Tuesday, August 6th

The Daily Report

So, last night I figured out how to resolve the biggest problems with A Wilder World's combat system, that being that it was complicated and too different from the rest of the game. Now attack rolls are just checks, using the same rules as everything else. Just in the hour or so after I posted about it last night, I've written the basic combat rules and converted half the Character Qualities to the new terminology/rules.

I know I've had this much of the combat rules written before, but this time I'm feeling really good about them. I haven't just written out the bare mechanics but actually written them out in a way that goes with the rest of the rules. A lot of the stuff I haven't written yet--like the rules for multiple attacks--have so much more intuitive and obvious solutions now.

AWW is my "after hours" project, so I'm not going to be working on it further until tonight, where I think it will benefit from marinating overnight and through the day. But I'm excited to have progress, so I have to mention it.

The State of the Me

Last night was in the gray zone of not being hot enough to be uncomfortable but not being cool enough for my optimal sleep purposes. Today is projected to hit the 90s, but right now it's cool and rainy. The rest of the week is still supposed to be low 80s and high 70s, with 50s and 60s overnight. I'm really hoping that holds true.

Plans For Today

My main focus today is the Tales of MU e-book. Yesterday I had some decent progress on the second omnibus, I have a tentative title for book 6 and a vague idea of where it's going to end, which is good.

AWW: Design Techniques

Techniques are something that were originally going to be a huge and requisite part of character creation and advancement. Then I got rid of them when I temporarily added another limited use element to gameplay that ultimately didn't work out. I added them back in as an optional element... I understand some people don't want to keep track of limited use powers, and some people just can't grok how they can have a fancy sword trick that only works once a day, and some people feel like having a "move list" hampers their creativity.

But other people like having a repertoire of tricks.

So Techniques are in the game, as a sub-set of Details. Details occupy a design space similar to Feats in D&D, and most of them give a static benefit. They're weapon training and secondary skills and elements of a character's upbringing and stuff like that. Because Techniques are just Details, you can always take something else.

Techniques are inspired by the D&D 4E power system, but rather than just copying what they did, I tried to learn from it. I won't go into what I think they got wrong or could do better, though. Instead I'll talk about what I'm doing.

Every Technique has a static or at-will bonus that's a little more limited in scope or applicability than the average Detail, and a once-per-scene use that is often "triggered" by circumstances (though you still choose to use it). If the circumstances don't come up in every fight scene, the static bonuses will still tend to shape/reflect your typical tactics.

Take this example:

Watch Backs: You and your allies gain a +1 bonus to reactive Perception Checks and to Defense Checks made to defend each other when they are less than 1D away from you.

Now That's What I Call Teamwork Once per scene, you can defend an ally within 1D as a reaction. If you succeed, they can attack the attacker as a reaction. Alternately, you can allow an ally within 1D to defend you as a reaction, and if they succeed, you can attack the attacker as a reaction.

Now, first of all, when D&D does teamwork based Feats, they tend to require everybody take them to benefit from them. D&D Feats are a precious commodity, so I don't know how often that happens outside of games with a prefab party who are all supposed to be part of some group. So right away, I think letting one person have this and everyone benefits is an improvement.

Then there's the limited use application. It's pretty much a classic fight scene trope, codified in game form. If you can't picture what happens: Alberta is fighting Barbara and Carla. Alberta swings her axe at Barbara's head. Carla steps between them and catches Alberta's axe with her sword. CHING. While Alberta is distracted by this development, Carla lashes out with her mace.

Classic fight scene trope. In game terms, "as a reaction" means two things: it doesn't have to be declared in advance, and it doesn't count as an action. These are freebies. Normally, defending yourself is a reaction and defending an ally is an action.

My first stab at writing this, I didn't have the bit where you could defend as a reaction. It had to happen that someone defended someone (as an action) and then the attack happened. But then I started thinking about how often that would happen... the defending player would be giving up their attack for the hope that an ally would get an extra attack in as a result. The action economy trade-off was sub-optimal.

