Last weekend I ran the final alpha playtest session for the Bloodfall TTRPG and have come to a few interesting conclusions going into the final rewrites before publicly opening the table. This article is going to talk about those changes and give y’all a really good idea of what the final game is going to look like.

Firstly, running this session really hammered home to me the fact that single enemy encounters absolutely do not work with the combat system. In order to really challenge player characters there really needs to be at least two enemies in any given combat encounter. The way that declaration and phases work out the PC side just as so many more actions to exploit between characters and retainers. Single enemy encounters wind up with most players basically sitting around and doing nothing the entire combat. Noted.

Secondly, using a 2-15 range for ability scores sits better with with the 2d6 resolution mechanic than 3-18 did. It offers a better spread and shortens the math to a degree that means most skill checks aren’t completely trivial. In the same vein, I need to tone down to amount of skill points that each Profession begins with to distribute and cap starting skills at Rank 2.

Finally, dividing the Professions into Tiers and tying the progression of Profession and Faction rank into one system has really streamlined the way that advancement works. It also allows us to work on and release the rules for each Tier in chucks (think like B/X or BECMI). Having 15 ranks gives us a nice interesting spread of 5 Tiers of 3 Ranks each.

Other than that and tuning up certain Profession abilities, I think that the main design cycle on Bloodfall is pretty much finished and I expect to have the table opened and the Novice rules mostly finished by October 9th.