Friday, May 10th

The Daily Report

So, less than two weeks left before WisCon. I think my pre-con excitement has kind of peaked and now I'm just, "Oh, this is happening." Which isn't to say I won't be excited to be there. It's just something in my brain recognizes the futility of weeks of excitement and goes, "Okay, can we not?" If anybody asks me if I'm excited, I'll say yes and mean it, but the actual emotion has been put on hold.

I've got so much stuff I want to get done in basically the next week and a half, but I think the best thing to do is keep it at "want" and not "need"... my huge productive streak in March and April was preceded by an acknowledgment of how difficult and unsettled my working conditions can be and me deciding that there's nothing wrong with coasting along until I can improve those things, and that turned out pretty well for everyone.

My AWW-brain decided to run with some of the ideas in the game balance revision and go through the other Basic Qualities, basically trying to re-work anything that gives an escalating attack bonus that isn't tied to specific conditions into something more interesting and less unbalancing on the back end.

The State of the Me

We're having a stretch of cool nights and nice days here, it's really doing wonders for me.

Plans For Today

Today's a posting day.

AWW: Other Qualities

Okay, so, here are the Basic Qualities that I'm adding to the 24 currently available.

In keeping with the idea of having three Qualities to represent D&D-style core classes, I'm adding three that specifically match the concept of a bard:

• Minstrel: The minstrel's abilities revolve around influencing people through music and knowledge of stories and songs. They have a Bardic Magic option that allows them to use a fine musical instrument as a wizards' implement (including the ability to give it implement traits), but which hampers their ability to use magic quietly. Note that if the option's not taken, this is not a magical Quality... the option is just there so that someone who wants to make a musical magical character doesn't need to take two overlapping Qualities.
  
• Illusionist: The illusionist can create images as Trivial or Ordinary Magic (depending on whether it's an obvious illusion or not), inflict mental damage with physical spell attacks, and gets a nice bonus to spells that deceive or hide.
  
• Booster: As in "Morale Booster". This is based around the "Leader" combat role as articulated in D&D 4E, especially as it's realized in the "Lazy Warlord" build and the Bard class. Basically, it's the combat cheerleader.

Now, if you've been following the development, you're probably thinking that Wayfarer and Smooth-Talker fit the bard concept pretty well, too. And that's the fun of it. There's no chart that says "a bard is this, this, and this." It's all plug and play.

Then I'm adding three new Folk Qualities.

• Ancient is a celestial (or sometimes infernal) spirit that wraps itself in a mortal form in order to walk in the world. Ancients typically gray-bearded sages, wizened crones, and little stoop-backed elders who smile knowingly at everything. The direct inspiration here is Gandalf and other Maiar spirit "wizards" of Middle-Earth, but there are a lot of potential antecedents in fantasy and fiction and folklore. Despite their appearance, an Ancient is not in any way infirm (unless you stack their Attributes that way) and so they can be used to make a venerable fighting master as easily a mystic one, though their abilities tend to lean towards wizardly things. Ancients aren't born, they simply will themselves into being, so a character with the Ancient and Elf Qualities would be one who'd manifested as an Elf.
  
• Zirathikul (the name's been expanded to something with no Google results) are the arachnoid merchants that I described previously.
  
• Gnomes are the quiet, unobtrusive folk who live in holes. Their abilities reflect their ability to fade into the background and go unnoticed by larger folk, and their love of interesting puzzles and mechanisms with lots of little fiddly bits.

That brings the total up to 30, which I think is probably more than enough for the Basic Guide. I have some half-formed ideas for a 7th and/or 8th Folk Quality to add, so that there are more ones that aren't as human-like in their presentation, but I'm going to be capping Basic Qualities at 32. If I only come up with one more Folk Quality, I'll probably add a generic Adventurer Quality to get an even number.

AWW: Dicey issues.

I'm sitting in a bookstore cafe working on the combat rules for A Wilder World, and I think I know why I have so little confidence in them: they're wrong, and always have been.

The structure of a fight scene is just fine. The whole fight points/wound points thing, the simultaneous unfolding of action, the abstract distance... all of that's great.

But the attack roll/defense roll mechanic is wrong. Even with escalating attack bonuses nerfed, it's too easy to have a character who has no chance of hitting another who has no chance of missing them. And I don't think there's anything wrong with a game where some people are good at fighting and some aren't, I don't think you actually need to have everyone in a party on the same footing in that area any more than they all need to be equally good with locks and traps or whatever, but it's just too easy. Making natural, obvious choices for a fighting character basically turns out combat munchkins. (This is the kind of insight that having a bunch of people making characters helps me notice.)

The other problem is that with equally matched opponents, the most likely outcome is little or no damage on every attack. I don't see this as a huge problem because the typical fight scene in a fantasy adventure story shouldn't be featuring equally matched opponents, but the ones that do should be climactic, not tedious and decided largely by random swinginess.

I have some thoughts for how to fix this. They all lean towards turning AWW into a fistfull o' dice kind of game, at least for combat... this is a sharp departure from the out-of-combat check rules, which typically use only one die, but maybe that's good. As things stand, attack and defense rolls are almost-but-not-quite identical to checks, and having them be completely different might be less confusing. Once a player understands that they're not the same thing, there would be no chance of mixing them up.

The mechanic I'm leaning towards would also make a sharper division between attack bonuses and damage bonuses. More accurate attacks would still equal more damage, but damage bonuses would effectively be put on a different scale.

AWW: Second thoughts on second thoughts.

So, while I was sitting in the book store I wrote out my fistful o' dice system for attack and defense rolls, and there's a lot to recommend it. For some reason, even though it's more complicated than what I've been doing, I can explain it more simply.

But it involves more dice and more math, and basically turns every exchange of blows into a minigame. I can explain the whole thing in a single page, but it would slow the game down immensely.

So I suspect the lesson here is that I'm overthinking when I try to explain the existing combat system, possibly because I've been living with it for too long.

So I think what I need to do is start from scratch, not in designing a new combat system but start over from the assumptions that led to the current one. Bulldoze it in my head and rebuild it.