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| Mary GrandPre |
My wife’s friend was in town recently, and as she’s been one of the people asking me to hurry up and finish the Hogwarts game we decided to run a playtest session. I didn’t want to set it inside the castle itself because I wouldn’t have time to finish the whole thing, so I made a small adventure site – a haunted tower in a forest. And thus began…
Harry Potter & The Lady of the Wood (Part 1)
The Players:
Patti (my wife) – Jon-Baptiste Haggride
Suzie – Cassandra Trelawney
Samantha – Andromeda Black
The Session
The players were a group of traveling companions who, while journeying through the forest along the Scottish border, found themselves staying at the Inn At The Crossroads. The Inn is a popular watering hole and market location for the local wizarding folk, goblins, elves, and other magical creatures. While there they heard stories about the local haunt, known to all as the Lady of the Wood, and decided to investigate.
The companions spent a day at the Inn to rest and prepare. Jon-Baptiste Haggride spent his time drinking wine in the Inn’s common room and got to talking with three brothers who had come to sell pumpkins at the market fair, who told him that “a huge knight, big as a house, guards the Lady’s door” (Patti chose Gather Rumors as her downtime action).
Cassandra Trelawney decided to spend the day leisurely wandering the fair and taking in the sights. Unfortunately, while watching a traveling theater troupe put on a puppet show of “The Boy Who Lived” her purse was stolen (Suzie chose Take In The Sights as her downtime action and got unlucky with her roll on the relevant table).
Andromeda Black decided to visit the fair’s various booths and stalls looking for magical objects. She spent some time haggling over a fireproof bag made from dragonhide but ultimately decided not to buy it (Samantha chose the Visit the Market action but wasn’t interested in the item she rolled up).
Andromeda lent the now penniless Cassandra some silver sickles and the two of them slept in the Inn’s common room after a meal of bacon-and-lentil soup mopped up with hard bread (no modifier). Jon-Baptiste shelled out a gold galleon to rent a private chamber for the night and enjoyed a fresh loaf of bread, half a roast duck, and a dessert course of rhubarb ice cream along with his soup (+1 Luck during the next expedition). The krup that lives in the pocket of his fur coat sampled every dish.
The following day the trio set out for the Lady’s Tower. As a well-known haunted location the locals were able to provide clear directions, although nobody thought that going there was an especially good idea.
The Tower turned out to be in a wide clearing full of wildflowers. Climbing roses covered the Tower and one of its two outbuildings, a squat guardhouse. The other, an unidentifiable burnt-out ruin, was covered with magical fireweed. A huge troll in makeshift armor leaned on a club in front of the tower door. By the sound of his snores he was evidently asleep, probably lulled to sleep by the scent of the enormous flutterby bushes that grew around the tower’s base.
Not wishing to wake the troll, Cassandra attempted to pull some of the fireweed blossoms to her with a levitation charm. Unfortunately her swish and flick of the wand was too vigorous, and the entire bush’s worth came hurtling through the air at her, red blossoms igniting (failed Charms roll, +1 Presence). Cassandra and Jon-Baptiste managed to duck, but Andromeda Black suffered a slight burn to the leg as the burning flowers showered around them. In the aftermath Cassandra was able to gather some unburnt blossoms, hoping they might be useful for potion-making.
Carefully creeping up to the burnt out ruin (+1 Presence), the party discovered the blasted and burnt body of a warlock. He wore a fireproof glove of brown dragonhide and was clutching a golden sword with a large, dully-glowing ruby in the pommel. Around him lay the bodies of three men in makeshift armor, also apparently burnt to death. Cassandra consulted her crystal ball (Divination) and saw a vision of the warlock set upon by the three men with spells and swords. Wounded in the belly, the warlock invoked some magic from his golden sword: the ruby on its pommel blazed with light and the vision ended in a blaze of fire. After some discussion Jon-Baptiste donned the dragonhide glove and picked up the sword.
Rather than pass by the sleeping troll and the alluring flutterby bushes, the party crept the long way around the guardhouse until they found the back door (+1 Presence, Revelation triggered). Just as they went to open it however, a ragged man in homemade armor and a helmet with a chicken-feather plum stepped out, announcing to someone in the room behind him that he had to take a piss. Jon-Baptiste grabbed him by the collar and yanked him outside, where Andromeda and Cassandra hit him with a double-dose of petrificus totalus (no roll, but the shouted incantations immediately blew their cover). Immediately jets of red light started shooting down at them from the arrow slits on the floor above and the party ran inside, figuring they had a better chance of dealing with whoever was in there. This turned out to be correct: a brief, bloody fight ensued. Jon-Baptiste and Andromeda carved their way through three more marauders with their swords (Jon-Baptiste’s new golden sword, ruby glimmering with delight, left smoking wounds as it cooked the blood on contact). Cassandra was knocked into the wall by a fourth marauder running down the stairs to reinforce his fellows, but Andromeda hit him with a freezing charm and then tipped him over, shattering him. The enemy barely had time to shout their battle cries of “For the Lady!” before it was all over. Investigating the room afterwards they found a strange mix of badly maintained camping supplies and attempts at high art: a harp with several broken strings, clumsy attempts at embroidery, bowls of dried flowers, and bolts of blue cloth.
