Manifest: Playtesting
The art of playtesting is a rich one, and I won’t have the time or the energy to spell all of it out.
Instead, I’ll detail the things I want to explore with playtesting, and how I will do so.
The Rulesets
This is the obvious one. Does one kind of Power Roll work better than the others? Is one more interesting or engaging? At what levels of power do different kinds of play start to emerge? Sadly, the only way to test this is to run these systems in all sorts of permeations of abilities, types, strategies, and the like. It’ll be a lot of work, but I don’t see any simpler alternative.
Party Size
How many Manifestations may a player manifest at once? How many can they have in total? In Pokémon, a player can only have 1 out at a time with six in their belt. Alternately, you could look at it as six Pokémon in the field, and all the rest in the computer back at in the hospital.
Obviously we want more than 1 out on the field at once. Tactical combat should include at bare-minimum three, and probably no more than six. At the same time, teams of Agents might get up to four or five, and if each of them has six Manifestations they want out at once…we’re looking at up to 30 Manifestations, and that’s just on the PC’s side. The NPCs could have an equal number of Manifestations, which dominates the field with —- I think this is the correct term — too many units.
If we limit the max number of fielded Manifestations to three, possibly four, that could help keep the combat under control.
At the same time, part of the reason of having only six moves and two actions for each turn is to keep turns quick, controllable, and comprehendable. Chess, after all, has sixteen pieces on each side, and that’s not unmanageable. Could six-per-agent work, even with four or five players?
To stress test this, I will need a combat that has two or three playtesters fighting two or three enemies, all with six Manifestations apiece. Levels can be kept low and abilities relatively simple, while I note how fast the combat plays out and how smoothly the play goes.
Tier and Bond Balance
One of my goals is to make sure that players can use different strategies and still be effective. I don’t want players to have to “solve” the combat system to get the perfect strategy. I’d much rather create a system where any player’s strategy can be made viable through clever application. A player should be able to choose how many Manifestations to train, in what direction, and whether to focus on Bond or Tier and have those choices be viable.
To test this, I’ll need to compare two separate extreme strategies. One side should have Manifestations mostly focused on having a high Bond. The other side should have a similar number of Manifestations with high Tier.
High vs Low level
Similar to balancing Tier and Bond, I’ll need to explore how many lower-leveled Manifestations are required to take down a higher-leveled Manifestation. In short; how many goblins can bring down a dragon? Ideally, five level one Manifestations should be about equal to one level five Manifestation, assuming balanced leveling.
To test this, I’ll need an asymmetric combat, and we’ll see which side wins and how long it takes. (I’ll also need to settle on which Power Roll system to use, so I can decide on what “leveling up” even means/does.)
Combat stories
One of the more important aspects of tactical combat — an aspect that gets regularly ignored by a lot of games — is that tactical combat need never exist purely for its own sake. A horde of zombies may need to get cleared out of a dungeon room to advance, but a horde of zombies between you and the helicopter? Well they can be avoided. Tactical combat requires goals, and “kill everything” is a fairly weak goal. “Get out with the data chip,” “kidnap the CEO,” or “protect the swarm of civilians” are interesting goals, and will shift tactical considerations. Maybe killing the big-bruiser isn’t a priority when the weaker foes are only a few steps away from the explosive crate.
Having a couple mission-like maps in my playtest will be important, both to test the players and to ensure I’ve got a robust system that works in multiple situations.
Cognitive Load
I’ll need to pay attention to how easy and smoothly the players engage with the system. With multiple different things to keep in mind, I’ll need to build a combat where each player has a lot of Manifestations, and they are all different, both in abilities, levels, and roles.
Strange Abilities
What kind of abilities can I put in the game without breaking the system? A lot of funnel adventures give players four or five characters with all the same abilities; move, melee, and maybe shoot. I am going to give each player six characters, with up to two different higher-level abilities each. Some of these abilities have the potential to be quite awkward.
Can some Manifestations behave like mines? What about abilities that affect turn order, or freeze time? Can I write out bespoke and unique abilities that “break the rules?” Can some Manifestations summon even more units? How far can I push things outside the basic ruleset?
I’ll test this by, naturally, being experimental with abilities.
I think this is a good cross-section of notes to create different scenes. I may add more as I make Manifestations, and there are other minor questions I’ll need to pay attention to, but this is a good start, I feel. If it isn’t, I suppose I’ll learn soon enough!
Of course, the first question is the most important. Abilities that work in the first ruleset might not work in the second, and visa versa. So where do I start with making abilities and Manifestations? I should start with successes, of course! I will take inspritation from moves and abilities from other RPGs, including Trespasser, Valient Quest, Strike!, Lancer, Steel Hearts, and any others that happen to spark inspiration.
And that’s where we’ll pause it. Once I’ve completed a few playtests, I’ll return to the ruleset and work through some notes and adjustments.