#hellguts

[adams-r1b]

Is it gay to go steal your boss's daughter back from hell's digestive tract?

[mitchelldailygames]

HELLFORGED

I recently put out the HELLFORGED SRD, the system behind HELLGUTS and HELLDROPPERS, and three games made with it! I’ll be talking about all of that in this post.

First off, the HELLFORGED Jam is live now! Come join it and make a HELLFORGED game or content for an existing HELLFORGED game!

Now for the system itself. HELLFORGED games are geared for providing badass, over-the-top results for rolls as multiple successes stack together. It was created with combat in mind, but I would be so down to see a system made that didn’t focus on combat while still providing big, awesome moments. If you want to, you could also make a HECKFORGED or an H-FORGED game and avoid the word “hell” in your game all together.

Packaged with the HELLFORGED SRD and also available on its own is the XHell. XHell is a one-page HELLFORGED alien invasion game designed to show off the basics of HELLFORGED and give designers an easily-hackable jumping off point.

HELLMECH is a HELLFORGED mech game! It’s unique spin is that you’re playing as a black ops mech team, taking on missions throughout the galaxy that you could be disavowed for. To add to the political intrigue is a system of getting advantages from your crew, but risking something dramatic happening with a crewmate in the process, including death and betrayal. There’s a modular system for mech building and lots of options for putting together your mech weapons. I think it turned out really well!

Finally, I just put out HellTrain as part of the One-Page RPG 2024 Jam using the optional theme of “transport”. I wrote it on a Twitch stream where I showed how to reskin XHell to make a game. It turned out being a pretty rad sci-fi/gunslinging game about defending a train from bandits, hellhounds, and giant rattlesnakes. There is also a whole thing with souls being swapped between clone bodies that becomes a kind of character selection thing.

If any of that interests you, check them out! If you’re a designer or think you could try it out, I’d love to see you on the HELLFORGED Jam! The jam is open at least through the end of the year.

--Daily

[empty-he4rt]

hellguts replied to your post: I should just die tbh.

oh no you shouldn’t!

hm:(

[younggpilgrim]

I wish I could just hang out with a group of guys without arguments or disagreements. I prefer them to girls. I feel i can act myself without them thinking bad shit.

[mitchelldailygames]

One of my first playtest steps for most games with some kind of tactical combat is what I call the "couple goblins" test.

I make a character. I have them take on one or a small group of basic enemies, and see how it goes. In fantasy games these are often goblins, in HELLGUTS they were ghouls, and in Heroes of Song they will probably be hobkins. They fight to the death and as if it's the only encounter either side will ever have. They use all of their abilities and spend all of their resources.

Sometimes this is enough for me to go, "this move is way too powerful," or, "that's too many numbers to juggle," or, "I should be sure to give this kind of advice in the rules," and I can get all that without having to go through recruiting a bunch of players and doing super formal playtesting (which I try to do later).

Playtesting Your TTRPG

So, you've built your own system, or a module for an existing system, or even a set of houserules you want to share with people. What do you do next?

Often, but not always, the next step is to playtest it.

Real quick though, three disclaimers:

-Playtesting isn't always possible. If you can't playtest something, you can't playtest it. That's okay.

-Also, rigorous playtesting isn't always possible. If you can playtest your game a little but you can't dump 100+ hours into it, that's also okay. Do what you can.

-Finally, there's no definitive one right way to playtest. What I'm sharing is my approach, but please do what works best for you.

Now, to get started, you need players.

If you've got friends who are willing to help out, great. Recruit 'em.

If you've got friends but you're not sure how they'll feel about the game, ask them.

If you don't have friends who are willing to help out, you can simulate some players. Imagine a person and walk them through the steps of your game, or play yourself as both the players and the GM.

Now, when you playtest, your goal is this: to have fun with the game.

Try to get through a session. Engage the players. Tell an interesting story together.

For any element that breaks but doesn't crash the game, make a note of it and circle back later.

If any of the mechanics break completely in half, rendering the game unrunnable, that's fine. Stop and fix things only to the extent that you can continue play. You don't need to get everything perfect.

When the session's over, ask the players what they thought about the system and if there were any parts of it that they felt strongly about.

Sometimes their answers will tell you as much about the players as they do about your system, but all feedback is good feedback.

