Play testing my Campaign

How I play test my D20 based campaigns and adventures is something you probably wonder if you’ve ever heard me talk about it. It’s pretty easy. It is also a vital thing to do because of the way I tend to design dungeons/encounters/scenarios, which can be brutal sometimes. Without the testing I can’t really tell if a scenario is too difficult for players and because it is a heavily stat based combat system, it’s harder to do the DM fudge here and there to ensure the players aren’t being brutally overwhelmed. So here’s my way of testing the scenario out in order to make sure it is possibly survivable.

I start out with a generic set of “Player Characters.” These are 3-6 generic PC builds for important party rules built using the same rules as what I expect the players will have and appropriately leveled/geared. There’s nothing spectacular about any of them, they’re what you expect from a generic adventuring party using only the core rules. I don’t have anything weird in here nor do I have the broken combos that one might expect a player to make.

This group can be adapted to generic versions of what the players are running so that I can get a better feel for how the particular group is going to fair against the scenario.

Now that’s all well and good, but we’re talking about a game that involves dice, which means of course that luck can be fickle and cruel. So depending on the challenge I want to give I use 3 die values for determining the challenge level. Those numbers are 5, 10, and 15. The number chosen as the representative of a die roll depends upon how much of a challenge I want a particular thing to be.

When you get into combat though you can’t just select things like that arbitrarily though. There is far more going on than is possible to conclude with only those 3 numbers. So I rotate each character through a cycle of those numbers with every 20 th “roll” designated as a critical success or failure (determined by flipping a coin). Damage is determined with the half die value method I learned to use when playing Warmachine/Hordes. Each die is going to roll an average equal to one half of its highest number plus 0.5. So a D6 is worth 3.5 damage while a D12 is worth 6.5. For odd numbers of dice, say 3D6, you round down to the nearest whole number, because your dice will always screw you more than help you. So 3D6 = 10.5, rounded down to 10.

It gives the combat a sense of randomness and helps to make sure that it isn’t too easy or too hard. So when I say I’m playtesting my campaign and tweaking it, this is what I’m doing. It is typically an exercise performed entirely on paper. This enables me to not have to worry about figures being moved by children or animals and goes much quicker.

Which reminds me that I really need to go through this stuff again as soon as I finalize my latest system tweaks. Some of these modules I’ve designed haven’t been tested since I started tweaking the way magic works, that could be bad…

When I say I’m running the numbers on something, this is also how I’m typically going to do it. While working on the cannons and ships I’m running these types of numbers through my head with generic assumptions along each phase of development. Right now I’m working on damage scaling vs hull section Hit Points/Hardness. So a Pinnace, a small sailing ship, has 4 hull sections and sinks when a single section is destroyed. Each section has 5 inch thick wood which gives it a Hardness of 5 and 50 HP (10 HP/inch of thickness). A single Demi-Culverin, a type of medium cannon, does 4D10 damage. At a value of 5.5 damage per die it is dealing 22 points of damage (17 after hardness is applied) per hit.

That means that it will take about 3 hits on average from one of these types of cannons in order to sink one of these small ships (51 points of damage after Hardness). Is that about right?I’m not quite sure yet because I haven’t finished coming up with stats on other ships yet, but this struggle is another story for another blog post.

Oh man, converting real world ships into D20 system ships is bringing up a whole new host of problems and is a wonderful challenge. This is gonna be a lot more effort than I originally thought. Ever try to figure out how to make a 50+ cannon broadside against a ship that has 337 hull sections (destroy 84 to sink it, each section has 240 HP) work with the narrative naval combat rules and not make you insane while trying to keep track of each shot? (By the way, it’s the HMS Victory I’m converting as an example, this example is all based off of real world statistics. The freaking thing is a 104+ gun, triple decked ship designed with a crew of 850+ people on board.)