So I made the whole thing a freebie, which pretty much guarantees it will be used. Not that it will work... the defense can fail and the attack can miss. But if you pick this Technique for your character, the situation will come up often enough that it will be a defining part of your character.

The benefit is real: once per scene you get a free shot at an extra defense attempt and a free shot at an extra attack for someone on the team. And extra attacks are CANDY. Characters who can give them out are always a popular choice. But this is so much more interesting than just being an extra attack.

And it gives you a completely different effect than a Technique that lets you lash out with violent retribution when someone attacks you. The end result is similar: free attack once per scene. But the experience it creates is different.

AWW: State of Things.

Combat rules are going awesome. I don't mean they're going well, which is the kind of thing I say when it's not entirely sucking and I'm trying to convince myself that I haven't wasted years of my life chasing a childhood ambition of creating a roleplaying game system. I mean they're going awesome. This evening at the coffee shop I wrote the attack-for-effect rules and they came out pretty good.

I wrote the the rules for effects for physical attacks out, and then the ones for mental attacks, and because I was figuring out how to say what I meant as I went, the mental attack ones came out much better. Much more unified. Things like realizing that if I use the same rules for all ongoing effects and the shaking-off thereof, I don't need to restate them each time as part of the effect's entry. So I'm going to rewrite the physical effects to match.

After that, the non-magical combat rules will be basically done. I'm not 100% sure if I've listed things in the most logical order, but that's the kind of thing player feedback is useful on. For that reason, I think I'm going to put up a PDF with the combat rules sans magic, once I've got it presentable (which won't be tonight).

The revised version of the Basic Character Guide will follow sometime after. It's... well, it's undergoing an expansion as well as a revision.

See, my original thought for the BCG was to just cover the same ground as basic old school D&D in characters to show how this game handles the classics and give a tantalizing hint of the possibilities. Then I thought "four class D&D with mix-and-match multiclassing isn't that impressive", so I decided to add some of the more conceptual character types to the starter pack. And that was a little better, so I added a few more, plus a few more character class archetypes.

And then when I axed the ranked ability framework, I decided to maybe throw back in some Character Qualities I'd tried out, but hadn't been able to make work with the format of "one leveled and two ranked abilities" thing. And while this was only four or five more Qualities than I'd had, something about adding them into the mix just... clicked. Suddenly the game felt more like I wanted it to feel. I started to get a real hint of the feeling that the name "A Wilder World" was meant to suggest.

And then I started thinking, why am I trying to be coy? It possibly made a little sense when I thought I would probably give the game away for free and then sell expansions, but if I want people to pay $10 for this thing, it should be the actual game experience, not just a playable game and a hint of something more.

So the bottom line is that when the Basic Character Guide next sees the light of day, it will have about twice as many Character Qualities in it. With no illegal combinations between them, there will be literally tens of thousands of possible combinations. You can stack things together to make your favorite RPG class, like Wayfarer/Archer/Tracker = Ranger, or Treasure Hunter/Acrobat/Assassin = Rogue. Or you can get a little creative and make Coward/Fool/Warrior = bumbling comedy relief.

Or you can get a lot creative. Undead/Pixie/Brute? No problem. Giant/Fae/Beast? Who hasn't wanted to play an eleven-foot fairy tale monstrosity? Veteran/Scholar/Supporter? Wise old mentor. Warrior/Wizard/Healer? Whoa, a fighter-mage who can also heal? If you needed more proof that the sky's the limit here, I think that's probably it.

Right now my goal is to start playtesting next year, when I'll be pretty well established in the new place and I'll have better opportunities to do live in-person testing, though the bulk of it's going to be done online. In order to be ready for that, I'm going to trying to bring the two guides to a state of completion in the next two months so they can go through a couple of months of public comment and review, and so that potential playtesters can familiarize themselves with the rules.

That's the plan, for now. I think I have a pretty good chance of bringing it off, considering that I was very very close last spring until I started poking at the combat system and realized it wasn't working.