That means it is preview time! Exclamation marks! I'll show some of the modifications and tweaks to the things mentioned in the last post, plus some of the new toys that will be in the next version and I did not mention at all last time. Today I cut the crap and get to the good parts right away. Except for this one paragraph, I guess. Let's not make it two paragraphs and get started right away:
General Traits
Some Traits got sorta-buffed through cost reductions, and some others had new shoes to fill (Modern Ninja became Invisibility Device and moved to the Equipment section) that left space for adding some new expensive and awesome Traits in, and one of those is there to compensate for the "loss" of Modern Ninja.
I was Here all Along
Cost: 10
Effect: Once per Episode you may Test either Stealth or Deception against a DN of 10 to reveal that you were present in a Scene that did not include you, either in hiding or disguised as an unnassuming background character as appropriate to the Test in question.
Description: You are insidious and sneaky, everywhere yet nowhere, and generally in places someone else wishes you rather weren’t there.
Useful, flashy, and badass. The Test is more of a formality than anything, since the kind of character who would take this will likely pass more often than not. And that is good, because you only get to do it more than once per Episode, so you better not fail when you do!
Anomalies
New Trait type! These are a mix of Miracles and Features for the weirder PCs out there, like Cyborgs and Mutants of various types. Anomalies don't have a Cost - much like Mecha Features - but have a downside to go with their upside - again, much like Mecha Features. Here's an example.
Wild
Effect: You gain an Advantage to all Awareness Tests and uses of the Survival Skill. You may speak with Earth animals, translating sounds they make into simple and short sentences in your head - think “Master is angry” or “Timmy fell down the well”. This grants you an Advantage to interactions with them. All Tests using either of Intellect or Resources that don’t fit the previously mentioned criteria are at a Disadvantage.
Description: Ever since the first Cryptid sightings, there have been reports of ‘wild childs’ in some of the lesser populated islands of the Far West with a surprising ability to survive in the wild, in spite of radiation, and communicate with the little wildlife in the area.
Pretty self explanatory, really. Great in an outdoorsy game or if you fight aliens that are not actually at all alien. The most important thing about Anomalies is that they open the way for more varied character concepts, and now anyone who wants to homebrew a different type of character into their games can use the existing ones as a template.
Equipment
Equipment got a touchup to the general rules, owning cool things is more permissive to anyone who didn't start with a 6 on Resources, in addition there's also loads of new toys to play with. Are they any good? Well don't just take my word for it, go and have a look.
Ether Drive
Cost: 3
Effect: Choose a Miracle at the Amateur Level when you take this Trait. You may use said Miracle as if you were trained in it, but only with the chosen Specialty with no other possible use, and the Ether Drive will act as a Proxy taking the Damage in your stead. The Proxy cannot be repaired with any kind of Heal Test, and once broken only time will make it function again.
Description: After endless testing, the Clarke Foundation has found a way to weaponize the harvested organs of Cryptids. They will not tell you what exactly the items in question are, but their origin is obvious to anyone who has dealt with the original creature in the past. Its not like the put much effort in trying to disguise alien eyes as ‘experimental lenses’ anyway.
Simple but effective, representing anything from a stockpile of freezing grenades to a telepathic helmet as necessary. Not only is it a very useful tool, but depending on the application, it even allows the games without superpowers to access Miracles in a limited fashion.
(By the way, you can now heal your Proxies with Craftsmanship. Just not this one.)
Genre Powers
A number of Powers were tweaked mechanically, and some even have better names now (for instance All Weapons, Full Power is now called Last Ditch Effort) but the important thing here is not that. The new cool thing is that you can take Powers that require you to make a choice when you grab them multiple times. That means you could have more than one Signature Weapon, yes, but it also means you can get trickier. Case in point...
Hidden Power
Setup Power
Effect: Choose up to 15 UP in Upgrades or Weapons when you take this Power. Activate it to gain the chosen abilities until end of Operation. These abilities are not allocated to any particular Areas, and as such may not be disabled as a result of Maiming. You may not use multiple instances of Hidden Power in the same Operation.
