Wednesday, February 12th

The Daily Report

Yesterday was a day of frustrating technical difficulties. My phone freaked out on me while I was writing on it (and since it lacks autosave,I lost pretty much everything I did on Adventure Song yesterday morning). My SkyDrive has been giving me some issues for the past few days, which doesn't stop me from working--everything is offline as well as in the cloud--but does make sharing my draftwork difficult, which has some impact on my focus.

None of the problems are actually that bad. The real enemy here is frustration. Last week I had power outages and internet outages, and this week I'd hoped to have a "WHOO, BACK TO NORMAL!" week. I suppose in a way I'm a victim of my own expectations here. The solution is to let go of what I'd expected from reality, adjust to what reality has given me, and move on.

Moving on...

The State of the Me

As evidenced by the multiple blog posts I made last night just before bed, I had a creative burst late last night.It did keep me awake later than I would have liked, but I did sleep, and pretty well.

Plans For Today

Block 1: I'm going to try to sort out my Skydrive problem. If this succeeds, expect to see some FPS Blog drafts on my Patreon feed.

Block 2: Not sure yet. I'm going to see what grabs me after I'm done dealing with technical stuff.

Block 3: Tales of MU.

My SkyDrive issue is fixed.

So, the problem was that while I could create a sharing link for a document, I couldn't get the shortened permalink version of it. Patreon doesn't accept the long link in posts, I think possibly because it contains arguments or it redirects in a way their system doesn't like, but it does like the short links.

For some reason, the application form of Office won't shorten the link (I think it's always been this way), so I've always had to share the file with the internet, which makes it pop up in a browser, and from the browser view, I can shorten the link.

Or I should have been able to, but I haven't.

I'm a little embarrassed at how long it took me to figure this out, but: I was signed out of the browser version of the service while signed in to the application version. I'd been signed into the browser for so long that I kind of internalized it that they were the same thing... I'd forgotten ever having signed into it separately. The repeated power outages last week ended up knocking me out of everything I was signed into on Chrome (which is why the problem started then), but I didn't even think about this.

This meant I was viewing my own files as a guest, which meant I could do nothing but view them. If I'd been trying to work with them in the browser I probably would have noticed, but I was only paying attention to the one thing I was trying to do.

Anyway, fixed now. As soon as I post this, I'm going to be posting the first ~2,000 words of episode 3 to my Patreon sponsors.

Adventure Song: Handling magic items.

There's a lot not to like about how 4E handles items. There are good ideas, like the idea that it should be less capricious, that they should be treated as part and parcel of a character's abilities, etc., and ideas like spontaneous enchantment of a player's personal signature item as an alternative to finding a magic sword in a treasure cache.

But on a systemic level? They made one critical mistake early on, and it marred the whole of the thing.

That mistake was working the "magical plusses" into the steady progression of character attack and defense bonuses by level.

You can understand why they did it. If they hadn't done this, then it would throw that progression off completely if everyone has +5 or +6 equipment at the epic levels, and if some people did and some people didn't, it would be worse.

So they made the steady acquisition of better pluses a de facto part of leveling up, and as a result it became both crucially important to have magical equipment but also pointless.

Really, the mistake is having a standard steady progression of hit bonuses and attack bonuses to begin with. If you don't, then a +2 or +3 sword at any level is a significant (though not overwhelming) advantage. If you do, then it's keeping up with the Joneses.

So what would I do instead?

First, keep "basic pluses" on the low end, like +1 to +3. Keep them in the "why not?" category rather than "must have". I might even throw them out completely and just make it so that enchanted gear gives +1 and then does more interesting things on top of that. Or split the difference and make the range +1 and +2, with +1 pretty common (for magic items) and +2 pretty rare.

Second, give more interesting leveled abilities than hit/damage/defense bonuses. A seeking bow +5 wouldn't add its +5 to hit rolls and damage rolls, for instance... instead, it would let you target an enemy you don't have a line of fire to if you could hit a square within 5 squares of them, and subtract 5 from the penalty you incur when a sighted character can't see their target. The two uses can be combined, so that if you have no clue where your target is, you can tell the GM you're firing at a given square and if the invisible target is within 5 squares of there, you'll hit. Pending a successful hit roll, I mean. It's not automatic.

This is something that totally makes sense for what the bow is/does, and it can be stacked alongside any amount of hit bonuses the game system supports without breaking it.

Third, make item powers more wont to be encounter than daily, and let players lean on them more. In 4E, in order to head off the possibility of players stockpiling multiple copies of lower-level but useful magical items with daily powers and then using those daily powers xty times per day, they added a limit of how many magical item daily powers you could activate per day, and it was basically 1 for every 10 experience levels.

