Blade Bind Playtest 1

Although I've been testing Blade Bind's duelling mechanics fairly thoroughly with a number of "white-room" tests, I recently ran a playtest of the whole game online via Roll20. It took a while to find enough testers, but Todd from FacebookLand put out the call and we ended up with five players (including me).

This is a pretty long post, but if you're interested in Blade Bind and/or playtesting, strap in!

First Session

Setup

Setup went fairly smoothly, although it did take a while. This was partly due to using a VTT and partly due to the Fiasco-like discussion about how all the characters relate to each-other and who they are, but I also identified some areas that could be sped up. I'm interested to see how long it takes in a face-to-face game.

A web of Threads

While the characters do have a web of relationships, this image is not a relationship map as such, but a map of goals. Each coloured line is a Thread, showing the Chosen's intent towards elements of the game world — characters, organisations, items, and locations, plus the other Chosen — collectively known as Knots.

You can also see some notes on "who hates who", which refers to the enmity the supernatural Blades have to each other. This enmity is independent of the characters' relationships, and is designed to cause problems. Originally it was completely random, meaning someone could end up with multiple enmities targeting them, or none.

I've since revised it so all Blades have an enmity to one Blade, and from one Blade.

Threads generate Will, which allows the characters to control their Blades. If a Thread becomes impossible to achieve (usually by its target being destroyed), then the character loses Will. If their Will becomes less than their Power, they become slaves to the will of their Blade, which then hunts down its Enmity.

This was the first time Threads saw play, and it showed me a couple of things. Firstly, it really doesn't matter what a Knot is. I had classified them into different types, but what they are makes no difference to their behaviour in the game. Secondly, some of the goals — although logically structured — were a bit convoluted and difficult to get a handle on. Some were also redundant or didn't make a lot of sense. I've now restructured the way Threads are written, and made sure to define how each one works.

Scenes & Duels

We finally got to the scenes, and had time to play through only one before we ran out of time. My character challenged her antagonistic twin brother to a duel to prove she could defeat him. The setup and descriptive play before the duel was excellent and evocative, and thanks to a good hand of cards the duel ended with my victory.

The winner gets to claim a prize, which I took to be the defeat of my brother, thus securing my Defeat Thread. Figuring out the aftermath was a little hazy since I hadn't actually seen it in play before, and wasn't sure if the "defeat" was just a thing that happens or if it should be a prize in its own right.

I've now revised things so the winner gets to either destroy or take control of a Knot, or rewrite a Thread belonging to either one of the losers or themselves. "Defeat" Threads work a bit differently now, but scoring victories against your rival is basically an "extra" in addition to the regular prize.

Second Session

We reconvened after a week or so and played through some more scenes. Things went pretty well, and I was able to identify the "shaky" parts of the Thread system and make some revisions.

In addition to better-defining prizes, I also removed the option to simply erase one of the loser's Threads. It proved too powerful. However, there's still the option to rewrite their Threads, meaning you can persuade them to stop attacking your interests and give them goals that align with yours. They don't have to follow the Threads you give them, but their decisions will affect their Will value.

The Wind Dilemma

A Wind (rhymes with "bind") is what happens after a Bind, where two Blades lock together. It's meant to represent the struggle for leverage on the razor's edge, where things can go either way. The original mechanic was for both players to play a blind card, with the high card becoming the attack and the low card having to scramble to defend. With a couple of card-counting mathematicians on the crew, though, this mechanic received the most negative feedback. They didn't like the way that it both came down to luck, and basically forced the loser to not only play their best card (in hopes of winning the Wind) but also an extra card (to make up their defence).

After some discussion and thought, I've come up with a new idea. Both play a blind card as before, but it's the suit that determines which card is the attack. Rather than the old guarantee that the attack would be high, now you can end up with low attacks or high defences. You can still end up with situations that force the defender to spend extra cards, but it's now also possible to Parry and gain the advantage.

This new idea is still untested, but I think it has promise. I have a couple of other ideas if it doesn't work out, but I think they might feel less satisfying.

