Thank you so much! I'll keep it in mind for that next time ^^
elenie
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I've played 1.5 sessions of Toil & Trouble (one had to be cut short) and it is a lovely game!
I do have two rules question around spells.
1. When casting a spell, you exhaust the current die and describe what you want to accomplish. Then you roll for the new spell slot (so far so good). But this is where we were divided on what happens: "If the number you rolled has been exhausted before, your spell will have a complication determined by the GM." Does the complication affect the current spell the player is trying to cast, or will it affect the spell that matches the number that was just rolled (i.e. the previously exhausted spell, when it comes back into play)? Similarly for the boon, is that basically a "success with extra" for the current spell?
2. When casting the spell in (say) slot 1, what happens if I roll 1 when rolling for the new spell slot? If I am reading the rules correctly, the spell is already exhausted and it will cause a complication.
I hope to play Toil and Trouble again one day and ty for making and sharing the game <3
I love the idea of the game and it looks beautiful, but the book is too hard to read with my failing eyesight (as is the itch.io page, but that's easier to fix than a PDF). It's a combination of the ornate fonts, fairly low contrast and the page background "blurring" the words further.
Would it be possible to provide a version that's either plain text, or a black and white PDF with consistent standard fonts and no page background art? I would really appreciate it!
We played this today with four people (later three as one of us had to leave, and we skipped the fourth Storm to go directly into the final confrontation). I enjoyed the story we told together and how our relationships developed.
We did notice that the challenges during the Storm were relatively easy to overcome. Even with three players, we were able to get a full success almost every time without using our boons, mech parts or sparks of glory (once we opted to take a partial success for narrative reasons). Being able to pull on a skill, link or the House gave us plenty of approaches, so each pilot drew a pilot card for every threat, and that ended up being enough.
Not sure if we missed something there. We didn't need to use our mech parts, though I noticed that lower value ones would basically never be helpful compared to the pilot cards, so spoils tend not to make a big impact.
We also weren't completely clear if a link that is established between PCs always leads to a link going the other direction (with possibly contradictory tags), but decided in favour because it made more sense for the Calm move to establish a mutual link.
Hope that makes sense and thank you for making and sharing the game <3
Our group of five had a lot of fun with this today! The rules were clear, though our MM ended up allowing us to work together (helping by betting one of our traits).
The Blackjack resolution made for some great choices, and the tradeoffs felt interesting to me. We randomly drew the encounters, and our MM would improvise any duplicates.
Overall, a game that suited our group excellently. Thank you for making and sharing it <3
Our group of five played this today.
We probably didn't have the most representative experience because our first encounter was with a crocodile that ate the box we were transporting, and it took a long time and many failures before we collectively dropped a microwave on it.
Evolution was quite random of course, and except for one of the players becoming superintelligent at the end, we were mostly rolling d4-d10s.
A few things were a little unclear:
- The first column of the Abilities table says "D8" but there are only six options. Typo or does the D8 signify something?
- Abilities and skills are presumably the same thing.
- The character sheet has free abilities (Climb, Hold, Problem Solving) that aren't mentioned in the rules.
- Apart from these, do players pick a single initial ability (from either Body, Hand or Mind), or is it a whole row (so e.g. Parkour, Lockpicking and Reading)?
- When a player evolves, do they immediately roll with the next higher die size, and then potentially keep evolving multiple times in the same roll? It sounded that way but wasn't completely clear.
- We assumed that evolution at d12 would go to d20.
So maybe we didn't quite play with the rules as intended, and we also allowed people to work together and combine their values where it made sense. We had a lot of fun, in any case, so thank you for making the game <3
This was sweet! I enjoyed everything, but having the voice acting and music was an unexpected treat. Sometimes the text was a little hard to read on the semi-opaque background, but I managed.
I liked Adelaide especially, and the way she and Kristine connect. The final chapter was an incredible note to end on. Thank you for the game <3
We started by putting dwarves into the forests, logging and building tall towers. The fae used to live in the mountain ranges (somewhat like magical mountain goats). The Kin were the traders, especially known to travel waterways. And the wights lived underground in huge cave systems.
What changed? A variety of virulent fungal species arose and took over the underground caves, driving out the wights to live at the surface.
What of the old remained? The grand tower tree of the dwarves, visible from across the world.
What new thing has emerged recently? The fungus has begun to organise into moving beings, often using the bones of wight dead in the caves as structure to hold new fungal bodies together.
