It’s been a month since I last gave an update on Protoplastic, and there’s a reason for that: when I tried to run a playtest one-shot shortly after 0.4 came out, only some of the players were able to make it and we didn’t reach quorum. However, a few days ago I was finally able to put together a proper playtest session, which I’m now pleased (and relieved) to be able to give a report on.
Prep
I can’t be overly upset about the first playtest falling through, since the act of preparing for it revealed quite a few things about the system from the GM’s side. I loved the cute form factor of the half-page character sheets, but soured a bit on representing body components as little squares to be placed on a grid atop them: I know this is a beloved aspect of Mausritter inventory, and it gave a great sense of building your character out of physical components in the absence of actual plastic pieces to snap together, but cutting out numerous copies of every possible part was a bit tedious, and once a session was over, they would all need to go into a bag rather than remain on the character sheet anyways. All of that said, some players adored this physical aspect of the game, so maybe I’ll keep it.
I also found that there was just too much stuff going on. The basic resolution system wasn’t complicated, and neither was any individual subsystem, but as a whole I started to question whether it all came together the way I imagined. I had tuned the game towards a lateral problem-solving sandbox with heavy crafting elements, but although that appealed to me as a concept, once assembled it didn’t feel like it delivered on the desired fantasy: it wasn’t what a potential player would be looking for when they were sold on a Bionicle-inspired RPG.
So, over the next few weeks, I reworked 0.4 to turn it into a game that I found easier to hit the table with. For one thing, I accepted that this was, in fact, a game about combat – a huge departure for myself, who has never much cared for TTRPG combat and always written games that minimized it. It grew clearer that the most functional gameplay loop for the premise was essentially Monster Hunter: there is a powerful boss enemy causing problems for an island, you run around gathering resources to prepare to fight it, then you have a big fight as the third act capstone of a session, so you can harvest it for parts to upgrade yourself. I didn’t completely remove the elements of travel and building things, but I pushed them a little further into the background.
Crucially, I changed the core mechanic in two ways. First, the Tyrant no longer has their own dice pool (switching to a “players roll all the dice” model) to solve the question of who revealed their die first. Second, the die pool now measures time: it has a number of dice equal to the number of heroes (essentially abstracting their collective action economy), and whenever it runs out, that “round” ends, and time passes. I wrote up a set of events that occurred in sequence whenever this happened that acted as a sort of doom track to disincentivize dithering.
Opening
To keep things simple, the players were offered a selection of pregenerated character to choose from, of which four were selected as the heroes of the evening. These were:
- Kavama, cautious farmer turned aggressive Hero of Fire.
- Miru, patient builder turned passionate Hero of Oil.
- Onogi, mercurial sailor turned patient Hero of Metal.
- Utavu, principled leader turned alien Hero of Void.
Each player drew their mask in the provided space on the character sheet, as shown above. Exceedingly pleased with how those turned out.
These four began as villagers on the small island of Korunoi, in the fishing village of Ikeru. One day a canister full of heroic masks but no pearls to go with them washed up on the shore, and they took up the masks to complete the destinies that would otherwise go unfulfilled. I asked each player why their character chose the mask they did, when they each ran counter to their natural temperaments, and got some interesting answers: Kavama chose the fire mask so they could feel confident instead of anxious, Miru chose the oil mask so they could seek greater beauty in their craftmanship, Onogi chose the metal mask to temper their impulsive heart, and Utavu chose the void mask simply because it let them embed post-hypnotic triggers into people. Worth remembering those reasons for future reference in how I frame the mask/pearl divide.
Rather than do an origin story, the gameplay proper began with their careers as heroes already underway, heading to the crescent-shaped island of Mahivota, where unseasonable storm clouds had gathered. When given a choice of either navigating through the treacherous sprue reef or taking extra time to go the long way around, Onogi chose to employ their telescopic sight to carefully guide the catamaran through the hazardous zone and land on the beach. Once their feet touched black magnetite sand, the exploration began.
