Testing character sheets and random dungeons

This past couple months we have moved from playing the game only among the designers to actually call our other RPG friends. They have played other RPGs, but they had never seen our app, didn’t know about our setting or classes so it’s a much better way to see if everything is more or less understandable.

It’s always impossible to really tell how your products work until someone who has never seen them tries to use them (and completely fails to understand how to do it correctly because your design was not easy to use).

We were testing several aspects of the game, but my personal main objective was to do another test of the character creation process. I wanted to get my players to go from a blank character sheet to play-ready in less than 5 minutes. It certainly took a few tries but we finally managed to do it within the target time.

The hex-crawl generation tool was already good enough several months back but creating characters was still a bit cumbersome. Besides, we are still retouching the classes, moving around abilities and skills and that changes quite a lot of other things in the game.

The character sheet structure is probably now finalized. We obviously need to send it to the art and layout department but for now it’s pretty much done.

We’ve based the overall idea of the layout in the Blades in the Dark playbooks. No need to copy any text for classes, powers, skills, etc., just fill out the info you are going to roll or calculate, stats, HP, etc. That alone probably saves an hour or so.

The basic Shadowdark values (including gear and equipment) will be identical and go on the right side of the sheet. The middle part will be the “Playbook-ish” section with the classes already pre-filled. And the left side will be the new part that gives characters personality quirks.

I also thought the helper sheets from Daggerheart that you put behind your character sheet and have all the rules you need is an absolutely brilliant idea so I plagiarized that exactly and was very successful.

We were also testing the dungeon generation tool. Just like the character creation, this has been pushed many times because we didn’t have any numbers for the classes or items so there was nothing to put inside de dungeons.

Now we kinda have some more realistic numbers, and the generator now has a lot of info and pseudo-lore for each random dungeon. All these ideas were a mix between OFCOURSE Morkborg with some Perilous Wilds, Black Hack, The Sandbox Generator and a couple others. Just like on the overworld, I wanted the tool to give the GM a lot of usable ideas so there is a lot of material to work with.

• The character creation time is below 5 min, so that’s fantastic.

• Dungeon generation is ok but we discovered quite a lot of problems with the numbers of monsters and treasures so that still needs some work.

• Classes also need some work still, their starting powers seem a bit generic at the moment.

The work continues!!