Did some playtesting for FAR (sort of) yesterday

[Judging__Eagle]

so.... like every other RPG palytest I've done for FAR so far.... the players basically recreated existing characters from actual stories. One played Ahriman of the 1,000 sons; an other played Kharne the betrayer of the World Eaters; the third that jumped in, I helped write up a (partial) write-up for a Valkryie (eye-blasts, full magic, flying heroic Asperii mount; laser-eye blood-drinker on a air-running my little pony is a fairly accurate description).

The scenario was... basically my chaos minis vs my vampire counts minis; the story was basically something out of a heavy metal story. Some sci-fi power armoured dudes (aka CSM led by three of the baddest characters; Ahriman and Kharne supporting the flanks of an abaddon mini and an other CSM lord) invade a low tech, but magically rich world, in order to steal loot and magic items from a necromancer empire.

The "battle field" was... just a battlemat, with the actual forces arranged off the edges; and the PCs able to interact in the "not to scale" no-man's land.

Some things I learned:

In a game where d6's are king; the d12, d10, and other Dice are..... super fucking useful.

I ended up using my other dice to represent distances between different units. Since the "scale" of the battle was to be about as wide as the table we were on was long; but I wanted to be able to keep control of 200~ minis all at once, keeping them all super tight was ideal.

d12 Inches, 1-12", d12 have suddenly become my new best and most favorite dice for representing distances around Assaultan' units.

At one point, one of the players requisition for the Plasma and Melta gun squads to help take on entire horde of undead zombie bullettes. Keeping the Plasma Guns out at 23" at the most; and all of the Melta Guns at ~11" was rather interesting to represent; because the actual distance between the actual models was rather closer, more like 1"; but a d12 between them on a 3 and a d10 on a 2 is pretty easy to figure out as 23". Especially if nearly every unit has either a d10, with numbers ranging from 80"

With about 5 major battles going on across the field, ranging from a wing of marines, havocs and assault marines going after an abandoned fortress, all the way on the very eastern edges of the field. Which that seemed like it has some sort of towers, and maybe paleo-tech artillery. All the way from Ahriman leading a bunch of his minions to a massive skull shrine, that he desecrated, by stealing the book of necromantic secrets that was inside. At the far back of the Necromantic lines, a forest had been chopped down; and the undead hordes were building siege engines, to shell across the no-man's land where the chaos havocs where killing any undead regiments not screened by ghosts (early on, killed by Ahriman).

In any case, there were many lessons learned, and I'll probably be making a lot of clarifications on how dice pools are combined.

The current idea is that a dice pool has certain types of "flags" that it can be used for; and their highest tier pool can be used for any single action. Players "fill out" the "bottom" of their dice pool, by using lower tier dice pools from other sources. Currently, any specific dice pool is capped at six; so dice pools have very easy to recognize caps.

For the playtest, I pretty much handed out 6 dice pools for their character powers; ranging from Mortal to Legendary, and up to 1 Epic Dice, so players could get over their normal caps with certain actions, by 1 more dice (when you're seeing rolls of 6, 12 or 18 dice; a roll of 7, 13 or 19 seems different; of course, that's because you unlock tier break-points; and you're buying with higher tier points).

Overall though, I was able to stage a battle between hundreds of undead warhammer regiments; and hundreds of space marines; and it didn't actually take more than 5 or so hours of actual playing time (re-writting character sheets; and makig 3 characters doesn't really count; also, being able to make characters in under an hour for people who weren't sure what they wanted for their characters, at first; was really handy).

[Judging__Eagle]

Other things; using "trays"; CD jewel cases, or Dungeon Tiles; to help represent unit groupings or regiments worked pretty well; moving an actual regiment of 40-ish skeleton or zombie minis would have be stupid bad.

I'm crazy, but I'm not completely stupid.

I also noted how the game played out a lot like a Dominions 3 battle... except with much more interesting unit actions; and the ability for the terrain to be useful, and interesting to the PCs.

I also found that giving Players a free hand to take items out of a series of containers to randomly determine things their character owns, or things important to/for their character worked pretty well. One container was a shoebox with a silver duct tape lid, and black around the sides with all sorts of random stuff in it that could represent quest related items. Then a GW bits box for some sort of random item (everything from "suits of armour", to "special weapons", "magic cloaks", etc. etc.).

In any case, I'm finding that I mashed a lot of ideas together to get this session across to the players, and that having players direct most of the action was a good thing. Each player was asked to describe some sort of terrain feature on the battle field (the skull shrine, and fortress were both player creations; the third was a crawling tree that the Valkyrie was interested in); and they each were really easy to interest in the things they had added to the game (which is of course, a no brainer, everyone needs to have authoritative power; even if the MC has editorial power).

[fectin]

Other things; using "trays"; CD jewel cases, or Dungeon Tiles; to help represent unit groupings or regiments worked pretty well; moving an actual regiment of 40-ish skeleton or zombie minis would have be stupid bad.

Just as info, there are movement trays from some of the other GW games that would make moving regiments a lot easier.

[Judging__Eagle]

Yeah, I know, I really don't want to give them any more money unless I have to.

A good chunk of the zombies used were.... from my Zombies!! (the helicopter one) game box. The goal being to at least proxy the forces in use, even if everything isn't all going to look the same.