Walking ten miles through snow, uphill, both ways…

This may have happened to you: it's winter and you're shovelling snow off your sidewalk and driveway. As you exhale great gouts of steamy air, it begins to snow. Yet you continue to shovel, steadily progressing until you eventually finish your frosty task. As you look back to admire the fruits of your labour, the satisfaction you feel is instantly replaced with irritation, for, while you were busy scooping away the icy flakes to your front, the snow from above blanketed anew the ground to your rear.

At times like these, I like to go back inside and brew up a nice cup of the Earl Grey (or pour three fat fingers of Glenfiddich, depending on my level of frustration). And whist my beverage (regardless of proof) always brings comfort, I can't help but think to myself, "I've got to do this all over again."

No one told me that the job of designing a roleplaying game was much the same. Two weeks ago, Matt and I finalised Section 5 of The Chimera RPG rules: Combat. Clearly, this was an achievement; combat, to me, has always been a litmus test of sorts for the quality of any role-playing game. And while combat is not the foundation of Chimera, it's important to get it right. Face it, an RPG's character development can be wondrously façile and intuitive, skill selection can be a breeze, and a system for action arbitration within the game can be a model of its type. But if the combat system is clunky, unfair, arbitrary, and unrealistic, no player is going to care how easy it is to roll up a half-orc assasin/bounty-hunter/mage.

So, a fortnight ago, Matt and I finished combat. And it was good. We got together a week later to play-test. We found some flaws and we tweaked where necessary, and we tested some more. And it was still good. I mean really good. We had the realism we wanted with the ease of play we strove to convey.

I wrote up the changes to publish to the website, sent out announcements to the mailing list, and started working on the next chapter.

Last Saturday, Matt and I got together again. This time we invited Colin, another player in our group, to give the system an objective eye. I mean, Matt and I already knew that the combat system was good, but we wrote it. Why not humour the Fates and see if it passed muster with an "outsider"?

Colin and Matt arrived at my table, which, in a flash of inspiration, I covered with a miniatures playing mat. Why not really pull out the stops and truly see what this masterpiece system could accomplish?

Well, either Colin was in the employ of Satan himself, or the Fates sent him just to vex my muse, because in no less than five minutes after rolling up our characters, Colin's objective eye began to perceive holes in the system. Actually, they were gaping caverns.

In our defence, it wasn't that Matt and I dropped the ball completely. It's that Matt and I didn't plan properly for possibilities outside our own limited, playtesting environment. Using figures is a prime example: Up until the arrival of The Colin Incarnate himself, Matt and I had been testing combat in an abstract, it's-all-in-your-head-and-on-your-character-sheet, sort of way.

We didn't count on how that abstraction would fall apart in the face of an "outsider" like Colin, let alone a half-dozen plastic Celtic warriors leering at us and calling us names from their vantage on the kitchen tabletop.

So, we found more flaws. Lots more. Like, how do we incorporate movement with attacking? What's this business of performing one action every 15 seconds? If the rules say that combat actions happen simultaneously, why should I throw my spear at your PC if I know that you're moving behind that wall, even if my character has no idea that you're going to move behind that wall? What do you mean I can't take a shot at you while you run across the large, wide, open clearing?

You get the idea. In a nutshell, our original combat system was fine until you actually used it. Well, maybe not that harsh, but our system broke down when you saw where combatants were, how they were positioned, and you gave them the ability to move tactically. I knew what we had to do: shovel the driveway in the middle of a blizzard.

So the tweaking began. . .again. In a big way. After several false starts, much rolling of the eyes, a plethora of whiny questions and curt responses, two packs of Dunhill's, one dozen lagers, a change of venue to Colin's house, and a bag of Jenga blocks (you probably shouldn't ask), we actually shifted the system to a workable model.

And it was good. No, it was actually better than it had been. In the first half-hour after Colin's participation, I could have gleefully wrapped his head in duct tape and made all his die rolls myself. By midnight, I was prepared to pay off his car loan.

You see, despite all the effort Matt and I had put into devising Section 5 to begin with, we were too close to the game to appreciate all the nuances, loopholes, and inconsistencies. We had invited Colin for his objective eye, and that's exactly what he gave us. At the end of it all, the revisions we devised turn out to be good. Frightfully good. Even better than we could have imagined, even without those horrid Celtic warriors insulting our mothers from the kitchen table.

It's strange how we, as creative people who love this hobby called role-playing, can be so adamant about what works in a system and what doesn't—which game mechanic is ironclad and which is a house of cards. We alter and tinker and fiddle with rules and guidelines, always thinking that our improvements represent the most distilled, the clearest, or the most singularly excellent design possible.

Yet we should all have players like Colin, who with a frosty glare and a frank observation, can discern what you, the designer, have missed. We all need someone to force us out into the blizzard, coats on our backs, boots on our feet, and snow shovels in our hands. You might look like a fool scooping snow up as fast as it comes down, and your neighbours might think you the village idiot for doing so, but you know that the alternative is doing twice as much work later.

And as your neighbours leer from their windows, know that they do so from the smug warmth of their living rooms. When the blizzard stops, and they have to don coats and boots, and wield shovels of their own, wading stiffly into snow twice as deep as when you started, you'll know that your task is already done while their's has just begun.

And that, if nothing else, should help you enjoy that soothing cup of Earl Grey.