Playtest feedback

Hi,

I know you have already drawn your conclusions from the playtest, and I'm sorry it took me until now to put the following things in writing. Some of the notes below may be misunderstood from my notes during the session. I may correct any misunderstood notes later.

I organised an AW oneshot a few weeks ago, and ended up not running it, because we started according to the Co-MC suggestions, and then someone else had a better idea to start than I did, so I passed on being the GM.

When creating our place, it was a bit difficult to come up with names for peoples and nearby places. The language-based name lists seemed to imply that peoples and place names should also depend on languages, but there are no guide lines.

I had not printed enough peoples sheets, and also more peoples creation rules sheets would be good, so people can create peoples in parallel. If your next iteration ends up with stuff that is needed multiple times, an estimate of how frequent stuff is needed on the table would be helpful.

Did we miss an indication of how wealthy characters are?

Are the seasons supposed to follow the yearly seasons of spring, summer, harvest and winter, or are they of arbitrary length, a time during which circumstances are comparable or something like that?

What is the mechanical trigger of “sizing someone up”? In particular, do I need to interact with them, or can I do that from a distance?

How does small-scale stuff interact with large-scale stuff? I think this question turned up during a small battle, in which the influence of individual PCs' actions was comparatively large in “enemies incapacitated” or similar.

During a small battle, we managed to outnumber our fighting enemies 3 to 1, because some of them were incapacitated and some out of range (it was a battle between three boats, so some melee fighters on a boat could not come closer to the action), which scewed the odds extremely in our favour. Are we supposed to have such an immense difference in fighting capability?

The gods did not seem to really play a role at character creation, and did only rarely turn up later.

Leap Into Action reads like a nice move, but when successful allows quite a few choices given the fact that not all of them may be applicable. We felt that either there need to be more options to choose from (I may remember later what we considered missing), or less choices.

Is it on purpose that hindering other characters is not in the rules, but helping is?

Thanks for your feedback! I'll answer a couple of your questions, but mostly we are now working on the next iteration.

Did we miss an indication of how wealthy characters are?
Nope. It's just a matter of scale - if you have a royal PC, they will probably be more well-off than the peasant beauty. There will probably be more on  this in the full game

Are the seasons supposed to follow the yearly seasons of spring, summer, harvest and winter, or are they of arbitrary length, a time during which circumstances are comparable or something like that?
Generally it's the actual season of the year.

What is the mechanical trigger of “sizing someone up”? In particular, do I need to interact with them, or can I do that from a distance?
From a distance, you may not have as much info to work with, but if the fiction dictates, for example, that you are wary of someone approaching down the road and you want to pay attention and see what they're about, you could use "sizing someone up" for that.

During a small battle, we managed to outnumber our fighting enemies 3 to 1, because some of them were incapacitated and some out of range (it was a battle between three boats, so some melee fighters on a boat could not come closer to the action), which skewed the odds extremely in our favor. Are we supposed to have such an immense difference in fighting capability?
Sometimes the luck is in your favor, sometimes it is not. Imbalances like this are a thing, yes. This time you got lucky!

Is it on purpose that hindering other characters is not in the rules, but helping is?
Generally, if you are hindering other characters you are either scheming against them or directly opposing them. Single combat covers the second and role-playing covers the first.

I'm fully aware that you are working on the next iteration, but we took these notes, so I did want to share them with you, in case they would be useful.

Thanks, they were!