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Game design is a funny thing. You can spend hours hacking away at a design, sure that it's the best, most elegant way to do things, only to find it fail during playtest. Today's devlog is a story all about how I discovered (and fixed) one of those issues in JourneyMon!

Planteater, a Nature-type monster

Tiers of Powers

So let's set the stage, here. As I talked through on the last devlog, JourneyMon fuses Powered by the Apocalypse narrative and storytelling with a battle system that rewards environmental storytelling and tactical play. Once I was sure I wanted that "crunchier" system for JourneyMon's battles, I set about drafting up the mechanics for the various powers that monsters can use. To begin with, I wanted three tiers of powers:

• Basic Powers would be useable whenever you want. They're the bread and butter of combat. Exciting to roll, but probably not the climactic moment of a given battle scene.
• Major Powers would be the scene-stealing moments. The ones that make your monster seem cool and powerful. They'd be useable once per battle, so they could be your monster's "signature attack" without getting stale.
• Apex Powers would be complete game-changers available only to the most powerful monsters. Actual design of Apex Powers didn't come until much later in the drafting phase, and I'll probably discuss these again in a later devlog.

I wanted Basic Powers to be moves common to most monsters, regardless of their type or fighting style. Everyone would get to use something like a simple melee attack called "Tackle", for example. 

The natural extension was a "Blast" power to serve as a ranged attack. 

It was there that I hit my first design snag: wouldn't it be more fun if a "Blast" did something different if it was a Fire-type attack or a Water-type attack? A blast of searing flames or a high speed spout of water?

Minor and Mod Powers

Enter a new tier of powers: the Minor Powers! 

Each Minor Power would be tied to one of the nine monster types (Fire, Nature, Water, Mind, Matter, Mayhem, Fey, Heroic, Machine), each with a different effect. Early on I settled on the idea the Minor Powers should mostly be the same as the Basic Powers for the sake of ease of play, with the key difference being what happens on a Crit (a 10+ roll). So "Embers", the Fire-type Minor Power, would be identical to Tackle except that it causes the target to catch fire on a Crit.

With the goal of seeking a mechanical identity for each Type, and again for ease of play, I settled on giving the ranged Minor Power derived from Blast the same Crit effect as the melee one derived from Tackle. That way, if you're commanding a Fire-type monster, you know that your mechanical shtick is going to be damage-over-time.  Since that'd end up meaning a lot of copy/paste, I had the idea of re-writing both Minor Powers into one: a "Mod Power" that would modify both Tackle and Blast. 

Behold, the Minor Power "Embers":

Overall I was pretty happy with this approach. It had a few clear advantages:

• Less cut/paste repetition of power mechanics.
• Expanded design space for Mod and Minor powers:
  • I could design new Minor Powers to expand player options in later supplements.
  • I could design Mod powers that alter Major and Apex powers too, later down the line.
  • Trainer Class-specific Mod powers might be a good avenue for expanding player options later down the line. Maybe a Performer's Boost could be different to a Researcher's?
• Basic Powers being a lower tier of power than Minor Powers means that they can be evoked by moves in interesting ways. For example, the Performer has a Grand Finale feature that allows them to spend "Showmanship" points on a big finish once per Episode. The lowest tier of reward for spending Showmanship would be a free Basic Power (i.e., it can't Crit), then a Minor Power, then a Major Power and so on.

On the negative side, splitting Minor Powers from Basic Powers meant a little bit more page flipping through playtest materials. I thought that be less of a problem as players became more familiar with the system, especially over longer campaigns. And even if not, people could print out (and cut out) the powers their own monsters have to store alongside their character sheet.

On to the Playtests!

After running several playtest games of JourneyMon, I was mostly happy with the design. I could explain to players that you're expected to modify the Basic Powers like Tackle with Mods like Embers in the vast majority of cases, and prompt them to do so in our tutorial battles. The maths worked great, the balance seemed spot on, and most importantly... players were having fun!

So what convinced me to change it?

I joined a game of JourneyMon as a player, run by one of our most enthusiastic playtesters now turned GM. I made a conscious choice not to interject with any rules explanations, and just let the game play out with the GM at the helm. Our trainers traveled to a beach resort and stumbled upon a plot by a washed-up actress looking for recognition and revenge. We finished the Episode with a battle against a giant mecha-monster, and everyone had a great time (especially me!). 

It was a partciularly eye-opening experience to observe the game from the player-side. Importantly, I noticed that players weren't using modified powers nearly as much when a different GM was running in subtlely different ways to me. I couldn't tell you why I hadn't noticed before... perhaps because my mind was partly on running the game as well as trying to teach it. As an observed, I noticed that players frequently announced their intention to use the Basic Powers like Tackle and Protect instead of the modified ones like Embers. It also became more clear that the negative point of having to flip back and forth between quick reference pages of Basic and Minor Powers was worth addressing

I relented. Let's fix this!

The Fix

I do want to extend my thanks to some of the other designers I talked with about this. It always helps to consult with an independent voice, especially when you're going back and forth one whether it really is time to kill your darlings. The solution was fairly obvious in hindsight: ditch "Mod" powers (for now at least), and combine Minor Powers with Basic Powers entirely. Instead of modifying a Basic Power with a Minor Power to a Crit effect, the four powers Tackle, Blast, Protect and Boost would have a variable Crit effect built in. It would simply depend on the type of the monster making the attack. The rules are fundamentally the same, it was just a case of changing how those rules are presented.

Let's examine the pros and cons...

Pros:

• Much easier to understand for new players.
• Less cross-referencing required.

Cons:

• A single power like Tackle takes up an entire page in the 6x9" handbook.
• The size of the power block might look a little intimidating. It looks more complex than it is!
• Since they no longer have their own names and descriptions, the Minor Powers have less of their own identity.

As it turned out, the Pros vastly outweighed the Cons, and we have our final design!

Conclusions

I think there are a couple of points here that stand out to me:

• Playtest, playtest, playtest! But not just with yourself at the helm. See if you can observe someone else GMing, and get out of their way as much as possible. That'll tell you so much about the pain points in your system. You'll find that same advice plastered over game design blogs across the internet, and they really do have a point. If you can find playtesters willing to GM, they are worth their weight in gold!
• Don't underestimate how important graphic design and information accessibility is to your rules elements.

I'd love to hear about anything in your own system that you had to ditch after similar soul searching. Comments are open below!

Booster Packs

The Kickstarter campaign continues at high speed, and we've sailed past 250 followers! To celebrate and drive for the next milestone, I'm excited to announce we'll be releasing Quick Start 'booster packs' for the Youngster and Oldtimer playbooks. One will unlock at 275 followers, and the other at 300! 🎁

Follow the campaign at journeymonrpg.com