Description: “Give up, you’re out of ammunition and surrounded, be reasonable!” T he enemy shouted. “NO, I REFUSE!” Came the reply from the silver-coloured mech as it flew into the air and began bombarding its enemies with some kind of devastating heat ray. “I TOTALLY HAVE ICE MISSILES TOO!”
It is like having Frames, but entirely on the spot! Megaman would be proud. Because it does not actually use the rules for Alternate Forms, this means you can have multiple One-Shots and the such at your beck and call, as long as you did not take any with your default form and they each use a different Hidden Power.
Archetypes
Yes, there's been tweaks to Archetypes, and there's also two new ones. Both of the new Archetypes are more general-use rather than directing you towards a specific build - I figure there's already 7 of those so it is fine to have three for the all-rounders. Because nearly everyone would want to take them, there's also now a limitation on how many Archetypes you can have to give them an opportunity cost.
Custom Blueprints
Effect: Increase your Chassis’ Evasion, Armor, Accuracy and Penetration by 1 point each. This bonus point does not count as purchasing an Enhancement to those Attributes.
Description: Instead of getting all fancy and gimmicky, your Gear sticks to what works and has an improved structure over its contemporaries.
There you go. It cannot get more general-use and simpler (and boring-er) than that. Note that it is super efficient in that not only is it cheap for what it does but in that it cannot be disabled, so the opportunity cost in limiting how many Archetypes can be taken is really important now.
Active Defenses
Upgrades that improve Evasion or Armor in response to an enemy attack in exchange for energy have gotten some serious buffs. A good number of them were rewritten from the ground up, and most importantly, they have their own unique functions and roles now. Take for instance this new version of Oscillating Armor.
Oscillating Armor
Areas: Any non-Core
Cost: 3
Effect: Choose a Weapon Type when taking this Upgrade. If you would be dealt Damage by a Weapon that is not of the chosen Type, you may spend 1 Energy to increase your Armor against that Offensive Action by 3.
Description: Gygravagnite-powered repulsion fields are not as uncommon as the Gravagne Field is, the key difference is their unstable yet minimal output. Not only do they fail to protect against all sources of incoming damage, but they only strengthen specially-made composite alloys rather than creating a barrier on their own. They sure make even the most dull Gear fabulously colorful though.
That is a lot of coverage for very little UP, and nothing else short of Gravagne Field at the very top of the ladder is going to offer as much general protection. What is it you are saying? 'Face Shift' something or other? I can't hear you oh look it is time for the next category.
Weapons
Numbers on the custom weapon tables were tweaked to encourage more diversity. Of particular importance is that Blasts and other area of effect Weapons have more interactions with other rules (they ignore cover, for instance) and because this led some of the design to make mobility and range more important than it used to be, the power balance between Ballistics and Missiles has shifted noticeably.
Lux Cannon
Range: 0-10
Accuracy: 0
Penetration: 5
Energy: Special
Special: Beam. This Weapon always gets a result of 10 when Testing Accuracy. Using it will drain all the remaining Energy from the user, but granting a bonus Accuracy of 1 for each Energy point lost this way. You may not use Lux Cannon if your Energy is of 0.
Description: A honest to God giant laser cannon. Not only is dodging light rather hard, no matter who you are, but it is obscenely powerful. Unfortunately for users it is extremely prohibitive concerning energy efficiency, leaving Element G reserves completely empty.
Lux Cannon was, as mentioned in the last post, not very good at its job of countering ultradodgy types. The new version can miss, but that's not very likely to happen, and it packs one mean punch too. Because it can, potentially, murder the hell out of the squishier Grunts with a single shot; a single shot is all you're going to get without building around getting repeat shots.
Weapons, Again. Wait, what?
Did I mention there's new weapons? Because there's new Weapons. Also a new drawback for custom melee types. In my quest to ensure that there is no such thing as a perfect defense against anything, I've concocted a little something for Incinerator users who shake their fists at those pesky flying enemies that dare not burn to their deaths.
Anti-Air Missiles
Range: 1-7
Accuracy: +1
Penetration: 1
Energy: 0
Special: Missile. When using this Weapon against targets with Flyer or using Anti-Gravity, you may add all of the surplus from your Accuracy Test to Penetration instead of halving it.