Resonance Techniques

This game also saw the first use of the special Blade Techniques. We only used a couple, but even a brief look at them in play helped me get a better idea of their power level and usefulness in play. You gain Resonance whenever you Bind, and gain more when Binding against your Enmity, and then spend it to activate Techniques. In a duel where both of us were Enmities, we managed to Bind three times in a row off an Engagement; each time, he used Seal to cut off my access to another suit! By the end of the exchange I could only play one suit, but I managed to survive long enough to tag him with my (under-priced) Vampire move, steal a card, and then win in the next Exchange.

Techniques are the part of the game that needs the most testing. I've revised them given the latest version of the rules, and have a checklist set up to make sure they all get chosen and used in play at some point.

End-Game

We once again ran out of time, but I could see how the game was going to play out — several characters had become Bladebound, meaning they would sever their connections to things and then attempt to destroy their Enmity.

In the first session I was worried that characters were going to become Bladebound very quickly, but we managed to go around the table a couple of times before it started to kick in. I've revised the Will values from Threads (mostly downward for Threads that aren't quite so high-stakes), and also boosted starting Will a little. It probably also helps that it's no longer possible to simply erase someone's Thread, although you can still cause the same effect by destroying important things. I might boost Will by another point, but we'll see how the next couple of tests go; I'm not too worried if the games are fairly short, so long as there's enough play to make up for the setup time and to let a decent narrative unfold.

Next

I've spent the last couple of weeks revising and refining the manuscript. Lately I've been adding examples and a bit of flavour text, plus a couple of setting outlines.

I have a face-to-face playtest planned for tomorrow, so I'm keen to see how my changes work and if anything else needs looking at. Things seem to be coming together nicely, and playtesting is providing invaluable feedback.

Blade Bind Designs, Part 1

I'm still trying to get a couple of my Blade Bind playtesters together to go over the latest duelling draft, try out the character/drama-web setup, and maybe even attempt a quick game to see if anything falls off.

In the meantime, I've been working on some art assets. Behold, the first three completed Blade designs!

I sketched them out in pencil first, then scanned them and created vector art in Illustrator. That should give me a good amount of flexibility to rescale or repurpose the images.

Incidentally, I'm an experienced vector artist. I worked for fourteen years at an embroidery firm, turning people's bad logo scans into high-quality vector art. I've been doing freelance logos, icons, character sheets, and images in addition to layout and editing. If you have a need for quality handcrafted vectors, please get in contact! You can email craig (DOT) t (DOT) judd at the gmails.

Pretty much all of the swords in Blade Bind are massive two-handed "buster sword" type things – it's a not-so-subtle metaphor for the melodrama and angst! I'm taking some inspiration from Soul Calibur and the manga Shadow Star (the monsters in which had creepy eyeballs that looked like they were made of shiny ceramics).

• Vargr is the blade from the original inspirational image I drew. It's something of a fierce, battle-hungry Blade. 
• Michael is the feather of an Archangel, or possibly an embodiment of the Archangel himself, as a "blue flaming sword". 
• Kunlun is one of my favourites so far; it's inspired by the style of the 3x3 Eyes manga and anime, and I named it after the lost homeland of the three-eyed folks.

I've also been spending some time setting up a draft layout for the book in InDesign. Since I haven't finished designing the game yet, let alone writing the mechanics, that should give you some idea how keen I am!

It still needs a little work – I intend to experiment with graphical flourishes or effects in the top and bottom graded strips, either adding some more red traceries or turning them into roiling tendrils of black fog. I might also see if I can incorporate some Blade silhouettes, blowing gusts of sparks, or blood-splatters, but I don't want to end up obscuring the text or putting graphics behind it because it reduces legibility. I can always add some of those embellishments to the chapter title pages.

I have some other Blade images in the works that I'll post next time. Until then, I... should probably catch up on freelance work! Hopefully we'll get a chance to do that playtest in the next week or so, and I'll be able to start refining the manuscript.

Blade Bind Playtesting

Following on from my previous Blade Bind post, I've spent the last week-and-a-bit testing and refining the duelling rules, as well as figuring out how to structure a drama web. It's all looking very promising, and hopefully with a bit of effort I can put together an alpha-draft in the next few weeks.

