Pulpy! - Home Brew Play Test
I've decided to host a game down in Jacksonville at Skirmish Game Con the weekend of March 1st. I've been wanting to host a light pulp-style game for a few years now and of course there were many struggles to cope with. Struggles such as which rules, formulating an enjoyable scenario, creating interesting characters and motivations... that sort of thing.
So, since last Fall's con up in Raleigh, I've started checking boxes and I think I have a working solution. I have a good scenario for six players, characters and a game! The hard part was crafting a game mechanic suitable for a convention. One of my convention game pet peeves is the rules-heavy game that the players don't understand completely. Only the GM has a book and he has to constantly refer to it. It sucks and detracts from the experience. My design goal was simple - the game had to be able to be explainable, in its totality, within five minutes. Move, shoot, melee, other things. No books to rifle through, no rules situations to look up. I've hit my goal and dadgummit, it's a fine game. My wife gifted me with a few hours of her time on Saturday evening for a thorough play test and we put Pulpy! through its paces.
My other goals for the play test were to work out terrain, setup areas, play balance, travel distances, etc. I got my answers well enough to not be embarrassed come March.
I took many pictures of the layout so I can refer back to them later. A lovely beach with some jungles and a hillside secret laboratory.
Automata and Drones out to greet the infiltrators!
Some action in the sand and around a ruined building.
Heroes ascending the hillside.
A showdown in the hideout!
The play test was very successful. It revealed some weaknesses that were easily addressed. I tweaked force composition and will re-arrange the start positions of some of the forces so they're able to get into some action more quickly. So nice to get the Steampunk minis out for some Steampulp. I'm slotted for 9am Saturday morning, March 2nd. Very exciting. https://skirmishgamecon.com
Nice looking layout and certainly some nice goals for solving convention game rule problems. Best of luck and please share another writeup if you will.
ReplyDeleteI'm a 100% solo gamer and would like to chat with you about the mechanics. I'm always looking for new ideas, approaches, considerations, simplifying assumptions, game designer's thoughts and so on.
Also willing to write up recommendations for anyone trying to use them solo if that's of interest to you. Happy to sign any non-disclosure agreement you might like if you are thinking of marketing them. I'm terrement@aol.com.
Cheers!
I'll be happy to share the game mechanics I've put together for Pulpy with you. It might be a few weeks since right now the majority of it exists in spreadsheets and text files that wouldn't make much sense to anyone else. Once they're in a more presentable format, I'll send them along.
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