Sleep? Sleep? What is that?
Mar. 17th, 2011 08:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinNot quite a status post, just a note to say that I've been up all night... just as I was getting ready to lie down, I had the breakthrough of breakthroughs for A Wilder World. I've had the underlying game system, the engine for game play, in more or less the same shape since September of last year, but I've never been able to get the process for character generation (to say nothing of presentation or advancement) to gel, despite the grand vision of stacking archetypes.
It was always too complicated, both in terms of number of steps and the total amount of information you had to pore through and the amount of information you were left to manage. This is a natural risk when you want a system that can handle nigh-unto-anything at a mechanical level, but since my goal was to find a balance between complex possibilities and a simple system an eighteen step character creation or a character sheet that comprised a small booklet was clearly not what was called for.
But now I have had a minor epiphany (building on the random burst of creative insight I mentioned the other week) and I think I have it.
First, ditch Archetypes as a mechanical structure entirely. They now exist for categorization. It's an interesting bit of intellectual metagame wankery to see how many concepts you could make by juggling combinations of exactly four narrowly defined concepts, but I want this to be a game that's fast and playable, not just an endless series of charts to play around with. This might seem like a radical departure from the original concept, since the whole time I've been talking about AWW it's been Archetypes, Archetypes, Archetypes, but really each iteration of the character creation system since the first one has de-emphasized them as a structural element of the system. Each revision has made them both less complex and less hardwired.
Second, forget the idea of character sheets. Someone who's old school and hard core and hard school and old core could very easily write down their abilities and equipment, but one of the better things D&D 4E and its mutant offspring D&D Gamma World have brought to the gaming table is cards. Not as a collectible "gotta catch 'em all" element, but as a compact reference that tells you exactly what abilities you have, exactly what they do, and exactly which ones you've expended or have available at a given moment of the game. They might seem like an odd prop for a roleplaying game, but after seeing them in action it seems odd that they didn't become more common sooner.
The real goal of the AWW character creation system is to allow modularity. Not as free form as GURPS, not as bound in iron as D&D, but something that hopefully combines the best elements of the two (at least as applies to pseudomedieval high fantasy settings. I don't plan on trying to compete with GURPS's "go anywhere" mentality.)
The archetype-based system was a step in the right direction, and a logical step from my starting point (looking at how classes were put together in 4E, and in particular how they made the transition from 3E), but it left me with two different levels of modularity, the stuff that existed within an archetype and the stuff that existed outside it. This created arbitrary and artificial restrictions for players, and imposed arbitrary and artificial restrictions on design, necessitating a lot of what the 4E devs refer to as "needless symmetry" and "grid-filling"; i.e., game design by way of fill in the blanks.
Now everything's modular. The concept of archetypes still exists to give players (particularly new ones, or ones who aren't interested in absorbing whole catalogs of abilities before they start making a character) guidelines and starting points, but you'll never find yourself screwed or forced into a box you don't want to be in because some stupid game designer somewhere (i.e., me) had a different idea of what the key components of an assassin or ranger are.
So here's how it works, in a nutshell:
You pick a number* of Traits. These are static bonuses or always-available abilities, things that act as constants in differentiating your character from the base line. Mastery with a particular weapon or fighting style, raw fighting ability, physical toughness, charisma, etc. A lot of these are things that would have been the base ability of a particular Archetype in one of my old builds.
Then you pick a number* of Techniques. These are abilities that you actively use. They correspond most closely to Encounter Powers in D&D 4E.
The "serving suggestion" for managing your character is that you lay your Traits down on the table as you would a character sheet and keep your Techniques as a deck/hand, turning them over or laying them aside when you use them. Quick and manageable. Only the most complicated abilities, the ones that require more than a paragraph or two to explain, will ever require recourse to a rule book because the whole rules for the use of an ability will be written in plain language English on its card. The exceptions are mostly the really open-ended abilities that require caveats and guidelines, like illusion and shapeshifting.
The * after number is because it'll take some testing and proof-of-concepting to work out good starting numbers. One key factor of this system is that it would be scalable. You could make simpler (and lower powered) games by scaling down the number of Traits or Techniques or higher powered ones by scaling them up.
This is just an overview, I'm skipping a lot of details obviously. Some of that is because I don't have all the details worked out... what I have is very preliminary. But I think this is a big step in the right direction. Just the thought of literally building a character out of cards is tremendously appealing. I mean, imagine you show up for the first gaming session and there are piles of cards on the table. Fighter-Fu here. Thief-Fu here. Magic-Fu here. Find what you want, put it together. I think it's something that can appeal to newbies and oldbies alike. No calculations. No table look-ups. Total plug and play.
It was always too complicated, both in terms of number of steps and the total amount of information you had to pore through and the amount of information you were left to manage. This is a natural risk when you want a system that can handle nigh-unto-anything at a mechanical level, but since my goal was to find a balance between complex possibilities and a simple system an eighteen step character creation or a character sheet that comprised a small booklet was clearly not what was called for.
