Hello, honored deities, and welcome to the Beta Testing of the Diamond Pantheon system!
The playtest is now live. You can continue to sign up. Once you get a PM from the Norns, you can change your name to your godly name.
As soon as you know you are interested in playtesting, go make a post in the signup thread, which has been made available to guests.
If you don't want to be part of the playtest but you got an invite from the Norns, you are guaranteed an invite for the full version when it goes live sometime in 2013.
You're here for one of several reasons.
- Someone involved in production recommended you as a particular player archetype. We hope the playtest will include numbercrunchers, heavy roleplayers, and even people who've never played an RPG before.
- You're well known in one or more circles - it was easy to see that you belong here in this honor society.
- You are somehow involved in the administrative aspect of the forum.
Whatever the reason, the most important part of the playtest to me is input of all sorts. Make sure to keep some sort of log of all the opinions you have and update them as the playtest continues. This thread is for discussion of the parameters of the playtest, but we've got this whole forum dedicated just to playtest opinions. Please submit lots of them! You're shaping an important future here.
Here is the lowdown on the playtest parameters:
- Everything in the playtest is canon for the Immortal Facets. That is, this stuff contributes to your character history and to the history of the plane, so take it seriously and think long term. Some of the rules will change, of course, but the Norns will be searching for great roleplay and precedent-setting to reward.
- You will all have access to Eitr Exposure. This means that at certain times, you will be given extra rope to hang yourself in the form of bonus DM and Norn Favor. We're testing balance as well as feasibility.
- We've removed the restriction on who can be invited. There is still a list of meatspace people who have agreed to playtest and you should try to invite/sponsor based on their blurbs, if any exist in that thread. At the same time some characters will "spontaneously" pop into existence without benefit of sponsorship. If no one on the list meets your criteria, then you can move on to inviting others.
- Feel free to try to find bugs and even to exploit them. If it's huge you may get some of your resource yanked, but I am currently offering a reward of 1 DM Favor per Tier for each minor bug you find, and 5/Tier for any gamebreaking bugs. That should make up for any balancing I have to do on you.
- One of the goals is for this forum to work for people of different time commitments. However, if you think you'll only be posting less than once every two Hrairdays, you probably shouldn't make the commitment to this playtest.
- Keep this forum's existence secret, please. This restriction will relax when the forum goes live - at that point you will be expected to use your own discretion. At the moment, most areas of the forum are read-only to guests without accounts, but guests will not even have that much access in the future.
- Don't reveal who you are in real life. For some people this will be impossible if you've got a famous campaign world and that's OK.
So that does it for rules. Here's some design goals:
- Quick to learn
- System independent
- Shared-world friendly
- Predictable results for your actions; less subjective than a diceless game
- Complex interactions, framework for any sort of story at all.
We want feedback on that as well.
If you want to appear awesome as DM, use these terms in your campaign:
Steep
Facet
Diamond
Apotheosis
Thor, Odin, and Jord on the Skidblade lifeboat, in stasis.
Jord as Odin's loving wife
Grey Oronos dead, Ymir dead, Earnaness the Green Dragon dead, Arcane Cronus dead.
Steep Wolves
Arcane Steepest Gaia stepping down from power
Sessile Tartarus
Nidhogg
Hundred Handed / HekatonKheires as a sort of Evard's Black Tentacles
Hypercone of the Present
TL;DR - Treat it like it's not a playtest, but offer more opinions.
