Fueled by Blood! Playtest Report 2/17/24

I held Fueled by Blood!'s 2nd public (5th group) playtest on 2/17, and it went...alright. I've found a couple of fairly important things to consider when designing for both new players as well as playtests specifically, and got some feedback from someone not playing, but rather observing the playtest as it went on. I'm a fair bit late on this post due to some life events and hoping that I could combine it with the 3/2 playtest report, which unfortunately had to be rescheduled last minute.

If you're unfamiliar, Fueled by Blood! is a character action TTRPG about cybernetic super soldiers fighting eldritch monstrosities---you can think of it as Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance + Doom (2016) with a little bit of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice sprinkled in.

Here's what I prepped and the pregens for this playtest if you're interested. These are the up to date quick refs and these are the completed Striker Check rules, which hint at a couple of changes that I've noted in this report.

PLAYTEST BREAKDOWN

GOALS

Similar to the last playtest, and as I imagine I'll be doing in the background of every test and session, I want to make sure that the game's design is holding up its design strategies. For this test, however, I also wanted to check the targeted tweaks I mentioned in the last playtest report; specifically I wanted to ask the following questions:

1. Did the changes to Challenge Consequence Clocks allow the Director to play more, rather than just keep track of timers?
2. Did the changes to actions, hostile defenses, and Striker defenses make the game feel more fair, and the Strikers more powerful?
3. Did the changes to expertise make Strikers feel more competent and cool?
4. Did the game overall feel faster and more interactive?

WHAT I LEARNED

Unfortunately, this time around, I've little direct playtester feedback to give. I had 2 playtesters again, with 1 returning this time around. 1 of the 2 testers did fill out the multiple choice segments of the after session report, but they rated everything as greatly enjoyed---except for Intent and Method and Risk and RL, which were moderately enjoyed.

While that initially seems like a great success, I'm cautious about the veracity of these results. The player did seem to enjoy the session, and I'm fairly certain it was the returning player that filled out this report, but it was clear from play during the session that not everything was greatly enjoyed.

Just as with the last session, there were some real good and fun moments. There was an encounter with summoner type enemies that the players failed to target after seeing them summon an enemy during the first round, so they were swamped by weak enemies by the end of the second round---something that was really fun up until they killed the summoners, and then had to spend 5 rounds cleaning up the minions.

A big part of the drag, I found, was players getting set in 1 combo that mostly worked, and then never trying out anything beyond that. This issue was especially evident with the new playtester, who was most familiar with D&D and had never played Character Action video games. They approached the game like it was D&D, and were happy to get off small amounts of guarantied damage in return for taking no damage despite having multiple built in ways to deal and heal considerable amounts of damage: those methods were just too risky and were more complex than simply using 1 ability and moving maybe once per turn to stay out of enemy range.

FIRST LESSON

That lead me to one of my bigger take aways for that session, and it's that pre-gens and the early levels of characters have to be designed to solely encourage their specific playstyle; and that certain designs which are perfectly fine for advanced players cannot be presented to new players not because the designs confuse the new players, but because the new players misuse them without knowing any better. 

It results in the much repeated issue where a player will optimize the fun out of the game---they've found a strategy that works, but is boring, and now aren't having fun because they're clinging to a boring strategy. The important thing to do here is to not blame the players, however. I know the design of that ability works, it's just bad for someone that's new, so I've moved it to later levels and gave something that fulfills the same fantasy but cannot be abused in the same way.

SECOND LESSON

There was also another interesting issue with the design of these pre-gens, and it's that they didn't reinforce the Should feel like Hack and Slash/Character Action combat design strategy specifically. They gave interesting abilities and made the characters very tanky and powerful, but they were highly reactive, focused on exact movement and specific conditions, and all in all would have been better fits for D&D 4e than MGR:R the TTRPG. 

I learned a 2 fold lesson from that problem: First, always look at your damn design strategies and tactics when creating something new, you can never remind yourself of them enough; second, part of Character Action and feeling powerful, competent, and cool, is that YOU get to do cool shit constantly and whenever YOU choose. Characters should be proactive, and their abilities should enable them to be more cool instead of making their enemies less cool.

FINAL LESSON

The final major lessoned I learned had to do with Director facing tracking and monsters. A huge part of combats and challenges (segments of non-combat, action focused gameplay) has been background timers ticking away. Not completing a challenge or combat before the timer reaches 0 means failure. Up until the end of this session, those timers were clocks the Director had to spend consequences to tick, which meant that the Director had the choice of "bring the Strikers closer to failure" or "take cool monster actions," which resulted in boring play.

This session, I tried to keep the clocks but have them auto tick. What that resulted in was 1 too many plates that I had to keep spinning, and meant I dropped Risk Points, which were designed to keep encounters surprising and engaging as they neared their end. What I found was, again, two-fold: 1. I don't need consequences clocks, they're just too much and simple round based timers would be better; 2. that good enemy design and the Director's ability to spend Consequences on cool out of turn monster actions was significantly more important to keeping encounters fun than having unique Director abilities.

While I still want Director abilities which help lean the game more towards one of its touchstones than another, I know for certain now that I'm going to make a couple of tweaks to give more consequences per roll, to make RL a little engaging so that the battle over consequences becomes more important, and to create more interesting monsters.

NEXT PLAYTEST

Currently, the hope is that the rescheduled 3/2 playtest will occur on 3/9 with a full group. I plan to test the changes I mentioned above, with an added in powerful and complex boss to see if good enemy design really is all that's needed, and what good enemy design even is for that matter.