Grandcon 2017 Retrospective

Leading up to Grandcon was a challenging time for me. I had just introduced a wide arc of rules changes into Hostargo - so much so that my character sheet and character abilities were no longer valid! The pre-made characters I had been working on in the past had to be scrapped, and brand new ones created in their place.

On the bonus side, the new ruleset allowed me to get new characters up and running in just a couple of weeks (including creating interesting abilities from scratch). Some of the major simplifications I made were a big help with that While I still have a relatively large number of "numbers", for everything from a character's rolling potential to their armor score, I boiled them down to six key stats that everything else is derived from. In addition, the more free form skill system meant I was able to simply describe the characters that I was imagining. Lastly, the simplified damage system meant I wasn't antagonizing over various weapon and armor builds.

Luckily, I finished early enough to get in a couple playtests before the con. These helped flesh out the characters even more, and make sure the numbers weren't <completely> broken. Now, the con was the "real" playtests, as with mostly random people I got a much better understanding of how the game works with the "public".

Could-have-been-better was my main thought for the weekend. The extremely deadly style of the game just didn't work out for the tactical combat I wanted. The already simplified damage system needs to be simplified even further (more on that in a later blog). The "help a friend" mechanic needs overhauling. Luck and gears need to be tweaked to not be so wonky. Character skills were a little too wishy washy, and some abilities definitely need to be reworked.

Overall the games were fun, however. The theme, story, encounters, and characters all seemed to jive with each other to form an enjoyable play experience. The biggest mechanical success was the tick system, where I introduced ticks (action points) as simple actions (move, aim, attack) and reactions (duck behind cover, help an ally). You get two ticks at the start of your turn, and one tick on the start of the GMs turn. On your turn, you can perform actions (or reactions), and on the GM's turn you can interrupt at any time to perform a reaction. Likewise, enemies could act on their turn and generally perform a single reaction on their own turn. This was simple enough to keep in everyone's mind, deep enough to form strategies, and dynamic enough to keep the action flowing without anyone feeling like they were sitting out for long periods of time.

People left with some great laughs and memorable moments. The Hostargo theme continues to provide all sorts of ridiculous but awesome experiences, and I'm excited to continue hammering out the mechanics to work for that.

Hostargo Rewritten

When I started out with Hostargo I had a handful of interesting mechanical ideas. I put them into action, but needed some sort of setting to play in. As time grew, so did my setting, and the setting of Hostargo bloomed into something my playtesters started enjoying more than the system itself.

I began to focus on making the game work towards that setting. The adventures, the character designs, and even the rules were all being bent towards making the Hostargo setting come to life. As more playtests go by, it became clear that some, if not a lot of the mechanics were actually getting in the way of that.

So this year I started from scratch - again - in the sense that I went back to square one and asked each rule if it belonged to Hostargo. Unfortunately, most did not, and I have basically gutted and rewritten the entire game of Hostargo in the last few months. People have asked me for the latest changes, but that's a hard question. While there are a lot of similarities, the game has evolved past anything I had created before.

This time, I can actually answer a better question: why Hostargo? Why should anyone care about this game over the thousands of others that exist? Why would anyone want to buy this game? Well, I made a sort of sell-sheet in order to outline just that. Please take a look and let me know what you think (feel free to comment on the doc itself)!