ACME Test...

...went pretty well. There were some connection issues that may stem from my current set-up that will have to be addressed one way or the other.

At one point my east-west aphasia did lead to a momentary confusion about how many zombies were still undead and kicking, but all in all the test went better than I expected in that area. I know how I made the mistake and can watch out for it in the future. It was also in the more complex of the two battles that I staged.

(I had four planned, but with the connection issues things took about twice as long as they should have.)

The ACME rules seemed to work well. There was some distance-fudging and some judgment calls involved, but that was expected. Nobody pulled out a power that made me go, "Wait, how can this be applied?" I rarely had to think before answering when somebody asked who they could reach.

One thing I had planned on doing but forgot about (and that moofable, who observed the session to give me a neophyte's perspective on the proceedings, noted to me that this would helpful) was giving a textual update of the combatants and their positions after each round and after major changes/upheavals. That I think would speed things up for the players and help prevent errors on my part.

Those are procedural things that can be easily fixed/improved. I think the rules are playable and ready. I have some concerns that it might be too easy to target blasts with the narrow/wide rule, but it's not something I think needs immediate adjustment. It'll take repeated play to really determine that, and the best way to do that would be to "go live" with the rules and play them repeatedly....actually, I have been thinking about this since the test ended, see below.

The connection was really bad by the time we gave up (and right before a big climax: giant zombie bear versus kynn's spirit bear) so I didn't get to have a whole big breakdown session at the end or anything, but I think the playtesters enjoyed it. I'm sure they'd agree that getting a text summary of the battlefield would help.

For running actual games the connection thing might be an issue... I could solve it by making the games text only instead of voice, or by taking a computer downstairs where I can plug it in directly to the router. I'll take a look at both solutions. Now that I know the rules are playable I'm getting eager to start.

Playtesters: If you have any comments, questions about why something went a certain way, or other feedback, feel free to drop it here.

---

Update on close blasts: after some time reflecting on how well gamingdragon was able to use Howl of Fury as a minion cleanser, I've decided that the "narrow blast" mechanic does give players too much of a "shotgun scalpel" without giving enough up. Catching three enemies in a Close Blast 3 isn't a bad deal most of the time.

So to fix that, and more closely emulate how blasts get dropped on the map in regular play, it's going to work like this: you can pick one adjacent character (or "empty square") and say it's the origin square. Anyone else who's adjacent is safe. After that, it'll be resolved using the threat rules and common sense about who's where. There wasn't a time in the game that a blast was used where I didn't have a good enough sense of who was where to know if the Wizard was inside the tent pissing out or the other way around, as it were. In most situations where it wouldn't be possible to figure out who would or would not be hit (because everyone's all bunched up), it wouldn't be possible to drop a Blast 3 and not hit allies anyway.

Basically I overthought things. Blast doesn't need a lot of special handling, and the handling I used made it more powerful than it was meant to be.

Post Mortem of a Zombie Attack

While the ACME test did go well, the second encounter we did suffered some design flaws. Part of that comes from the fact that I drew it up again in a hurry after realizing I'd saved over it with one of the other potential encounters I designed. I should have taken another two minutes to get it right, but I was concerned with keeping everybody waking. It seriously didn't take that long to make it in the first place, thanks to the Adventure Tools/Monster builder so I didn't save much time by rushing the second time, and the monster selections ended up being not as good for the set-up.

The basic idea is something I'm happy with: the party is in the middle of a clearing, and every round another group of zombies bursts in from a random direction. There were, all told, 16 minions, a couple of generi-zombies, and a zombie gravedigger, plus the "big bad" at the end: a zombie hulk, which I repurposed as a giant zombie bear when it became clear that kynn's Spirit Bear was the crowd-pleasing animal sidekick of the night.

The basic design flaw that was there in the original version is that I made the clearing too big. Zombies are slow, unless they happen to be fast zombies, and I didn't have any fast zombies in the mix, before or after the redo. By the time the zombies reached where the party was clumped, the Strikers and the Wizard mostly took care of the minions and whittled down the leader of each group. There was never really the sense of being besieged that I was going for. By the time Zombie Bear was on the scene, the party had expended a number of dailies and encounter powers on the Digger, but they were very full up on healing resources and HP and there was nobody else standing but the minions who came in with ZB. It would have been a total grindfest if we'd continued.

So, if I use this again, here's what to do differently:

1. Smaller arena. The zombies need to be able to engage with characters in the center of it in one turn using a move-and-charge. If the party ends up moving off center (pulling away from a throng), they can end up further away than a single turn's movement, but then they're all the closer to zombies coming from the center of the woods.

2. Give the zombies artillery. They did in the first write-up... not one in every group but enough to make things different. If they had had artillery then the oversized arena would not have been as much of a problem. As it was, the two compounded.

3. More variety. The zombie gravedigger is interesting, but it's only got one encounter power, otherwise it's just a guy with a big stick. Again the original version was better, but not as good as it could be.

4. Less randomness. I was rolling random directions and random numbers of minions out of the total pool each time, but if I did this again I would plan things out to make sure the sense of being besieged from all sides is better conveyed.

5. Bring the big guy out sooner. It was supposed to be a climax, but if it arrives on stage too late it ends up being an anticlimax. And the players assume the special zombie with the fancy suit and and big city learning and dirty-encrusted shovel and ton of HPs is the main threat and spend too much effort neutralizing it, even though it's a one-encounter-trick pony. (Note to self: redesign that thing into a leader. It's got way too much potential for just Guy With Stick.) Really the fight should have been focused on Zombie Bear with the party in the middle, and waves of reinforcements arriving from the sides to demand the party's attention.

It was good as far as a test goes. I wanted a completely nonlinear battlefield to emphasize that "adjacent-near-close-far-extreme" aren't a set of five positions you move between, and it worked for that. It also exposed how much my east-west differentiation problem will affect things and how I can avoid that. But the encounter was not as interesting or challenging as it could have been. There needed to be some fast zombies and some throwing zombies in there, and, as mentioned, there needed to be a smaller arena.