Fueled by Blood! Playtest Report 3/9/24

Finished my 3rd public playtest, and it went pretty damn well! There were some major changes I made prior to the test that really helped (including going diceless) which I'll cover below, but I've found that there is always more that needs to be done. 

This time around I managed to pull in 2 players that would be at opposite ends of the range of crunch Fueled by Blood! could support---a Lumen player/designer and game mechanics enthusiast/tactical video game dev---and 1 primarily play-by-post player/designer, which let me see both the real gamut of skills and playstyles that this game can support, as well as how an actual full group might function during play.

If you're unfamiliar, Fueled by Blood! is a character action TTRPG about cybernetic super soldiers who fight eldritch monstrosities---you can think of it as Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance + Doom (2016) + Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. It's about combos and knowledge checks, over the top abilities, and larger than life enemies.

As always, here is what I prepped, these are the pre-gen characters, and these were the rules we used during the playtest.

PLAYTEST BREAKDOWN

MAJOR CHANGES

First up, the big changes that I alluded to already. I don't want to explain them fully here, since additional significant changes are already happening (like Cut Scenes replacing Challenges and hostiles getting reworked), but I do want to quickly mention them and give the reasonings for them.

1. The game is now diceless. Every iteration of the game has slowly lost more and more dice. I want this game to be purely skill based, so it's an obvious move that I was previously hesitant to make because I've only ever read about 3 diceless TTRPGs. After watching Gila RPGs' discussions on Lumen 2.0, however, I decided to bite the bullet and go diceless---just in a different way. Rather than giving new resources to manage (like Lumen 2.0's Approaches) I wanted your choices to be about empowering your playstyle, so the diceless system centers around choosing between buffs and making a trade off between them and successes (your number of actions that turn).
2. No more Combo Meter. I put this change here because, while the Combo Meter is not super mechanically important and multiple other systems could take over its job, it is a staple of the Character Action genre. The issue is that I just couldn't make tracking it both fun and not complex. I knew that players were close to feeling like Character Action characters, so I took the risk and cut it---and it paid off, because players are now better able to focus on defending themselves and the other, more interesting resources rather than having to deal with this fiddly and frankly not very exciting mechanic.
3. Introduced Focus. In the process of making the game diceless, I found that Skill didn't live up to its fantasy as an attribute. In my head, skill is about 2 things: having the right tool for the job, and knowing what the enemy will do before they do. To remedy that, I've given players Focus. They can spend it to swap between active Cyber Systems (discussed below) at any time, to cheat on the knowledge based checks that compose defensive actions, or to slightly fuck with enemy actions. The goal is that spending Focus should create "skilled" moments on demand, without actually teaching you how to pull those off later---like playing Vergil in DMC, whose kits sometimes means new players accidentally do something really fucking cool but can't pull it off again so easily, as if Vergil took over for a second and handled to problem himself.
4. Cyber Augs are now Cyber Systems. While they hold a similar narrative and mechanical purpose, the executions are fairly different. I've effectively made it so that the players now have a list of Dante-esque Styles to pick from which also grant explicit narrative permissions (like "You can lift and throw multiple tonnes") for non-combat gameplay. There are no upgrades to Cyber Systems, either, which is something that Cyber Augs were supposed to have. The reasoning is that Cyber Augs just weren't that interesting. They did have promise, however, so Cyber Systems are a redesign that keeps Cyber Augs' fundamental elements and builds off of those in a new way.

GOALS

Now, the goals of this playtest were mostly standard. I wanted to know if the game lived up its Design Strategies and to see if the previous changes were positive, just like every test prior, but I was also interested in answering the following questions:

1. What do "lair actions" (where the environment acts against you mid combat) look like?
2. How feasible is it to combine elements from a Challenge and a Bloody Challenge?
3. Is it more interesting for a hostile to have a lot of simple actions, or fewer, more complex actions?
4. What is required to make an encounter interesting? Is a slightly complex map with simple hostiles enough?

LESSONS LEARNED

In testing and asking the above, I found out a lot about Fueled by Blood!---I found out even more after the test, too, as I chatted with the playtesters for damn near 4 hours after it ended. Today, I'll split the lessons I learned between the good, the bad, and the ugly.

THE GOOD

The best thing I can say is that the players really did feel like Character Action characters---which is huge, considering the Lumen fan/designer was in the first playtest did not feel that way back then. It wasn't constant, not every move felt super bombastic and over the top, but they really felt it when they could pull off a good combo on their turn. I also learned that they felt very engaged outside of their turn with not only the defensive actions, but also just looking at their character sheet and trying to plan out their combo before their next turn rolled around.

Another very interesting and good lesson learned is what optimal play looks like. I don't know what perfect play is yet, but the mechanics enthusiast got very fucking close: dominating every encounter, carrying the team, and pulling out interactions that I hadn't even considered before, things like quick attacking an enemy and taking Heat to move them when they attacked to learn their attack's range or push them out of its range.

