Thursday, October 2nd

The Daily Report

Today's been a slow wake up day. Next week, I really need to work on getting up by alarm again, and starting every day with a begin day routine. For today, I have a feeling like it's going to be a slow day from start to finish.

I'm putting together a plan for getting Adventure Song out there by the end of the month. I'm giving myself one week to go over the character classes for the test release, one week for other character options/creation info, one week to tune up the combat system, and one week to clean up the other rules. Whatever I have at the end of the month I'm going to throw out to the winds whether I feel it's ready or not, because that's the point of testing, of course it's not ready.

My other plans for the month are somewhat modest and more dependent on building up momentum than getting particular things done.

The State of the Me

As mentioned, it's a slow brain day.

Plans For Today

From here until noon I'm going to be working on Omnibus VI. After lunch, I'm going to spend three hours on Adventure Song and then three hours on Tales of MU.

Adventure Song: Going Rogue

Okay, so I talked about adopting the hybrid/mashup character class approach in my last post on this topic. One of the "core classes" it took me the longest to find the right split with was the rogue. My first approach was to split it along the lines of "assassin" (combat skills) and "thief" (exploration skills).

I ended up ditching that because there are more interesting things to do with the assassin label than make it the solo DPS class, and because it's hard to justify calling a class "assassin" when it has abilities for inflicting harm in combat but none for getting close to a target or taking them out outside of combat.

I ended up resolving this by making the warrior half of the class just called rogue, as their real focus is on low blows, sneak attacks, and dirty tricks, and that seems roguish enough. Any character who doesn't sit still and fight fair might be a rogue, whether they're also a thief or assassin or criminal of any stripe. It fits.

Once I had this settled, it was a bit easier to fit the rogue's mechanical abilities in place, since they no longer had to be connected to particular "thief skills" in any way.

I then found to my slight surprise that the thief was even harder to pin down. I mean, it's obvious what the thief should be, but it was less obvious what the thief's specific abilities that set them apart from any character with the requisite "thief skills". That's what the thief class was to begin with, in D&D: just a vehicle for skills in a game that didn't have a skill system yet. Their roll as a swashbuckling striker is mostly a response to the existence of skill systems that let anyone become the "expert treasure hunter" of the group.

The solution I've come up with is to kind of double down on the idea of the thief as the original skilled expert by giving them abilities like the ability to pick locks and pockets at combat-useful speeds and the ability to sometimes safely back away from a failed attempt at any thief skill check.

Not only do these things serve to distinguish a character with thief levels from one who has a similar skill list, it also serves as a model for other "skilled expert" classes in other areas.

But at the same time, the thief class still feels a bit... hollow... and I'm not sure what to do about that.

Barring combat maneuvers like a sneak attack/backstab mechanism, what do people think of as an essential must-be-there thing for thieves in fantasy gaming? What kinds of abilities do people associate with fictional/fantasy thieves?