I meant to make a post about gaming stuff earlier.

[alexandraerin]

...but I ended up in a "do stuff" mood more so than a "talk about doing stuff" mood, so I did stuff.

I was developing an idea that came to me last night, during a mild bout of creative insomnia. This grew out of a lot of things: my thoughts on what I like and don't like about 4E, ideas I rejected from AWW as being not right for the project that would work better for a 4E clone, my recent experiments with rules lite/stat lite gaming systems.

I guess I should explain what I mean when I say a 4E clone. I think an actual clone of 4E would likely be pretty terrible. What I have in mind is more of a reboot, something that flushes the d20 system and focuses on the essence of 4E.

Here are the specific things I'm talking about:

• Combat that is won more by tactics in the sense of opportunities the players create and exploit from round to round more so than strategy in the sense of what feats the druid has and what spells the wizard prepared.
  
• The idea that every character should have something they can do in a fight, and even new players should know what their character is about in those situations.
  
• Simple (very simple) basic rules with special abilities layered as exceptions over them. As an example: basically everything you attempt to do in the game, you do by rolling a d4. Higher levels of ability are represented by an ability that tells you to use a bigger die.
  
• Enabling high concept, cinematic character types like the Seeker (spirit archer with variable flavored elemental arrows!), Barbarians who crackle with elemental energy or take on bestial aspects when they rage, Rogues who can do things like double jump and steal things like time, luck, and magic when they get higher level, Sorcerers whose mystical bloodline explodes out of them, Bards that can cut an enemy to death with satire, Rune Priests, Artificers, etc., while also making sure that the basic, down-to-earth, straightforward character types can stand toe-to-toe with them.
  
• Customization that's broad, if sometimes shallow. The kind of variety of character type suggested by the final build trees of the 4E classes and the hybrid system, even if it didn't fully deliver on this promise.
  
• Combat rules that are strict enough to be clear and deep enough to account for awesome.
  
• Light rules for everything else having to do with adventuring and little to no rules for everything else, so you can make a ruling on just about anything the players want to try but you don't have to consult chart 5-b on page 27 of appendix c.

The things 4E has that I'm throwing out:

• Stats and skill system. The game was poorer for clinging to these relics of D&D/d20 as much as it did.
  
• The kludge. Opportunity actions vs. immediate actions? Opportunity attacks in general? If a character is meant to be a sticky tank, they can be given an ability that lets them lash out at enemies who ignore them. That's the beauty of exception based design.
  
• The endless (and controversially uneven) progression of numbers. When everyone has +x to everything for every y levels and the game is balanced around the idea that you always face threats within a few levels of yourself, a lot of math is happening for no reason.
  
• The role restriction. Instead of saying that the Ranger is an archer who is a striker, and the Seeker is an archer who is a controller, but oh here's an alternate Ranger who's a controller, choosing a combat style is simply a step in character creation.

This is a bit more ambitious project than Trouble In Star Kingdom, though far less so than AWW. It definitely helps that where with AWW I was (and am still, to an extent) figuring out what I even wanted to make, whereas with this I have a definite model, but... I feel like what I've written in about an hour on my phone last night and a couple hours today is already playable. It could maybe stand to be re-written to be more easily understood and the character content is not all there, but it's a game.

What I do with it next is going to depend on a couple of things. The next newsletter (out before the end of the month) is going to give my subscribers access to the Trouble In Star Kingdom document. After they've had a chance to look at it and I've done at least one real test, I'll make it available to others. So far the response that has been kind of muted, but so far only the people in Patreon even really know what I'm talking about. If the response remains muted, I'll probably throw more energy into this. Otherwise, I guess I'll see what people are more excited about.

This doesn't mean I'm forgetting AWW, but as previously mentioned... I'm just not sure how to move forward with AWW right now. It's such a big project, and my life no longer works in such a way that I can manage something like that in my spare time.