This problem is compounded by how uninteresting and unworthy of being a daily power so many item daily powers were. A lot of them seemed like they would have been once-per-encounter utility powers, except then there would be *nothing* stopping you from stockpiling them and using them except a limit on how many item encounter powers you can use.

Well, Adventure Song already doesn't use a "use up individual power" system, so I think here's how item powers will work: they can be activated with either a Copper Token OR a Silver Token (encounter utility and encounter attack, respectively), PLUS characters over a certain level will start accumulating Mithril Tokens, which can be used in place of a normal token to activate item powers.

So using an item's special abilities takes the place of using your own, *but* you can get better at item use, *and* you can be very flexible about it.

And to be clear, this is not a cost just for using the item. Like the bow of seeking? All the things I described above would be ordinary use. Spending a token might let you do something like redirect an attack that misses, or move the arrow up to 24 squares as if it were a flying character under your control to find its target.

Heck, having said that, here's what it would do: turn the arrow into a flying animated object with a relatively high speed under your control, capable of carrying a small item like a scroll or potion or ring. You'd have line of sight through its "eyes", be able to attack enemies with it by moving through their square or delivering/picking up items from allies by moving through theirs. On a successful hit, you can immobilize (pin) the target but this ends the effect.

If you don't do this, then at the end of your next turn, the effect ends, though if the arrow is still live, you can direct it at one foe (or empty square, if it's a special delivery) in its line of sight and normal range.

Would that not be a magic item worth owning? It's not unbalancing, it's not something that you would be crucially disadvantaged by not having... but it would be cool and useful and fun. Not necessarily something that fits on a card, but while the cards 4E uses are useful, they're also limiting... and I think the decision to handle power exhaustion at the level of individual abilities is how they ended up there.

Adventure Song: After that rambly, semi-ranty post about magic items earlier...

...my brain kept spinning around on that subject, and I think I've come up with a basic structure that I like not just for items, but for character progression.

I probably don't need to repeat the fact that I don't like the pointless progression of numbers. An untrained fighter at level 1 is rolling an 11 or higher to hit an unarmored/untrained target. If at level 21, the same fighter is trying to roll a 31 or higher with a +20 bonus to hit the same target, that's not character development, advancement, or progress... that's busywork so pointless that the worst math teacher in the world wouldn't assign it, and you're sitting around a table doing it for fun.

So, my progression is this. Starting at level 6, and at every multiple of 6 thereafter (assumed progression ending at 30, just like 4E), you get +1 as a Level Bonus. What does your Level Bonus apply to?

Well, it applies to any attack form that you have an attack skill bonus with. ASB fills the same role as "ability modifiers" to attacks in 4E... it's not tied to attributes, but it has a similar distribution at level 1 and is the basic "add this to your hit roll" thing.

So if you have +5 with close weapon attacks at level 1, then at level 6 you have +6. If you have +0 with them at level 1, then at level 6 you have +0.

It applies to *all* your defenses. Why all defenses and only some attacks? Because you can stick to what you're good at for attacks, but enemies will be coming after you on all fronts. Having a standard progression for defenses means that if you have Reflexes 2 and Willpower 0 at level 1, then at level 18 your Reflexes and Willpower have the same relationship to each other that they did back then. On an in-game level... you will have been attacked in a multitude of ways over the course of your career, and you're still standing.

For non-combat stuff, the rule is: add it to skills, not attributes. If you're making a Strength roll to lift a bale of hay, you use your Strength. If you have a skill bonus to lifting, then you roll Strength + skill + level bonus.

Why have an auto progression at all, given general my feelings on the subject?

Well, first, there's some stuff built into the magic item system that works "for every six full levels you have", so it's useful to have shorthand for that. Second... I want to have a greater ability than in 4E to fight foes above or below your level, and there should be a difference there. To jump to the extreme example, most of the difference between a level 1 character and a level 30 god-killing abomination should be in overall capabilities, not point spreads that make hits impossible or misses inevitable.

Originally this post was going to be about magic items, but it kind of got away from me and now I'm tired, so, I'm going to drop it off here and maybe pick it up again tomorrow.

Adventure Song: Can't sleep, thoughts on magic items will eat me.

So, here's the idea.

