Play Report: Opera Eterna at RPG Nite

RPG Nite Labs

IRL I organize a monthly open table play group with Alex Roberts out here in the PNW. Over the last year and a half of hosting this, we’ve schemed towards building a culture of making and playing RPGs in Victoria.

To that end, we formed a cohort of local people interested in working on game design projects, which we’ve been calling RPG Nite Labs. On November 30th, Alex and I hosted our very first playtest day.

On that day, I finally got my shit together to bring Opera Eterna to the table. I’m here to tell you how that went.

Setup

I playtested OE with Alex and two others, my friends Niki and Wren. We set aside 3 hours for playtesting, though I had to cut my session a little short for logistical reasons.

Unlike every other playtest I have ever run, Opera Eterna was playtested much earlier in its life cycle. It was a rough sketch of a game, with index cards and scribbled notes. This was by design; playtesting sooner rather than later is the goal, but it’s something I have not been very good at in the past. Simultaneously hosting and designing for the event meant I really didn’t have a lot of time to prepare, so I went in with just the guts and some WIP subsystems to try out.

One of the core parts of OE is its job system, which allows players to swap between different vocations — each with a few key visual elements to their look — to access new stats and abilities. I gave each of my players a choice of any two jobs from a big list I had been working on so that they could do a little job swapping during play (though this mechanic did not get used this time around). Although I have plans for a primary/secondary job system, I didn’t implement it this time around for brevity’s sake, and I think that was the right call.

I went into this playtest with the assumption that, in a more fully realized version of this, players will begin only with the Visitor job, which is a job oriented towards travel and job-seeking. New jobs could then obtained through play by completing “job tasks”. For instance, becoming a Maiden requires declaring a patron saint, so perhaps you’d take on the task of making a pilgrimage to a shrine to pray to a saint. After completing this task, you are granted the Maiden’s outfit and can take on that job.

As a shortcut to give my playtesters these stories, I asked them how they picked up each of their jobs. This ended up being extremely effective at grounding them in the world, and was a noted highlight for the players. This is making me consider the possibility of introducing a few starter jobs for players to choose from, though I am still curious what beginning as a Visitor will be like.

The players also prepped their characters by drawing their job outfits. Using some of my provided “body” stickers (which give you multiples of a body type and pose for consistency across jobs), and with a few given “look” prompts for their chosen vocations, the players got to work drawing their job outfits. The table went quiet as they all immediately fell in love drawing their little outfits on their little characters. It was just pure, absorbed doodling as they played dress up, then a burst of excitement as they shared them with each other. I couldn’t have asked for a better moment.

The Story

This project began as an Ironsworn hack, so where needed, I fell back on Ironsworn to fill in any gaps. To begin our story, I gave the party an Ironsworn-style starter quest of a pilot who had gone missing. They all covered their connections with the pilot: the Mafioso-Dancer blackmailed him, the Perfumer-Cavalier provided medicines for his sick daughter, and the Gambler-Maiden was a buddy of his who forgave a steep debt. I then gave them an arbitrary time limit of one week and let them loose on a little sandbox-style play in the seaside town of Estia.

The party spent the day connecting with the pilot’s daughter to try and discern his whereabouts. During the exchange, the Mafioso-Dancer threatened her to gain access to his ledger (inflicting fear on her and starting a bond in the process). In the evening, they visited the night market, where part of the party grabbed a folk spell from a witch while the other part studied the ledger, which revealed that he had an irregular drop off point with a caravan out east. This would be their destination.

They set off for the drop-off point during during the day phase after. The travel system I had sketched out for this occasion broke almost immediately, but I managed to get a bit of play with a little on-the-fly tinkering.

Upon after a full day’s travel, the party neared their destination, and the Gambler-Maiden used their connection to their patron saint to locate a shelter. The party spent the night there and I rolled on the Ironsworn theme table to see what the morning would bring. Unfortunately for the party, I rolled the word “corruption”, so I corrupted the idea of their shelter and exposed them.

The party awoke to rifles pointed to their throats. Their aggressors were led by a veteran Cavalier. The Mafioso-Dancer tried to get off a quick shot, but the Cavalier was quicker to the draw. The aggressors disarmed and captured the party and then tossed them in a brig. There they found their pilot.

That’s where we had to wrap up for the day.

Reflections

Some general feedback I got from the players:

• Jobs were everyone’s favourite part of the game across the board.
• The weakest points the players identified were less consistent, but the issues here were generally shared among them. One player’s least favourite part was the travel system which was confusing. Another player felt very connected to the world but an absence of connectivity within the party. Another player just didn’t like the little clocks I used for my hack of the Ironsworn progress system.
• Generally the playtesters loved the direction and vibe I was building, though one player was less familiar with my JRPG science-fantasy nonsense. They remarked at the outset that they didn’t know the cultural touchstones for the jobs and wanted a little bit of a primer on the setting and technology. They got very excited when I mentioned trains.

To take a closer look at a few subsystems I played with:

Jobs

The job system is obviously the big star of the show here and is on track to become the defining feature of the game. Players also remarked that they hadn’t seen this kind of character archetype system mechanically and materially in RPGs before, which is extremely exciting to hear, especially from playtesters as knowledgeable as these ones are.

The only things left wanting from the jobs were more depth and clarity to their impact on play. “What does being a cavalier let me do?” The job design began with the idea of job commands (like Final Fantasy’s WHITE MAGIC, STEAL, DARKNESS, etc.), but for this test just went for a couple descriptive lines of what you can do with each job this time around. I think I need to go back to the commands, however. Players wanted to know what their job meant, mechanically and socially, and I think I can play with that there.

