AWW: Multiple Qualities, simplicity, and balance.

So, as I'm redoing the Basic Character Guide, I'm thinking about a few things.

One thing I've decided to do is tweak the idea that characters can start with progress towards the second tier. Letting brand new level one characters dip into second tier abilities even once or twice an adventure drops a lot on the plate of newbies, especially since the way it stands now, the simpler your character is, the more often you'll be doing that.

That's not a very newbie-friendly approach.

So I'm either going to do one of two things with that. One of them is to just drop the idea entirely, new characters start out with no progress on their tiers. The other is more complicated than that, and for that reason alone I'm probably not going to do it, even though it's appealing. It's something that will really have to wait until I hammer down the advancement rates, though, so I'm not even going to get into it. The upshot is that the fewer Qualities you start with, the easier it will be to advance those starting ones towards the second tier.

Either way, for all characters, the second tier is going to be something to look forward to, not something to grapple with from level one. The other advantage of this is that it means nobody has to print off/copy the second page of any of their Qualities to make a beginning character, which saves some hassle.

Practically speaking, it's hard to balance more Qualities versus fewer. The fact that the characters with fewer Qualities start with the first tier abilities at higher levels mathematically works out to be about the same when you're comparing Qualities with two ranked abilities, but the extra static abilities of the character with more Qualities is an advantage that's going to be present to varying degrees depending on the number and nature of those abilities.

So what I'm thinking is: Details. Details are the natural equivalent of a static ability. They give a bonus in the neighborhood of +1-+2 or a slight extra capability. So, maybe the cost of having three Qualities will be fewer Details and the benefit of having one Quality will be having more of them.

The exact details of this will take some working out, but I think it's a solid idea. And yes, it does give the newbie player who wants a simple character more resources to spend, but Details explicitly allow you to save them up for filling in later.

The other change I'm considering is also to simplify things for players (especially new ones), and this is to simply present the instructions in the form of "Pick two Qualities", and then having simpler or more complicated characters as an option at the end. This makes the character creation process smoother, it makes balance simpler (with one or three Quality characters being presented as optional variants, I can just flat out say "These characters may not handle exactly the same as a standard one, though they should be within an acceptable range."), and while one person did mention a plan to make a three Quality character, exactly none of the characters I've been shown would be impacted at all by this particular change.

At the end of the day, the balance isn't going to be perfect, and that's okay because that's not my goal. My goal with balance is to have everyone playing on the same field.

All of this post is a lot of TL;DR to say that the process of making a new character and playing as a low level character are both going to be a bit simpler.

Friday, May 3rd

The Daily Report

...I've been up for a few hours and even working, but woke up with a blank mind in terms of anything to report. My work life has kind of hit a routine plateau.

I've got a couple of pretty busy weekends coming up (family stuff), but I'm going to try to get a newsletter out this weekend or the next one.

The State of the Me

Doing okay. It's warming up a bit, but the cold days gave me a nice break.

Plans For Today

Today's a Tales of MU posting day. I have to keep reminding myself that... it keeps slipping my mind because I'm not used to posting on Fridays. Or knowing what day of the week it is.

AWW: Johnson & Johnson No More Tiers

So, I'm completely reworking Quality progression in A Wilder World based on reader/tester feedback. This is something that grew out of the thoughts bumping around in my head when I went to sleep last night, which I laid out in my last post on the subject.

When I say "completely", I don't mean I'm throwing out the content I've already created. If you were looking at the higher tiers of your favorite Quality and going, "awesome, I can't wait to play a character who gets there", fret ye not. The progression from Treasure Hunter to Expert Treasure Hunter to Master Burglar is still going to be there. It's just going to work in a less convoluted fashion, one more in keeping with what players were apparently envisioning when they started reading about Qualities, tiers, and levels.

Here's what the Qualities listings are going to look like now. At the top of the crunch box (the part with the special abilities), right under the name "Treasure Hunter", you have a level indicator. This level indicator is not attached to any ability, it's your level of Treasure Hunter. Some abilities (usually the first one listed) will refer to your "Treasure Hunter level" (or whatever Quality it is).

Then you have some abilities with ranks, as there currently is, and one or two static abilities that don't have ranks and don't change with levels.

Tier two and three? They used to be on the next page, but now they're gone. The whole Quality section is one Quality, one page. You turn the page and then you wash your hands and you're looking at a new Quality. When you add a Quality to a character, you just have one page to print/copy.

So what happened to tiers 2 and 3?

They're now separate Qualities, not listed with the starter ones because they have a prerequisite of having x levels of the Quality "below" them in the tier scheme. The original idea was that you could advance your character by buying more Qualities or training into higher tiers of the ones you have now. Now, they're the same thing. Your choice is now to pursue more Beginner Qualities or focus your way towards an Advanced Quality. This also opens the possibility of having paths of advancement not tied to a particular Beginner Quality, and also makes it possible to introduce longer or shorter chains, or branching ones.

So, the tier/rank/level/progress-towards-next-tier confusion is resolved like this: tiers are gone, level is attached to the Quality itself and replaces the separate progress-towards-next-tier bubble thing that didn't have a name, ranks are still clearly attached to individual abilities that have ranks. Character advancement works mostly the same whether you're branching out or specializing.

This change eliminates the "dip into the next tier's abilities" mechanic I was so fond of, but that had some implementation problems. It worked better with some abilities than others, and limiting higher tiers to abilities that could come and go within an adventure without causing problems wouldn't have been worth it. Plus, it was another thing that seemed to be confusing.

Now, if each former tier is now its own Quality, does that mean that a Master Burglar now has three separate sheets? ...probably. I could keep the advancement paths tied together on a page because they are tied together, but I think some would benefit from having a fluffbox (the descriptive text above), and I know that some would benefit from having the ability to have the crunchbox steal space from the fluffbox. That, and in the long run, I don't want every Advanced Quality to be locked into a definite progression with another one.

My description here is probably not doing justice to how simple and streamlined the change will be compared to the previous way of doing things, so I'm going to stop describing it before it gets any longer.

(As a side note, character advancement rates are ultimately going to be pending playtesting, but I'm almost 11110% sure that I'm going to get rid of the idea of an overall character level, leaving the level a Quality has as the only use of the word "level" in the whole character scheme, for further clarity.)