Description: Air dominance is still very much a thing even in this new era of Gears. Everyone in Earth understands this, and provides their troops with necessary countermeasures against their enemies. The RUF has to be careful of those pesky Majesty types, Hiryu has to worry about flying Outsiders taking advantage of how complicated it is to fight giant monsters in the middle of the ocean, and the GAF wants the Wagner destroyed by yesterday.
Bam! Grunts everywhere may now rejoice, this unassuming little baby gets much scarier against those Players who think they're above playing with the rules for terrain and cover like us lowly pedestrians have to do. Too bad that it might well be a One-Shot for how likely it is that someone will stay up in the air after you've hit them once with this. But hey, it keeps them on the ground where they can be Overfreezed by your Boss! Just don't, you know, expect anything but a below average gun the rest of the time.
And that's that for the previews. You can expect the wording to be clarified a little here and there, and for the fluff descriptions to be touched up a bit maybe in between now and the release proper, but the mechanics are pretty final.
To continue from last time's topic on balance, GGG definitely aims for the kind of balance that is asymmetrical in nature. See, symmetrical balance is what happens when a game is fair because the rules are the same for each player. This includes games like chess, most traditional card games, and pretty much every sport recognized as such. Asymmetrical balance on the other hand permeates most nerdy hobbies from Magic to Starcraft to, yes, GGG. Starctaft in particular is one of the so-called better balanced games ever. In Starcraft the three playable factions each have their own completely unique strengths and weaknesses, but players of equal skill levels will have an even match against each other no matter their choice of Terran, Zerg or Protoss.
Note that Starcraft has had two years of constant patches and literal thousands of competitive players providing feedback to balance the three factions. Even then it took Blizzard eight more years to iron out all of the game's unintended advantages in its various exploits. Also Starcraft is a videogame, and thus a lot more limited in what you can do with it. It is common to see people talk about balance in games like it is a hard science, but those are mostly competitive videogames about dudes shooting each other or about managing dudes who shoot each other. It turns out that those have very different needs from RPGs, which tend to be cooperative and much more open ended in the kind of activities you can engage in them.
Achieving this kind of balance in a tabletop RPG is, to put it lightly, kind of hard. So what a designer can do is instead make sure that player options are all usable and good, even if some of them turn out to be slightly better in most situations. Asymmetrical balance has a crucial advantage on symmetrical balance, and it is that it makes everyone distinct and unique. It is a lot more fun to play with if you are a creative, imaginative type. Would you happen to guess what the core features of the RPG hobby are? Three guesses, and the first two don't count!
When everyone can contribute meaningfully to the group effort, yet all characters are the best at their own thing. When everyone has a distinct role that they like because they chose it with its pros and cons. When those things happen, even if the one carrying the team to victory is usually the same player, then you've got something that is fun.
I cannot aim for balance, but I definitely can aim for fun and make balance the secondary goal.
March 24, 2013
March 10, 2013
A Balancing Act
Making a quick post before a whole month goes by without any word on what's coming up. 1.7 is not going to have any fundamentally big changes, but there's going to be a lot of little ones, because I am taking the trouble to double-check and examine nearly every mechanic in the game.
I could talk about those, but I'd rather wait until I'm pretty sure I got them right to do so. Instead, let's get a little more abstract, I'm going to talk about the philosophy behind balance changes, or at least the ones that I tend to do. Then I will bring up some of the changes I've got in mind.
So what is Balance in Tabletop RPGs? Well, when gamers talk about 'balance' they usually refer to all player options (usually classes, races, or their equivalent) being more or less equal in capability. The thing is, the only way for characters to be truly balanced right next to each other would be to make them identical to each other. And because that is not a very attractive idea, we tend to focus on the balance of the game around its primary method of conflict resolution - usually combat.
But in practical terms balance is different things to different people. Some want to be always able to contribute to all kinds of conflict (combat, social, investigative, or any other type) even if it is only a little, while other Players want to have a single scene every once in a while where they get to save the day entirely on their own. But it gets more complicated than that! To some a balanced character means one able to overcome any challenge through carefully managing the game's subsystems, while others just want to keep things simple and roll some dice then see where luck takes them - yet both of those playstyles need to be equally good choices.
