Last night I finally had a chance to run the second playtest of Alpha Cipher, a one-shot RPG I’ve had in the works since late last year. Those who’ve been in the loop may remember a prototype called “Megaloschema”, which was renamed because it didn’t communicate the tone without explanation; also it was bad Greek. Compared to the prior version, this one ditched dice and involved combat in favor of relatively simple rules that revealed a surprising depth of design space during the process of writing.
In summary: magic is reducible to mathematics, and a charge for casting a spell is created by solving a pertinent equation. Someone plugged the necessary code into a supercomputer and generated a single charge of the ultimate wish spell, the Alpha, so now every faction of the magical underground is engaged in an espionage cold war for the cipher key it’s encrypted with. It’s an impromptu Grail War (à la Fate/stay night) meant to inhabit the rather underexplored territory of strictly competitive roleplaying games, principally inspired by Shinobigami.
The mechanics are meant to reflect that information-based conflict: everyone is dealt a (secret) hand of spells and one artifact at the beginning of the game, and one of those artifacts is always the Alpha Cipher. The goal is to figure out who has the cipher, take it from them (or hold on to it if you’re the dubiously lucky bearer), and end the eighth round with it in your possession. Each turn, you do this by taking one of three actions: attacking someone to injure and steal artifacts, charming them to gain their trust (leaving them open to betrayal), or spying on them to look at their hand. Actions are resolved by rock-paper-scissors, chosen due to that minigame’s inherent element of duplicity and reading your opponent’s patterns.
At any time, though, you may also play one of your spells:
Essentially every spell in the entire deck is a trap card. That’s why spying to see someone’s hand is crucial before going on the offensive: not only does it let you identify who has the cipher, but it lets you anticipate what situations they might be able to trigger a contingency for. This is reinforced by the counterspell rule: whenever someone casts a spell, they put it facedown first, and if the target can guess its name, it fizzles. That, and everything else you do in the game, is grounded in giving diegetic descriptions of how each move plays out, meant to evoke the back-and-forth turnabouts of a battle anime.
As for how all of this worked out in practice: pretty well! The returning playtesters remarked upon how streamlined it was compared to the prior version, and both old and new enjoyed the experience. There were all the dramatic reversals I was hoping to see, with double betrayals and entire chains of spells being triggered in response to one another. People came up with straightforward but memorable characters, and a great deal of laughter was heard.
However, as might be expected, the test revealed quite a few issues. Most of them were relatively simple to solve: I reduced the number of starting cards in favor of more frequent drawing (less upfront reading), cut the number of rounds by two (the game ran a bit long), made RPS throws more lenient to the offensive player (simple failure rather than a riposte on a tie), tweaked several wordings to handle edge cases (funny how those all come up once the game actually hits the table), and of course caught a typo or two. I’ll be adding icons to spell cards to clarify at a glance whether they’re on-turn, any time, or triggered.
Some issues, however, resisted easy fixes. Especially in the early game, players wanted more scaffolding for how to approach other characters and frame scenes, so I intend to add some kind of scene prompt list – not at all intractable, but will require some writing. Remembering what was in someone’s hand after spying on them proved too difficult, making the counterspell mechanic unwieldy, but I’m hoping the changes to spell cards will ameliorate that. Many of the spell effects were too complex, so I’m considering cutting the more niche effects and adding copies of the more generally useful spells. Perhaps most troublesome was the way the endgame devolved into repeated attacks on whoever had the cipher, which will take some thought to unravel, but I have some leads.
Overall, the playtest was a success, and I expect the next iteration will bring the game very near to a final form. I look forward to releasing it within the next month or so.