And that’s where we left things! Hopefully we’ll be able to schedule Part 2 soon.
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Observations on the Session
As usual, I overestimated how much adventure a group of players can get through in a session.
I’m not very good at teaching new players (particularly noticeable b/c my brother worked as a tutor for a long time and is an excellent and well-trained teacher). I kept catching myself explaining things as if I were talking to someone who had already read the rules.
Two of the players have played a lot of Hogwarts Legacy, and were pulling more from that than from the books when selecting their spells. As a result I think they were in more of a video game mindset: looking for specific “buttons” to press to find the solution to a situation, and categorizing encounters in a very videogame-y way. In a way it was funny watching a couple of 30-year-old women who hadn’t played a TTRPG before do the whole “this is obviously a trash mob tutorial encounter, let’s just kill these guys and move on” thing that my friends and I used to have as kids.
The players immediately gravitated towards the idea of whipping up potions with random ingredients they found, but seemed to think that this could be done instantaneously (possibly also as a result of having played a lot of Hogwarts Legacy). I think my potion-brewing rules are already pretty fast (for the fiction), but I don’t want it to be a downtime-only skill.
The Presence score is really just a form of random encounter roll, but I think the framing makes it seem scarier than it is. They triggered one Revelation (encounter) and in PbtA terms I made a fairly “soft” move, saying that they crept up to the door of the ruined tower they were trying to sneak into right as one of the guards went outside to take a leak. I didn’t feel justified in making a harder move because I had barely signposted the presence of guards in that tower up to that point.
Observations on the System
The players liked making characters!
I decoupled Houses from stat bonuses, so it’s now possible to roll up a cowardly gryffindor or a stupid ravenclaw. You still get your House’s Inspired Action though, so the cowardly gryffindor aspires to the ideal of courage and can occasionally live up to it, which I think is nice. The old version had a fairly serious issue in that it wasn’t actually possible to recreate Neville Longbottom.
Players who haven’t wasted hours of their time thinking about the probabilities of a 2d6 roll read the ability score array of -1, +0, +1 as inherently weak. I should probably communicate more about what this means (that everyone gets one strong, medium, and weak stat).
I think I need another pass on this system. There are two problems, I think: one is with the resolution mechanic and the other is that I have too many low-impact rules that are neat in theory but in practice weren’t really pulling their weight.
On the resolution mechanic, I think I’m going to go with something closer to the Apocalypse World roll.
I never wanted to set a DC other than 7 (for normal rolls) or 12 (for the rolls that specifically call for it). Modifying the difficulty by the consequences of failure felt a lot more natural.
I really felt the lack of a mixed success band. This was particularly true in combat, where enemies only take their turn on a failed roll. Even with most rolls being made at +0, it felt like characters were succeeding so frequently that failures felt jarring and arbitrary.
The system is too busy. I have lots of neat rules, but when taken all together I think it’s a little much.
Fatigue could be dropped entirely and replaced with Strength damage (especially damage that didn’t call for an injury roll). I’m fine with implementing this change immediately.
It feels like there are a lot of skills that aren’t particularly useful or just didn’t really come up. I was worried about that, but I think I need more playtesting before I start cutting skills.
The Stat + Skill system needs work. I wanted the option for -1s in both categories because in theory I like the idea of inexperience canceling out natural ability, but in practice it’s just not fun. Too many rolls ended up at +0, which feels like wasted effort. I think after revision Untrained skills will be +0 and then you’ll be able to get two tiers of training for the +1 and +2 (maybe called Skilled and Expert). I should probably drop Master (+3) if I’m going to adopt PbtA rolls for everything. A +4 breaks the math completely, resulting in characters with a 97% chance of success, but I’ll have to think about it.
If I’m revising the skill system then I think I need to do another pass on the Clan playbooks. I think characters will need to receive a smaller number of skills, since a +1 is more impactful. I also think players should get to pick a couple of skills to go with the ones assigned by their playbook, to increase replayability.
Nobody used Inspiration. I think this was due to a combination of getting to grips with the basics of dice rolling and weak enemies.
Combat felt a little too loosey-goosey. I have more of an appreciation for PbtA’s stilted programming language now that I’ve run a mostly improvised session with more freeform dice rolls. There were several instances where I wasn’t really sure whether to call for a roll and had to go with whatever seemed right at the moment.
Injury locations being randomly determined make sense in the abstract, but we immediately ran into a situation where they felt kind of goofy (the shower of sparks causing a leg injury when an arm or face one would have made more sense). Too soon to tell if I should just roll with it or add a line about not rolling if the fiction has already suggested an injury location.
Players making injury rolls for the enemy they’ve attacked seems to come across as unintuitive. Maybe I should roll for these. I had intended to use a strict “players roll all the dice” model, but in places it was getting awkward and I could see where things would speed up if I just rolled stuff. Presence is another candidate for a DM roll
I forgot to set a hard stop, so we paused in the middle of the action. As a result we won’t get to see the full intended session cycle of Downtime Action → Delve → Distribute Points until the next time that we’re able to play.
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