Strife Player: Sean Nittner
Drivers: Three brave KublaCon attendees
System: Ride or Die (hack of AGON)
Playtesting Ride or Die: Netherzone Drifters, a hack of AGON!
Playtest Feedback
- Rerolling 1s, 2s, and 3s often leads to the strife player’s total be 6+1d6 (tested it on Anydice and there’s a 55.56% change of getting a 6 when rolling 2d6, but that drops to 36% change of an 8 on 2d8 and 26.53% of a 10 on 2d10). Here’s all the die pools and results I had over the weekend (Bold results were died that rolled max but strife was too low to unbind, Red results were unbound results):
- Intro (2d8+2d6) – Result was 12 (6+6 on d6)
- Detour (3d8+1d6) – Result was 8 (8 on d8, couldn’t unbind)
- Best of the Best (2d8+2d6) – Result was 8 (8 on a d8, and 6+2 on d6)
- The Gauntlet (2d10+1d8+1d6) – Result was 12 (6+6 on d6)
- Descent of the Damned* (1d10+3d8+1d6) – Result was 10 (6+4 on d6)
- If felt like every time I was rolling d6 strife dice, I was exploding and getting very high numbers (12,8,12,10,12,9). I think that felt very daunting, but…
- The heroes won every contest, though often spending massive amounts of divine favor to do it, and often only one hero won at all (the others suffering pathos).
- One hero winning an the others failing was a pretty good strategy. 1 pathos is better than 1 glory if you’re playing for that big pathos die.
- Bonds were great and though there was one player who had some trouble with them, once I read aloud what was on the character sheet “Bonds I may call upon” it clicked with them. Completely removed the confusion during the achievements that Oaths caused.
- The fun train never stopped. We were riding high the entire time.
- After the intro, Hype was 12, 0, 0 so there was no clear leader to. The two heroes with 0 Hype disagreed on whether or not to do the detour, so I had them roll off on a name die. Since these two were bitter rivals, this worked great.
- I added the Strife die to all the rolls (Intro and on). I’m not sure if that was the intent, but it worked fine.
- The players loved the scene cards so much. After the game two of them told me that their big frustration with a lot of story games are those moments when the GM says “What do you do?” and there is a big pause in the game, or worse a protracted conversation about it. They loved picking things and then filling in the details. They also loved knowing the difficulty and reward.
- * We ran out of time so the Descent into the Damned was just one Contest (no showdown, no interlude), and then we had to skip the end of session, and end of island stuff as well. The game had several interruptions so I think we probably had 2.5 hours (maybe less) of game time. They had a blast even without the Showdown mechanics.
- As a strife player I didn’t know what the scenes were going to be (I only read the intro while they were making characters, and I didn’t read the scenes until they picked them). It was still both easy and fun to run. That is a huge success for me.
- The players asked for a Mythic Zone (horse drawn chariot) which I think would be a hilarious nod towards tying the games together.
- With zero promoting from me, one of the players (who was the zamboni driver of hell) revealed himself in the final race as the Grim Reaper. He was the only one who hadn’t picked to be a legend and he was out of Boost. I told him, well clearly, he’s now a legend. He marked four F8, and used the extra 3 boost to roll his redline and won the race. The other players were ecstatic because they all wanted him to win. It was fucking awesome.
- Wanted one blank strength. In our case our Zamboni Driver from Hell wanted Oblivion as a strength.
