At the Games on Demand event at KapCon 2009, I got to run, for the first time, Duty & Honour in a convention environment. Out of all the games arrayed on our GoD table, this was one of the ones I really wanted people to sample. I was therefore pretty pleased when we got to play it on the Sunday.

2009 saw the second year of the Games on Demand room (or, rooms, this time round) at KapCon. Our facilitating team from last year was boosted by the addition of Simon Carryer and Gregor Hutton. This meant that, overall, we had seven people able to facilitate and talk about games. It gave a lot more latitude if people wanted to take a session or two off, play in games, run to get coffee etc.

1. 'Company' IDs.

Since I first put finger to keyboard, about 18 months ago my publishing 'ID' was going to be Omnihedron Productions. Its a nod of the head to both the wonderful world of Zenith by Grant Morrison and it was integrally connected to the generic system I was going to use with my first game, MI:666. In a true show of 'cart before the horse' of course, MI:666 has been consigned to the large lever arch file of doom and Duty & Honour has become the centre of my gaming world.

Oh this one could get fruity.

A question came up last night during our D&H test regarding game balance and characters of differing experience. In D&H you choose how many campaigns you have served and that gives you a number of points to spread around. The more campaigns, the more points. Whilst the seperation between raw recruit and grizzled veteran is far closer than it was before there is still a gap.

Mike Sands, Jason Pollock, Stefan Tyler and myself got together here in Wellington to play test the latest draft of 'Duty & Honour' by Neil Gow. First off, there were a lot of positives expressed round the table but, as is the way of these things, there is a lot of stuff that needs re-written, changed or fundamentally altered in some way. Then again, that's only to be expected, as the game is still at a very early stage of development and I believe this was the first external play test.

I had the lads around for the first playtest of the new version of Duty and Honour and wow - was that a brutal, heart-wrenching, annoying, eye-opening and fundamentally WONDERFUL experience.

First up, anyone that has printed out a copy of the game already to playtest I have to say that I'm sorry but so much of that game is utter pants and needs to be fixed. Skills that have no purpose, stats that have no purpose (stats with no purpose ffs!), missing uses for Talents and a chargen system that can simply be done better and quicker. I was stunned.