If a player is frustrated because they wanted to power-game and your system wouldn't let them, that's useful information! There might be types of players your game clicks with more than others, and maybe you can add some text to let readers know to prepare for this.

Similarly, if a player is constantly getting confused by a dice mechanic, maybe there's another way to explain that mechanic. Try to draft some other versions of that text.

Of course, if the players liked some part of the system, that's worth recording too. If the players light up at your fishing minigame, maybe you can develop that minigame a little bit more.

What you *don't* need to do at this point is worry about whether your game is good, or stress out if the mechanics hit a snag.

The goal of playtesting is to improve a game, so it doesn't matter if the game is good at the start of the process.

I have had systems break in truly spectacular ways, every single mechanic imploding, the moment someone enters a car or tries to assist on a roll. So really don't sweat it if you find some bugs.

If you've got friends helping you, and if they're good friends, they're not going to give you (too much) grief over the system breaking.

And if you're testing by yourself, then you've got even less of nothing to worry about.

After you've gotten your feedback, the final step is making changes to your game. Fiddle with the mechanics, add or remove material, and generally revise the text based on what worked for you as a GM and what the players liked or disliked.

When you're done, you might have an entirely new-looking game, so provided you can keep playtesting (see the earlier note about rigorous playtesting,) schedule another session and see if there's anything more you want to change.

[mitchelldailygames]

Heroes of Song Devlog Part 13: Bosses & Playtest 3

Blows the dust off of this blog.

Where were we?

In the last post I said something like, “I feel like I got some momentum.” That was February 4th. Life’s been busy, both inside and outside my game design world, so there hasn’t been a lot of active work on Heroes of Song, but there’s also a lot I was planning on talking about but haven’t gotten around to yet.

I actually wrote this the first part of this and meant to post it before the last devlog. It relates pretty directly to the third playtest, though, so wrapping them up together works out.

Bosses

I’ve added some bosses to the test document! Remember the design principles:

The heroes are cute.

Kindness matters.

The world is weird.

Sometimes you don’t fight. Sometimes you do.

Health is hearts.

I think this is bringing in mostly principles 3, 4, and 5.

I’ve been working on one of the most Zelda-like aspects of the game, bosses! I’ve been having fun coming up with super specific vulnerabilities that could be acquired in the same dungeon where they’re found. I think these weaknesses are pretty clearly described in the stat blocks for these bosses in the test document, though I do have some unique items I plan to add at some point that would provide more options for unique vulnerabilities to exploit.

The bosses I added are:

Mysterimoth: An illusion-based moth adversary that makes duplicates of itself and shoots beams out of the eye-patterns on its wings. It’s vulnerable to strong winds, such as the Gale song. It also has a larval form that could be faced as a mini-boss.

Mirror Crab: A scuttling, shelled creature with a noticeable vulnerable spot on its belly and some obvious weakness to the Shatter song.

Vault: A hulking tank of a boss that litters the battlefield with bombs and keeps its weak point locked away in a chamber on its chest that just begs to be hit with a Lockpick song.

I think these all feel appropriately Zelda-y. I could picture myself encountering them in any Zelda-like. I also made an attempt to leave them open-ended enough that Songkeepers and Heroes could come up with their own ways of defeating these enemies.

Playtest Session 3

The last playtest I did featured an encounter with Vault.

This was with my usual game night group, so our goal was more about having fun than gathering a lot of information, but I think it was still a useful session. Players were a wide range of different character options, including some that are not in any document out there. It was my first time playing with four heroes so it was the most capable and powerful group I’ve had so far.

The session revolved around a desert town that fell under attack by bandits who stole the magical item that allowed them to grow crops. The bandit leader was a vulture guy and many of the avikin and furrikin were animals you might find in the desert (hares, coyotes, hyenas, hawks). The players had to first run off the lingering bandits in the town and then go after the main group and the stolen artifact.

After handily defeating the bandits in town, the players found the bandit’s hideout in an old fort/bank called the Keyless Keep. There were some creative uses of abilities, such as the bard blowing enemies off the walls of the fort with their Gale song. There was an easy bell puzzle that taught the Lockpick song and unlocked the underground portion of the keep.

Inside was a series of doors that needed to be unlocked while exploring and relocked in a particular configuration so that a the final vault door could be opened. The puzzle… kind of didn’t work based on how I had it written out, but I think has some potential. There were some extra encounters mixed in with navigating the dungeon and some special items to be found.