The new met the old that remained, what happened? The roots of the tower tree are being invaded and changed by the fungal invaders making their way there, leading to the entire tree slowly changing. This is of great concern to many.
---
Our adventure was about procuring the ingredients for a fungal cure our Herald wanted to sell to the dwarves maintaining the tower tree. Though in the end, we stole it back, rallied the dwarves ourselves and administered it with the help of our boat, which had been partly turned into a ravenous crocodile. To cap it off, we pooled our remaining glory to (barely) defeat the Paladin of Dominance, an emissary of our Shadow.
Our group played this today, six people overall.
We had a good time and enjoyed the possibilities the GM and other players had to improve the roll results. Pull built up pretty quickly to provide plenty of options.
Suggestions/Things we didn't fully get:
- The prologue questions come before the Lineage Descriptions or before they are even mentioned by name (except for Wights). Could reorder, or add a link to the lineages.
- If the PC roll result is equal to the GM's, the PC succeeds? It wasn't 100% clear and may be worth stating explicitly.
- Are most/all rolls meant to involve multiple PCs? The rules read a bit that way, but narratively for us most checks involved a PC leading the way, with each PC rolling once per book.
- Our two Faerie PCs tended to roll relatively low all up (Brilliance never triggered), and suggested that perhaps their Special Abilities could do with a little boost to help out.
Thank you for making and sharing the game <3
We played this today with four superheroes and our guide.
I think we saw the full spread of doom luck, with the first player being knocked out on his second roll and the second one not too long after, while the others kept hanging on. It's intriguing that helping someone increases the likelihood they'll be doomed.
We had a good time, but if running this, consider how you might let people who get removed early stay involved in the game.
Thanks for making the game <3
They were all great, but the first ones we made were fire based lifeforms living on the hot side of a tidally locked planet with no other traces of life. They aren't individuals as we'd understand them, but can detach and exchange the components that make up their selves. This is done to transfer information or even fuse together several beings when a task requires it.
When advanced humans made first contact by landing in heat resistant suits, the fire beings thought these lifeforms must be like them, and suggested in their language of colours to exchange personality parts with the new arrivals. The humans recorded and played back the same colour signals, not understanding the language, and the fire beings took that as agreement and crowded in, overloading their suits and killing the landing party.
Our group played this today, and it was very satisfying. We made four species in all.
I enjoyed trying to come up with nonhuman facts and twists, and building on each others' contributions. Though because our species were so different, first contact was characterised by an inability to communicate, that we partly leaned into and partly skimmed over.
A great experience, and thank you for making the game!
Thank you for making the game! <3 Our group played it today, with four parts to the chimera (Dragon, Hydra, Minotaur, Leyak).
We ended up having each player decide on an action and revealing their choices at once, since free discussion resulted in consensus too easily.
By dice luck, we ended up with a lot of rooms of the same type (maybe another room type or two might help). Our chimera wasn't ever recaptured, and alert level never went above 1. We did have a lot of fun together, and the game took around 1h 40min.
I loved this, prototype or not. The suika was fun and felt good, and the idea of nursing a horse back to health so it can regain its true colours was really sweet (plus colour / pattern collection books!).
I could see maybe having the suika phase have several possible "win conditions" (go on until you hit a score goal, or complete a few "quests" (like create 10 hay bales and 2 "bandages" for an injured horse), and an optional "true suika" mode? But I very much enjoyed this as is, great work!
Played this with our one shot group of five.
We didn't fully understand how the failure mechanics were intended to play out, and decided to reattempt any failed checks with a new plan. We ended up with the parking attendant, bandits, the custom inspector from the sun and the virus pulling us towards the sun (clearly for another customs audit). The customs inspector chased us during splashdown as well.
I had a lot of fun with the game. Sometimes we all worked together, other times it was more scattershot. We generously added resources, and failed only two or three checks total - overall most rolls were easily over the threshold.It took us just under 90 minutes to play.
Thank you for the game!
The writing was the star of the show as expected, thoroughly loved it!
In addition, the love and knowledge of horses really shines through. The font was pleasant to read, and the end-of-page visuals were a gorgeous addition. Found most of the ways of dying in the swamp, and more than one way of making it back (which I appreciated).
A wonderful game <3
I feel so at home around these characters! Lovely game, I played through one route a few years ago and now I'm finally back for more.
Thank you for the game, and all the best for CMU and other future projects <3 If I could wish for one thing, it'd be to have better self voicing but I'm guessing that's not easy to improve on as a game dev.