AWW: In effect.
Sep. 25th, 2013 06:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinSo far, most of the (still constructive and helpful!) negative comments on the AWW Player's Guide have centered around the rules for attacks for effect. There have been some other parts where it's been pointed out that a line of writing is unclear, and a bit of "I think this might make sense to me if I see it in play", which is to be avoided where possible but might just be part of the nature of the beast, but no one's flat-out said that they can't make sense of any of the rules outside of the attack for effect, and at least three people have said that. I'm not saying that everyone's been mystified by it, but out of about ten people who've given me substantive comments on the guide, three people told me they couldn't make heads or tails of it, two people needed clarification, and nobody has yet said anything positive about it, which leads me to suspect that most folks aren't grasping it. Not because I think the system is so inherently impressive that anyone who isn't blown away doesn't grasp it, but because it's kind of the "candy" part of the combat system.
And I kind of expected this to be the trouble spot. It's the most complicated part of the most complicated part of the game.
I do have a plan B. I'd planned on testing the game with plan A and only instituting plan B if plan A (effect points) failed to hold up, but I'm thinking the failure to click is widespread enough that I can declare plan A a failure.
Plan B is... checks. I.e., the same system used to revolve everything else is used to revolve it when you want to trip an enemy, or disarm them, or whatever. The advantage of this approach is that it's not another sub-system awkwardly stapled on for combat only, it's the core rules of the game.
I avoided Plan B because of potential game balance issues, but to be honest, that was mostly about the danger of monsters with high stats being able to steamroller over player characters with checks. But the game officially takes the stance that the special combat tactics in the Advanced Combat chapter are for player characters... that NPCs only use them if they're defined as using them, that they essentially need a special ability to do so. I can't stop someone who's running from the game from going "nuts to that, the octopus would want to win the fight so obviously it would disarm and restrain everyone", but I also can't stop anyone who's running the game from saying that rocks fall and everyone dies.
...and to be honest, the game balance issues comes from the fact that without something like a chart or table of modifiers to the checks then all effects would have a roughly equal difficulty, varying only with the attributes of the characters involved. But the catalogue of effects with their costs buried in their description isn't any more user friendly than a table of modifiers would be.
I wasn't 100% about this change when I started writing this blog post and I'm still not 100%, but in the course of writing it, I'm at about 80%. This will just be so much snappier and easier. Want to trip an opponent? Agility vs. Reflexes. Want to shove them over? Strength vs. Agility or Strength. Obviously the rules will still be more involved than that (types of effects will still be a thing, for purposes of bonuses and resistances, and effects combined with attacks for damage will still be a thing), but still, simpler in the long run, and more intuitive considering that you'd be making opposed checks for the equivalent actions outside of combat.
And I kind of expected this to be the trouble spot. It's the most complicated part of the most complicated part of the game.
I do have a plan B. I'd planned on testing the game with plan A and only instituting plan B if plan A (effect points) failed to hold up, but I'm thinking the failure to click is widespread enough that I can declare plan A a failure.
Plan B is... checks. I.e., the same system used to revolve everything else is used to revolve it when you want to trip an enemy, or disarm them, or whatever. The advantage of this approach is that it's not another sub-system awkwardly stapled on for combat only, it's the core rules of the game.
I avoided Plan B because of potential game balance issues, but to be honest, that was mostly about the danger of monsters with high stats being able to steamroller over player characters with checks. But the game officially takes the stance that the special combat tactics in the Advanced Combat chapter are for player characters... that NPCs only use them if they're defined as using them, that they essentially need a special ability to do so. I can't stop someone who's running from the game from going "nuts to that, the octopus would want to win the fight so obviously it would disarm and restrain everyone", but I also can't stop anyone who's running the game from saying that rocks fall and everyone dies.
...and to be honest, the game balance issues comes from the fact that without something like a chart or table of modifiers to the checks then all effects would have a roughly equal difficulty, varying only with the attributes of the characters involved. But the catalogue of effects with their costs buried in their description isn't any more user friendly than a table of modifiers would be.
I wasn't 100% about this change when I started writing this blog post and I'm still not 100%, but in the course of writing it, I'm at about 80%. This will just be so much snappier and easier. Want to trip an opponent? Agility vs. Reflexes. Want to shove them over? Strength vs. Agility or Strength. Obviously the rules will still be more involved than that (types of effects will still be a thing, for purposes of bonuses and resistances, and effects combined with attacks for damage will still be a thing), but still, simpler in the long run, and more intuitive considering that you'd be making opposed checks for the equivalent actions outside of combat.