As we continue to develop A Town Called Malice, we’ve been running multiple playtest sessions to try out different scenarios with different types of player types. Luckily I have a pretty big swath of people I know willing to test things out. This past weekend, I did a playtest with an eclectic group that would not normally game together, so bringing them together in one session was an exciting opportunity. To give you some background –

• My buddy Logan is well-versed in Vampire: The Masquerade and probably what you’d call a “thespian”  player type – he likes characters and doing interesting things with them.
• Frank has a very analytical mind, a “Problem-solver” that takes a few moments when confronted with in-game challenges to think it through and come up with potential solutions.
• Shannon is a “social player” – she likes games because she likes the social aspects of coming together as a group and trying out stuff. I always like running games for Shannon because of this, she’s literally up for anything.
• Nathan was a new player, that had not played RPG’s in quite a while so he was a clean slate of sorts – experienced with the concept but this was brand new to him on every level.

Considering this was the first time for all four of them in playing Malice, especially with the Story Pillar mechanics, I was really curious to see how it played with diverging styles of play, brought together in one session. It worked really well, and I had a lot of good feedback from everyone, watching how they fit into their individual roles that were different than their normal comfort zones.

Talking about the system a bit, one of the aspects of a character in Malice is the Personal Goal of the archetype – In addition to taking actions to address one of the Story Pillars (the Body, Darkness and Event, as you can see in the photo), players have the option of working on their pre-defined Personal Goal in order to gain Character Points (Character Points are the game currency that let you improve/add elements to the game). For example, the Medic’s Personal Goal is to “Save lives”, while the Criminal’s Personal Goal is to “Gain the advantage”. Each Goal however is intended to be open-ended, allowing the players to determine what that means and how they want to act on it. By playing the Criminal, Frank (the problem solver), frequently took a moment to figure out the angle on each situation, and working out how he could get the upper hand on a situation). Logan, as the Law, was probably the most conservative in terms of character activity, because he was consistently working toward “Maintaining Order”. This was a little more complex in earlier versions, when I realized I was overthinking the whole idea. I needed to let the players run with their goal however they saw fit. And by making it a lighter touch, it was more nimble and flexible as a game mechanic.

Other smaller changes had also been implemented – right now, I am wanting to make sure The Event doesn’t get lost in the pursuit of the Darkness or investigating the Body. Still building that up, and it’s definitely getting better.

In other matters, we have begun the arduous task of finding a front cover – we’ve reached out to a few people but we’re still looking. More on that as we continue.