A wild Wilder World update appears!
Aug. 3rd, 2013 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinOkay. So. Pretty much right up until the point where I was getting ready for WisCon and summer travel, I was working pretty full-bore on A Wilder World, and I made some impressive progress. I put up a version of the character creation rules and the basic game play rules (minus combat stuff) and there was some *AWESOME* feedback, including multiple people who were enjoying the character generation as a game in and of itself (which is part of the goal, honestly, though I want the game itself to be fun/playable).
Then things got knocked off the rails a bit by the stuff of summer, and I've been having a hard time getting back into the swing of it. Well, the dam burst again, and as is often the case, having a bit of a fallow period has been helpful in clarifying things.
I'm making another slight tweak to character creation. While my re-writes helped alleviate it, by far and away the thing that people found most confusing/cumbersome/unnecessarily complicated was the whole concept of ranked abilities within Qualities. And they were also the source of a number of tricky balance/design problems. Every time I looked at a character somebody created and did a double take at the numbers, it was a result of stacking up ranked abilities... a problem that would only grow with characters who were past entry level. Also, in designing a Character Quality, figuring out the ranked abilities was often the most difficult part. Very rarely did I manage to create something with two or three different abilities that seemed equally appealing that operated on the same or even a similar scale.
The re-formulation of the combat rules required me to go back and revise a lot of abilities that deal with combat abilities anyway, so what I've done/am doing is to go through all 24 of the Basic Qualities and convert the ranked abilities into static (or mostly static) things. Some of them have notes that they increase when the Quality reaches a certain level, but it's no longer a requirement of design that every Quality has two or more abilities that increase with each level.
And you know what one of the immediate effects of this is? They get more interesting. I've kept saying Bonuses Are Boring. A straight +1 bonus per level to a roll is one of the least interesting ways to make a character exceptional. And yet when you need to have a bonus that increases each level, you end up with it a lot.
Some Qualities still include a little bit of customization-as-you-go within them, where it seemed appropriate. Every Quality still has at least one (and sometimes more, since there are some formerly ranked Qualities that absolutely work better if they're incremental) ability that increases as you level the Quality, and a lot of those are straight bonuses because it's hard to get away from them completely (and they aren't even all bad, either, they just shouldn't be everything), so there's still an inherent sense of getting better within a Quality as you level, but another effect of making more of the abilities static is that it heightens the sense, when you take something like Archer, that your character already is an exceptional archer.
Now, the downside to this change is that taking away the ability to discretely raise a Quality's abilities also takes away a balancing tool for characters with more Qualities versus characters with fewer, and to be honest, I'm not one hundred percent sure what I'm going to do about that. I'm considering three main options.
One is throwing up my hands and saying "Pick one to three Qualities. Note that characters with more Qualities will be significantly more powerful." and making it free to add Basic Qualities to your character later until you get to three, so a player who wants to start out simple can start out simple but can also catch up at any point.
That's honestly what I'm most heavily leaning towards, because there really is no way to exactly balance out the significant benefits of having more Qualities.
Option two is to make it standard that all characters start with three Qualities, and include some incredibly generic Qualities ("Adventurer", "Hero") with very simple abilities for those who don't want a character that's more complicated than a Dwarf Warrior. To be honest, I like the idea of having some beyond-basic Basic Qualities for various reasons, but I'm not keen on requiring players to begin with three Qualities and I'm also not keen on taking the option off the table.
Option three is to try to balance it out with other character creation resources, something that the previous/present version does (along with giving more ranks and levels to characters with fewer Qualities). The balance this achieved was very... approximate, and trying to balance out the addition of a whole Quality just by taking away Details or Gear seems daunting. Taking away Attribute points might get closer, but since different Qualities need different Attributes to work, this would create a problem like D&D's Multiple Attribute Dependency.
Actually, I'm not even really considering Option Three. I only mentioned it to explain why I don't think it's a tenable approach.
I'm pretty sure I'm going to go with Option One: pick one to three Qualities. They all start at level one. Between adventures, you can add one more Basic Quality if you have less than three. So you can't go from one to three in one swoop, but there's no cost. No front-end balancing considerations.
Another change I've made is expanding the level track for each Quality from 5 to 6. This is something I'd been weighing for reasons having to do with the pace of advancement. It's not a huge change by any means, but worth mentioning.
