Playtest of the first draft

So, I ran a session yesterday, using the rules as last posted. Overall, I'm quite happy. The group I had would not have been exactly my first choice for testing an indie-style game, but I guess a harsh test is more informative than a gentle one.

The first phase ran as smooth as clockwork- even where violence occurred, it didn't seem out of place. I think some formalisation of penalties for 'doing dumb stuff', in the form of wasted trait pool, would have helped keep things a little more in hand.

The story developed quite well, I foresaw some avenues they would look at to investigate but they also had other interesting ideas as to how to smoke out their opponents.

Tracking twist pool, however, was an annoying distraction. I'll get rid of that.

The mastermind was suitably behind the scenes and mysterious, the antagonist got a lot of face time and was suitably mean. The transition to the second phase was a little scrappy, but I think that was more a fault of the session plan than the system- I think more ideas for how to manage it would be useful.

The second phase also went pretty well. The antagonist had a Machine with twice as much power as each of the four players, there was a named foe with one equal in power to theirs, and a smattering of mooks.

The balance was pretty good- the players thought the antagonist was unbeatable at first, but as his power depleted they started to break through his defences. That was an unanticipated aspect of the rules set- it makes the fight more dramatic that at first the players seem to be doing really badly, then rally towards the end.

The named foe was a suitable distraction, and lasted quite a while, too. He ran out of power for his weapon and started to flee, but was cut down as he ran. Dropping him seemed to be the turning point in the battle.

The mooks were underpowered. I think I need to halve their costs.

It was an unusual fight in that three of the players only had melee weapons. There was mondo property damage.

I didn't use any twist pool- principally because I had some very lucky rolls and I didn't want to make it a lost cause.

Advancement could only be basic, but that seemed to go really well. There were suggestion as to how some traits could be renamed to better reflect how they were being played- I'll include that as a listed option as it's a neat idea.