Welcome to the final part of my self imposed game jam! If you’d like to check out the last part, you can see it here! The long and short is I’ve decided to give myself two months to fully design and build out a fully functional TTRPG game between the start of April and the end of May. Now that we’re in the last half of May, it’s time to really buckle down and get to actually playing the game itself.

Playtesting Character Creation

My main goal for this week was to really lock in my playtesting, namely on character creation. What I really wanted to prove to myself was that any kind of character that you could think of in an outrun-style game. Mean mercs, disgraced hackers, escaped androids, etc, etc. That’s what I was really going after.

To start out, I began by writing a name and short line or two description. Simple right? Just something to bite my teeth into that I could try to make. Normally as a player this is how I go about my character’s genesis, so it only felt right to put my own game through the paces. I came up with a disgraced hacker, a grizzled cop turned merc, a starry eyed detective, a one man army, an expert bladesmith, and an android with amnesia. It felt like I really covered all my bases, and set out to work.

Creating the Characters

True to my word, I simply wrote their names in the character sheet, picked the background that felt most apt, and began rolling my stats. I’ll say that when you don’t get any do overs for rolling characters, it leaves you with some interesting stories to tell. I could feel the stories of these characters emerging from the rolls and outline I put together. A good example is the disgraced hacker I rolled up. His “Smarts” stat (which obviously says how smart he is) wasn’t the highest, but it made sense. He’s disgraced and lost his luster. He’s rusty and will need to build it back up. I could feel all these stories that I wanted to tell just leaping off the page at me.

For the most part however, I felt like I was able to cover my basis (having a list of keywords that are needs and wants definitely helped keep me on track). The classes that I was able to choose and the starting gear for the most part did feel like they matched the characters that i had in my head. I did decide to add a rule or two, namely when rerolling stats should be allowed, however for the most part nobody was really terrible at their jobs. Once they picked their starting gear, I felt like I’d be good to set them up on a job to take care of.

Conclusion

I was pretty impressed with the way things played out. I’ve began to send out review copies to some of my closest friends to see what their feedback is first, but I felt like things for the most part are going smoothly. I’m entering the final week of my jam and I’m really at the tweaking phase. The game feels like it’s coming to fruition before me, and I think that by the end of the year it’ll be in a pretty solid place to start getting some more eyes on it. If you’d like to stay up to date on any developments or other things I release in the meantime, please sign up for my newsletter below!