It is a complicated issue.
A lot of games with balance issues can hide those pretty well until characters grow in power level, only then the cracks begin to show, with the gaps getting larger the more time passes until finally the whole thing falls apart. There are a multitude of reasons for this, but one good way around them is by not relying on what I call Vertical Character Growth.
Think of all characters as standing together next to each other in a line, each of them is good at one or two things, and the more they grow in power at those two things the taller they get. If the balance is good, then they will keep the same height, but if the balance is not good then one of them will tower above the rest. Vertical Growth is about pushing you forward on the same path you started during character creation, and assuming all starting options are the same in power level.
Things are easier to balance if you promote Horizontal Growth instead - Characters step into each other's spots and sort of merge together, while still having things that are unique to themselves. Wherever it is possble, I try to promote Horizontal Growth while still making Vertical Growth a viable but difficult option.
Note how in GGG there's Evasion and Armor as two perfectly viable methods to defend your character, as well as Accuracy and Penetration to give you two ways to go on the offense. You can be the hyper-dodgy super-accurate guy, but you also can make the character a better-rounded one instead. In most games not being uber-specialized is a terrible idea, but in GGG being good at only one thing is a risky proposition - you can gimmick your way to victory against unprepared foes, but the moment you walk into a counter it is going to hurt.
Of course. That is all in theory. To get to that point where things are balanced for both Horizontally and Vertically-minded Characters I need to make sure all options are good in the first place, and that means giving some of the game's weaker areas a push. Here's a (very, very brief summary) of what I've got in mind:
-More ways to use Resources. Plus more and better Equipment to go with it too.
-Improving Active Defenses, that means Evasive Systems and Defensive Barriers, but mostly Defensive Barriers. All eight Upgrades are either getting a buff or being rewritten.
-Better counters to highly Evasive Units. Currently some of the answers to annoying turbododgers don't work as well as they should (Lux Cannon can be ECS'd and Ensnaring Wires need you to land a hit with them in the first place, and the Aim Action is just kind of not worth it unless you have a Long Rifle.)
-Toning down a lot of gimmicky weapons that also had high penetration as a bonus just for the hell of it. Bombardment I'm looking at you.
-Adjustments to various Enemy templates. Mostly this means tweaking Grunts a bit and Boss Archetypes a lot.
-The return of Premade Enemies, now with more advice on how to craft them to better challenge PCs.
Plus other stuff that may or may not include the ToC and Index I've been dreading to redo since 1.4's big change. To cap things, ultimately balance is - at least to me and for the purposes of this system - about making everything good and allowing for a better distribution of power so that even the most obscure of niches is satisfying to play with. You do not need all options to be exactly as powerful or generally useful as each other, in fact that is nearly impossible to accomplish without a ridiculous amount of resources. Some things are going to be better than others in a general sense, but those things can be countered, and this creates a metagame. In a vacuum one character might seem much stronger (or weaker) than others, but out there against a wide variety of challenges they are going to have their own unique role in the team.
Expect 1.7 sometime March or April.
I could talk about those, but I'd rather wait until I'm pretty sure I got them right to do so. Instead, let's get a little more abstract, I'm going to talk about the philosophy behind balance changes, or at least the ones that I tend to do. Then I will bring up some of the changes I've got in mind.
So what is Balance in Tabletop RPGs? Well, when gamers talk about 'balance' they usually refer to all player options (usually classes, races, or their equivalent) being more or less equal in capability. The thing is, the only way for characters to be truly balanced right next to each other would be to make them identical to each other. And because that is not a very attractive idea, we tend to focus on the balance of the game around its primary method of conflict resolution - usually combat.
But in practical terms balance is different things to different people. Some want to be always able to contribute to all kinds of conflict (combat, social, investigative, or any other type) even if it is only a little, while other Players want to have a single scene every once in a while where they get to save the day entirely on their own. But it gets more complicated than that! To some a balanced character means one able to overcome any challenge through carefully managing the game's subsystems, while others just want to keep things simple and roll some dice then see where luck takes them - yet both of those playstyles need to be equally good choices.
It is a complicated issue.
