I will be rambling for a bunch of paragraphs to tell the story of how Hexen and its first playtest came to be. Feel free to skip to the first heading if you only care about the design stuff!

Almost a decade ago, I decided to participate in a few "TRPG game design contests" (I didn't know we called those game jams at the time). I'd been writing tabletop roleplaying games for a couple of years already (most of them are terrible), even dabbling into half-releasing some. It was an awesome experience. I kept going until the demise of Google+, where most of these were organized and run. With my usual platforms and contacts lost, my interest for these jams was also lost.

I tried to get into game design again on a few occasions, I never really lost the passion. I even started a master's degree in tabletop game design to explore this passion of mine. Yet, with life getting in the way (and a post-COVID world where universities seemed to think remote studies are a thing of the past), it seemed this hobby of mine would fade away like so many others. That was until this year, when I decided I would start participating in game jams on Itch.io and start building up my design muscles again.

That's where I found the Shit Or Get Off the Pot game jam on itch. I thought "a zero-stress game jam about creating 10 one-page games in a month just to start creating? PERFECT". I would even give myself an added restriction where I could only create games with a "physical component", like marbles. I should have read the rest of the title where it said "Solo games" (I.E. games you play alone) before I designed 8 group-based games. Oh well, I ended up recycling this and running my own fake game jam instead. I'd create 10 one-page imperfect games to get something out, to be creative. Of course my perfectionism wouldn't get in the way and prevent me from releasing 10 games…

Towards Hexen

So anyway, why the story at the start of this dev log?

That's from this whole story that Hexen came to be. Hexen wasn't a long-term project I finally released or an idea I've been exploring for a long time. Rather, it was something I put together in about 3 days. I had the idea to take the fun parts of "block" placement games like Blokus and turn them into a TRPG. I hadn't been creating for nearly 5 years, it ended up being pretty rough and rambly, and yet I'm incredibly proud of the results.

Keeping it to 1 page forced me to focus on the big mechanics, and to avoid any additional stuff that would detract from the core. Whenever I design games, they almost always end up turning into 50+ pages-works that I can't be asked to finish. I get into the nitty-gritty of designing foes, adventures, powers, complex mechanics. Too much to work on at the same time. Keeping things to one page instead did wonders for my creativity and motivation. I recommend it.

I really like the final product. I think the visuals are really good for a total noob when it comes to visual design, and the mechanics are really nice in my opinion. I find it has that "elegant, generic system" touch I see in many other generic games on Itch. It's also really surprising, but also humbling, to me that it was by far the most successful of any game I've ever released. 100 views and 30 downloads might not be much, but it was massive for me.

With this success in hand, this long story is finally leading to the whole point of this devlog, the playtest! For the first time – ever – I decided to finally run a playtest of one of my games. For the rest of this devlog, I'll go over the learnings and what I want for the future of Hexen.

The playtest

I chose the first adventure for the Keys from the Golden Vault adventure anthology for D&D 5e, and decided to run it (I mostly chose it for its non-violent potential) for my playtest. I had 5 players, 4 were regular players and 1 never played any TRPGs. The game ran for about 2 hours and 30 minutes, not including creating the characters and going over the rules. Not a very long session, but the players want to run a second one, which is exciting!

I was running the playtest using the rules from the official V1 version of the game, with some adjustments based on my own tinkering after I had released it on the Itch page:

• I had the players choose their cores and hex groups during character creation based on D&D themes, like classes and spells. I also asked them to create three specific groups (their abilities, their skills/magic, their equipment) rather than keep things freeform like the base game.
• I changed the power of the Hexen point to allow changing your entire board rather than only one hex group, which made the option a lot more appealing.

Let's review what I learned from the playtest:

1. Prior to the playtest, I quickly threw together a PDF file with a bunch of printable hex groups to cut for playing the game. I didn't really think about making the hexes easy to cut though, turns out it takes about an hour to cut just one copy of the file! I'll have to think how I can make this better.
2. I gave each player 1 hexen point to get things started, and no more points were generated during gameplay. Turns out most rolls would be done with 1 or 2 dice, leaving very little opportunity to generate hexen points and still potentially succeed. This brings me to the next point;
3. 10 hexes for the character sheet and only 3 specific groups makes things easy during character creation, but it also doesn't lend itself to a lot of experimentation. Almost every player ended up going for 1 four-hex group, and two three-hex groups. They also grouped their hex on one end of the grid, preferring to have more space for conditions than more dice for rolls (which is likely due to me prompting them to leave space open). This meant that most related attributes were not adjacent, leading to rolls with few dice.
4. Not directly related to the design itself, but I printed out the grids on normal paper and made the hexes out of heavy craft paper. They ended up moving around a lot, leading to a few players having to redo their placement during the session. Maybe building something using fridge magnets would help.
5. Playing with d12 didn't really work out, we had too few d12 for everyone and ended up switching to d6s. I went with d12s in the original game since they're the closest to a hexagon shaped dice, but I think I'll have to drop the hex puns there.

The future

Those were the big lessons. Overall, I think this tells me that I need to streamline character generation and help players get more than 2 dice per roll, potentially through additional mechanics. I have some ideas I might toy with soon based on the after-session discussions:

1. Some system for helping other players would likely be very good for the game. Maybe players can temporarily loan one of their hex to another player, though something related to actually placing the hex on the other player's grid would be much better for the theme I think. Something in the lines of "you get +1 dice for each help you get" feels a bit too boring.
2. Some system for temporary hex groups or other temporary boons would help the game a lot in my opinion. The adventure gives the player a bag of holding they can keep if they complete their objectives, which would have been a very good thing to actually represent through hexes. Maybe this can tie into the help system.
3. I didn't plan for "situational modifiers" like giving more dice if the characters are in an advantageous situation and kept it this way in the playtest. It became clear to me pretty quickly, though, that players often set up great situations where a "+1 dice" would have been great. Maybe some kind of temporary Hexen point system could also be great here.
4. Healing conditions is a must, but not too fast to avoid the game being too easy. One player got two conditions and was pretty worried they would stay "blinded" for the rest of time, even with another character having a "healing" ability.

As I finish this log, I already have another file opened to start working on the next version of Hexen. I'm hoping to get feedback for the new mechanics through a series of more devlogs, if that's something you're interested in.

My main goal, though, is to extend the core mechanics and provide more examples, and for that I'll need more space. I think I'll still limit the size of the document in some way, however. Maybe a booklet format where I limit myself to 10 letter size pages that can be joined together would work great. That'd give me a total of 20 pages, including the front and back covers.

For those curious, all my games' were created in JavaScript with React and React-pdf. I'm a software developer through and through. Limiting the game's size to a booklet format has the added benefit that I can also build some kind of system to automatically generate the booklets based on some files. I'm already getting hyped for the coding part! But I need to start writing the game first. Priorities.

Hopefully this devlog gave you some insights into how Hexen came to be and an idea of where it's going. Please let me know if you've got any ideas for mechanics or things you think should change, I'm very interested in hearing your feedback. Also look forward to more playtest reports, I intend to keep playtesting the game as I improve it.

I'll see you in the next devlog 👋