Crunch Friday - Doing it all for you
This week Oliver takes a look a how EDRPG does most of the heavy lifting for you. Take it away, Oliver...
Let me tell you a story about playtesting.
In January 2016 we got a nice email from Frontier inviting us to attend a meeting in April to discuss our RPG proposal formally. Rather than sensibly wait for the outcome of the meeting I immediately assumed everything would be okay and began to dive into playtesting.
Playtesting a game like EDRPG is difficult, just from a preparation perspective. Before each game I would have to spend the whole day putting the material together. This was because most of the stuff was not yet written and only existed conceptually or as a bunch of tables stuck together in no particular order.
The biggest time drain was writing up NPC stats. Just how much detail should I go into? What power level is challenging but not overwhelming? Several beheaded players later (sorry Jon) I was starting to get into my flow, but found the demands of both writing the game and playtesting it was causing me to cheat.
By cheating I mean that I was re-using stats I had already written lots of times, perhaps just bumping a Defence (Dodge) score up by 1 or bolstering the To-Hit number if I seemed to always be missing the players. I realised quickly that if I, as the game designer, was suffering, other GM’s would be too.
For this reason as soon as I finished the equipment section I started to write out the Opponents chapter. I have a thing about RPG core books that don’t give you enough enemies. Too many give you the description of an orc, a goblin and an elf before reckoning that ‘you’ve got the idea, now go and make your own’!
EDRPG comes with a good sized opponents section, covering not only enemies for personal combat, but plenty of spaceship and vehicle scale opponents as well. Inside you’ll find sections devoted to criminals, police and security, assassins, soldiers and mercenaries, alien animals, biomods (more on these horrors later) and combat drones. All opponents are divided by the same rank scores as the players (Harmless, Mostly Harmless, Novice, etc.) so it is easy to pick an opponent of the right power level who won’t overpower your players, or be too weak to provide a suitable challenge.
Once this section was written I found planning much, much easier. Even if I didn’t have exactly the right opponent in the correct category, I could easily steal an enemy from a different category and jut re-skin in. For example, say I wanted a sword wielding assassin (because Jon loves those) but I didn’t want to use the Elite ’Unstoppable Assassin’ because my players are only Competent in Rank? All I have to do is look for a different opponent of the right rank who is sort-of similar. Ah, look! The ‘Wise Guy’ in the criminal section wields an axe as well as an Autopistol. All I have to do is swap out the axe for a sword, dress the ‘Wise Guy’ in black and hey-presto – a sword wielding assassin. I can probably give him a Stealth skill of 5 or so if the question of him sneaking around ever crops up; otherwise I have a fully statted-out opponent ready to go.
In addition to opponents EDRPG gives you some help in designing missions; essential if you want to undertake the challenge of the dreaded ‘sandbox campaign’. In addition to providing you with a mission synopsis you can also use the optional ‘twist generator’ to make the mission more challenging. Here’s an example from the Exploration section of the random mission generator:
Obviously this is only one of the missions available, but you can see how the twist generator creates the drama of a mission into which you fill in the blanks. The point here is not that 30% of exploration feat missions have weird stars that drive your players insane, but that 100% of the time something interesting and unexpected should occur that challenges your players to think. Taking a mission and then inverting its expectations is the thing that gets your players talking, engaged, panicked and gives them something reminisce about later at the bar.
