After poking around with the text for Six Bullets for what seems like an eternity, I've finally got it to a stage where I'm happy for people who are not me to have a look at and see if it makes any sense. I'm fairly comfortable with how the game plays, and a few people who've never played with me have got fun out of it using the text alone as their guide. But I still feel the need for others to take a look at the text, make sure it makes sense, and even take it for a spin and see if it works for them.

So, literally within a day of requesting the playtest doc, the Pompey crew have returned an awesome actual play/playtest report of Six Bullets. I doff my hats to you all. I owe you a game.

The actual play report and playtest feedback itself can be found at UKRPG at the link above, but for my own future reference, I'll post my responses to the questions here as well. I'm interested in everyone's take on the comments below, not just those who played, so please post away!

Hiya

Folks at the Pompey Crew, but mainly me, want to play "Six Bullets for Vengeance".

I've crabbed around the internet reading AP reports and looking for The Game Itself, but all I've found is this PDF, which looks unfinished and out of date. Is SB4V still a goer? If so, can I have the latest version of The Game Itself so that we can take it for a spin? Ideally we want to play it before Conception... I will of course post an AP report so that y'all can get feedback and stuff.

I had a lovely surprise when I went by Story Games this morning, as there was some actual play posted for Six Bullets for Vengeance from Sam Hawken! This is doubly surprising, because I haven't really solicited any external playtesters yet, so this makes it the first blind playtest.

So I thought I'd link to Die By the Gun, part 1 and part 2.

One of the things that has come out of the past few playtests is the need for information about the antagonists and revelations to be presented clearly to all the players.

The revelation map was the first way of presenting this information, alongside all the information about a given scene, but this got confusing at times.

In the Spodley playtest I also introduced an antagonist sheet for each antagonist, divided into chapters to keep the information clearly laid out.

One comment was that the antagonists only used a small bit of their sheet, if any at all, so Malcolm suggested it be combined with the revelation map. I didn't quite go this far, instead rolling all the antagonist information and scene information into a single sheet. The protagonist has their own sheet, and the revelations have a sheet of their own, along with space for reward dice.

So last night I ran a playtest of Six Bullets for Vengeance with my regular gaming group. It was a spectacular failure, but a fascinating, if frustrating, playtest.

First, a little bit of background on the group. With the exception of one of the other guys, the group is very firmly entrenched in traditional roleplaying games – we normally play Earthdawn, WFRP, Savage Worlds or something similar. They’re curious enough about indie games to let me run a one-off of something every month or so, but I’ve yet to find one they’ll accept wholeheartedly. It’s frustrating at times, but for the most part we have fun regardless.