But now I have had a minor epiphany (building on the random burst of creative insight I mentioned the other week) and I think I have it.
First, ditch Archetypes as a mechanical structure entirely. They now exist for categorization. It's an interesting bit of intellectual metagame wankery to see how many concepts you could make by juggling combinations of exactly four narrowly defined concepts, but I want this to be a game that's fast and playable, not just an endless series of charts to play around with. This might seem like a radical departure from the original concept, since the whole time I've been talking about AWW it's been Archetypes, Archetypes, Archetypes, but really each iteration of the character creation system since the first one has de-emphasized them as a structural element of the system. Each revision has made them both less complex and less hardwired.
Second, forget the idea of character sheets. Someone who's old school and hard core and hard school and old core could very easily write down their abilities and equipment, but one of the better things D&D 4E and its mutant offspring D&D Gamma World have brought to the gaming table is cards. Not as a collectible "gotta catch 'em all" element, but as a compact reference that tells you exactly what abilities you have, exactly what they do, and exactly which ones you've expended or have available at a given moment of the game. They might seem like an odd prop for a roleplaying game, but after seeing them in action it seems odd that they didn't become more common sooner.
The real goal of the AWW character creation system is to allow modularity. Not as free form as GURPS, not as bound in iron as D&D, but something that hopefully combines the best elements of the two (at least as applies to pseudomedieval high fantasy settings. I don't plan on trying to compete with GURPS's "go anywhere" mentality.)
The archetype-based system was a step in the right direction, and a logical step from my starting point (looking at how classes were put together in 4E, and in particular how they made the transition from 3E), but it left me with two different levels of modularity, the stuff that existed within an archetype and the stuff that existed outside it. This created arbitrary and artificial restrictions for players, and imposed arbitrary and artificial restrictions on design, necessitating a lot of what the 4E devs refer to as "needless symmetry" and "grid-filling"; i.e., game design by way of fill in the blanks.
Now everything's modular. The concept of archetypes still exists to give players (particularly new ones, or ones who aren't interested in absorbing whole catalogs of abilities before they start making a character) guidelines and starting points, but you'll never find yourself screwed or forced into a box you don't want to be in because some stupid game designer somewhere (i.e., me) had a different idea of what the key components of an assassin or ranger are.
So here's how it works, in a nutshell:
You pick a number* of Traits. These are static bonuses or always-available abilities, things that act as constants in differentiating your character from the base line. Mastery with a particular weapon or fighting style, raw fighting ability, physical toughness, charisma, etc. A lot of these are things that would have been the base ability of a particular Archetype in one of my old builds.
Then you pick a number* of Techniques. These are abilities that you actively use. They correspond most closely to Encounter Powers in D&D 4E.
The "serving suggestion" for managing your character is that you lay your Traits down on the table as you would a character sheet and keep your Techniques as a deck/hand, turning them over or laying them aside when you use them. Quick and manageable. Only the most complicated abilities, the ones that require more than a paragraph or two to explain, will ever require recourse to a rule book because the whole rules for the use of an ability will be written in plain language English on its card. The exceptions are mostly the really open-ended abilities that require caveats and guidelines, like illusion and shapeshifting.
The * after number is because it'll take some testing and proof-of-concepting to work out good starting numbers. One key factor of this system is that it would be scalable. You could make simpler (and lower powered) games by scaling down the number of Traits or Techniques or higher powered ones by scaling them up.
This is just an overview, I'm skipping a lot of details obviously. Some of that is because I don't have all the details worked out... what I have is very preliminary. But I think this is a big step in the right direction. Just the thought of literally building a character out of cards is tremendously appealing. I mean, imagine you show up for the first gaming session and there are piles of cards on the table. Fighter-Fu here. Thief-Fu here. Magic-Fu here. Find what you want, put it together. I think it's something that can appeal to newbies and oldbies alike. No calculations. No table look-ups. Total plug and play.
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no subject
on 2011-03-17 04:44 pm (UTC)But this? This is exciting.
a practical note
on 2011-03-17 09:44 pm (UTC)You're talking about the sort of situation where you might have a Trait card for 'can use magic' and a handful of Technique cards that are spells? Or 'weapon proficiency' Trait and a handful of T.. there would be some issues with having extra crap on the tableechnique cards that are special moves?
I can see this working fairly well actually - as long as it doesn't get too fiddly with having cards on the table while you play. It might push too many 'game' buttons on some people's heads and cause them to think of it more like a board/card game than a rpg, but you get that with dice too.
You've got the option there of saying this is a once-per-X card to play, if you want to run that sort of power use. Or some of the cards could be energy for an existing Trait? so you have 5 mana cards or something, and they get spent as you exercise your trait...
