Academy Playtest Report 3
The Unfortunate One
Tonight we finished our first threat. The details don’t matter here especially much. What’s important is that the system worked as designed, and we soon realized that’s not the same as working as intended.
We all had a lot of fun. However, we soon realized that some of the game’s holdovers from Blades don’t really work when you make the PCs boarding school students rather than hardened, murderous criminals.
The Harm system is the big issue here, and I’m going to need to rewrite a lot of it. Believe it or not, it just isn’t okay for bad guys to constantly threaten kids with lightning bolts or broken arms, or kids to do the same to them. When’s the last time Harry Potter murdered a goblin? Never.
Additionally, Academy as written focuses a lot on the students rather than their school, their work, and their NPC relationships, which are incredibly important in this fiction. We’ve identified several other issues which need work as well.
I still think this game is best Forged in the Dark because of its fictional positioning system, the way it packages action, and its approach to relevant abstracted resource management.
So we have bittersweet news here, folks. The game I’ve been working on is a fun game, sure. However, it is not at all the game I wanted it to be. It will undergo several drastic changes in the near future and I think the game it is now isn’t yet ready to go public. I’m pulling it offline for now. I am very, very thankful for my playtest group, who helped me see the issues inherent in Academy. This is a very frustrating situation, but a good one, I think.
This is all good and healthy parts of iteration. Learning what you need to toss out out is supper important. Bittersweet as it is, this is good to learn now!
Best of luck with it, Matt.
Harm-wise, it might work to make as simple a change as de-emphasising physical injury and making everything more serious than it might be in a Blades game. Worth a thought, anyway.