playtest results 3/23

changes:

added a set difficulty feature. Difficulty levels for rolls variy from 1-10, with each level being multiplied by 25 to determine the actual difficulty.

players have fatigue in each attribute equal to their stat. Whenever they fail a roll, the difficulty goes up by 1 level and their fatigue decreases in the attribute they used by 1. For each level of fatigue below 3, they take a penalty of -1 from their roll. If they hit 0, they can no longer attempt rolls of that attribute.

added critical success at 50 beyond difficulty and critical failures at 50 below. Critical success grants a bonus and critical failures give an additional negative event or debuff. If you crit fail, you can’t try again with that attribute for this encounter regardless of fatigue.

after testing, I’ve found that this system works fairly well for scaling difficulty of encounters. If a player can’t beat something with one stat, they have to use their head and find another way around. Test scenarios included moving a heavy object and scaling a cliff. When fatigue became too high for one player in the first one to try and move the object, the player elected to destroy it. When the same was true for the cliff, they decided to stack objects at the base of it to boost themselves.

Game makers notes

  1. What questions did your players have?

What some of the material cards meant.

  1. How quickly did they learn?

Fairly quickly

  1. What kinds of interactions did the players have?

They liked stealing cards/plants from each other

  1. What confused the player?

The event cards and what order to play your turn

  1. What made the players excited?

Being able to fill the orders of customers

  1. What did your players enjoy doing?

Stealing the plants from other players and getting money

  1. Did any aspects of the game frustrate players? 

Just the event and material cards. I feel I need to go back and fix my rules and add more filler material cards so its not just event after event.