Fueled by Blood! Playtest Report 4/20/24

I've now finished Fueled by Blood!'s 6th public playtest and, while there are still some problems that need to be fixed, this game is making promising head way towards its release. This session was slow, and there are some flaws that I'll talk about later which I think caused that issue, but it was also insightful and proved that a few (previously unmentioned) changes were moves in the right direction.

I'm able to consistently pull in 3 players now, but, rather unusually, none of the 3 players were game designers this time around. We had 2 Lancer fans, 1 of which was a sort of self described optimizer, and a friendly individual that I managed to pull off of r/LFG. I think, in part, that spread is why the game went so slowly, as all 3 were new to the game and didn't approach it like game designers. They all interacted with the game as players without any prior knowledge of it (and little of its inspirations) what so ever, which made this test very valuable in terms of seeing how it might actually play without me.

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 characters.

Before I go over the results of this test, here are the rules, pre-gens, and the mission that we used for this playtest. If you're interested in joining a playtest, or just discussing this game's design, you can join Fueled by Blood!'s Discord server.

PLAYTEST BREAKDOWN

CHANGES

As I mentioned before, there were a handful of changes that I made beyond what was hinted at in the previous playtest report. Here are the big few:

1. Limited Quick Actions.  Quick attacks are no longer universal, and quick actions in general have all gained specific triggers (except for Jet Heat, which can still be done at any time). The goal here is to make quick actions less intrusive by better matching them with the existing pauses and spaces in the game's flow, which their triggers indicate.
2. Simplified Hostile Actions. Restrictions and triggers were too much, even if they were fun to play with when together. Due to restrictions being the more difficult to run of the 2, and triggers being necessary for out of turn actions, restrictions were removed. For a bit, I worked on enhanced actions and possibly special ranges alongside the mechanics enthusiast from playtests 3 and 5, but they were too much as well. In the end, hostile actions are all now trigger + effect, including their on-turn sequences.
3. Attacks now Combo instead of dealing damage. I found that all attacks applying damage directly caused a couple of issues. 1st, you need to resolve that damage, which slows down each and every attack by requiring a cross-role interaction. 2nd, it encourages optimizing around damage bonuses rather than cool factor. As such, attacks now create and build Combos (ranked D-S) against their target, and the Combo's ending rank determines damage. There's some nuance to it, but the goal is to encourage more stylish play.
4. Model design update. Now that I've made a couple of big design changes to combat, it was also a convenient time to take a closer look at all of the models. While none of them have been dropped or swapped, I did refine their design and change their roles just a little so that they would better fit under this new Combo based attack system.

GOALS

Going into this session with the above changes in mind, I had a couple of specific things that I wanted to test:

1. The above changes, of course, but especially to see if they made combats quicker, Directing easier, and encouraged the desired kind of play.
2. To see if verticality could be made fun/important, and, if so, was that easy to accomplish as the Director.
3. To push exploration a little further by including NPCs to interact with in a social setting---something which has not previously been tested in Fueled by Blood! because it's not my strong suit as a GM in any system.

LESSONS LEARNED

With all that said, I think I've learned a fair bit in terms of what adjustments need to be made to get Fueled by Blood! closer to that finish line.

THE GOOD

First, Combos worked. They did what I intended them to do: encourage more stylish play while making players look at damage numbers (at least a little) less. The system does need some cleaning up, the players were confused by it early on and tracking Combos seemed to mentally exhaust them rather quickly, but I think its problems can be solved with an on-sheet tracker and better writing for attacks/model actions---both of which would clear up some confusion, reducing the amount of effort required to think about the system.

Second, Reads (the knowledge based checks for defenses) are great. These players really got into them, with 2 of them separately taking notes on what the correct answers were for each enemy. Getting the correct answers resulted in a strongly positive reaction, players were ready and willing to engage with the system, and they quickly took notes and worked together to get the correct answers. While there are still some lingering issues (they open up room for discussion that slows down the game, and pushing the boundaries of which answer is correct can confuse players) this test has indicated that Reads are close to being finished.