I'll save the drama side of things for later, because today I want to talk about the evolution of the card-based duelling system.

Each combatant has a hand of cards, sometimes playing blind against their opponent and sometimes reacting to a face-up card on the table. It's this use of hidden information that makes it difficult to test the system properly on my own – there's only so well a "blind-draw" player can do. Thankfully, I've managed to recruit a couple of keen playtesters and run a few experimental duels online.

I complained to (at the time potential) playtester Nat that I was having problems finding a way to play with a deck of cards online, and he pointed me to Roll20. I'd had an account for about two years, but never actually used it. Now I may have gone a bit overboard – not only have I designed a custom card back, but I've also set up a soundtrack and made some custom character portrait icons!

First Draft

The original duelling system was pretty simple: after playing a card face-down to Engage and decide who seizes the advantage (otherwise known as Initiative), the attacker plays a card and the defender plays one or more in response.

• A higher defence card is a Parry; the defender gains the initiative and may perform their own attack. 
• An equal card is a Bind; both combatants draw a card and must play to Engage again. 
• If the card is lower, then the defender Dodges by playing multiple cards totalling the attack card's value or more, and the Attacker keeps initiative. 
• If they can't match the attack card, they are hit and the duel ends. 

Also, whenever you have the initiative you have the option to Disengage, which clears the current exchange and lets both players draw two cards.

That system was quick and pretty fun. Playing to a single hit always keeps you on the edge of your seat. A bad hand could spell the end for you, but I was looking for a quick resolution anyway. However, it was also lacking in some areas. There wasn't much depth or strategy to it, and it also tended to break a little when the combatants started with different-sized hands. It basically came down to forcing the other person to run out of cards before you did, so you could land an unopposed hit. Effectively, your cards act somewhat like Hit Points, and the only way to change the relative values of two hands was to force your opponent to dodge using multiple cards. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to claw your way back once your opponent has a card advantage.

Dodging was a bit of a double-penalty, because you had to spend two cards (or more) and deal with another attack... when you probably only had rubbish cards left anyway. We experimented with "you only need to play a single low card to Dodge" and "Initiative switches automatically after each move", but neither was particularly satisfying.

Revised Options

I'd been looking for ways to incorporate suits into the system as well, and during a three-hour test, Playtester Todd suggested "the defender gains Initiative if they Dodge with two cards of the same suit." This sparked off a chain of ideas in my brain, and I revised the defence options. Now I've included a variety of ways for the defender or the attacker to lose cards.

I'm particularly proud of the new Counter, which is a Parry that uses the same suit as the attack. The attack gets reversed, with the Parry card forming a new attack, and the old attack card becoming the basis of the old attacker's defence. There are a couple of options for defending, but it basically forces the old attacker to play an extra card. It's also possible to Counter a Counter, which is really cool, not least because it mimics actual swordplay around counterattacks.

I revised Bind; rather than just playing a new Engage, you play face-down attack cards. The low card gets to play extra cards to defend themselves, and play continues as normal.

There's now a few different options for if you can't equal or beat the attack with a single defence card. I won't go into them all here, but they include situations where the attacker keeps the initiative; the defender gains initiative; or the exchange ends. I'm also mulling over some options for the Jokers; now that suits have a bigger effect, I'm thinking maybe they let you declare the suit of the next card you play.

What's Next?

I am hoping there aren't too many options now! The game feels a lot more in-depth and there are more meaningful choices to make and tactics to take advantage of, but that can mean spending more time making decisions. Still, it's starting to feel polished, and even if I end up dropping some of the defence options to streamline things I think it's well on its way to being a playable system.

We need to run a few more duel tests, and I hope to try out the tentative Melee rules for fights between more than two combatants soon. I'll try to make a post sometime soon about the drama-system setup I have in the works, but no promises if something else exciting comes along!

Forging "Blade Bind"

I'm currently working on the draft rules for a game called Blade Bind; I mentioned it in my previous post, but to recap it's a GMless one-shot game of brutal hyper-drama and massive supernatural swords, inspired by this picture I drew for PowerFrame:

The game-world is going to be fairly vague, although I'll probably outline a modern-day and fantasy setting. The game focusses pretty strongly on the Chosen wielders of the Blades and their personal struggles, so the shape of the world around them is only as important as the players want it to be.

