This playtest went really well. Only a couple hiccups, where I was frantically looking stuff up in my clumsy playtest doc. Playtesting is hard.

A couple musings:

• Rules tweaks as explained on the main page.
• Probably the GM will need a cap on maximum Hazard spendable on one conflict, similar to PTA. G Ms will want to be able to lay the smackdown of adversity, but not with awesome godlike destruction. Possibly something that could be tied to progress on the goal track.
• One player was interested in the idea of a 'give' mechanic like that in Dogs, where you can avoid the catastrophic consequences of a really bad roll by, say, giving and then just taking 1 impairment, gaining no fortune from your lost dice. But it's too soon for me to tell if that's necessary.

Play

I was pleased to find that game play went just how I wanted it to, in terms of pacing and participation. There was a lot of table talk, with Chris and Daniel (Sarah couldn't make it) tossing ideas back and forth, me joining in here and there. Play seemed to charge right toward conflict, so it felt a lot like PTA, where you're just hopping nicely from conflict to conflict. The game never stalled out. It didn't get boring.

Daniel's character, Barati, started the game off with a scene I set up where he had just landed, and the colony is in some disarray. Barati has two goals: "Establish a military base," and "prevent a war." Since we're not done with the adventure, I won't spill the beans, but I introduced the colony director, Eva, as a nice foil to his first goal, as the colonists are wary of a larger military presence considering the trouble they're already having with the alien "terrorists." That set up a perfect conflict for Daniel, where he tried to win her support over dinner with her staff (via his Diplomat).

His first roll went kind of crappy, and I had an advantage, and the narration came pretty easily like so: Eva says the aliens will just increase their numbers, and if construction begins on the base, it would be vulnerable until it was completed, putting the colonists at risk.

I can't remember who said what, but the next step included checking off a redshirt and bringing in a new archetype, Warrior. He explained the Redshirt as a couple people on guard near the landing craft, attacked by the aliens. Warrior, then applied as Barati puffed up his chest and talked about military codes and civic duty and the like. Chris jumped in somewhere, either first or second roll, using the environmental trait "mountainous" to my advantage, saying that the aliens had the advantage of terrain and would be hard to deal with. In the end, I conceded, and Dan marked off a successful conflict for his "base" goal.

Note that I wasn't following my own rules here. I'm lame. I completed a conflict before switching players. It seemed kinda natural, and what's written in the text is arbitrary and not really crucial to play.

Chris' first scene and conflict for Jesper involved him trying to get information out of one of his contacts on the world. One of his goals was "find out why (can't remember name!) is really threatening the blockade. The syndicate contact, I told him, wasn't telling him the whole story. The stakes for the conflict involved finding a weakness for this mysterious guy. I can't remember if there was any bringing in of new archetypes, but he used the character's connection with the syndicate for a re-roll, and he applied his vice of "impulsive," explaining it as the character deciding on a course of action that would probably get him in a lot of trouble. He won that conflict by a decent margin. My GMC took some impairment. Chris basically said that if he won, he wanted this dude to have a vice, so I said he was kind of like that creepy guy who fronted for Hearst on Deadwood, whose name eludes me. This was, after all, a pleasure planet, so I said he just liked to watch, and he liked specialty acts. That gave Chris a win on his track.

Back to Daniel, I got to frame, since he won the conflict, but I opened the floor to ideas, and Daniel said they would be out on patrol, looking for his captured troops. I dove right into conflict with an ambush, saying the aliens' goal was to capture them. Daniel made his stakes such that if he won, they'd have a lead about where to find the alien HQ. The conflict was harsh, and Daniel used three archetypes to win it. I used a specific GMC as the base for the conflict, having that alien be the leader of the ambush, and started out with Scoundrel, myself switching to Warrior. He started with Warrior and switched first to Astronaut, flying in with the landing craft to try and give his squad some cover, and then using Diplomat to try and get the colonists to come to their aid. It was awesome, and I was left with a GMC reduced to 1d6 in two archetypes.

Chris' second conflict, and the last one we did for the day, was a dramatic loss for him. He attempted to pass off one of his crew as "the most exotic dancer in the region," and it went poorly. It ended with two of his crew dragged off at gunpoint, and the captain suffering some serious impairment. My favorite bit in that exchange was Daniel using "hazardous lifeforms" for a re-roll, justified as my GMC having a fear of nasty ST Ds? and being wary of this unfamiliar dancer.

I have a 90 minute commute each way to play, so we didn't get a lot of play time in (also because of the Indian buffet, which left us all in kind of a food coma for a good 45 minutes). Next time I might want to just skip lunch and get playing. Hopefully Sarah will also be free to play.