Finally, the heroes encountered Vault who was holding the special magic item in their chest. Vault maybe went down a little fast, but they did have to make a point to use the song they learned to open up Vault’s weak point. The fact they wracked up as much damage as quickly as they did also had a lot to do with effectively using runes on their weapons and other items and abilities well.

It was a fun session with a few takeaways. One was that giving dungeon design tools to Songkeepers is going to be quite a bit of work. I’m not sure I’m super confident in my personal dungeon design, so helping other people design dungeons is kind of intimidating. My other takeaway was that these bosses could probably be tougher. They don’t need to hit harder, but should be able to take a few more hits, especially tankier examples like Vault.

Wrap-Up

I’m not sure when I’ll have more to share. It’s been a busy (and, frankly, really stressful) time outside of game design. In my game design life, this has kind of meant that I’ve had more capacity for lower-stakes projects that I can put up on Itch without worrying too much about them making back the money I put into them. So, things are kind of stalled on Heroes of Song until I feel like I have the capacity for it again, but it will get picked up again.

If you want to check out what I’ve been working on most recently, pick up HELLDROPPERS, a game using the system from HELLGUTS inspired by Helldivers. I think it does a pretty good job getting the Helldivers feel without being overly granular.

That’s all I have for you for now!

The world is weird; kindness matters.

--Daily

[mitchelldailygames]

Heroes of Song: Devlog Part 1

I have a lot of irons in the fire right now, so I’m going to talk a bit about the design process for one of them.

The Inspiration

I watched a video about Tunic. It looked brilliant. I couldn’t get that fox, the mysterious world, and the squiggly writing that didn’t tell you anything out of my head. Then I remembered my experience playing (and rarely beating) various Legend of Zelda games. Then I remembered A Short Hike, then Haven Park, then Wanderhome, then Blackbirds (the Batts one). I ended up knowing five things about what I was going to make:

The heroes are cute.

Kindness matters.

The world is weird.

Sometimes you don’t fight. Sometimes you do.

Health is hearts.

Side note: I’ve since played Tunic. It rules. I don’t know if I’ll beat it because it’s been awhile since I’ve beaten a hard game, but I’m having a great ride.

Dice

I’ve been using all the different dice shapes a decent amount lately. HELLGUTS (not cute, not kind, yes weird but only in the Doom way, all fight, health is guts) uses d12s because they are chunky. A Hotshots-inspired game about soldiers in a galactic war wip (not cute, not kind, weird galaxy if you want it, lots of fight, health is… well, it’s complicated) is using a d20 because it’s more than a little OSR-like. 1e (not cute, maybe kind, maybe weird, maybe fight but not recommended, no health just death) used a d20 because it’s a spoof idea of what the very first fantasy roleplaying experience was.

But this game has cute heroes. It is inspired by Legend of Zelda, games for childhood (many of which I’ve played as an adult). I wanted kids and people fresh-eyed to the hobby to be able to pick it up quickly. The six-sided die is simply the most accessible die. Yes, there are dice-rolling apps and dice are cheap, but downloading an app or searching for specific dice are still extra steps. Everyone knows what a six-sided die is. I wanted this to be a game you could play by stealing the dice out of a board game you already had if need be. This would end up being a 2d6 system because I wanted a little more room for difficulties and modifiers, but we’re rolling with cubes here.

We’re going to keep these logs relatively short. I’ll talk about the next step for me next time. Take care. Remember, the world is weird; kindness matters.

--Daily

[younggpilgrim]

future lul.

When I'm at uni I wanna have a flat with my sister. I hate living here. Me and my sister just hang out all day on our laptops and cook together and go out with friends. It'd be crazy fun. - NO HOMO. love ya bby.

[younggpilgrim]

Coral: The good thing about porn on tumblr is that you don't get virus'.

Me: You don't on porn sites either though.

Coral: oh, you don't?

Me: -erotic paedophile face-

[empty-he4rt]

hellguts replied to your post: NEED SOMEBODY TO HELP ME PLEASE THOUGH

You can get some good foundation for covering them up, or a cream of some sort that will fade them

Thank you lovely x

[younggpilgrim]

bacon creepers.