I think this will probably make more sense if I put it up to see, but the existing issue of it being hard to make sense of the combat modifiers without knowing the combat rules is likely to get worse since the combat rules have been significantly changed, so I don't think I'm going to put up a new version of the Character Guide until the Player Guide with combat rules is ready to go up.
But I've also had some progress on that.
Then things got knocked off the rails a bit by the stuff of summer, and I've been having a hard time getting back into the swing of it. Well, the dam burst again, and as is often the case, having a bit of a fallow period has been helpful in clarifying things.
I'm making another slight tweak to character creation. While my re-writes helped alleviate it, by far and away the thing that people found most confusing/cumbersome/unnecessarily complicated was the whole concept of ranked abilities within Qualities. And they were also the source of a number of tricky balance/design problems. Every time I looked at a character somebody created and did a double take at the numbers, it was a result of stacking up ranked abilities... a problem that would only grow with characters who were past entry level. Also, in designing a Character Quality, figuring out the ranked abilities was often the most difficult part. Very rarely did I manage to create something with two or three different abilities that seemed equally appealing that operated on the same or even a similar scale.
The re-formulation of the combat rules required me to go back and revise a lot of abilities that deal with combat abilities anyway, so what I've done/am doing is to go through all 24 of the Basic Qualities and convert the ranked abilities into static (or mostly static) things. Some of them have notes that they increase when the Quality reaches a certain level, but it's no longer a requirement of design that every Quality has two or more abilities that increase with each level.
And you know what one of the immediate effects of this is? They get more interesting. I've kept saying Bonuses Are Boring. A straight +1 bonus per level to a roll is one of the least interesting ways to make a character exceptional. And yet when you need to have a bonus that increases each level, you end up with it a lot.
Some Qualities still include a little bit of customization-as-you-go within them, where it seemed appropriate. Every Quality still has at least one (and sometimes more, since there are some formerly ranked Qualities that absolutely work better if they're incremental) ability that increases as you level the Quality, and a lot of those are straight bonuses because it's hard to get away from them completely (and they aren't even all bad, either, they just shouldn't be everything), so there's still an inherent sense of getting better within a Quality as you level, but another effect of making more of the abilities static is that it heightens the sense, when you take something like Archer, that your character already is an exceptional archer.
Now, the downside to this change is that taking away the ability to discretely raise a Quality's abilities also takes away a balancing tool for characters with more Qualities versus characters with fewer, and to be honest, I'm not one hundred percent sure what I'm going to do about that. I'm considering three main options.
One is throwing up my hands and saying "Pick one to three Qualities. Note that characters with more Qualities will be significantly more powerful." and making it free to add Basic Qualities to your character later until you get to three, so a player who wants to start out simple can start out simple but can also catch up at any point.
That's honestly what I'm most heavily leaning towards, because there really is no way to exactly balance out the significant benefits of having more Qualities.
Option two is to make it standard that all characters start with three Qualities, and include some incredibly generic Qualities ("Adventurer", "Hero") with very simple abilities for those who don't want a character that's more complicated than a Dwarf Warrior. To be honest, I like the idea of having some beyond-basic Basic Qualities for various reasons, but I'm not keen on requiring players to begin with three Qualities and I'm also not keen on taking the option off the table.
Option three is to try to balance it out with other character creation resources, something that the previous/present version does (along with giving more ranks and levels to characters with fewer Qualities). The balance this achieved was very... approximate, and trying to balance out the addition of a whole Quality just by taking away Details or Gear seems daunting. Taking away Attribute points might get closer, but since different Qualities need different Attributes to work, this would create a problem like D&D's Multiple Attribute Dependency.
Actually, I'm not even really considering Option Three. I only mentioned it to explain why I don't think it's a tenable approach.
I'm pretty sure I'm going to go with Option One: pick one to three Qualities. They all start at level one. Between adventures, you can add one more Basic Quality if you have less than three. So you can't go from one to three in one swoop, but there's no cost. No front-end balancing considerations.
Another change I've made is expanding the level track for each Quality from 5 to 6. This is something I'd been weighing for reasons having to do with the pace of advancement. It's not a huge change by any means, but worth mentioning.
I think this will probably make more sense if I put it up to see, but the existing issue of it being hard to make sense of the combat modifiers without knowing the combat rules is likely to get worse since the combat rules have been significantly changed, so I don't think I'm going to put up a new version of the Character Guide until the Player Guide with combat rules is ready to go up.
But I've also had some progress on that.