A lot of games with balance issues can hide those pretty well until characters grow in power level, only then the cracks begin to show, with the gaps getting larger the more time passes until finally the whole thing falls apart. There are a multitude of reasons for this, but one good way around them is by not relying on what I call Vertical Character Growth.
Think of all characters as standing together next to each other in a line, each of them is good at one or two things, and the more they grow in power at those two things the taller they get. If the balance is good, then they will keep the same height, but if the balance is not good then one of them will tower above the rest. Vertical Growth is about pushing you forward on the same path you started during character creation, and assuming all starting options are the same in power level.
Things are easier to balance if you promote Horizontal Growth instead - Characters step into each other's spots and sort of merge together, while still having things that are unique to themselves. Wherever it is possble, I try to promote Horizontal Growth while still making Vertical Growth a viable but difficult option.
Note how in GGG there's Evasion and Armor as two perfectly viable methods to defend your character, as well as Accuracy and Penetration to give you two ways to go on the offense. You can be the hyper-dodgy super-accurate guy, but you also can make the character a better-rounded one instead. In most games not being uber-specialized is a terrible idea, but in GGG being good at only one thing is a risky proposition - you can gimmick your way to victory against unprepared foes, but the moment you walk into a counter it is going to hurt.
Of course. That is all in theory. To get to that point where things are balanced for both Horizontally and Vertically-minded Characters I need to make sure all options are good in the first place, and that means giving some of the game's weaker areas a push. Here's a (very, very brief summary) of what I've got in mind:
-More ways to use Resources. Plus more and better Equipment to go with it too.
-Improving Active Defenses, that means Evasive Systems and Defensive Barriers, but mostly Defensive Barriers. All eight Upgrades are either getting a buff or being rewritten.
-Better counters to highly Evasive Units. Currently some of the answers to annoying turbododgers don't work as well as they should (Lux Cannon can be ECS'd and Ensnaring Wires need you to land a hit with them in the first place, and the Aim Action is just kind of not worth it unless you have a Long Rifle.)
-Toning down a lot of gimmicky weapons that also had high penetration as a bonus just for the hell of it. Bombardment I'm looking at you.
-Adjustments to various Enemy templates. Mostly this means tweaking Grunts a bit and Boss Archetypes a lot.
-The return of Premade Enemies, now with more advice on how to craft them to better challenge PCs.
Plus other stuff that may or may not include the ToC and Index I've been dreading to redo since 1.4's big change. To cap things, ultimately balance is - at least to me and for the purposes of this system - about making everything good and allowing for a better distribution of power so that even the most obscure of niches is satisfying to play with. You do not need all options to be exactly as powerful or generally useful as each other, in fact that is nearly impossible to accomplish without a ridiculous amount of resources. Some things are going to be better than others in a general sense, but those things can be countered, and this creates a metagame. In a vacuum one character might seem much stronger (or weaker) than others, but out there against a wide variety of challenges they are going to have their own unique role in the team.
Expect 1.7 sometime March or April.
February 10, 2013
A Tribute to Player Agency, part trismegistos
So far we've gotten a closer look at Attributes, Defense, Plot Armor, and Skills. There's only two holes left to fill concerning those - Resources and Miracles. And then we can move on to Traits and their ilk. The reason I've left them for last is because their creation is closely linked! You see, early on Resources was going to be Mana Ether Spirit Soul, and it was going to be exclusive for use with Miracles.
That did not work out too well. It would be an extremely important stat to characters who used it, and absolutely worthless to everyone else, and that's not what a supportive attribute (like Awareness and Willpower) is supposed to be. In addition to that, Willpower just got hit by reducing the four layers of Plot Armor to three, so I figured - hey, maybe we could use Plot Armor to fuel off your superpowers! Sure, why not.
The Damage mechanics were always the same from the moment they had a track of their own to their final version, since I wanted the use of Miracles to be unpredictable. As is right now, the average character can use one Miracle per Scene more or less safely, while someone who invests into Willpower will be able to use two. Combat Miracles are unfortunate in that their use will probably take you into the second or third Layers of Plot Armor earlier than you'd like, but they do far more damage to the enemy than they should do to you with each use anyway.
