythe was kind enough to run the game -- a 1940's hollywood noir/conan the barbarian far-future mash-up -- and Paul, Grace, and I played. We tried out a few different things, some worked and some didn't.

The Set Up

Saul the Fortune Teller/Comedian has a ancient artifact (the Eye of...something) which swaps his mind into the body of his pet Bonobo chimp. Dirk Durgen somehow steals the Eye, so Saul hires Grant Nettles, P.I. to recover it, however, Violet (the femme fatale) and Vyrella (her spunky gear-headed naive roommate) have tracked Dirk to the First Bank o' whatever, where Dirk is trying to break IN in order to lock the Eye away...just as T.L. Random (history professor) is attempting to take a out a bank loan.

Chaos ensues. Everyone is blinded, and the Eye is activated and all the characters are transported...

Grace played Dirk (the Madman) and Violet (the Mimic).
Paul played Saul (the Saint) and T.L. (the Hapless).
I played Grant (the Hero) and Vyrella (the Genius).

We actually role-played the scene in the bank. It was mostly a short combat. Grant tells Some Teller to hit the alarm, Drink shoots the alarm button, Grant charges, Saul grabs for the Eye, misses, Violet grabs for the Eye, snatches it, then Vyrella sets off a flashbang...everyone save her and T.L (what luck!) are blinded.

AND THEN TRANSPORTED TO THE WARREN OF THE MANTS (man-sized ants).

We negotiate a mostly non-violent escape and set off across the sands.

We discover and break into a giant black city-sized building.

We search and find some weird stuff - some scary stuff - and eventually find a tribe of people living within the black building who think we might be gods...

And that's where the adventure tapered off. We may or may not continue it...(though Grant will certainly persist)

THINGS LEARNED:

1) The archetypes really work really well for putting together an interesting motley crew together post haste.

2) It's kind of a confusing prospect to play more than one fully realized character. All of us quickly settled into primary characters (Dirk, Saul, Grant) and mostly ignored the others. Does this mean parties with fewer than all the Archetypes? Or parties with NPC archetypes?

3) The most combat we did was in the bank lobby, and it worked pretty well...but we need to figure out how dodging works. However, distributing multiple dice across a single turn (do you shoot once well, or shoot three times poorly) feels really good.

4) Skills are...fucked? Not sure. We just barreled in with no real plan for skills, ended up a sort of half-ass applying a simplified version of Pathfinder skills, and then debating for like 30 minutes about all the ways we were fucking it up... :( biggest hurdle so far.

5) How do we use luck? Consistently? Specifically for the Hapless?

So...up next we're probably going to shelve skills, do an arena of combat types to simply make it make sense, and then I think I'll GM an old west scenario after that.