Tuesday, February 11th

The Daily Report

Yesterday ended up being a short day, as we kind of scrambled to re-stock the kitchen after realizing how low we were on supplies after not being able to get out of the house last week. I did start the actual writing of Episode 3 of the FPSEB, but because I only had like an hour for it, it's less there than my previous efforts.

I think this really highlights the importance of what I was talking about when I started that project, of giving everything I do the time it needs, and my full attention during that time. It's not that I'm going to throw out what I did yesterday, it's just that what I can do in one hour is not the same as one half of what I can do in two hours, in quantity or quality. So, I'm going to give it another two hours today.

The State of the Me

I'm having a lot more memorable dreams lately. I'm not sure if anything's causing it, but I'm in favor of it because it means I'm sleeping.

Plans For Today

Block 1, Adventure Song. Things are falling into place there in a big way.

Block 2, FPS.

Block 3, Tales of MU.

Adventure Song: Swapping Spells Between Classes

I've mentioned before that powers in Adventure Song aren't class-restricted, but that each class has benefits with its favored power set. Some of these benefits are front-loaded into the class, and some are attached to the powers themselves.

I've also mentioned that different power sets will have different attributes, as part of making characters less "same-y" than they were under 4E. Using a Fighting Technique is different than casting Spells.

However, at the end of the day, this ends up creating a lot of very similar power sets with very similar rules. Although I've always kind of ground my teeth at the idea of a Cleric as a "spellcaster", I ended up deciding that what a Cleric, Wizard, and Druid aren't really that different. The *effects* of individual powers might fall into different patterns—Wizards being more likely to blast enemies, Clerics being more likely to aid allies, Druids being more likely to reshape the terrain—but they all use basically the same mechanics for activation.

And so I've decided to bite the bullet and call them all Spells, divided into four subsets by their cosmological alignment.

Arcane spells are called incantations. You use a magic phrase or sign to command the arcane power to produce a desired effect.

Celestial spells are called invocations. You invoke a deific or angelic power, which makes itself known through a magical effect.

Infernal spells are called supplications, because each spell you cast is, essentially, a bargain, though for game mechanical purposes it's largely assumed you're just adding to a spiritual tab that will fall due when you die.

Primal spells are called evocation, as you're calling forth an energy that is omnipresent yet normally invisibly woven into the fabric of the world.

So if you go to the Wizard class, you'll see that their favored power type is Incantation, and then there's a list of them: Fireball, Acid Splash, et cetera. Many of them have a bonus for Wizards who use them, something specific to the power.

If you to the Druid class, you'll see that their favored power type is Evocation, and then there's a list of them: Standing Stones, Circle of Flame, Suddenly Bees. Many of them have Druid-specific bonuses; e.g., more bees.

If you go the Cleric class, you'll see that their favored power type is Invocation, and then there's a list of them: Hammer of Conviction, Shield of Faith, Searing Wrath. Many of them contain Cleric-only bonuses.

But remember that cross-class borrowing? With anything under the heading of "Spells", it takes on a new wrinkle: a Spell of any type can be turned into another type. If you see a use for Hammer of Conviction as a Wizard, you can take it as an Incantation. Where the damage type says "celestial*" with an asterisk, that becomes "arcane". All your special abilities that relate to Incantations apply, because your Hammer of Conviction (or "Lazenby's Forceful Refudiation", or whatever you call it) is an incantation.

But the line at the end of Hammer of Conviction that says "CLERIC: One ally adjacent to the target gains +2 to defense until the start of their next turn"? That does not apply, because you're not a Cleric. You don't "translate" the class-specific bonus the power has when you copy the spell.

Now, that bonus is tied to class, not power type, so by the rules, if your Wizard multiclasses to Cleric, suddenly Lazenby's Forceful Refudiation would be Lazenby's Protective Refudiation, even though it's still an arcane spell. And I'm okay with that... a change in class could easily be seen to come with a change in outlook that alters/enhances some of your spells.

Adventure Song: Halflings vs. Hobbits vs. Gnomes

I've hit a bit of a sticking point in my development of Adventure Song.

My longterm followers already know my position on the name "Halfling". Gygax and Arneson originally called them Hobbits because that's what they were, the Tolkien estate made some noise because "Hobbit"—being a book title and brand name—is subject to trademark, and they changed the name to "Halfling". Now, legally, having a word trademarked doesn't mean other people can't use it, it (broadly speaking) means they can't use it for marketing or branding in a way that is substantially similar or would cause confusion.

But a couple of hobbyists trying to create an industry don't want to be sued by the people who have money wrapped up in the name "Hobbit", so they grabbed another word for Hobbits from the books that no one had bothered to trademark and here we are.

The problem is it doesn't make sense. The other name they grabbed was the rude word that Humans used to call Hobbits. It's a name that only makes sense from an outside point of view, and one that's derisive and dismissive. HALFlings: you're half of us. Half a man. Half a person. Half-sized.