I really didn't have a sixth that anymore, but I did not spend long looking for (or even wondering if I should have) another. But why Resources? I mean, Resources is a thing that you could easily abstract entirely and never have come into play meaningfully to an entire long-running game, and yet sometimes someone's wealth or contacts can be campaign defining. You know, it is not exactly the same thing as the function that Awareness or Willpower serve, but that sounds like secondary stat material to me. The question now was how to implement it.
In addition to having Resources be a thing you could Test when in a pinch, to see if you can obtain an item or to ask a friend for help, I decided I would use them as the workhorse for Equipment, which was previously very vague and almost ignorable. The rules for Equipment might be a bit prohibitive right now, all things considered, but they give you a reason to pay attention to Resources, which in turn gets people thinking more about their character's position in the world, which cannot be bad. That said, I'd like to make items more desirable and accessible in general.
This brings me to Traits! Let's rewind to the pre-1.6 version for a second and explain why they were like that. Because I wanted starting characters to be competent, and because Traits had to match up to Attributes and Skills in terms of XP, I made them very cheap, but they could only be obtained during chargen. Now fast forward to the present, and starting characters are a lot more competent now than they used to be, therefore Traits can afford to be more expensive, and can be obtained after the creation of a character. That said some of them need to be recosted or buffed, not by much but at least a little.
There was one piece of the puzzle I was missing, and that was to make some cheap customizable abilities that could be used to fill up space, in the same way that you can make backup custom weapons for your mecha with leftover UP. Since everything in general was more expensive now, and since even cheap attributes could scale up quickly to costing 5+ points, pilots were in dire need of something to bank their XPs in when they were done getting the big stuff and had some spare PP left. Something more interesting than the old Plot Armor, hopefully. This led to the creation of Deathblows and Assets.
Deathblows came to be as they are for a variety of reasons. One of the things that didn't work so well in the previous version of the rules was combat, mostly because it was a slow drawn-out affair without many of the interesting tricks that mecha combat brought to the table. Fortunately I already knew I wanted to make personal battles a lot shorter than they used to be, but there was still the issue that it wasn't very interesting. I came up with the idea of active modifiers to regular attacks, kind of how like even in JRPGs it makes no difference whether you use excalibur or a folding chair as a weapon, save that sometimes special weapons have a special command you can use with them. The end result left me pretty satisfied, you can use Deathblows to make energy whip attacks distinctive from say a rocket launcher, without bogging down the game with tons of complex rules.
Next there's Assets, which you might be surprised to hear are one of the game's original mechanics waaay back when it was a humble .txt file - albeit with some tweaks because Resources was not a thing. Back then there weren't as many rules for pilots as there are now, so every PC had a free Asset to use as a get out of of jail free card, in a sense. As the rules expanded, Assets weren't so necessary anymore, and I rolled most of them into Traits of their own (Such as Ally and Resourceful) or discarded them entirely. What changed? Well, Resources happened! And since there is already a stat designed to handle these things, I figure there's no harm in bringing them back, though now they would have a cost. As the book itself explains, the idea behind them is that you turn to your Assets when you have no idea how to advance further and want the GM to give you a hand, with the drawback that you will likely have to pay the favor back to the Asset later. They are a panic button with an in-built hook for future developments, and that is a nice thing for both the Player and the GM.
But why are both Deathblows and Assets so limited in their use? I mean, sure, mechanically it would be because they're cheap, but why can't I say, spend 10 PP to to let my character use them all the time? Wouldn't that be awesome? Well, no, it would not be. At least not after the first few times. It would take both Deathblows and Traits from being this awesome thing you use to turn the tide of combat or advance the plot against all odds to a gimmick. Now I do get that, in practical terms, putting enough points in them basically lets you use them every time you get the chance - but you still don't know if you will need them again later, so you always have to think about when the most effective time to use them would be.
And that's that for our look behind the scenes at 1.6 and its changes. As mentioned above, there are a few things I would like to adjust or expand for 1.7. I don't want to approach the levels of 'equipment porn' some systems indulge in (You know who you are) but I do want to expand the list of fancy equipment with more interesting toys. I have no idea when that one would be coming out, perhaps sometime in April. There is a lot of work to be done!