Blade Bind kind of has two parts at the moment – the duelling system, and the drama system.

Duelling

The sword-fighting system uses regular playing cards. It's going to be the only real resolution system in the game – if you can't fight over it, it's not worth "drawing" for.

I've used my several years of historical swordsmanship to come up with a quick, abstracted system that captures the feeling of actual sword-fights without getting bogged down in modifiers and fiddly split-second manoeuvres. I came up with the basic system pretty quickly, although there are a few variant rules I want to playtest before I settle on a final build. I'm also pretty confident that it'll be able to handle a free-for-all melee rather than simple one-on-one duels.

Unlike Thunder Hunters and Neon Burn, I'm actually finding it relatively easy to expand the duelling rules and tie other parts of the game into the system. Perhaps it helps that the game is even smaller in scope so it has fewer moving parts, or that I'm embracing abstract mechanics and not worrying too much if the mechanics are leading the fiction – or maybe it's because I've just had more practice!

Best of all, the duelling system leads to very quick fights, and combines luck with strategy. There are a number of approaches you can take when facing an opponent, and there are some nice emergent qualities that mean fights are never predictable. Differences in character power-levels do make a difference, but there's always a chance the less-skilled fighter will come out on top.

Drama

I had a few things in mind that I wanted to include: a web of interconnections that set the characters at cross-purposes right from the start; the struggle for control versus the temptation of greater power; and a rapidly-evolving situation that challenges the status quo from the very first scene. I've tied all of those things together, hopefully creating an engine that will spew forth melodrama and tragedy.

Besides coming up with a concept and choosing a Blade, character creation is mostly going to involve tying your character to others. A Thread is basically a goal and a target. Each character creates a Thread to another PC, an NPC or Item of importance to them, and an NPC/Item that belongs to someone else. Goals at the moment include Protect, Control, Kill/Destroy, and a few others relating to PCs specifically. I'm still figuring out how best to represent them, and I'd like to make a card-draw table of options that give some story prompts. In addition, each Blade randomly hates one of the other Blades, and longs to defeat it in combat. That could get awkward when it's the Blade wielded by your ally...

Each character has a Will and a Power score. Will is based on the number, type, and current status of your Threads – so it can fluctuate as you lose them, complete them, or gain new ones. Power starts at 2 or 3; you can put it up by 1 at the start of any duel, and it also goes up by 1 whenever you lose a fight. If Power ever exceeds Will, the Chosen succumbs to the will of the Blade and they become "Bladebound". While in that state, the character is a demon on the battlefield who will lay waste to anything that stands in their way.

The basic procedure will be to go around the table and have each player set a scene for their character. Apart from the other characters, there's nothing in the way of them just going and achieving their goals – the Blades give the Chosen powers beyond the ken of mortals, and no ordinary foe can stand before them. So things should get violent and messy in short order.

Spiritual Ancestors

Thematically and mechanically, the game is inspired by three other games – one I've played, one I've read, and one I've only backed on Kickstarter.

Eternal Contenders is a really cool GMless game of duelling fantasy warriors that I've played a few times. It also uses cards for resolution, although mostly just by colour (red=success, black=nothing). The duels tend to take a lot longer than Blade Bind's, probably because it's based on a boxing RPG where fights can really drag out. Each fighter also has Hope and Pain scores that track how dangerous a fighter they are, and how likely they are to achieve a happy or tragic ending. Ironically, putting everything into winning fights provides the greatest chance of a tragic ending, and to have any hope of happiness you really need to give up on victory... while at the same time, victory is your surest means of securing Hope. It's a fine balance, and one I've yet to master, but it's also the sort of painful choice I want to build into Blade Bind – succumbing to the lure of power will turn you into a tragedy engine.

Wield is also GMless, and is about playing as magical artefacts that vie for control over their wielders. While Blade Bind is about playing the Chosen rather than the Blades, it's also about that fine line of control. When someone does cross that line, they're effectively playing the Blade instead.