Exploration
Thus began the main phase of the game, a pointcrawl across the island. Starting on the beach, they made their way to the village of Nuikolo, in which the elder Hotata explained their fellow hero, Seleso, had already arrive a year ago, and protected them from outside dangers – at the price of devouring one villager each month. The heroes stood witness to the ritual sacrifice of Ue the artist, who had (informedly) volunteered for this duty. Out from the top of the extinct volcano Mt. Mahi flew a giant bird with transparent purple wings, which landed only long enough to eat Ue whole, and for the heroes to see that it did, in fact, wear the Mask of Lightning on its forehead, presumably why the villagers treated it as the hero.
None too pleased but not wishing to immediately draw the ill will of the elder, the heroes traveled to the organ farm to the west. There, an oil well flowed through a spiderweb of canals to feed a field of twitching limbs and half-formed heads. They spoke to a farmer who implicitly pleaded for them to stop the sacrifices, as they were running out of new bodies – agreeing immediately gave them a debt owed by the farmer, which spontaneously seemed like the most natural way to indicate taking on a side quest.
From there, they decided to brave the eastern jungle to capture a creature appetizing enough to act as bait for the bird, but in searching the area they discovered an old lava tube that led up the mountain, acting as a secret entrance. This let them sneak up on the sleeping creature in the caldera, and bind its wings with a pump cannon arm filled with fast-drying glue. It flew into a rage, and called the storm down upon the island.
Crisis
This initiated the final phase of the game, which I termed the “crisis”. Based on Agon 2nd edition’s “battle” rules, the thunderbird’s rampage presented a set of threats (the oil well burning from a lightning strike, the village being destroyed, and “Seleso” eating Hotata), along with the opportunity to search the caldera to find a useful secret. Through a combination of decent rolls and burning most of their remaining character resources, they managed to achieve every one of these goals, leading to the final battle with the electromagnetic raptor.
The boss fight was built around the concept of a big creature being treated as a collection of parts you could individually target: it was very powerful, but you could knock out its claws so it couldn’t swipe you, and so on. The players largely sidestepped this whole dynamic by maneuvering it into a fragile part of the caldera, sending it tumbling down into an empty lava chamber beneath, then performing a plunging strike to finish it off. Thus, the day was saved, and in spite of the half-charred state of the village, no more sacrifices would have to be made. They claimed the lightning mask and moved on to the next island.
Lessons Learned
The problem that immediately emerged was that, even with barely decent dice rolls, the heroes always succeeded at checks. Whenever something needed doing, they had the party member with a +1 in the relevant virtue do it, and since they could strategically choose the dice that would just barely succeed with the bonus, they hardly ever suffered any negative consequences. As such, we agreed to drop the virtues within half an hour of playing, and balance was quickly restored. The virtues always felt a little tacked-on to me since they weren’t derived from body components, masks, or pearls anyways, so I’m happy to just remove them entirely in future builds and instead provide (rarer) modifiers based on specific parts.
The third problem was that, even with failures on dice, the heroes still never suffered any defeats, because they had enough mask and sleep debts between them to soak any consequences. The takeaway here was the removal of sleep debts: like with virtues, I already didn’t care for them (mostly due to the awkward name), whereas mask debts were far more interesting, representing you drawing upon the power of your mask in a way that make you vulnerable to its influence and prone to elemental-emotional outbursts later on. I could even remove the ability to soak consequences with mask debts altogether, and just use those to power elemental abilities. Perhaps you could still choose to break parts instead, to fulfill a similar function; I’ll put some thought into it. Regardless, future games should properly force actual hard choices the way they were supposed to.
Speaking of hard choices, I really liked the crisis rules: they really emphasized the idea of managing limited options that the dice pool mechanic was all about. In the future I’m curious about using it for even more parts of the game – combat could potentially be thought of as an iterated crisis, with threats being telegraphed attacks by boss monsters.
Player feedback did indicate that the passage of time made them feel hurried, preventing how often they were willing to take time to search areas and the like. In the future I should probably employ random events: I’m imagining 1d6 tables, which hunters can place dice on to hunt for (or avoid) during encounter checks. Timed scenarios can still exist but the time limits should be explicitly established so that the players aren’t fearful of a vague, unknown deadline.
In the end, all of the big problems that revealed themselves in play were relatively simple fixes: just take those parts out! Streamlining is going to be the name of the game for the next version, which I’ve already begun work on.
I’ll keep everyone posted about version 0.5 as it develops, so thanks for reading!
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