Stress-testers needed for Game System

I'm looking for people to stress-test aspects of a rules-light, narrative driven system to see how well they work and where they break down. Here are some of the main questions at this stage:
1) Character Creation and Advancement: Does the system let you build and develop the kinds of characters you imagine?
2) Basic Mechanics: Are the basic mechanics easy to understand? Do they give you narrative flexibility without getting bogged down in detail?
3) Combat Mechanics: Is the system easy to understand? Do the concepts of Conditions, Advantage and Disadvantage make intuitive sense? Do the mechanics work smoothly in practice and do they give you a sense of narrative options? Is combat satisfying and fun?
4) Magic System: Is it easy to understand? Does it make it easy to build the kind of spells you want to?
5) The No Dedicated GM Option: Is this section easy to understand? Do the concepts of rotating Lead Narrator and building Adventure Seeds make sense?

I would especially like to test out the collaborative Adventure Seed creation and GM-less mechanics to see how they work in practice.

If you're interested, let me know and I will make the draft ruleset available. Stress-testing the system before going to playtest would be a huge help! Thanks!

I'd love to take a look and help out. I can't promise anything until at least next week or the week after, but I'd be happy to help.

I'm also running a playtest on GP at the moment because I think rules-light could be really great for PbP, so I'd love to help you! I can't promise posting everyday though :)

Thx 78! That would be great. There's really no super rush, so whenever you get the chance. :)

CESN: Thank you, and no worries on frequency of posting - I figure we can just kind of muddle through the different bits and pieces as time and interest dictates. For PbP purposes, I think you might be really interested in the 'No GM Option' section. It gives a method for task resolution that (I think) would work really well for PbP. Essentially, the players state what they are hoping to do, make their roll, and then narrate the scene based on the outcome. No need to wait on a GM's response to move on to the next post - each player narrates their part and advances the story. (That's the simplified version, but hopefully that makes some kind of sense.)

I'll pm you both and send a link to the rules (GDocs). They're a work in progress, but more than complete enough for testing out.

Thanks again for the interest!

I'm new here, but this sounds like a good way to get involved. The curse of PbP has always been the long, sometimes excruciatingly long wait to see what happens next, so the "No GM Option" sounds like an excellent solution, assuming of course that it works. I suppose the biggest problem would be that the players could only use it effectively in situations where they could guess all the possible outcomes.

I'm reminded of that ancient Bob Hope movie in which our hero is exploring a supposedly haunted house and, prior to investigating a room from which suspicious noises can be heard, he gives his equally unheroic companion a big stick and says: "If anyone runs through that door, don't hit the first one - that'll be me." Of course Bob doesn't know what's behind the door, and inevitably things work out such that he unexpectedly chases someone else out of the room and gets walloped.

Anyway, I'm not doing anything very time-consuming at the moment so I can post as often as required, starting as soon as you like. By the way, what's the game actually about? "Game System" isn't a terribly descriptive title! The only hint you give about content is that it includes magic so I assume it's not sci-fi, but it might be anything from Harry Potter to Call of Cthulhu, or something else entirely. Maybe it's sci-fi after all, only with wizards. Or Wrath of Tinkerbell. Perhaps a brief description would be useful?

I'd play that system.

Lol, there's no specific setting as yet, but the material so far is geared towards fantasy as a default. (It will be expanded later to cover modern and Sci-fi.) At the moment it's just a system that's "Rules-light, Narrative-Driven, and Genre-agnostic," to quote from the title blurb. This is a call for people who would like to stress-test the system - put it through its paces and test its limits - prior to opening it up for an actual playtest.

If that sounds interesting to either of you, you're more than welcome to join - the more feedback the better! :)

That sounds fine! I don't particularly object to any setting (except those I'd have to watch hundreds of episodes of some ugly hyperactive Japanese children's cartoon to understand), I just wondered, that's all. So we basically come up with some temporary characters in various genres, put them through their paces in one-off battles and micro-scenarios, and see if anything breaks? Yeah, I can do that, so count me in. It will be interesting to get the chance to play types of PC I wouldn't normally bother with because you'll probably want some fairly extreme or downright silly characters who will push the boundaries.

I'm particularly interested in systems which have no dump-stats. For example, original D&D was notorious for making Charisma one of the six numbers your entire character was based on and then failing to find a proper use for it, so that absolutely every PC ended up being horribly uncharismatic unless their class required it, and even then it still wasn't the slightest bit of real use. And if you thought your Fighter would be a more interesting character if he was highly intelligent, you'd soon discover that there were very few situations in which having a brain mattered in practical terms unless you could cast spells, and you really should have minmaxed him into the Hulk. I'm much more drawn to creating PCs who are versatile than ones who are ridiculously good at one thing but otherwise useless, and the kind of game which prefers rôleplay to roll-play, which looks to be what you're aiming to do here, very much appeals to me.

I'd also be particularly interested in helping to develop a really good system for magic. D&D got it horribly wrong by giving high-level wizards such enormous power that they're basically God and everyone else is irrelevant, then trying to compensate by forcing low-level wizards to struggle through a lengthy period of being bordereline useless and highly likely to die. It's a tricky thing to get right, but I'm surprised the creators of D&D didn't notice that their primary inspiration J. R. R. Tolkein strictly rationed the amount of magic-use in his Middle Earth saga.

Notice how even Gandalf, a professional wizard, seems oddly reluctant to use all but the most trivial magic except in the direst of emergencies, as if he's afraid there might be horrible consequences. And indeed, when he's forced to turn his sorcery dial up to 11 to survive falling several miles while wrestling a Balrog (as you do), he comes out of it transfigured into a better person but seems to be slightly less human than before. Whereas Saruman, who obviously had no such inhibitions, has become a far more powerful wizard than Gandalf, at the cost of completely selling out to the Dark Side and perhaps literally losing his soul.

Anyway, I look forward to helping this new system come into being and iron out its kinks. And hopefully one day soon playing a real character in a real scenario. Let's get to it!

Welcome aboard, Tom! :)