We played the first session of our Magical Land of Yeld playtest this past weekend, and though short, the adventure went rather well. We added two more players, Cody and Kim, who played Zappa the Baby (5 yo boy) and Rainbow the Know-It-All (8 yo girl). I will post stats on these two characters later, as well as the revised stats for the existing characters. We made sure all of the characters now have a Tough of at least 2, and changed Davey (our resident Princess) Special Die: Girl Knowledge to Monster Knowledge, figuring he was a big comic book/sci-fi/fantasy fan and would have a better chance than most of knowing secrets of some of the monsters we would encounter.

The setup for "Goblins in the Stacks," our first adventure, was rather simple. The player characters were all Friends who were going to the Mall of America to a comic book shop to purchase Issue 1 of a Japanese Manga called "The Magical Land of Yeld." All of them had heard the comic was incredible, but no one knew any more about the book. So the session began with the kids standing in a long line waiting for the store to open and worried that by the time they would make it inside, all of the issues would be sold.


I plan to post updated character stats and monster stats as well. I need to go back and figure out how many Adventure Dice I spent (four monsters and one challenge), but I am sure it was well less than 20, so it was an Easy Challenge (meaning the players now have 1 Reward Die).

Thats about it for now. I will post more as it comes to me.

ME

Several players and I are working to get another session of Yeld scheduled. In the meantime, I thought i would post character stats and descriptions to give you a sense of what The Magical Land of Yeld is all about. Several of the players compared character creation to "Best Friends," where characters stats are based on how much everyone else at the table hates you. 

With Yeld, all of the players take on the rolls of children between the ages of 5-12. You roll two 6-sided dice to determine your starting age, create a name, decide if you are a boy or girl, and then everyone else at the table decides what kind of Friend you are. These can range from Big Brother to Brat to Know-it-All to Princess (which can be a boy). Some have restrictions based on age or whether you are a boy or girl. All of them come with Special Dice, which are extra abilities, and bonuses to your Core Dice, your basic stats.

It seems like for the first few sessions, I will be the game master. One of the ideas of the game is to rotate who is GM to give everyone the chance to come up with a session idea and influence the course of the story, but my players really want to be players at this point. Once they are more familiar with the rules and gameplay, I'm sure they are going to want to step up and take the GM's hat for a session or two, but until then I will fill the role and keep Chase mostly in the background.

I think I've come up with the first adventure, or at least the story hook/title: "Goblins in the Stacks." It will be set in a comic book shop in the Mall of America.

ME

Today myself and three friends got together and did character creation for Magical Land of Yeld. Since this was only about half the players we had hoped to have, and since this was a relatively short session due to scheduling issues, we didn't get much further than character creation.

However, the whole process did get the players excited for the game, and we already have a list of questions and "concerns" (I put it in quotes because it isn't as serious as it sounds, and it is a playtest after all) to try to address at the next game, mostly concerning some of the background of the game and a few mechanical issues. As I get more time, I will post more notes and be sending item lists to Jake Richmond, one of the designers working on the game.

I did run the players through the basic rules of the game, and they picked them up quickly. I do see one possibility that I think really isn't a concern for my group, but could be for other groups: There seems to be a lot of potential for players to force a game master to burn through challenge dice. I need to re-read the various rules sections, but I don't remember anything that addresses how often a player can challenge a situation. For example, if my character tries to convince the shop keeper to give him the magic item, and the GM uses challenge dice to set a challenge level, does that challenge level stand regardless of how many other characters attempt the same feat? Or could players continue to keep pushing the issue, or changing tactics to force new Challenges, causing the GM to burn more dice?

Or on the other hand, if a GM has a character argue with a player, is that considered a challenge? Does it need dice? Or can the player automatically win any argument simply by calling for a die roll (assuming the GM doesn't want to burn any dice)?

Also, I know once you purchase a monster, the monster is part of the story for that session. Does that mean unique or recurring villains (say, one pursuing the characters through Yeld) must be purchased for every adventure in which they appear?

These are just a few simple questions that came up while explaining the game, and likely as I re-read the rules they will be answered, but it gives you an idea of what players think about when they look at a game like this. Though everyone at the table was all about having fun, there still is an element of competition and wanting to "win."

I'm going to be posting more notes and observations as we go through the playtests, and I will put up some of the character stats/descriptions hopefully tomorrow.

Before I go I'd like to point out the icon I'm using for this post is one of the characters from Magical Land of Yeld as drawn by Jake Richmond. You can find this icon and others from Yeld at Jake's livejournal jake_richmond

In some very cool news, next month myself and several friends will begin playtesting Jake Richmond's new RPG The Magical Land of Yeld. You can purchase a .PDF of the playtest copy for $1 at RPGNow.com.   

The game is an homage of sorts to the old Nintendo-style adventure and rpg games, like Legend of Zelda and the original Final Fantasy games. For the record, I grew up playing these games, and loved them. There are some other fantasy elements thrown in as well, but every person I've showed the game to has immediately recalled some moment playing Zelda or another game and said "We have to play this."

So that is what we are going to do. I will have about 3-5 players on a regular basis, and we're going to take a group of characters through the main game. The idea is to take notes on what we like, what we don't, questions or problems we encounter and things that absolutely rocked. Then we'll send our notes off to Jake and hopefully he will find something useful. 

I plan on posting actual play reports as we go along, and encourage anyone who might be interested to buy the playtest copy and start their own game.

ME