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Saturday, September 19, 2009

[PBAM] Playtest 1: Dockyard Attack; Desert Sands; Toll Booth; and Midnight Monsters-

The 'werewolf' and the 'wolf-man' were still rampaging through the tavern and healer's outfit.

Roy scanned for their minds in the hopes of launching a vicious psychic attack.
"Where are these freaks?!"

Cogra Spades smiled as he helped the field surgeon up the rickety stairs of the burning and charred tavern. Upstairs one flight was the healer's shelter, still blessed with air conditioning.
It was now a cold 35*.
"HEY! I THINK YOU CAN FIND WHAT YOU NEED UP HERE! OKAY?!"

Roy gestured to keep his voice down.
The kid had killed the 'wolf-man' with a missile launcher from within the tavern below. He'd been blown back out the front door and lost his hearing.

A moment later, both were startled to see Cogra's mecha start, seemingly, by itself, and the two weapons prime for fire.

Cogra dropped down through the open service door and raced to engage his mech's hijacker and save them both.
He clambered up the ladder rungs on various parts of the assembly, and threw open the canopy.
A person-sized spider-thing was piloting the mech, and to his horror, Cogra saw that it targeted the healer's shelter with a long range rocket.

FWOOM!
B=O=O=M=!

Cogra saw the life-sensor indicate a flickering sign.

---

Somewhere in Coralglass Submarine City-

A cyborg stirred just below the waves of unconsciousness, as if he should awake any instant and grasp his current reality.

Rainmaker cloud routines sprinkled the streets with traces of mirror as seen from Roy's hospital room.

"See ya' soon."
Cogra said as he keyed-up 'Rusty' from his remote.

The mech had been inspected and fumigated, and cleared for duty.
"Why is Coralglass City under attack? And who could it be? I'll find the answers, Roy. You'll see."

===

PBAM's first playtest session resulted in the rapid adoption of the die mechanism, and one very excited 10 year old boy.
--Even Roy's player seemed to have fun, and was debating whether to bring him back as the cyborg character he had been discussing before the game.

The die mechanism does interesting things with probabilities, with three things being accomplished with one roll.
--Super-tools, like mech weapons have very high base damages, but on a human-to human scale, things seem to ring truish enough to not display any apparent lopsidedness other than that statistically expected.
---6 and 7 are the highest density results which create fairly powerful Effect-values (damage, etc.), but the elusive success-generating feature is indicating that the effect of the full polyhedral set tends to favour the chances of success only slightly, but such higher-power successes pack quite a wallop.
----This models the source materials and overall design premise very well.

I am splitting my attention between Small Arms and Equipment, and the Referee's section.

Kiddo was hooked as soon as he ogled the AT-43 minis.
--I was glad it didn't have movement grids.