As in 4E, character levels are divided into tiers. Rather than Heroic/Paragon/Epic, I'm going with Basic/Advanced/Legendary. It includes a nice throwback to previous editions of D&D and their tiers, it avoids the awkwardness of "Paragon" (a word I like, but not exactly in common coin... I feel like after they decided to establish tier 1 characters as Big Darn Heroes, they looked up "hero" in the thesaurus), and best of all, they're all adjectives that work for other things as well as they do for the PCs. Basic Quests, Advanced Items, Legendary Monsters... Basic Monsters, Advanced Quests, Legendary Quests.

As you might have gleaned from that last bit: magic items are also divided into the same tiers.

The "enhancement bonus" (the vanilla magical plus) is tied directly to the tier of the item. You're never going to find a basic magic sword that's not a +1 sword, or a legendary magic armor that's not a +3 armor.

But all the enhancement bonus determines how much better this magical object is at being itself than a non-magical one. A +3 sword has a 3 point advantage over other swords at being a sword (hit and damage).

Because it's tied to tier, we'll just call that the tier bonus.

Separate from the tier bonus, a magic item also has an Enchantment Level (EL). When you've got a bog standard magic sword +1, it's EL 0. As soon as you've got a flaming magic sword +1, you're dealing with EL 1 or higher. The highest possible EL is 6.

The EL determines how strong the extra magical effect on the item is. For a flaming magic sword, it determines the amount of the fire damage it inflicts. For leprechaun shoes, they determine how far you can teleport with a step. And so on. The magic item's description spells out what it actually does.

EL is completely separate from tier. You can have a tier 1 magic item with EL 5, and a tier 3 magic item with EL 1. Or even EL 0. But higher tier items, their EL is on a different scale, of a different magnitude. This affects how you can use them.

How it works is this: the maximum total EL you can be using at once is equal to your character's level, and EL 0 items count as 0.5 for this purpose. The maximum individual EL of a single item you can use is equal to 1 plus your character's Level Bonus (level divided by 6, rounded down). So at level 1, you can only use at most two EL 0 or one EL 1 item. At level 6, you could be using up to 3 EL 2 items, or 6 EL 1 ones, or some mixture of EL 0 to 2.

As a sidenote, characters of these levels probably wouldn't be at their operating limit very often, these are just examples. As another example, at level 30 a character could be using five EL 6 items, which is pretty much where I started and worked backwards from.

But back to the low level characters. What happens if you get a higher tier magic item when you're still a basic hero?

Well, first, you multiply the EL. Advanced tier counts double and legendary tier counts triple, until you hit advanced tier, where advanced becomes normal and legendary goes down to double.The bare bones magic sword +3 counts as EL 1.5 for purposes of your limit, so you can't use it at all until level 2. And legendary items of any complexity (high EL) are going to be well beyond you for a while.

Then we get into the complications. Most higher tier items are more complicated than low tier ones. A flaming sword? It does some extra damage, fire type. Shoes that let you teleport short distances? Useful, but simple.

So what happens when you get a more complicated item? Well, let's consider that Bow of Seeking I was talking about earlier in the day.

Imagine that's an advanced item, and there's a line at the end of its description that reads:
"*Basic Tier: If you miss with an attack using this weapon, re-roll the attack with no bonuses, but yourself as the target."

Oops! That's what happens when you use magic you're not ready for.

Let's consider another magic item, the Lesser Ring of the Wraith Queen.

---

LESSER RING OF THE WRAITH QUEEN (Advanced Magic Ring)
+2 to Stealth (Note: This is the +2 it gets for being a second tier item. Rings improve one attribute.)
Effect: You can see invisible undead within a distance equal to 3 times the ring's EL. Additionally, you can add the EL as a bonus to hit incorporeal undead, which takes full (not half) damage from your physical attacks.
LIFE POINT (Action): You become invisible until the end of your next turn.
*Basic Tier: Any time you do not renew the invisibility this ring provides, you must make a Willpower roll with a difficulty of 10, plus the amount of Life you have lost. If you fail, you lose another point of Life and remain invisible until the end of your next turn. This is automatic and does not require an action. If you lose your last point of Life to the ring, you die and a wraith appears in your square. You cannot be resurrected until the wraith is destroyed, though since the wraith shares a true name with you, it can easily be summoned by anyone who knew you.
*Legendary Tier: You can spend Vigor in place of a Life Point when using this ring's ability.

---

As a word of explanation: Vigor is like healing surges, though slightly cheaper. Life can be used in place of Vigor, but it's also lost when you're unconscious/dying... and pretty much irreplaceable, mid-adventure. The average character has around 10 points of it at level 1, and would have around 12 early on in the advanced tier, but you *don't* want to spend more than a point or two of it, because that impacts your ability to survive when you're down.

