Time to Break Things

I'm afraid. Very afraid. I'm gonna have to do something that I dread.  I'm gonna have to do another test-drive of our system.

There's a couple things we do that bite us in the ass: 

• We prefer that every power we give someone can be used to the utmost. We give you a few simple rules, and anything not explicitly forbidden by those rules is pretty much sanctioned.
• We develop largely in isolation, so most testing is internal. Getting feedback is a slow process for us.

When we get ready to start showing our game to other people, we do an initial look-over to try and sense out some pain points that could need attention. Sensing out pain points means pushing them. I'm the person that tends to twist the system's arms and make it do things that it doesn't want to do.

I find a combination of new rules that are scary and old rules we forgot about. The old rules aren't terrible by themselves, but when they overlap with new things that took their place, we get stupid results. Like a lion jumping into a helicopter a hundred feet in the air to rescue its cub. Don't ask.

Actually, yes. Do ask. That's our process for breaking the game. We try and come up with the most uncomfortable scenarios we can think of and see if the fun of breaking things is outweighed by how fucked up the results are. Basically, the game's not broken unless one person has way more fun than everyone else. As long as people are having fun, we're okay with ridicuous results. In fact, we love them. There's a lot of abilities in this game that make us personally uncomfortable, but they're just so much more fun than they are uncomfortable.