#34: Playtesting & Panic Mechanics
I. Dear Reader
This week, I’m excited about playtesting. Finding games online can be really hard and annoying. But if you generally like playing RPGs and aren’t too fussy about “your kind of fun”, playtests can be a real delight. Designers are always looking for people to join their playtests - you’re literally helping them by letting them run a game for you! It’s the winning-est of win-wins.
(If this sounds like a neat idea to you, join small indie designers’ discords. And then mute everything except the LFG/playtesting channels if you must - hey, you need to do what you need to do. There should be a better way to do this - if you’ve got ideas, let me know.)
I participated in 3 playtests this week - which makes it my busiest gaming week more or less. Two of those were at an informal playtest night that is happening every other Tuesday on the Session Zero discord. I got to try out a WIP game of mine called Mavericks which is right now half-UNO (yes, the card game) and half-Blades in the Dark. And on the same night, I played Mutant Monster Machinegirls 2e which is exactly what the name says.
On Friday, I got to play Amble Studio’s For the Awesome, a game based on For the Queen. It’s a game that’s designed to be used as a kind of “teambuilding activity”. It’s a game about a team executing a big, awesome project together - and by playing it with your co-workers, you end up playing through a lot of issues that come with teams and projects and workplaces.
And this trend looks likely to continue: next week, I’m hopefully playing a WIP version of a dimension-hopping PbtA game.
Yours playfully,
Thomas
II. Listen of the Week
Fun and extremely watchable review of Mothership from Collabs Without Permissions. I love the way Vi discusses the mechanics of the game with a strong focus on theme and emotion.
III. Links of the Week
I stumbled on an article from last year where Emmy Allen talks about rules as ‘hard and soft tools’: “The tools the game gives you shape how the game plays out. Players will gravitate towards activities in the game that they have tools relating to. In particular, the relative hardness and softness of tools is useful to consider.”
On the Indie Game Reading Club, four reviews of indie games in one article: Rebel Crown, Arcana Academy, Little Monster Detectives, Cobwebs.
In an article titled The Political Economy of Game Design, a writer compares RPG system and economic/political theories: “the non-dice mechanics of Dungeons and Dragons essentially cast the players in a similar role to that of artisans in a primitive Chartalist economy. To continue their journey, they need to acquire the currency distributed by the GM (or king), so that they can return it to that original source for benefit.”
(If you read it, I recommend starting with section IV - that’s where the good stuff starts.)The designer known as Speak the Sky has blessed the community with two very cool Pay What You Want typeface resources recently.
There’s Dicier, which lets you insert dice and many, many other fun glyphs as you type.
Then, there’s TimeTo which lets you insert clocks and do other fun things.
IV. Small Ads
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Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. I’m half-man, half-beast, half-journalist, half-game designer.
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