So we have a ring that if you find before level 11, it's a ghost-hunting ring with a potentially tempting power that can literally suck the life out of you. If you find it during or after level 11, it has the same useful power with a high cost, but it's under your control. If you keep it until level 21, you can overcome the ring's most draining limitation.

You can see a common thread between the Bow of Seeking and the Wraith-Ring: if you use them before you're ready for them, they act like interesting interpretations of cursed items. Cursed items were one of the things that got excised completely in 4E, and then put back in late in the edition's life cycle in a pretty drastically altered form. Here, a cursed item becomes an item that you don't understand the proper use of. It might be literally cursed (like the Wraith-Ring) but more powerful characters could overcome it, or it might be a feature you don't quite have the hang of (the Seeking Bow).

And while both of these items are more interesting than what 4E would come up with in their place, they still roughly fit into the same kind of design ethos that 4E employed... which is really what the Adventure Song project is about.

Anyway, a few words real quick about the enchantment system. I mentioned it's going to be tied to Great Deed Points, which I'm just going to call Deed Points. The name has two meanings, since you get them for your great deeds (abstracted into leveling up) and you use them for great deeds.

Creating enchanted items in Adventure Song is indeed a great deed. There's no enchantment industry. Making multiple powerful magical items is something only the greatest figures of legend can accomplish. A wizard in employ of a great king might toil for years to present him with a basic magic sword (sword +1).

The way it works is this: at each level, you get Deed Points equal to your level. So you start with 1, and by the time you finish the basic tier, you've racked up 55 of them.

Creating a basic magic item requires 5 DP. That gives you your sword +1, your ring +1, your armor +1. I'm considering ranking the items by usefulness of magical versions, as magical armor in particular might end up having a disproportionate impact because of how armor works (the system's built around the assumption that there are only 3 or 4 possible values it can give), but for now, we'll just say they're all 5 DP.

Turning that basic item into an EL 1 item costs another 5 DP. For a wizard to conjure up a basic flaming sword, it's 10 DP. (If you're counting along at home, this means that a level 4 character can manage this task, once.)

To enhance your flaming sword--to get each EL beyond the first one--you pay DP equal to the next EL. So a flaming sword with two levels of flaminess costs a total of 12 DP. Three levels of flaminess costs 15 DP, total. Four levels of flaminess costs 19. Five levels costs 24. Your sword of maximum flaminess costs a total of 30 DP, which is more than half the DP you'll accumulate fighting your way out of the basic tier... though it starts to look like chump change later on, and since you can't even use a six-levels-of-flaminess sword until level 30 (which you get 30 DP for reaching), the average character's going to have plenty of DP to pay for their magic items.

Higher tier items cost more. Double the costs involved for advanced, triple for legendary.

For enchantments that have a clear tier system of their own (flaming to fiery burst, to borrow from D&D canon), you can convert them upwards. Fiery burst would be the advanced version of flaming, so if you've got 15 points invested in a flaming bow, you could spend 15 more points to turn it into the same EL fiery burst bow.

Now, you might be thinking that even with the limitations on item use, the party's poor wizard is going to be using all their DP for the fighter's flaming weapons and armor of infinite asskicking while the fighter is spending DP on I don't know, cohorts or something. Well, I'm eleventy percent sure that the wizard will have a class feature and/or feat equivalent that gives them extra DP every level just for magic items, and everybody will be able to spend their own DP on their own items. The enchantment spells require that the DP come from participants in the ritual, not specifically the caster, and further, since they are DEED points, I'm shamelessly running with the idea 4E advanced that great deeds can spontaneously turn a mundane but sentimentally valuable weapon into a magical one.

None of this covers anything like gold cost for enchanting, which I think there will be... it just won't be the major balancing factor in the system. In particular, I think that you'll need to have a formula for a specific enchantment. So, anyone with the enchantment spell can put together a magic sword, but in addition to the 5 DP cost to make it flaming, you'd need to find that formula. The simplest enchantments in every tier would be widespread (as far as magical learning goes, but wizards know where to find it) but relatively cheap. The more complicated ones, expensive or priceless (i.e., quest worthy).

Having devised a proxy for the One Ring, I'm not sure whether to put things like that into the "priceless" or "common wizardly knowledge" category. I'm kind of leaning towards the latter, with the idea that the Wraith Queen spread the method of its creation far and wide, in order that it would tempt more mortals and ensnare more souls.

Or to put it another way: it's forbidden knowledge, not secret knowledge... if it were secret, it wouldn't need to be forbidden.