I’ve been slowly writing and testing out my own OSR Roleplaying Game I call Battle Jacket. This is its development blog. [Part 1 Here] [Part 2 Here] [Part 3 Here] [Part 4 Here]

Playtesting the Battle Jacket

If I want Battle Jacket to be playable, I need to playtest the thing. If I’m going to playtest the thing, I’m going to need an adventure to play it in. One-shots are best for this. The shorter the better. But that means it’s time to do some more writing.

Some of my favorite schlocky adventures in fiction and movies were clearly written from the title backwards. (For example, the Red Panda Adventure: “Death Danced at Midnight.”) I figured it would be very on-brand for Battle Jacket adventures to be similarly written. I made a list of cool epic metal sounding titles and picked the one I figured I’d have the most fun writing and drawing:

“Secret of the Skull Spire!”

It has alliteration, the suggestion of mystery, a tall tower instead of a subterranean dungeon, and finally… skulls!

Other titles that I have since kept are: “The Witch of Wug Wamp Swamp,” and “The Cursed Warlock.” Both of which will be turned into one shot adventures at a later date.

Writing a One-shot

I believe that one-shot adventures are the absolute epitome of any TTRPG experience and I can expound upon my philosophy in this regard for many paragraphs, but for now I must pear down to the essentials of what my game must be tested on the most:  Character Creation, Social Encounters, and Combat.

Armed with my one-shot philosophies and a killer title, I wrote a cursory adventure for some willing participants to help me test these three essentials. (I will blog in detail about the creation of this one-shot at a later date.) My players were interested in the game, the setting, the flavor, and had at least one character class each they were dying to try. First hurdle hurdled: players want to play!

Test #1: Character Creation

My original desire was to make character creation as quick and simple as possible, but there is a fatal flaw in such a design. The more simply a character is created, the less a player can invest in that character. The more complicated a character’s creation, the more over-invested a player becomes. Or worse, the more overwhelmed a new player will become and just quit the whole thing before it begins.

Player characters, in the eclectic heavy metal hellscape I created, are supposed to be outcasts of a kind. In-game their class of society is universally known as “Dirt Bag.” The unwanted discarded refuse of any society. Injustice, circumstances, or objective reality has placed each player character in that category. Wherever they came from, they can not go back. Wherever they go, they are treated with suspicion, contempt, fear, or indifference.

Colorful and interesting backstories will place the characters in this echelon of society, giving them unique abilities and insights, but their existence on the fringes also puts a bullseye on their backs and likely shortens their life expectancy. This is precisely what makes the player characters dangerous. They are tough, resourceful, capable, flawed, and they have nothing to lose!

To test character creation, I handed players copies the rule book and told them to roll up characters on their own. I floated around the room to observe. It fell apart almost instantly.

I partitioned information in the book un-intuitively. I hid certain charts in the back of the text instead of in the character creation section where they were more needed. I also wrote instructions with wording that was about as clear as mud.

how the character Creation is supposed to go:

Character attributes are rolled on a 3d6 for each attribute. This method produces a reliable curve of results. Totals can be placed on whatever attribute the player desires. Each character class has bonuses and penalties built into their class-attributes. When and how to add/subtract these from character rolls was not clear to my players from the text alone. To make matters worse, the point totals exist only to find their modifier. After modifiers are established, point totals are thrown out.

I like this aspect of the Mörk Borg character creation because I felt it made the process more simple. Each attribute modified dice rolls from -3 up to +3. Simple!

Communicating this idea with class based modifiers on top… Less simple.

In order to create a character as I had it written, players needed to read the entire character creation chapter, find the charts at the back, and then proceed to flip back and forth through three sections to compile all of the information into their character sheet. Clunky. Inelegant. Unclear.

I noticed that players spent most of their time on the pages concerning their chosen character class. This is the most obvious place to put most of their creation information, however, for design reasons, I wanted to limit character class pages to single pages or two page spreads. It keeps the design simpler, and limits the information a brand new player needs to track.

After trying a few stop-gap solutions, I have come to the conclusion that the entire chapter must be rewritten. I am going to have to revisit that single two page spread thing, which is to say, scrap it entirely. Each character class will require the page count that it requires. Simple as that.

The number one thing I am trying to avoid is having a potential player/GM with an attention problem, like me, read my rules and go cross-eyed and say, “nevermind.” However, if I want player characters to garner some sort of investment from the players themselves, a certain amount of complexity is required. My strategy is to keep writing as succinct as possible, stopping just short of truncation. I am not known for my brevity, so this will be a hell of a challenge.

SOMETHING I DID NOT PREDICT:

No one was really interested in playing a wizard. For most new players, the wizard is the bottom of their priority list. One of my more seasoned and thoughtful testers made the case that the character class should be removed entirely. “Can you imagine a wizard wearing a battle jacket?” he asked me. I could see a wizard like Akiro wearing one, he wears a tattered vest after all, but him aside, I suppose I really couldn’t.

Not to worry really. The only reason I included the wizard as a character class was in case there was a player in the party who could not bear playing a character that was not a wizard. That player may not be in the majority, but that player exists, and I want them to have a good time too.

Similarly…

In this world, there is no such thing as a healer dirt bag. No party has a cleric who can lay on hands or otherwise buff the other players. The closest one gets is a drug dealing Alchemist who can brew up a reliable, yet reliably addictive, health potion. However, I know that there are the odd players who only want to play as healers. Therefore I wrote a healing class of character, and buried that character class in the lore. Enter, the Kind Fellows. In their lore are all the special rules and healing spells required to roll up a Kind Fellow as a party’s dedicated healer, but it is kept away from the character creation to keep to the style guide.

I figure I’ll do the same for the wizard class as well.

Thanks for reading,
-Gabe D.

NEXT TIME:
Testing combat.