Shinobigami is a recently-Kickstarted translated version of a Japanese RPG. It's very PVP-oriented, and has a really abstract way of approaching things mechanically, which has given me a lot of confidence to go ahead with a game that doesn't pay much attention to the way things are traditionally done, and that merges elements of board/card games with RPGs.

What's Next?

I need to playtest the duelling rules a bit more to figure out which variants to go with. I'm also in the process of drafting the Threads, Will/Power, and Special Manoeuvres, so when I'm not playtesting I'll be trying to beat those into some sort of prototype shape.

I'm also working on a few RPG-related freelancing jobs lately, which I should talk about in a future blog post! Work has been going nicely, although I'm always on the lookout for new editing and layout jobs. Let me know if you need some help on your own project, or if you've seen something I could apply for!

In Pursuit of Fiction-First

It's been a few months since I last posted here, but I'm hoping to revive the blog. Since releasing the PowerFrame Core Rulebook I've been working on-and-off on a couple of new RPGs, and I'd like to keep a record of my progress and thoughts.

The first new game is Thunder Hunters, which I've mentioned here a couple of times – a naturalistic game of primitive tribes living alongside dinosaurs. I've made some good progress, but I need to put some time into playtesting the basic mechanics before I develop the rest of the game.

The second new game is one I've just thought up recently, so my brain's currently buzzing with ideas – Blade Bind, a hyper-drama game of Chosen wielding giant supernatural swords, inspired by Shinobigami, Eternal Contenders, and Wield. I've got some idea of the overall shape and content of the game, and I'm just starting to develop a card-based duelling mechanic, which prompted today's post.

Pursuing Fiction-First

I find it really easy to come up with RPG rules that are Mechanics => Fiction (like a D&D tactical map battle, or a board game), but I find it harder to come up with systems that are Fiction => Mechanics => Fiction (like Apocalypse World or Cortex Plus).

This isn't necessarily a problem, but it's harder to get evocative descriptions out of players when you can play part of the game like a card or board game: the mechanics generate plenty of fictional output, but they don't respond at all to fictional input. You can describe your actions however you like, but the bottom line is they don't affect your mechanical options.

I hate to pick on Eternal Contenders, because it's a great (although sometimes frustrating) game, but it's one place where I really notice this phenomenon. The card-based duels tend to take a while to resolve, but although the game exhorts you to be descriptive there really is no link between your description and the outcome of the mechanics. After a few rounds, duels tend to turn into almost pure card-games, with the players reading the fictional outcomes but not offering a lot of description unless strongly prompted.

I also experienced this phenomenon when working on Neon Burn. I came up with a wonderful dice game for antigrav racing, where the way you played your dice expressed the way you were racing (conservatively, reckless, blocking others), and the mechanics provided fictional outcomes (progress, current positions, damage). But as above, the mechanics didn't really respond to fictional input – instead, your mechanical choices dictated fictional outcomes. You could play the whole race just by referring to the dice, and check at the end to see who won.

Designing for Fiction-First

I really like the effect you get when a character's approach or intent shapes the way the mechanics work. That way, there's no bypassing the description. I've experienced at least a couple of games that manage to achieve this.

The first is Apocalypse World (and its kin). The mechanical Moves only trigger when you do certain things, so you have to actually describe how you're going about it. If you don't, and just try to jump straight to a Move you assume is going to be the right one, you risk rolling for the wrong thing. I've seen this with players who assume that Seize by Force or Hack and Slash are the "Attack" Moves, and roll for them before I can point out that their opponent isn't in a position to fight back.

The second is Cortex Plus, of which I've played the Smallville and Firefly variants. In these games, the dice you roll are tied to your approach. It's more than just picking the appropriate skill to roll, though – depending on the variant, you may need to pick and justify appropriate Values, Attributes or Roles; Relationships or Skills; Distinctions, Assets, and possibly other stuff. In effect, building your dice pool tells a little story about how you're trying to overcome a particular challenge.