That optimal play also leads into the next lesson, that less skilled players don't feel useless, and in fact are excited to attempt the things that more skilled players pull off! That is so tremendously important for a cooperative skill based game, and is a fundamental part of how Character Action games build communities---skilled players showing off and teaching less skilled players the game's mechanics---so I am extremely glad that it works out that way in play. It was the play-by-post designer that mentioned that as well (which is relevant because he has the least amount of experience with Character Action games), saying that watching the better player dominate made him feel like "Woah, I can do that?!" and that he should focus up and still try because bosses and minions are still left that they all have to deal with.

THE BAD

What I learned wasn't all good, unfortunately, though everything I learned this playtest has been useful. The biggest issue I found was that Challenges, the out of combat gameplay, just sucked. They're boring, immersion breaking, and are dragging down combat because combat was built off of them, so any designs I made for combat also had to consider their place in Challenges. 

This system was already on the chopping block because it didn't really work in any of the previous playtests, but this session has shown how negatively it can impact play when the theming behind one isn't just right---and I don't want to rely on the Director getting themes down when the mechanics should just uphold the game's themes and strategies on their own.

I also learned that monster and encounter design has really sucked so far. I've been so focused on making sure that the Striker side of the game felt great that I've neglected monsters and encounters, basically designing monsters with simple and minimal rules. and I've found that the game's current version of simple hostiles (including bosses) are not interesting. They need a huge redesign, and about half of the conversation with those other designers has revolved around how to do that. 

So far, there have been some really good ideas from everyone that I've collected and then made something that I'm happy with and that even the dominant player thinks would be interesting and provide challenge while still being fairly simple. I'm excited to share that all around 3/17/24 when I've finished up enough to show off and explain it.

The last major issue, and what has been the hardest to solve so far, is that the game just isn't punishing enough. There's a lot of barking (warnings that you should or shouldn't do certain things) but almost no biting (punishment for ignoring the game's barks), and that meant that the game falls flat at times. Even if the combos are cool and your turn is fun, the game overall becomes less interesting because you're attempting to pull off insane combos against a punching bag---it's not really fighting back, just swinging back and forth. For a game that's trying to inspire the same feelings as Sekiro, Doom, and MGR:R, that's really bad. 

We all agreed that a large part of the problem was enemy design, they were just too easy to deal with, but another problem was that Countering/Dodging was too easy. There's an inherent cost to their design, which is that repeated tests are almost guarantied because they just ask you to verbally repeat 2 specific words (and you've already learned which). The solution thus far has been to punish failure more, and to make learning those words harder, but the issue with repetition being easy is a cost inherent to this design I think.

THE UGLY

Finally, we've got the ugly lessons. These aren't necessarily bad, but they definitely good either. They're like small failures that are easily corrected, but that I'll also need to keep in mind as I work on games in general. There are 3 ugly lessons that I learned.

Knowledge gained can't be lost, only forgotten. This idea ties into my statements about knowledge based checks, and is something you have to consider when you're only testing knowledge and not execution. In Sekiro, Genichiro Ashina is still dangerous after you beat him three dozen times because you can still fuck up the execution by pressing the wrong buttons or getting cocky and being caught out in an animation. If you don't test for execution, you need to present and test new information way more frequently, or chunk the information out more. It's also important to note that, if you're ever using knowledge checks, you cannot change the answer without a warning ahead of time. They're really just small, fun tests, and it feels like shit when the teacher tells you something will be on the test only for it to not be.

Encouragement with a cost is a just polite enforcement. If I tell the player "If you attack the enemy 4 times you'll deal a bunch of bonus damage (but if you don't you'll have wasted an action)" I'm not actually giving them any decisions here. You don't want to waste resources in this kind of game, so you'll always make those 4 attacks. This issue came up with the Gathering Storm ability that the Blade pre-gen has, which has you track the number of attacks you make and then apply that as bonus damage on the last attack you make that turn. It takes an action (so, you're trading a move, attack, or other action) to activate this ability, and if you don't exclusively attack after activating it you've diminished its value in retrospect. This design is not fun or interesting, and should be avoided except if used as a punishment like a soft taunt (attack me or I get to attack you).

Lastly, player decisions need to have a consistent minimum scope. Each and every decision that a player makes takes time and energy. Making decisions is a big part of what makes games fun, but you need to keep in mind that time and energy are resources that people don't want to waste. As such, each decision you ask the players to make should notably alter the game state so as to make their time and energy worth it. This issue also arose with, again, the Blade. Their weapon, the Hailstorm, allowed you to split the damage you dealt between any number of targets in range. Even when dealing just 2-3 damage, it meant you were suddenly making 1-3 very small and unimpactful decisions about who to apply that damage to which should have already been made when you decided to attack in the first place. It is slow, repetitive, and is tiring for the player making the decision while also being boring for those watching.