Grayboxing

We’re doing a weekly test on Fridays (alas, not every Friday, Flee, Mortals! and ARCADIA still come first) and tinkering with the rules for our new game and I want to make sure folks understand exactly what we’re doing and why.

You’re gonna see us talking about actual play. This isn’t paper-design, we’re actually trying out our ideas, as we have them, in a real gameplay environment. Here’s a dungeon, here’s some goblins, let’s go. Play. Record what worked and what didn’t. Revise. Play again!

So you’re gonna hear about ‘the Tactician’ or ‘the Conduit’ and you’ll get glimpses of how we think they’ll work. Like the Conduit has prayers that generate Wrath and prayers that generate Virtue and they can use these resources to attack/debuff enemies (Wrath) or heal/buff allies (Virtue) or combinations thereof. And maybe they roll the cosmic die at the beginning of every turn? Not for Drama, just to generate more Wrath (Chaos) and/or Virtue (Law).

That’s cool, we like that. But is that “how this character works?”

No.

Simulation

Because right now, even though we’re “playing” tacticians & talents & conduits & beasthearts, they're not real classes. They're simulations of our classes. They look cool! And are fun to play, but in reality we don’t have a single class level designed yet. We don’t even know how class levels work yet. Sure, we have a bucket of cool abilities labeled “Tactician” and they all describe “things we think a tactician should be able to do.” But we only did that because we needed SOMETHING to test our core rules with.

By “core rules” I mean;

• Custom dice with a small range of successes instead of a WIDE range of numbers.
• Attributes ARE dice. “Agility 2” means roll 2 attribute dice.
• Being proficient with something means you roll the proficiency die with a unique range of results.
• Facings include successes, one crit, and surges.
• Testing what the Crit does. A singular “take another action” effect that can only happen on one facing of the proficiency die representing being “in the zone.”
• Testing what surges do. Several facings on the attribute dice have surges, including facings with 2 surges, and they represent a burst of adrenaline, insight, or literally magic. “And something cool happens!”
• Your core actions do not require an attack roll, just roll for impact.
• Armor reduces incoming damage by an amount proportional to how much slower it makes you.
• Movement is important and many abilities move people around the battlefield and even slam enemies into walls or statues. Being hard to move is one way to be a tank (see Armor, above).
• Each side acts as a team, no individual-initiative.
• Each class has some resource to manage, and their coolest stuff requires a lot of resources, so battles get MORE interesting the longer they go. Some classes can tweak or ignore this notion in special ways to support a specific archetype.
• Some abilities are analog, affect many targets, and can be resisted. I roll for Impact, each target rolls to see how much of it they resist. The excess is applied as damage. (fire breath, lightning bolt, Rain of Daggers)
• Some abilities are digital and affect 1 target. Roll stat vs stat and if I win, you suffer the effect (hold person, polymorph, grappling).

That’s a lot! It is a LOT to test, it’s way too much to test while at the same time trying to test actual character design. Because real characters are pretty complicated. They have a Class, sure, but also…

• An ancestry representing physical differences between species (humans can’t breath fire!)
• A culture representing the various skills people from your part of the world tend to spend their time on (swampy country does not tend to produce excellent cavalry).
• A Career Path representing the choices they made growing up that led to them becoming a 1st level adventurer (like, university, or the military, or just…our farm was attacked by goblins and I sought out a legendary swordmaster to train me for revenge!)
• Skills that can be affected by some of the above.
• Attributes that can be affected by some of the above.
• Eventually, magic items that can break the rules and grant entirely new abilities.
• Eventually a Team or Organization that grants abilities that make your Team feel unique and different from other adventuring companies.
• And probably other stuff I’m forgetting.

We could try to figure out ALL of the above, characters and combat and core rules, before ever testing anything. Do it all on paper, write it all up in design docs, then argue about it all, then build something that incorporates ALL that design, and do our first test. I have worked on games designed this way.

It’s a bad process. You end up with a bunch of good ideas you haven’t tested, each dependent on other good ideas you also haven’t tested. With the result that A: it immediately falls apart and you don’t even get 20 minutes into your first test and B: it’s sort of impossible to figure out “which bit should we try and fix” since you just built a huge Jenga tower with every part resting on some other part.

As opposed to the process we’re using which meant after only working on the game for like a week and a bit, we were able to play an entire low-level adventure and it went okay. It worked, and it was fun. Huge advancement in a very short period of time!

We’re able to do that because when it comes to this huge box of features and design we call “a character” we just stubbed in some stuff that was quick and dirty, but also actually reflected our ideas of how these classes should work.

Grayboxing

In video games, this is called Grayboxing, or Graybox Testing. You just stub in temp assets to test your core gameplay loops. Because if you can get the team excited to test the game every day, when it’s literally just untextured gray boxes (hence the name) with no music, no dialog, nothing (or very little, like choice of gear) differentiating one character from another, if that’s fun…your game is gonna be fun. It might take a while to get there! But you’re gonna make it.

The practical upshot of all this, and the reason for this post, is that when you hear us talking about the Tactician, or the Cosmic Die, these are just ideas we like. And we’ve cooked up some temp design to act as a placeholder for the real thing (which we do not yet know how works) so we have something to use while we test the foundational principles of the game.

So we know two things; Those ideas are going to evolve as we continue testing. But however they evolve, they’re already pointing in a certain direction. Will the actual tactician be able to do all and exactly and only these things at 1st level? No way. But will they be doing stuff like this? Yes. Ditto the Cosmic Die and the Conduit and all that stuff.

That's it, folks! Just thought it would be fun to talk about "the stuff we're testing" and "the stuff we needed to stubb in to test the other stuff."