Happy Frontier Friday spacers 🚀

It's been a couple months since I gave any updates on the sci fi game, codenamed Project Cobalt, but I've been really busy being horrifically unwell, killing all my player characters in D&D, working on a new Icarus Games website, and winning awards 😎!

But among all that, I finally found time to run a playtest for other people instead of just playing with myself 👀

And gang. . . it sucked.

OK, so it didn't actually suck for the most part, but they say I gotta hook ya with hyperbole, you know?

So I recently ran two playtest sessions with 5 players using my pregenerated characters and the starter adventure that I've been working on.

My goal of the playtest was to test out the core dice resolution mechanic in actual play - I wasn't too concerned with anything else other than getting a feel for that d6 dice pool, success on 6s pipeline.

And that works, but I had made the initial pregens with far too few attribute and skill points, so their dice pools were WAY too small in the first session, to the point where I was worried one of the players was going to walk out into the sea with a pocket full of rocks because they were rolling so poorly. The PCs dice pools were often only 2-3 dice; a 30-40% success chance, which is far too low!

The Playtesting

In that first session I ran the system with maximum narrative openness - little to no established action economy, no defined distance ranges, and the ability for the players to do literally anything they could imagine on their turn.

That, combined with dice pools that were too small so the players were failing too often lead them to feel lost and directionless for much of the session. I could feel that they weren't having fun at several points and I'll be honest, the next day I lay in bed until past noon in a depressive spiral 😅

But after dragging myself out of bed I knuckled down and made a raft of changes and asked my players to come back to the table and give things another try, and because they are good people (and didn't have any other options for anything to play that week) they said yes!

And fortunately, the second session went worlds better than the first. In comparison to the week before, my players were god damned action heroes in this playtest, which is exactly what I wanted.

I upped the dice pool size for a character's competent skills to be 5-6 dice, which increased the success rate to 60+% which felt much better for the players (though we still have one player roll NINE dice and fail to get a single 6 - incredible!)

Changes

I also reworked and built up a lot of the rest of the core of the system.

• I added an initiative system where you roll either your reflex or intellect dice and the total is your score.
• I put a defined action economy in place; move 6 squares, perform an action roll, interact with one thing that doesn't require an action roll. This will be tweaked and refined over time but was enough of a scaffold to give the players direction while fostering their creativity.
• I removed a couple of "dead" skills, and reworked how shields worked to make them a little more powerful. Instead of acting like a second health pool like before, shields can absorb damage less than their threshold every turn so long as they don't take too much damage. So a character with shields [4] could take 3 damage in a turn and shrug it off without issue and still have their shields the next turn. But if they ever take 4+ damage in a turn, the shield overloads and is offline for the rest of the encounter.
• I added a suite of new "critical" abilities, so when players rolled more than one 6 they could spend the extras to do things like deal extra damage, move a little more, increase their armor, or mark enemies.

Initially I had thought players would need to spend adrenaline to use these features, but I forgot about that by time the session happened and after running it without an adrenaline spend, I think that is the right call. It makes extra 6s feel good, and allows the players to do really cool combinations of things when they get lots of 6s.

I cannot underestimate how much of an impact the "mark a target" critical effect had though. Players were choosing that quite often and getting the extra +1D against a target was helping other players succeed and chain into really cool moments.

In Practice

Towards the end of the session they were fighting a mech and the Mercenary had already blown one of its arms off. The Ace Pilot got a critical and marked it, which allowed the Scientist to jump up on top of it and hack it, powering it down. Then the Mercenary used the blown off rocket art to finish off the last guy and blow a hole into their next area.

By the end of the session they were really starting to work together to build on each other's narratives and tee each other up for cooler and cooler moves, which was awesome.

The players all agreed that session 2 was much better than the first attempt, more dice=more better, but more than that the other changes I had made flowed together to make a more cohesive and fun experience for them, and despite the rough edges, I could absolutely have run a short campaign arc off the back of that system.

So my goal from here is to get this in front of a different group of players for another playtest ASAP. At this stage, I think I want to try and run it for as many different groups as I can to get as broad a range of first impressions as possible.

Then I will probably commit and run a short arc campaign for a group because that kind of connected storytelling will bring up all kinds of issues I haven't even thought about yet!

I'd love to hear your thoughts and questions about this whole process so far down below, though!

And for more tales from the 'verse, stay tuned. 
Much love
Anto