Fueled by Blood! Playtest Report 5/30+6/1/24

As we move closer to July, and I've settled more on how Fueled by Blood!'s final design will look, I've slowed down playtesting in order to work on this game's quickstart. This past week, I ran 2 playtests back-to-back using (mostly) the same content and no rules alterations between them. These tests were very successful, having drawn in 5 new players with 2 repeat testers. I can confidently say that the current design of FbB! has proven that it achieves its goals.

3 of the 5 new players enjoyed tactical games, 1 of the new players had most of their experience with D20 games, and the final new player had experience with a myriad of systems but seemed to enjoy pushing the limits of all of them (based on my prior experiences playing with him). The 2 returning players were the mechanics enthusiast from 3/9/24, and the TTRPG designer from 3/23/24

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 these tests, here are the rules, pre-gens, and missions that we used for them. If you are interested in joining a future playtest, or just discussing this game's design, you can join Fueled by Blood!'s Discord server.

PLAYTEST BREAKDOWN

CHANGES

There were very few changes between the 5/9/24 playtest and these playtests, with the following being the most important:

1. Cyber Systems were reworked.  After the previous playtest, I decided that Strikers needed a new way to gain Heat in order to Jet Heat consistently, but I realized that I couldn't add Heat gains to the existing actions. Instead, I scrapped passives and had Cyber Systems take up their mechanical space as low powered abilities, with the exception that this time you have to take 1 Heat to benefit from them.
2. Everything now grants narrative permissions.  Each Cyber System, Weapon of War, and Model Action grants 1 narrative permission alongside 1 combat centered effect. That means everything has an in and out of combat use.
   
3. Secrets were reworked.  Due to events tied to clocks (now called Set Pieces) taking their place as the premier exploration activity, secrets have been changed to take more of a back seat in exploration mode.
   

GOALS

The goals of this playtest were extremely simple:

1. To confirm that the above changes were beneficial.
2. To reconfirm what I learned from the 5/9/24 playtest.
3. To test out the mission and pre-gens that will be used in the upcoming release.

LESSONS LEARNED

Now then, with the changes stated and the goals set, here is what I learned from this playtest.

THE GOOD

The most important good lesson is that everything still feels the same as it did in the 5/9/24 test, which means that it was not a fluke. While every individual player has considerable influence over the pace of the game---I've found that players who are unconfident or who want to heavily optimize tend to slow the game down, while those willing to take risks or just button mash hit the expected pace. It does, however, tend to flow about the same no matter the group, and the mechanics strongly provoked the desired feelings in the vast majority of the 9 players across those 3 tests.

What few changes there were have also been successful. The new Cyber Systems were frequently used and did push the Strikers to Jet Heat multiple times throughout each session. Only 1 tester did not Jetting Heat at all, though that seemed to be due to specific circumstances during the session rather than the game's rules. Similarly, the narrative permissions added to the Model Actions were liked and I received no complaints about too few narrative permissions to play with during exploration.

Secrets unfortunately did not see too much testing, but they seemed to be successful the 1 time they appeared, which I anticipated given that the system has changed so little.

THE BAD

As always, however, the game could be better. Most changes at this point are about refining the game's design and balancing. While these changes seem small, little tweaks add up over time as they remove the rough edges that add to the cognitive load but not the experience. 

The biggest issues in regards to clarity right now are trigger types and action resolution. Both are awkward and little difficult to get used to. The rules for both function well and as intended, but that is only because I am the one running them---and a number of rules overall are like that. Luckily, the solution mostly seems to be rewriting and editing chunks of rules text rather than creating or removing rules.

Currently, the only major balancing issue comes from bosses taking 2 back-to-back activations at the end of a round. While the double activation helps non-boss hostiles pose a threat, it's slow and simply too many actions for bosses (who already have the most complex actions). While that issue could cascade into changes for the initiative system as a whole, I think the fix is simply to restrict bosses to [Striker] activations per round instead of any number of times (therefore making it so that they usually won't take 6 actions in a row).

THE UGLY

I have little new to say in regards to ugly lessons this time around, save for 2 simple points:

The impact of a something on play is what justifies the effort in using it. That is to say, if something takes effort to handle in play but has no impact, damages the game, or even just fails to bring as much entertainment as it takes effort to use, it needs to be changed or dropped. While I did not have that issue with any systems in this test, it did show up in some of the content (specifically zone tags and certain hostile actions). This point is fairly straightforward, and is a cousin to "Player decisions must have a minimum scope" from 3/9/24.

The advantage of a linear medium is that it is conducive to complexity. When I say "linear medium" here, I mean something like video games, most board games, and films. These are experiences where there is not only a clear start and stop, but usually a very well defined middle that everyone who experiences a specific piece of work within those genres will go through---like the missions in a video game's campaign. Often in TTRPG design spaces, people are quick to bring up the advantages that TTRPGs offer in regards to player freedom and autonomy, and how personalized the games and experiences can be. 

What I rarely see brought up, however, is how a more limited, linear medium actually allows for more complex concepts by allowing the devs to not only slowly introduce them to you, but force you to think about and engage with each concept before introducing the next---like placing a new enemy or puzzle alone so that the players can experiment with it before actually being tested on it. 

While a TTRPG can do that, the typical format asks 1 player to effectively be a game designer, and so lacks that intentional and testing pacing as (for the most part) the first appearance of any piece of content they make is both its first test and its final form. The players also act like the computers running the game, which means that the mental strain (or possibility of automating) every rule has to be considered since it only exists and impacts the game if the players remember it during play. When combined with the fact that TTRPGs are typically learned from a) friends, or b) rulebooks, the complexity they can reasonably offer becomes limited because the standard way that TTRPGs are taught and played is not conducive to highly complex designs.

While I have no plans to make Fueled by Blood! a more TTRPG linear, especially not at this point, future games built on its engine may be. For now, however, Fueled by Blood! has to be finished first, and I believe that we are still right on schedule for that public release in mid to late July.