RINGER's First Open Playtest


Yesterday evening I brought "RINGER" to a "Blind RPG Night" I organize. For those who don't know, I am the founder of a event format called "GDR al Buio", literally "tabletop rpg blindate": once a month we gather in a pub and people can play without know what TTRPG they're gonna play and which whom. There's a team of "Facilitator" who prepare a game and propose it, people choose what they like and have a one-shot of the game. It's a big thing here in Italy, we have more than a dozen cities involved and there's room for game designers to bring their own stuff in playtest.

The RINGER playtest went really well, beyond my expectation. Some thing I thought were broken show up to be okey, so, good! There are some major modification I will add to the ruleset, however, due to a better understanding of where I want to go with the project. Let's dive in!

  • First of all, the game need a "ruleset" aside the deck of cards to educate players about procedures and good practices. I thought about it after a comment on Reddit and it came clear I must write it. It will be a sort of "How to RINGER" meet "FAQ about RINGER".
  • The game starts really well. In my mind, the first 4 Arches should have only one scene each — and this proved to be true. At the same time, reaching the 5th/6th Arch, players had to few 1s and 6s on their dices to move on with the story and this means I have to change the initial dice of the rings: instead of 1, 2 and 3, the Rings will now start with 2, 3 and 4. 
  • Framing a scene reveals to be easy... for players accustomed to story games. To help a bit new players, I am thinking about changing the Purpose of each player into a sort of Area of Authority, similar to what happens in Matthijs Holter's Archipelago III. In fact, each Purpose cannot be chosen by more than one player and they have already on them keywords to split area of interests. 
  • Maybe 8 Arches are too much. I want a perfect ring around the central deck, but three times out of three trials we ended up loosing "conflict material" around the 6th arch instead of the 7th. I will thinking about this, maybe more trials could help.
  • Experience revealed to be useless. I knew already this, since Exp was added only because characters became exhausted (all dice on 5or 6) around the 5th/6th Arch and there was no chance to get to the end. Last night, instead, we talked about cutting out Experience and adding a sort of exchange between scene: you can low one die by one to rise one die by one point; you can do this also between characters, to represent healings and reparations.
  • Cards sizes will increase for better reading. 

That's all, folks! I'm looking forward to post an update to the rules! 

- Daniele

Get RINGER

Download NowName your own price

Leave a comment

Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.