A Halfling isn't half anything, though. They're a full sized Hobbit. They're actual size.

My usual solution to this is to use the word "Gnome", which has the advantage of having less of the associations Halflings have picked up in 35 years of being rogues and scamps.

The problem with this is that D&D has an equally iconic treatment of Gnomes as a separate people, and since Adventure Song is my treatment of D&D's iconic character types, I'd like to use Gnomes, too.

So I've considered using another word from Middle-Earth cannon, or something that sounds like Halfling (Alfling, Apling, Harfling), or even just biting the bullet and use "Hobbit" (other games have, in the intervening 35 years). Underpinning all of these possibilities was the sure and certain knowledge that whatever I called them, if the game caught on at all, they would be called Halflings.

But then I was flipping through an older edition's PHB, and I came upon a tidbit: the idea that the Halfling language is private, not spoken with outsiders.

With this canon, a possibility emerges: they don't tell anyone the name they call themselves. And in the absence of that, the rude Human nickname becomes the dominant description. But they use that as a shield... it helps encourage them to be underestimated, overlooked, and ignored.

Which is just how they like it.

(For their part, they call Humans "Too-Talls" or "Brain Bellies", with the idea being that no brain could stand to be as high up as that, which is why Humans seem to think with. their guts.)

Adventure Song: Really Big Magic

Another sticking point with Adventure Song has been how to handle major expenditure abilities, like resurrection or item enchantment. Traditionally in D&D, this sort of thing costs XP and/or levels and/or ability points. 4E did away with that, a decision I largely agree with, but I'm not overly satisfied with their solution, where basically these things just cost money which in 4E, rules as written, is basically a proxy for experience.

To go along with the encounter/daily power fuel being Silver and Gold Tokens, I've considered having Platinum Tokens for these sorts of things, with the recharge frequency being "when you complete a major goal" or "when you level up" or something. I still might use Platinum Tokens for the bigger-than-big gun abilities you get as you level.

But I think instead, I'm going to stick with the idea of using a proxy for experience of sorts, only 1) not having it be gold and 2) lopping some zeroes off to make the costs easier to compare.

To be specific:

Well, for lack of a better name, let's say you have Great Deed Points. At level 1, your character has 1 Great Deed Point, though not a lot of things to use it for. At level 2, you get 2 Great Deed Points. At level 3, you get 3. And so on. With an expected 30 level progression, this gives you a total of 465 expected Great Deed Points if you play through to the endgame.

The Rite of Resurrection would cost 1 Great Deed Point at level 1, with a cost that rises as you level but probably not at a 1 for 1 rate, because that would mean that dying would always set you back one entire levels' worth of GDP and that's harsher than I would want to go. Maybe 1 GDP per five levels of experience or portion thereof. The expectation would be that the GDP cost is paid by the resurrectee, but it could be paid by the person performing it or anyone with a stake in the person's life (which could be any member of the party).

GDP could conceivably be used for creating permanent magic items and effects, attracting followers, increasing attributes (with an escalating cost each time you do this). Obviously I don't have details for how that would work and figuring it out isn't exactly a priority, but this just seems like a basis for a system where things like creating magic items or resurrecting/being resurrected would set you back and you'd have a limited ability to do so especially at low levels, but manageably so.

I could even include in the system something where Cleric levels give bonus GDP earmarked for resurrection and major healing, Wizard levels give bonus GDP earmarked for magic items and other big magic, stuff like that.

This is all something that will even be in the first version of the rules I put up, but I figure that if I'm not thinking about it now, whatever solution I come up with will look grafted on.

Adventure Song: One thing I'm not giving in on...

...is "dark elves".

Where 4E has Eladrin/Elves/Drow as "High Elves"/"Wood Elves"/"Dark Elves", I'm using a different cosmology. The Eladrin are represented by the Summer Elves, who come from the Summerlands (a Feywild parallel, a mirror of the mortal world bursting with life and magic). Their opposite number, the Winter Elves, come not from the underground but from the predictably named Winterlands, which is a Shadowfell cognate that differs from its inspiration in still being explicitly fey.

Elves who have lived in the mortal world, cut off from the magical realms for many generations, become more mortal and more in touch with the primal energy of the world. Since most of these were descended from Summer Elves, they've started calling themselves Autumn Elves. This has some slight grim humor in that they're Summer Elves who have "fallen" into mortality, aging in a way that their ancestors didn't (cf. "autumn years").

This I think nicely retains the flavor of 4E's take on the Elven subdivisions, while staying away from the dark-is-evil tropes and other baggage of the drow. It also goes back to the elves-is-elves approach of previous editions*, which just seems neater and also more, I don't know... just, the idea that you can't have variety or division within a fantasy folk without making them entirely separate seems off to me.

*On that note: reconciling 4E's changes with previous editions was not at all one of my goals, but I'm surprised at how often I find myself both feeling that 4E threw the baby out with the bathwater and figuring out ways to incorporate the older ways into 4E's style.