Its an intriguing idea... I look forward to hearing more about it
no subject
on 2011-03-17 10:35 pm (UTC)The "gamey/gameist" thing is going to come up, and is probably why cards aren't more common. But you can have everything else on the table from a board game including the board itself and it doesn't stop people from roleplaying.
In terms of how it affects people's gameplay, the fact that I'm designing this as a game you can play without tiles and minis will probably help (and will also help with issues of table space), as will the fact that in contrast to D&D 4E's preference for a large number of specific and evocative Power names and descriptions with the implicit understanding that they can be interpreted more broadly than the name and flavor text imply ("Beholder Eye Stab: You stab the Beholder in the third eye stalk from the left. Target: Any one creature."), I'm going for a smaller number of open-ended ones that lend themselves to interpretation in the moment. Things like "Mighty Blow" and "Well-Placed Shot".
You've got the basic idea of how Techniques would relate to Traits, but I'd like to clarify a couple of things.
One is that each Trait must be broadly useful in and of itself to justify being a Trait... your choice of Traits doesn't dictate that you must take Techniques from this pool or that pool to make the Trait useful.
You could take a "Can Use Magic" Trait and nothing else relating to magic and your character is a convincing wizard. ("Can Use Magic" pretty much sums up what it does... lets you say you're using magic to accomplish things that could be done through other means, with pay-offs you can accomplish in terms of things like acting at a distance or doing things faster. ) You won't be the most robust or versatile wizard... but no one could say you weren't a wizard.
As a counterpart to that, not every Technique would devolve from/depend on a Trait. Most won't. You can take the Warrior's Edge Trait (generic "I fight good" ability) and load yourself up fight fighting Techniques, or you could skip it and load up with fighting Techniques. The only prerequisites are ones that are necessitated by the system... no learning to pickpockets so you can be a good enough thief to walk a tightrope, for instance. A spell-like magic Technique that lets you accomplish something more with your "Can Use Magic" Trait (working title: Wizardry) requires you to have that trait, but you don't have to take that trait to take a bunch of other Techniques that are clearly magical, or to take Techniques that have no implicit explanation/justification and say that they are magical spells and powers.
And on that note, it's not so much that there are going to be specific spells that are each individually a Technique, but Techniques will give you the ability to do different things that you can say are magic spells. You can also say they're clockwork constructs, or summoned spirits, or whatever. Your Traits and Techniques are what your character can do (and how often you can do it). The how is open to interpretation/imagination.
Example: The Battlemagic Trait lets you make attacks with magic. You can call them fireballs or acid arrows or missiles of pure magic or whatever you want. It can be the same thing every round, a signature blast of magic shaped like a fiery falcon or whatever, or you can be the wizard who knows dozens of spells and always has the best one for the situation. At a mechanical level, it simply opens up a different option every round in combat. Others might be attacking with bows and swords or words and wits, you're attacking with magic. The effects are just different enough to matter, but not so different that one option will always be the best.
You might expand your prowess by taking Techniques with names like "Ensnaring Spell", which could be vines twining around the enemy, the earth swallowing the enemy's legs, the air hardening around them, mystic bands of force, a compulsion to stop moving, a block of ice forming around them, etc.
There's no reason there couldn't be a "mana" system, but in the interest of keeping things fast and simple and not focusing too much attention on the cards, Techniques are going to be a once-per-scene thing. Use 'em up and set 'em aside. Some Techniques will be "repeatable" under certain circumstances, but nothing too complex to fit on the card.
no subject
on 2011-03-19 10:00 pm (UTC)As an avid consumer of role-playing games and a friend of game designers (never got into it myself) I have to say I like the way your approach is going with this. It sounds like an intersection of Hero System (in that the special effect isn't important most of the time; Energy Blast can mean lots of different things), the good things about 4th Ed DnD (which I mostly don't like, but appreciate the simplicity of) and the basic utility of card references (which I use in my games anyway for various things).
Do you already have a team assembled to push your project through to completion? I ask because, as I said, I know designers who'd love to offer constructive advice, and I myself am an experienced editor - mostly corporate tech stuff, but including a couple of game books. (If you want to hear more, try my LJ ID at yahoo.)
Involved or not I'd love to follow the progress of your pooject. Do you have an e-mail list? Should I just watch your journal? Would you mind if I added you to my friends list? Pardon the fan-gush but like I said, I like what I've seen here so far and hope it all comes together for you.
Thanks for sharing the fruits of your labor, and good luck!
Light and laughter,
SongCoyote
no subject
on 2011-03-20 01:10 am (UTC)I'm not at a point (either in terms of the development of the ideas or my life) where i'm ready to be making a push through to completion. This is not quite on the back burner, it's more of a mid burner.
no subject
on 2011-03-17 11:48 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-03-18 02:30 am (UTC)no subject
on 2011-03-18 08:52 am (UTC)