YAGH Test Run 1: The Tomb of Jin Shi

So I made a GLOGhack called YAGH, and today I finally ran it in it's semi-completed form. And I have some thoughts now about it.

Jin Shi basically.

So first things first, I ran Wild Man's Grave from Phlox's blog, with some changes. One thing I did was change the scope (rather than two nations, it was a local crime lord and a local normal lord). Another thing I did was rename Enkidu "Jin Shi", which I got from plugging the kanji for "Kintoki" into Google Translate and getting the Mandarin reading of it. I don't really know why I did that since it's not like my players are gonna somehow reverse that process (not that they could, I tried and it doesn't give you the right characters going backwards).

Anyways, how'd the system actually work. Well, there were only 3 players so I only had the chance to see 3 classes in action, but let's go over them.

The Shaman was... useful, ultimately, but the level 1 abilities seem somewhat situational. At level 1 a Shaman feels more or less like an occasional dowsing rod, which is perhaps too useful in a few situations, and not at all useful in many others. Still, how it ended up going was my players consulting a spirit to find a hiding spot before the crime lord caught up with them, and the spirit giving them this information so long as they used the (cursed?) sword that it was inhabiting. Said hiding spot was the burial chamber of Jin Shi, which I made a bit more difficult to make it into I think. Fairly useful, but it did end up allowing them to skip a puzzle, but they also didn't really have time to solve the puzzle normally at that point.

The Wizard I think felt a bit underwhelmed by his abilities. With the Shaman there, his Wizard Eyes' ability to see spirits wasn't very special, and his familiar wasn't really used until the very end (at which point the familiar promptly died, although that was honestly me being a bit unfair and I should have given the familiar more of a chance to survive). So even more so than the Shaman, the Wizard seems too situational. Oftentimes more or less a Ranger but without the woodsmanship (at least at level 1). Oh frig, I just realized that I forgot to specify that the Wizard's familiar could become invisible to non-Wizards (and non-Shamans, and non-spirits). That might have changed things in a few places. I'll fix that.

The Fistfighter, on the other hand, worked pretty much as intended. They did alright in combat, ultimately taking the most damage (and surprisingly not dealing the most damage), but that was mostly due to rolling really low a lot of the time (plus they were focused by most enemies and still survived). I think I'll lower the bonus for dual wielding to +1, partially because it makes a Wizard as likely to hit as a Fistfighter. But the class itself seems mostly fine.

Combat was perhaps a bit too "whooshy", I might lower base defense to 0. Five percent isn't that much a difference, but I feel like a DEFENSE score of -1 would feel bad, and a base ATTACK of 3 would just feel weird.

Overall, the system was good enough, I suppose. Good enough to run the bare minimum of a game. The session was perhaps a bit non-lethal considering how my players acted, but that's honestly more on how I ran the game I think than it is on the system.