I had a lovely surprise when I went by Story Games this morning, as there was some actual play posted for Six Bullets for Vengeance from Sam Hawken! This is doubly surprising, because I haven't really solicited any external playtesters yet, so this makes it the first blind playtest.

So I thought I'd link to Die By the Gun, part 1 and part 2.

One of the things that has come out of the past few playtests is the need for information about the antagonists and revelations to be presented clearly to all the players.

The revelation map was the first way of presenting this information, alongside all the information about a given scene, but this got confusing at times.

In the Spodley playtest I also introduced an antagonist sheet for each antagonist, divided into chapters to keep the information clearly laid out.

One comment was that the antagonists only used a small bit of their sheet, if any at all, so Malcolm suggested it be combined with the revelation map. I didn't quite go this far, instead rolling all the antagonist information and scene information into a single sheet. The protagonist has their own sheet, and the revelations have a sheet of their own, along with space for reward dice.

So last night I ran a playtest of Six Bullets for Vengeance with my regular gaming group. It was a spectacular failure, but a fascinating, if frustrating, playtest.

First, a little bit of background on the group. With the exception of one of the other guys, the group is very firmly entrenched in traditional roleplaying games – we normally play Earthdawn, WFRP, Savage Worlds or something similar. They’re curious enough about indie games to let me run a one-off of something every month or so, but I’ve yet to find one they’ll accept wholeheartedly. It’s frustrating at times, but for the most part we have fun regardless.

So over at the Forge my Six Bullets playtest report from Spodley has sparked an interesting discussion with Ron about how much setup the game really needs.

Ron is arguing that I'm putting too much setup into the game, and that much of the fun comes from it being the ultimate blank-sheet game.

Those of you in the game at Spodley will recall that I was agonising over the other end of the spectrum, that the game didn't have enough setup and that I was leaving things too wide open.

So what do you guys think? How much setup is too much setup?

This is quite a long playtest report, so I'm breaking it down into smaller posts. I'll post questions at the end of each post which you can reply to as I go along or wait til I'm done - I'm interested in hearing everyone's feedback!

Saturday afternoon at Spodley Grange I got to run a playtest of Six Bullets for Vengeance, I think for the 5th time. Each time it’s been with a subtly different set of rules and a different group of players, and this outing would be for the first time since I made the changes that arose from the Conception playtest.

Setup

There were 4 of us playing – myself, Malcolm, James and Janos. Everyone except Malcolm had played before, although only me and James had played with anything approaching the current version of the rules.