Third, and finally, hostiles were significantly easier to run. Restrictions were a huge mental tax and, with them gone, it took longer for me to tire out while running the session. That combined with the new stat blocks, which made referencing how and when a hostile acts far easier, meant that I was snappier with quick actions and could roll through hostile sequences faster. 

THE BAD

Of course, however, not everything was good. As mentioned before, this session was very slow, and that's our first bad lesson this time around. Typically, I schedule a 3 hour long session with the expectation that we'll be done in 2.5 hours, maybe 3 if we take a longer break and have a couple of short discussions. With no breaks or discussions, this session lasted 4 hours. While the playtesters sticking around (and their general reactions) indicated that they were having fun, if I could have the same amount of fun in half of the time, I would.

I think the biggest reasons for such were pointed out above: Combos and Reads. Combos started to move pretty quickly around the second combat, so, while they did slow down the first fight tremendously, the players eventually get used to them and could move through them pretty fast. Reads, however, got slower the longer that the session lasted. That's because players began to discuss what the correct answer could be for longer and longer periods of time with each new hostile attack. A couple of Reads lasted about as long as an entire turn towards the very end.

Another contributing factor, I think, is that hostiles needed to survive until the end of the round to use their cool sequences and most of their attacks. That means that, by design, combat has to drag on for at least 1 round and 1 turn so that hostiles can do their stuff, so health is often a little inflated.

These problems actually fairly simple and targeted fixes, however. Edits to the Striker sheet to make Combos easier to run. Reduce Reads to 1 guess (just Trigger type) and make the player's first guess their final, with a couple of changes to defensive actions to make them a little less forgiving. Activating 1 hostile at the end of each turn +1 at the end of the round, so they get their turns off faster, and then lower their HP. These changes should result in the game taking significantly less time to play a meaningful amount of.

The other bad lesson is that the abilities presented to players are just a little too complex. Previously, I thought that Striker didn't spend Focus because it was uninteresting. Now having played with these new players, I think it's because they just have 1 or 2 too many abilities at the start. Experienced gamers, especially those that like crunchy and tactical games, tend to pick up the game a little faster, but even they have a bit of trouble keeping everything in mind.

From the Director's perspective, hostiles also still have a few too many actions as well, and slow actions are a pain to track---and something I frequently ended up forgetting about towards the very end of the session when I was getting tired. 

Again, though, I don't think these problems require major adjustments. Slight tweaks should bring everything back in line. The mechanics enthusiast and I worked out a way to make Strikers start simpler but end with roughly the same amount of complexity as is currently planned, and I've decided to drop slow actions all together in favor of leaning into sequences now that hostiles will be activated at the end of each turn.

THE UGLY

As you may have noticed, verticality has not been mentioned yet, and that's because I've only really got 1 ugly lesson this time around. Map size matters. While I attempted to make use of flying enemies and larger maps, this session showed that maps need a lower and upper bound. After a certain point, distances became so far that movement felt like a chore rather than a meaningful cost, causing the combat to split into  2 or 3 fights just due to the cost of movement from 1 little skirmish to the next.

In the future, and in the Director's guide to this game, I'll have to note that a map should be 5-15 zones, hovering around 5-10 more often than not. For now, the test of verticality was mostly unsuccessful. Hostiles have to be specifically designed to fly as part of their actions, rather than in addition to them, due to the cost of movement for the Direct, and it's not particularly easy to make multiple levels of height very interesting as the Director. I might try again in the future, but it was more effort than reward this time around and isn't a critical aspect of this genre.

Though at glance it looks like we've got a larger than usual "bad lessons" section this time around, I think that the trend of less bad and more good is continuing here. There were only 2 really big issues with the game, and their root causes (though many) are easy to address. While the next 3 playtests will confirm or deny the above thoughts, the game seems on track for a July quickstart or ashcan release and open beta.