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Last night we continued with the private testing for Desecration. As testing goes, I couldn’t have hoped for a better run than this adventure has proven. After surpassing the initial opening pitfalls, the adventure has proceeded perfectly. Each component has so far proven to meet each design goal. That is no small feat, considering the nature of RPGs, where every player hopes to get something different out of the game, and so they contribute to the story in much different ways. With the unpredictability that players always bring to an adventure, it can often surprise even myself how easily these designs, and the E-RPG system itself can handle it.

This session was a difficult one. In our last test the players pretty much entered into the point of the story where their paths would diverge into one story or the other. While the key set pieces remain the same, what the players get out of the story largely depends on how they play and what they do. It was a design philosophy that James Arrington and I talked about a lot with the development of Prophecy. With Desecration, the concept is very similar. However, with Prophecy we had very divergent threads along the relatively same story. Only, in that adventure, the players would ultimately be playing within the same arc. Desecration only really has two threads, however, one path leads to a completely different story arc, while the other bypasses this. For the latter, the bypass doesn’t mean that the players lose out on anything. It simply means they will see a different side of the adventure. As in Prophecy, the players choose the path based on their play styles. However, in Prophecy the path is chosen in the story. In Desecration the path is chosen by the type of characters you created.

The group that is testing now consist of mainly my wife, Willie Santana, and his wife, and James Arrington. Each of these people had significant influence in the development of E-RPG. However, each one knows only a small portion of the overall system. They always seem to adapt well to their characters, but they learn the nuances of their characters skills while not really remembering or playing into any knowledge of the other game aspects. In this case, not a single one of the player characters fits into a typical dungeon crawl type of gaming group. There is no thief, fighter, cleric, or magic user archetype. One of the characters is a spy, the other is a psychic with very limited combat or offensive ability. The other is playing a sort of elementalist natural magic user focusing on water based magic. The last is playing mostly an archer type of character. Each character is developed along a personality, not a set of statistics. So in the last session (previous to this) they encountered the core crossroad event, it turned out to be a combat encounter.

With most combat encounters you expect some level of success. This one was designed to be a very solid ambush. It really would have taken your typical RPG group to win. So, if a group is focused on combat or dungeon crawling, they would likely succeed and move on to story thread A. However, this group, and many others that I have witnessed with E-RPG, did not fit into this mold. They lost badly. This put them on to story track B.

Story track B is the most difficult to develop. So in session I was actually trying out my different ideas. This lead to a final story path for the thread which I think will be very exciting for all. The players reached the point in the adventure where they took complete control over the story. Events weren’t forcing them at this point. Instead of being the group that takes it as it comes, they got to give something back. They hit hard and with a vengance.

It was an exciting night for me to watch the story start to take its momentem. It also happened relatively quickly into the story. We really only had about 3 sessions so far and most were less than 3 hours in play. As most groups game for around 4 hours, they arrived at a point in the story that would have ended up at the tale end of session 2 for most gamers. That is some pretty good momentum, considering the events about to take place.

As for the story, the holes are filled and I am continuing on to the final finished draft. I think things actually ended well enough that we can get another session scheduled fairly quickly. So that means enough blogging from me and back to work.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 6th, 2008 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Descration, Developer Blog, E-RPG General Development, Writing Adventures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.