Playtesting Archons & Armigers
Today some friends and I finally tried playtesting Archons & Armigers. I gathered my main D&D group (the first people I ever played ttrpgs with back in ca. 2012) and ran the Caves of Chaos to get a feel for the character creation, combat system, and dungeon exploration procedures.
Play Report
The first half of the session consisted of impromptu Q&A and character creation. Everyone was receptive to & supportive of the overall idea. Character creation went smoothly, even my brother who had apparently been sleep-deprived for 40 hours beforehand(!?) didn't have any trouble rolling up an adventurer.
The party consisted of an Armiger, a Hierodule, a Thaumaturge, a Versifier, a Mountebank, and a Lemure.
I started them off in the ravine of the CoC rather than at the keep to get going faster. Lairs were reskinned for Antibor as follows:1
- Kobolds -> Silver Skrogs
- Goblins -> Kobellins
- Gnolls -> Cynocephali bandits
- Orcs -> Nylocks
Anyways, they ended up poking their heads into lairs A, B, C, D, E, and G. With the kobold/skrog lair, they ended up falling for the tree ambush, but a really high reaction roll let them back off without a fight. In the goblin lair, they were outnumbered and got chased out. They didn't venture into either orc/nylock lair to trigger the traps there.
They decided to attack the Skrog ambushers as they seemed the least organized of the lairs they had checked so far. The player playing the versifier attempted to sedate the silver beasties with the following limerick:
A gaggle of gruff silver scrogs Got too much to drink of some grog The adventurers dared With their scrog foes impaired Now the drink makes them sleep like a log
Cackling, I gave it max on the subjective modifiers, but the roll was too high and the magic didn't take.
The combat went surprisingly well. Nobody had any difficulty with the ridiculous combat matrix, and the d12+damage > 10 to hit system worked really well (also easy to work with in Roll20). The idea of fighting in 'ranks' rather than using grid-based combat was an initial point of confusion, but it went smoothly after a round.
The players killed five skrogs before the defenders fled, and one of the 6 PCs was reduced to exactly 0 hit points. After the combat, three hours had elapsed, and we decided to call it a day.
General Feedback & Plans
- The players liked the hit die rules, but thought that the X+Y notation was really confusing. I had wanted to keep it to maintain closer compatibility with OD&D style monster stats, but that's irrelevant for players. Plan: invent new notation.
- As part of some changes in the works, I had the players start with 3-3 HD (that is, roll 6d6 and take the lowest 3), with the Armiger starting with 3-2. This results in an average of 6 HP. Being able to tell players that they should always have 3d6 on their character sheets was really helpful.
- The idea that losing HD imposes deeper and deeper penalties to HD was popular, but it was suggested that I changed the terminology to 'wounds' and add a wound tracker to the character sheet.
- The PDFs generated in LaTeX aren't searchable and highlighted text is weird. Plan: shift to uglier but more user-friendly markdown->pandoc pdfs and just use LaTeX for printed versions.
- Everyone agreed that the Versifier magic roll deserves some kind of degree-of-success system. Plan: implement this, also add a line clarifying no repeat poems.
- Feedback on the combat matrix and d12+damage>10 to hit system was surprisingly positive! Fighting in ranks as a unit was also well-received after some initial confusion. But everyone agreed that breaking combat into initiative/movement/ranged/magic/melee/morale phases was too much. Plan: shift to a simpler initiative/movement/action/morale system. Possibly also add more advantages and disadvantages to fighting in different combat widths.
- We didn't end up doing much dungeon crawling, but I'm increasingly realizing that even if we had I would have wanted to dich most of my dungeon procedures. Less is more.
Other Thoughts
- I hate to say it, but the Caves of Chaos were a little underwhelming. I probably was doing it wrong and didn't give it enough time, but it felt like all the individual lairs were too well-defended, without a lot of breathing room for exploration. I get that players are expected to hire mercenaries at the keep and stuff, so it's mostly just that it wasn't a great match for how I envisioned the playtest. My other top choice was Dyson's Delve, and tbh I feel like that might have been closer to the kind of experience I was after.
- I'm lucky to have really great friends who are willing to do this!
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