Friday, August 9th

The Daily Report

Today is the last day of the fundraiser: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/a-moving-plea It ends at 11:59 PM tonight (Pacific Time), so if you wanted to get in on it, this is the time.

TOMU book 2 is on track for publication over the weekend. Omnibus 2 will definitely be out this month, but I'm less sure of the ETA because I don't know how long it will take to go over it, since Omnibus 1 was two-thirds done when I started it. I'm not going to worry too much about cosmetics since the Omnibus is specifically the "quick and dirty" edition.

State of the Me

I don't know if it was because my body is mostly used to delayed sleep because I've been falling asleep around 3 AM so many nights (as that's when my room got cool enough, during the warmer ones) or if the little bit of caffeine in a Kahlua-based cocktail I had in the evening was enough to mess me up, but my sleep was shallow and fragmented. Still slept, though. I'm a little groggy this morning, but the kind that usually clears up.

Plans For Today

Main plans are TOMU. I'm still writing downstairs, and still not fully into the swing of it.

AWW: Magic Re-Thunked.

While I'm still waking up...

Another change coming to A Wilder World as a result of the summer percolation and the back-and-forth on the combat system is that Magic now uses the same scale as other attributes. That is, it's no longer capped at 3, no longer costs extra points, and no longer steals points from the combat side.

There were solid balance reasons for the different handling, but I've figured out ways to shift the balance to the backend in order to make the whole point allocation process uniform, and to create a greater range of viable Magic scores.

Before, pretty much everyone who had any Magic had exactly 3. Now, a low positive score basically just means you can do incidental, trivial magic stuff all the time and might occasionally do something productive for an adventure with it, but mostly you'll be using it to help other people do things. A moderate Magic score means you'll be really useful in a support role and can occasionally (usually by taking extra time) do something yourself. A high Magic score means you can do just about anything that anyone else could, given enough time, though you'll still be out-performed by someone with an equally high score in the same area.


The main points of the re-balancing are these:

First, when you use a Spell Check to replace another check outright, the difficulty is no longer identical to the original task's, but is that +3. Which means you'd have to take the "hour or so" level of extra time to match someone else who's doing it by hand. A Spell Check made to aid an ally doesn't have the difficulty bump, so using Magic to weaken a door frame or strengthen an ally will often be more efficient than trying to blast it to bits.

Second, you can't ace a Spell Check. Acing, for those just tuning in, is a mechanism whereby if you roll high enough, you can roll another die and maybe add it to the first one. The odds of triggering one and the potential range of the bonus it gives you goes up as your score in the attribute increases, which makes higher Attributes more dramatically effective, in keeping with the idea that they represent superhuman/legendary levels of ability. If Spell Checks can't be aced, then a Strength of 6 or Perception of 6 are still forces to be reckoned with, whether the wizard gets to take extra time or not.

Third, Magic Burn Tolerance (how many failures you can rack up before your performance suffers) is going to be equal to half your Magic rounded up, instead of your full Magic. This keeps it operating on the same scale as it would have when Magic was capped at 3. Honestly, this was one of the longest sticking points that held back this change... I base magical fatigue on *failed* magic instead of successful magic to put a soft limit on wizards overreaching or parties relying on magic too much rather than a hard limit on how often a wizard can be a wizard before they're no longer a wizard. But if you could accumulate 6 strikes without any consequences and then have 6 points of plus to absorb the negatives, I think that would be weakened quite a bit.

There are also some changes for how Magic interacts with combat (which is why it no longer takes from both pools), but since I've never publicly gone into much detail about the old way, I'll refrain from going into detail now. The short version is that you can use your Magic attribute to aim your attack spells, but just like Magic 6 is no replacement for Strength 6, actually having an attack attribute and using it instead will generally work out better.

Antagonist forces in A Wilder World.

I'm going to put most of this behind a cut, because on these longer posts, the cross-posts can be a bit much. So click the link if you want to read.

My original plan for A Wilder World was "no assumed world setting", just a set of rules and chargen content supporting generic fantasy tropes. In the four(!) years since I started working on the first version of it, I've come to realize that what I thought of as "generic fantasy tropes" contain multiple assumptions about the setting, that it's better to be deliberate about my choices than just mindlessly re-tread things, and that no matter how interesting my character creation system is or how engaging the gameplay might be, my worldbuilding can be a selling point.

So even though I'm mostly focused on the rules right now, I'm still giving thought to the world, and how those "generic fantasy tropes" fit into it, and why.

One of the things is that if you're going to have dangerous adventures and battles and things, there has to be an enemy... this simple truth is responsible for a lot of the worst implications of fantasy stories. I'm staying away from any "legion of mooks" type people in the game. There are no orcs, and My Goblins Are Different.

So who is there for player characters to fight?

( Read more... )