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We ran our second playtest session for V/R Variable Realm recently. The first session was mostly character creation. This time, we played. And I came away with some uncomfortable realisations. That’s what playtests are for.
Identifying the issues
The game, as currently written, doesn’t quite work. The rule gaps are larger than I thought. In theory, you can fill gaps with on-the-spot decisions. In practice, we kept asking “but what does this do?” for a lot of elements, and I didn’t have good answers. That made some of the mechanics that looked cool on paper feel inert at the table – they had no meaningful impact because the rules didn’t say what they actually did.
What V/R is trying to do
Quick recap: V/R aims to emulate a genre of media inspired by MMO games. It’s not trying to recreate World of Warcraft, Diablo, or Final Fantasy as tabletop RPGs. It’s trying to simulate stories about those games, drawing on works like Shangri-La Frontier, Solo Leveling, the DIE comic, and the LitRPG genre. The goal is to tell a story about people playing a game, not simulate the mechanics of the game itself.
Design goals and challenges
My original goals for V/R were: relatively easy rules, around 50 pages, playable with minimal preparation. Players should be able to jump in without extensive character creation or long setup sessions.
Part of that approach was making most of the GM’s content procedurally generated. Random tables have been a staple of tabletop RPGs since the early days of D&D, and while many modern games have moved away from them, I wanted to use randomisation specifically to emulate how video games work.
What went wrong
During the playtest, that approach clearly wasn’t working. The game felt directionless. By pulling the GM out of the driver’s seat and putting everything on the players, we lost something important. This was made worse by the fact that my players don’t share the same deep familiarity with the source material that I have. They didn’t have a framework for what the game expected of them.
My first thought was that the problem was a lack of context. After sitting with it, I think it runs deeper than that. The game is missing structure.
Finding inspiration in other systems
I looked at what works in other games. Blades in the Dark and its variants – Band of Blades, Scum and Villainy – offer a much more structured approach. Each adventure in Blades follows specific planning stages. That kind of scaffolding is exactly what V/R needs.
I also looked at smaller story games like “Follow” by Ben Robbins, which centres on a group working together toward a specific mission. GM-less games like this build their structure into how players decide what to do – which is what V/R is currently missing.
The missing piece: structure
V/R has character creation and combat mechanics. What it doesn’t have is a framework for deciding what to do. That first step – mission planning and goal-setting – is currently absent, and the whole game collapses without it.
This also explains why I’ve had success running PbtA games. In those systems, the available moves create the adventure structure – players look at what they can do and understand what the game expects of them. V/R, with its more generic “action roll” system borrowed from Blades in the Dark, lacks that built-in guidance.
What I’m changing
I’m considering several changes:
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- Implementing a structured pre-game planning phase, similar to Blades in the Dark.
- Exploring whether V/R works better as a GM-less or solo game.
- Focusing more on group creation and world-building before individual character creation.
- Drawing on what worked in Godflesh playtests, where we built the group and their area of operation together first.
V/R Variable Realm needs a framework. Without it, players don’t know what to do, and that’s a game design problem, not a player problem.