The first playtest group from JohnCon. (Photo by Duffy Austin) This past weekend I visited JohnCon , the annual gaming convention held at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md. hosted by the university's science fiction and fantasy club. Alongside the other developers there as a part of Break My Game , I was able to get one full playtest in along with two partial playtests and feedback from a number of helpful individuals. The first group was made up of two college students and a board game designer with Break My Game. that session lasted about two hours. The other sessions had two high school students each, but unfortunately had to cut our sessions short. WHAT'S NEW? EXPERIENCE FOR ARCHETYPES Experience can now be gained from lowering allies' Drama. The intent here is to encourage players to use their archetypes to keep other players from Crashing. Originally, lowering Drama was the only way to Advance characters. I included the experience system - reward...

(Photo by Duffy Austin) This past Saturday I was lucky enough to run some playtests at Awesome Con in Washington, D.C. in the dedicated tabletop room, and wanted to go over how the playtests went and the feedback I received. There were two playtests in the afternoon, each with two players. The first participants were a young man and an older gentleman, and the second group was an adult man and woman. everyone had prior experience with RPGs and were familiar with tokusatsu on a basic level. I recruited them by walking up to them as they were looking around and asking if they were interested in testing out my game. Each session took about two hours. WHAT'S NEW? Not much difference between this playtest and the last at the  Big Frederick Gaming Convention , other than adding more detailed explanations of the rules associated with Powers. WHAT HAPPENED? Saw-Tooth, one of the pregenerated player characters for this playtest. They're a werebeaver (Art by Duffy Au...

My playtesters during BFG Con. I was able to get in one playtest at the Big Frederick Gaming Convention this past weekend with some lovely volunteers and wanted to go over the session and feedback I received. I had two players - a father and son - who had prior experience in role playing games and were familiar with the tokusatsu genre who took part in a two-hour playtest session. This gave me the opportunity to take things a bit slower for each player, and gain more focused feedback. WHAT'S NEW? For this playtest, I incorporated new features including unique benefits for Finishers, the consequences for Crashing, and what I'm calling Trappings that are tied to different forms. FINISHERS As before, Finishers are all-or-nothing attacks where players can max-out their Drama so that they at the brink of Crashing, but gain access to the next-highest dice-type (a characters in form 1 who normally uses a d6 would have access to a d8). For this session, I tied spec...

This weekend I'll be running playtests at the Big Fredrick Gaming Convention. Hope to see you there!

Just an update: You can follow on twitter  @AlterArms for more frequent updates Some production art I doodled when I was playtesting a friend’s cyberpunk rpg tonight #tokusatsu #magicalgirl #art #tabletopgames #RPGs pic.twitter.com/CD7M03cuMm — Alter Arms (@AlterArms) March 15, 2018

This past weekend I was lucky enough to run some playtests of Alter Arms at Katsucon, an annual anime convention in the Washington, D.C. area. There, I got some great feedback that I wanted to write about in order to review the game’s current status. WHAT’S NEW? I had three sessions of about six players each with most players being in their early 20s, but most having only a peripheral knowledge of the subject matter based on exposure to Power Rangers and Sailor Moon. Most players were experienced with other tabletop role playing games, and those with little to no experience said that they felt they were able to grasp the system pretty well. Compared to last time, I had pregenerated characters with names and motives written on the character sheets in order to give players material to work with when acting them out. I also increased the difficulty of the encounters, and also increased the characters’ levels to match the challenge. The enemies the players fought were tougher overal...

I had the opportunity to playtest Alter Arms at the Music and Gaming Festival (MAGFest) earlier this year, and wanted to post about how the experience went. FEEDBACK I tested the game once on Thursday with three players, twice on Friday with six in the morning and six in the afternoon, twice on Saturday with six in the morning and six in the afternoon, and once on Sunday with two players, for a total of six sessions. Each session ran about an hour and a half, with games with more players running into two hours. After each session, I recorded a freeform survey of the group to gather their opinions. POSITIVES Almost all of the feedback was positive. Players said they enjoyed how the system enabled them to create their characters how they saw fit, which I had intended in my efforts to emulate the source material. I designed the three vector stats to allow players broad avenues to describe how their actions were success or failures, depen...