I've worked pretty hard to come up with a fiction-first system for Thunder Hunters, and I think I've done an OK job. You choose how to respond to the current situation each turn, which interacts somewhat with your opponent's actions to create a set of outcomes. Your intent determines which Stat applies, but you also get to choose where to assign your tool bonuses: Are you setting your spear to stab a charging foe, or using it to fend them off, or throwing it? Fictional positioning is also important to help minimise the natural "tools" that dinosaurs can bring to bear against you.

In a (Blade) Bind?

So the card-based sword-fighting system I've come up with for Blade Bind is currently pretty mechanics-first. Your choice of cards to play is representative of your approach to the fight (aggressive, cautious, desperate, cunning), but you can totally play out a duel without describing any fictional choices or positioning.

I'm not sure if it's a major issue though. I want the fights to be pretty fast, so the amount of time spent auguring cards to get fictional output should be fairly low. I also want the game to be pretty grim, where the only real way you have to alter the situation is through duelling, so cutting down on fictional options seems reasonable. Hopefully brief and thematic fights will encourage some enthusiastic description in any case.

I also have some ideas to tie extra mechanics to the cards; perhaps special powers can only trigger on a face or an ace, or I can tie particular manoeuvres to certain suits. I'll certainly be looking for ways to help tell a story and bring fictional positioning to the table as I continue development.

PowerFrame in Print

The PowerFrame Core Rulebook has been out in PDF for a few months now, and while I always intended it to be primarily a digital book, I got enough enquiries that I thought it was worth creating a print-on-demand copy as well.

I got the proof copy a couple of weeks ago, and activated the print option on DriveThruRPG as soon as I was able.

• The physical book includes the PDF at no extra cost, so I encourage you to choose that option over the book-only one. 
• If you have already bought the PDF and now want the book as well, you are eligible for a $10 discount off the book – please contact me at powerframe(DOT)rpg(AT)gmail(DOT)com so I can send you a coupon. 
• Likewise, if you bought the book by itself, you can contact me for a free copy of the PDF.

It's softcover and uses Standard colour rather than Premium, because those are the only options available for A4 books on DriveThruRPG at the moment. Although I made a few layout changes for the print copy, it would have taken too much work to reformat it to US Letter. I'll put up hardcover and/or Premium colour options if they ever become available.

Of course, print has certain limitations. The Mysticism supplement I'm working on has led to a few revisions in that chapter, and while I'll update the PDF and POD files, any books purchased before the update will require errata. I'll be releasing free errata files through the new PowerFrame website as new versions come out.

Arcane Errata

I started working on a book of pre-built Spells for PowerFrame and ran into a small problem. It's certainly not game-breaking, and I think I've come up with an easy fix.

Problem

I noticed when writing variants of the same Spell that it was actually cheaper to have an area-effect centred on the Caster, than it was to affect a single target at range!

• Range:self (-2), Area:area1 (2) = 0
• Range:range1 (1), Area:single (0) = 1

There's an extra discount built into Range:self, which allows me to charge more for Major Arcana intended primarily for self-use. However, it means that while the area or wall Parameters may take up more Vocabulary space, they actually make Spells easier to cast if you can start the effect from your own Hex (which works well for "buffs" but isn't quite as practical for harmful Spells). In effect, if you start with your own Hex you can get better Range for the same net cost by stretching out an area or wall instead of using the range Parameter.

Solutions

The easiest fix seems to be to change the Resistance of Range:self to -1 instead of -2.

This means the Range increments would be priced self (-1), touch (0), rangeX (X, 1 or more). In the above example, the two Parameter sets would at least have the same total Resistance.

The other option I considered was to make the area, cone, and wall Parameters cost 3 instead of 2. I'm not sure if this would be easier in the long run (as there aren't many established Spells that use these Area Parameters compared to the number using Range:self), or if it might either cause other unforeseen consequences or not fix other problems caused by the self discount.

Does anyone have any other thoughts or suggestions?

Conclusions

This change would modify some of the sample Spells in the Core Rulebook, as well as the Parameters section. I'm also thinking of adjusting a few of the Major Arcana Resistances, but I'll save that until I've gone through the Book of Spells and made sample builds for all the Major Arcana in case I run into any other issues.

Once I complete the Mysticism review, I'll update the PDF to v1.2 and release an Errata PDF for people who bought the v1.1 physical book.