Watch Well Games #55

Special 5th Friday issue. Special contents inside.

K.J. Montgomery

May 30, 2025

Welcome to our RPG community newsletter!

Hi. I’m K.J. This special 5th Friday newsletter comes to you after a few setbacks, but here we are. Hope you enjoy.

Today, I review a set of dice for you from Botch. Soon, you too can order your very own set of these unique dice.

Guest writer Kublai Kohen joins us to talk about partially succeeding at making a game.

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Botch Dice Review

Want Luxury 7-Die RPG sets made in the USA (Wisconsin) featuring cutting edge InkFX™ technology? Me too!

I got a set of Synth Nights dice from Botch to review.

Click on the button below to check out my Botch Dice review on YT.

Botch Dice Review by K.J.

Disclaimer: If you use my affiliate link here to order your own Botch dice when the campaign goes live next month, it (A) costs you nothing and (B) helps me know reviews like this are worth the time and energy it takes to make them. Save the link, share the link. The KS goes live in June. Thank you!

Partial Success

Is the glass a quarter full or three-quarters empty?

by guest writer Kublai Kohen

50% off Sleep Therapy - Dream Edition

One of my favourite game systems is John Harper’s Forged in the Dark (FitD), the engine behind his Blades in the Dark. Rolls can lead to outright success or failure, but most result in partial success – “you do what you were trying to do, but there are consequences: trouble, harm, reduced effect, etc.” In games, this is where you want to live. This is that sweet spot where your characters keep advancing toward their goal, but it’s challenging and fun and wild and you will be retelling the story for years to come. In real life, though, I feel about partial success the same as the improv theatre version of the term: yes, but…

My entry for this year’s PocketQuest was a series of partial successes. Every triumph came with a loss. Every high was succeeded by a low. The thrill of victory always tempered by the agony of defeat. This is not a design essay that shows how to write the best game ever made. It’s not meant to show you how to turn lemons into lemonade. This is commiseration in case your process fails and you learn that if you don’t have any sugar, the best thing you can do with lemons is to stave off scurvy.

You too could be this majestic in Kublai’s game.

Trouble

For a while, it seemed the staff would not be able to run the game jam. But then, what looked like full success. The game jam will happen! Time to get creative.

But… the announcement that PocketQuest was on was also the announcement that it was on immediately.

The eight-week clock started that day. I had to get moving during a rather busy time at work and home. Still, this was fine at the get-go. In the first week, I helped a couple of people with the ideas for their games and came up with what felt like a clever plan for mine.

My ideas often start with a visual, some often-ridiculous picture in my mind that is central to what I want to create. This one hit me reasonably quickly. Remember those flipbooks we’ve all had as babies, where the pages are split into three and you can create different people by choosing a different picture for head, torso, and legs? What if I used that for character creation? I decided to draw six different panels for each segment of the body, so that the player could use 3d6 to make their character. (A little while later, I decided that all the panels would be of different creatures, so there were no completely sensible characters – everyone was an amalgam of three things.)

Then, an interesting twist came to mind. What if I made two games? The theme this year was Dreams and Nightmares. My panel idea probably came from how dreams mash elements of our daily lives in random-seeming ways. But what if I created one game using only creatures from Dreams and another with only Nightmares? The math nerd in me was also pleased that while each game had (6 3 =) 216 different characters, the two together would give (12 3 =) 1,728. (And what if everything lined up and I could also make a game of extreme nightmares – the kind of thing that would call for an Adult Content label. That would be awesome.)

At this point, I was very excited about these ideas. Every year, I try to do something that stretches my abilities in a new direction and this gave me the opportunity to both have an art-heavy game – my drawing skills are… peccable – and to create separate-but-connected games.

Harm

As the second week began, my job shifted gears from Very Busy to Stark Raving Bonkers. With no time to build up a buffer at work (not that it would have been possible with the rolling emergencies through March and April), I found myself unable to get to the game. Weeks two through five were lost to dealing with stuff that wasn’t supposed to be a part of my job. Three weeks left and, what? Time to start thinking about making lemonade. The extreme version of the game certainly won’t be happening, but I still have time to get two games done. Except that I draw very slowly. I was managing at most one drawing per day and some days without any. The Nightmare Edition of the game was looking unlikely, but I think the drawings I did for the Dream Edition were looking pretty good.

Reduced effect

With days to go, I had to tackle the biggest problem, which you may have noticed by its absence. I had nice art, but I didn’t actually have a game. I knew I wanted to use FitD and I knew what I wanted the game to do – the Dreams would be an element of the subconscious of a Dreamer, helping them deal with trauma – but I had no idea how to connect these. Were the Dreams taking hold of the Dreamer’s real life, were they making suggestions, or was it all in the Dreamer’s head as metaphor? In the final days, I settled on the last of these and cobbled together a way to use FitD to do what I needed. And then I priced the game so that those who only buy it for the art will not feel cheated.

The game works. It’s not my best, but I’m rather proud of managing it. Partial success. I’m even putting together the Nightmare Edition now and hoping to have it ready within a week or two.

Et cetera

So, what did I learn? Mostly that a minor result is better than no result at all. Even if you don’t manage to “make the best of it,” you can still satisfy some of your creative urge and, if you’re writing for pleasure anyway, that may just be enough. It was for me.

Character samplings from Sleep Therapy - Dreams Edition