The Department. - Playtesting Update
If you read our last post on The Department you might be wondering where the quick-start rules are.
I wanted to take the time and talk over why they are taking a little longer than planned and what has changed in the mean time.
We’ve been busy with the department, between writing and editing rules, playtesting and working on 3D assets, we’ve had a lot to work on.
We’ve had a lot of helpful feedback from playtesting and have decided to make a number of tweaks to the game.
This article gives a brief summary of what’s changed and what to expect coming up. We’ll be writing more in depth articles on specific lore, game mechanics and play through as we get closer to a release.
for the time being have a read through and if you’d like to get involved consider joining our discord for access to playtest rules and regular updates.
Why aren’t they here yet?
Whilst writing the quickstart rules it became apparent that some of the core mechanics of the game weren’t working how they were intended when first written.
a lot of elements had been added to the full rules that bloated the system and took it away from our original goal of having a fast playing, narrative focused game with simple and fun combat resolution mechanics.
Instead we had created a dense mechanics heavy game that called to be played a certain way.
So what’s changed?
We’ve taken the game back to its core, stripped out any unnecessary bloat and reworked areas that we felt worked against our goal for how the game should play.
We had designed a graphical dice system from the ground up for the game that we found through playtesting was actually limiting some of our decision making and lead us down a design path that didn’t quite fit the game as a whole.
We have decided to re-work the dice mechanic now using numerical dice for action resolution and a custom dice as a modifier to the resolution dice, this custom dice can be replaced by a numerical D6 with a simple look up table.
This does now mean that the whole game can be picked up a lot easier than before using dice you may already own.
Rather than just a rework of some mechanics we’ve taken the opportunity to re-evaluate the rules as a whole, taking a ground up approach to retain what we liked in the first place and tweaking or replacing elements we felt didn’t fit our design goal.
What’s next?
We are working as fast as possible to get the plain-text playtest document ready and into more players hands, this contains the core mechanics for Player vs Player games, with an introductory scenario and stats for several characters.
We are still working on the full ruleset and planning on implementing a number changes to be play tested before moving forward with more.
Once we’ve release the quick start rules we aim to release regular further advanced rules in zine style releases for playtesters, these will be living documents and see updates throughout the process.
The world of the department was designed to be lore-lite and act as a sandbox for the player to play out a number of different scenarios under the umbrella of the departments.
Despite starting off as this, we feel that the game has moved past that and can benefit from having a lore and narrative of its own, we have been working on populating the world of the department with characters and lore which we hope the game can benefit from.
We hope to release the final playtest ruleset through our discord soon with the advanced rules being released regularly after that point.
We’ll be posting more about the department the closer we get to release of the quick-start rules, in the meantime why not join us on the discord for more regular updates and a chance to have your say on the game.
Over and out,
Will