There was also a little bit of a desire to combine the jobs a bit more, but as mentioned above, that is already in the design doc.

While not mentioned in the feedback, I also think I need to revisit the stats associated with each job. I worked with a few “multifunctional” stats where your score in a given stat served to both take actions and withstand damage, but mechanically it was a bit messy. Rather than double-down and find something closer to the Free League dice pool stats, I might change course and angle towards something a little more traditional in presentation but also more asymmetrical.

Something I was surprised by — which frankly I don’t know how I didn’t anticipate — is that the current system, in which character stats are defined by the job and tracked on the job card, makes harm inflicted on a character actually inflicted on their job. In essence, each job has its own separate pool of hit points, and changing jobs mean you’re redirecting damage to the other job instead. How very FFX-2: Last Mission of me.

On one hand, it’s kind of funky to have your job sustain damage instead of your character. On the other hand, it’s also very silly and would need some balancing around wardrobe size and job-swapping access. No conclusions drawn there yet but something to think about.

Life Sim

Life simulation in OE is very much rooted in the calendar and social simulation mechanics of the Persona series with elements of long term projects (think Forged in the Dark games), worker placement games, and random events. While this was not at the forefront of this playtest, the time spend in Estia made for a surprisingly good start and altogether stands as a good case for expanding the life simmy parts of OE.

Without some of the other mechanical levers put in front of them though, or perhaps because the party had an objective elsewhere in the world, we didn’t get to really put the systems through any substantial tests. For instance, we didn’t initiate any projects, but I think my hacked version of the Ironsworn progress system will make for a good unifying structure underpinning various life sim elements.

During my prep, I also oscillated between providing more of a defined structure for the locations (tag-based stuff to signal what kind of stuff you might expect to do in a place) and leaving it up to freeform storytelling. I went with the latter, which worked fine, but maybe didn’t have the teeth necessary to give the location a key into the other systems. Ultimately it was a little floaty and the party moved on to the action faster than anticipated.

The calendar subsystem was similarly surface level with this playtest but did feel really good to put into play. I ended up providing one day action and one night action, but I still want to try the four quarter setup, where rest actually does something positive instead of failing to rest doing something negative. Alternatively, perhaps choosing to push yourself to gain more actions could cause some kind of exhaustion (like pulling an all-nighter to work on a project to meet a deadline…)

I prefer mechanics that respond and usually reward (or at least provide a trade-off) for active decision making rather than mechanics that punish bookkeeping failures or require the GM to double-check that an expected “default” action is taken.

Finally, I did not expect to use the bonds subsystem during play, but when the circumstances called for it (cough cough threatening an eight year old girl using a Mafioso ability to inflict fear on her cough cough) I knew exactly how to handle it. That moment was extremely well received.

Travel

The travel system I used for the playtest was a bit of a bizarre modification on the Ryuutama and Forbidden Lands travel rules with a roll-then-assign mechanic I am designing based off of my vague osmosed understanding of the similar mechanic in Fight to Survive. (I am deliberately not researching the actual implementation of the mechanic until after I have a solid attempt of my own. Don’t ask why.)

In both Ryuutama and FBL, travel is proceduralized through a series of checks made on each leg of the journey. Checks for navigation, weathering the environment, scouting, making camp, foraging for resources, etc; and each player is able to assign their character to one of those tasks. I have…. a LOT of thoughts on this, which are going to be coming in their own separate blog post, but the short of it is that I want to use this structure to interpret travel with the same kind of gaminess and abstraction that a combat encounter has. In my sick and twisted mind, distance to travel is just a different kind of health pool to be damaged.

I provided something like a turn-based RPG action menu: ATTACK/DEFEND/ITEM or whatever becomes MOVE/SCOUT/SURVIVAL. Players would roll and then assign their the value of their dice to one of the actions. The numerical values I used in this rough sketch, however, were so swingy and so busted with some unforeseen implications that made it not a useful abstraction for the experience of travel. I think it was a fun idea though and I can see how I can sharpen it up.

I think even if I keep it at its present swingy dice roll, I could make it that you assign yourself to one action only to add your relevant dice to a dice pool before rolling, and then provide unique mechanical effects based on the action taken.

• Perhaps when moving, you only take the highest result to prevent the surreal cumulative effect where a big party moves faster. So like, you move the highest value of all rolled dice.
• Maybe scout becomes an exploration die, where the lower results are detrimental and the higher results with more mitigation are only accessible if you have a larger die size assigned.
• Survival is a good opportunity to do things like foraging, food preparation, etc. Again with food, I need to turn it into an active component of play rather than rote bookkeeping.

Encounters

I didn’t get to test encounters, as I had hoped (we ended up having to vacate a half hour early), so I will have to come back around to that. It will, however, have a mechanical rhyme with my weird take on travel.

Emotions

I started sketching out an emotions as status effects system for this playtest. This is a little bit of His Majesty the Worm, a little Enotria, a little Darkest Dungeon 2, and a little Omori (or so I’m told). Certain abilities can inflict emotions on others and on the player which have mechanical impacts or can be leveraged in social situations. When applied a second time, they escalated and trigger an emotional objective that will probably put the character in a compromising place. Fear escalates to terror and comes with the objective ESCAPE.

Certain jobs, like the cavalier (my latest in a number of names for my dark knight job) can even capitalize on their own emotional states. This was what made the mafioso’s threat on the the child so satisfying; it was an ability trigger with an associated status effect that just keyed so perfectly into player behaviour. I definitely want to explore this space more.