Another Step Into the Well

Weeks later, I’m still working with the feedback from Metatopa for Dark Well.

For me, I often design for and from the character sheet, and for Dark Well’s, I had a lot of questions myself as a designer that the playtesting helped me revisit from their perspective.

With the Dweller File sheet I have the following goals:

  • To change as the character engages with the fiction through the mechanics so that when a Dweller gets a Dweller, a Threat, or a Crisis token, there is the potential for that to affect or change them—including a narration rule that helps to feed this back into the trait changes.
  • To address the more common approach to experience where you get better or more things and so I have that through the experience tracker and have all Traits with the option of two marks.
  • To have big changes for Dwellers to feed the game and this is where the growth of leveling up ties directly into the information on the Conspiramap.

As a result, I’ve made the following changes so far:

  • The traits for the three Stats of Life, Power, and Truth, work the same when it comes to engaging with the token pool drawing from the Well.
  • Instead of tags I’m using something called details which are touchstones or aspects to help players pick traits for their Dweller which won’t box them in.
  • A copy of the Well Operations is on the sheet to test its inclusion because I like to have procedural things easy to locate for players.
  • The experience system has been revised and now includes both noting marks to traits in the trait section, keeping tokens, change, growth, and clearing conditions with the experience tracker.

The next thing that needs to happen is for me to playtest this next version to test my new hypotheses and to change the rules to reflect what’s working.

Author

DMK, the founder of AquaVertigo, is a creatively curious artist, author, designer, educator, entrepreneur, and organizer based in the Midwest, USA.

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