Playtesting and ideas

It's the end of school year, and that means our school does some interesting activities to keep students engaged. I've discussed that in previous years (end of 2024, here and here)... (I thought I'd written about previous years, but digging through the blog, it looks like I haven't).

So I figured that I'd run my Chrono-Labyrinth for the students. I know that particular dungeon really well because I've run it many times, so it seemed a good test to see how the game system works in contrast the the other systems I've used for that dungeon in the past.

So I ran Sceletus. 

I felt like it was going to be an easy system, elements of it just make sense. However I've really wanted to see how it actually works with a range of gamers, both experienced and brand new. Instead of thinking it works, I now know it does.

There's also some interesting emergent properties of the game, that I hadn't considered. The way stress works in the game varies depending on play styles, the inventory system works in interesting ways as well. I started with simplified combat, but had one of my regular student players want to push things further, making sure the proper rules were played (with initiative, and the specific combat sequence written on the back page "quick rules"). It worked really smoothly, and wasn't much slower than the simplified version I was trying to work with.

So I might have to get around to writing up the last bits of that system with Erin.


 

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