The official announcement has gone out from our publisher, and it’s incredibly exciting, and in all honesty, a little surreal. The impostor syndrome hits with some regularity, but this is real, this is happening, and we couldn’t be more proud!
We spent several days in town with GTG at the end of June, and had incredibly good progress. We were able to play through the entire roster of characters – including the core box characters two and three times each in some cases – with shining feedback in almost every case. Very little of the core roster changed, with most changes coming in small tweaks to the dice for some abilities that needed some balance help one way or another. We played through multiple scenario matches, some of which went over excellently, some that need another nudge in a different direction, and others that just need some more playtests to find a little more balance.
Cooperative play underwent a fairly major change involving the timing of when adversaries act in relation to the players’ characters. Having done most of our testing with 2-4 characters, we were a little floored when we sat down and they asked us if we could all play a six-player game. A good number of hours later, we modified how adversaries take actions in order to reduce the overhead of managing a target-rich environment, and played a setup that scales even better from 2-6 players than we thought possible.
Before we went to St. Louis, we had been playing with a new concept to help track the victory state of the game, as well as giving characters some way of feeling re-invigorated after they had been Knocked Down. We introduced a Trophy system where each character has a unique Trophy card with distinctive art, placed in a very specific area of the character’s board. When the character is knocked down, they would hand their trophy to the opposing team, revealing their Rally ability on their board. The character would therefore have a new, more desperate, enraged, or determined portrait that reflects their dire circumstances, as well as access to their new ability that will help them regain their footing and come back swinging, even in the late-game stages of a match. The opponents gain a clear, physical representation of how close they are to victory, as all matches’ win conditions are now centered around Trophies, and how they can be acquired. When we introduced this new addition to the system, it seemed to flow well and give players more motivation, as the victory tracking was no longer abstract tallies but a personal, characteristic piece of their chosen character.
Since our last post, we have made one further shift in the dice. No one liked the blanks on the d12s. Players enjoyed being able to take matters into their own hands and maximize their possibility of success, and having an absolute failure with no other effect wasn’t interesting, especially in the context of our largest die class. We chose to change the three blank faces to one hit alongside two conditional vitals, one each for Support and Opportunity. We also switched out a Hit face on the d4 for an opportunity, making the d4 the least optimal die, but easy to tack onto other rolls for an extra edge.
Also, we were formed one year ago today, so that’s exciting! We’ve had a roller coaster of a year, and are only further looking forward to what the future holds for Prime War and Lore Forge Games!
Lore Forge Games 