Sleep? Sleep? What is that?

Not quite a status post, just a note to say that I've been up all night... just as I was getting ready to lie down, I had the breakthrough of breakthroughs for A Wilder World. I've had the underlying game system, the engine for game play, in more or less the same shape since September of last year, but I've never been able to get the process for character generation (to say nothing of presentation or advancement) to gel, despite the grand vision of stacking archetypes.

It was always too complicated, both in terms of number of steps and the total amount of information you had to pore through and the amount of information you were left to manage. This is a natural risk when you want a system that can handle nigh-unto-anything at a mechanical level, but since my goal was to find a balance between complex possibilities and a simple system an eighteen step character creation or a character sheet that comprised a small booklet was clearly not what was called for.

But now I have had a minor epiphany (building on the random burst of creative insight I mentioned the other week) and I think I have it.

First, ditch Archetypes as a mechanical structure entirely. They now exist for categorization. It's an interesting bit of intellectual metagame wankery to see how many concepts you could make by juggling combinations of exactly four narrowly defined concepts, but I want this to be a game that's fast and playable, not just an endless series of charts to play around with. This might seem like a radical departure from the original concept, since the whole time I've been talking about AWW it's been Archetypes, Archetypes, Archetypes, but really each iteration of the character creation system since the first one has de-emphasized them as a structural element of the system. Each revision has made them both less complex and less hardwired.

Second, forget the idea of character sheets. Someone who's old school and hard core and hard school and old core could very easily write down their abilities and equipment, but one of the better things D&D 4E and its mutant offspring D&D Gamma World have brought to the gaming table is cards. Not as a collectible "gotta catch 'em all" element, but as a compact reference that tells you exactly what abilities you have, exactly what they do, and exactly which ones you've expended or have available at a given moment of the game. They might seem like an odd prop for a roleplaying game, but after seeing them in action it seems odd that they didn't become more common sooner.

The real goal of the AWW character creation system is to allow modularity. Not as free form as GURPS, not as bound in iron as D&D, but something that hopefully combines the best elements of the two (at least as applies to pseudomedieval high fantasy settings. I don't plan on trying to compete with GURPS's "go anywhere" mentality.)

The archetype-based system was a step in the right direction, and a logical step from my starting point (looking at how classes were put together in 4E, and in particular how they made the transition from 3E), but it left me with two different levels of modularity, the stuff that existed within an archetype and the stuff that existed outside it. This created arbitrary and artificial restrictions for players, and imposed arbitrary and artificial restrictions on design, necessitating a lot of what the 4E devs refer to as "needless symmetry" and "grid-filling"; i.e., game design by way of fill in the blanks.

Now everything's modular. The concept of archetypes still exists to give players (particularly new ones, or ones who aren't interested in absorbing whole catalogs of abilities before they start making a character) guidelines and starting points, but you'll never find yourself screwed or forced into a box you don't want to be in because some stupid game designer somewhere (i.e., me) had a different idea of what the key components of an assassin or ranger are.

So here's how it works, in a nutshell:

You pick a number* of Traits. These are static bonuses or always-available abilities, things that act as constants in differentiating your character from the base line. Mastery with a particular weapon or fighting style, raw fighting ability, physical toughness, charisma, etc. A lot of these are things that would have been the base ability of a particular Archetype in one of my old builds.

Then you pick a number* of Techniques. These are abilities that you actively use. They correspond most closely to Encounter Powers in D&D 4E.

The "serving suggestion" for managing your character is that you lay your Traits down on the table as you would a character sheet and keep your Techniques as a deck/hand, turning them over or laying them aside when you use them. Quick and manageable. Only the most complicated abilities, the ones that require more than a paragraph or two to explain, will ever require recourse to a rule book because the whole rules for the use of an ability will be written in plain language English on its card. The exceptions are mostly the really open-ended abilities that require caveats and guidelines, like illusion and shapeshifting.

The * after number is because it'll take some testing and proof-of-concepting to work out good starting numbers. One key factor of this system is that it would be scalable. You could make simpler (and lower powered) games by scaling down the number of Traits or Techniques or higher powered ones by scaling them up.

This is just an overview, I'm skipping a lot of details obviously. Some of that is because I don't have all the details worked out... what I have is very preliminary. But I think this is a big step in the right direction. Just the thought of literally building a character out of cards is tremendously appealing. I mean, imagine you show up for the first gaming session and there are piles of cards on the table. Fighter-Fu here. Thief-Fu here. Magic-Fu here. Find what you want, put it together. I think it's something that can appeal to newbies and oldbies alike. No calculations. No table look-ups. Total plug and play.