That did not work out too well. It would be an extremely important stat to characters who used it, and absolutely worthless to everyone else, and that's not what a supportive attribute (like Awareness and Willpower) is supposed to be. In addition to that, Willpower just got hit by reducing the four layers of Plot Armor to three, so I figured - hey, maybe we could use Plot Armor to fuel off your superpowers! Sure, why not.
The Damage mechanics were always the same from the moment they had a track of their own to their final version, since I wanted the use of Miracles to be unpredictable. As is right now, the average character can use one Miracle per Scene more or less safely, while someone who invests into Willpower will be able to use two. Combat Miracles are unfortunate in that their use will probably take you into the second or third Layers of Plot Armor earlier than you'd like, but they do far more damage to the enemy than they should do to you with each use anyway.
I really didn't have a sixth that anymore, but I did not spend long looking for (or even wondering if I should have) another. But why Resources? I mean, Resources is a thing that you could easily abstract entirely and never have come into play meaningfully to an entire long-running game, and yet sometimes someone's wealth or contacts can be campaign defining. You know, it is not exactly the same thing as the function that Awareness or Willpower serve, but that sounds like secondary stat material to me. The question now was how to implement it.
In addition to having Resources be a thing you could Test when in a pinch, to see if you can obtain an item or to ask a friend for help, I decided I would use them as the workhorse for Equipment, which was previously very vague and almost ignorable. The rules for Equipment might be a bit prohibitive right now, all things considered, but they give you a reason to pay attention to Resources, which in turn gets people thinking more about their character's position in the world, which cannot be bad. That said, I'd like to make items more desirable and accessible in general.
This brings me to Traits! Let's rewind to the pre-1.6 version for a second and explain why they were like that. Because I wanted starting characters to be competent, and because Traits had to match up to Attributes and Skills in terms of XP, I made them very cheap, but they could only be obtained during chargen. Now fast forward to the present, and starting characters are a lot more competent now than they used to be, therefore Traits can afford to be more expensive, and can be obtained after the creation of a character. That said some of them need to be recosted or buffed, not by much but at least a little.
There was one piece of the puzzle I was missing, and that was to make some cheap customizable abilities that could be used to fill up space, in the same way that you can make backup custom weapons for your mecha with leftover UP. Since everything in general was more expensive now, and since even cheap attributes could scale up quickly to costing 5+ points, pilots were in dire need of something to bank their XPs in when they were done getting the big stuff and had some spare PP left. Something more interesting than the old Plot Armor, hopefully. This led to the creation of Deathblows and Assets.
Deathblows came to be as they are for a variety of reasons. One of the things that didn't work so well in the previous version of the rules was combat, mostly because it was a slow drawn-out affair without many of the interesting tricks that mecha combat brought to the table. Fortunately I already knew I wanted to make personal battles a lot shorter than they used to be, but there was still the issue that it wasn't very interesting. I came up with the idea of active modifiers to regular attacks, kind of how like even in JRPGs it makes no difference whether you use excalibur or a folding chair as a weapon, save that sometimes special weapons have a special command you can use with them. The end result left me pretty satisfied, you can use Deathblows to make energy whip attacks distinctive from say a rocket launcher, without bogging down the game with tons of complex rules.
Next there's Assets, which you might be surprised to hear are one of the game's original mechanics waaay back when it was a humble .txt file - albeit with some tweaks because Resources was not a thing. Back then there weren't as many rules for pilots as there are now, so every PC had a free Asset to use as a get out of of jail free card, in a sense. As the rules expanded, Assets weren't so necessary anymore, and I rolled most of them into Traits of their own (Such as Ally and Resourceful) or discarded them entirely. What changed? Well, Resources happened! And since there is already a stat designed to handle these things, I figure there's no harm in bringing them back, though now they would have a cost. As the book itself explains, the idea behind them is that you turn to your Assets when you have no idea how to advance further and want the GM to give you a hand, with the drawback that you will likely have to pay the favor back to the Asset later. They are a panic button with an in-built hook for future developments, and that is a nice thing for both the Player and the GM.
But why are both Deathblows and Assets so limited in their use? I mean, sure, mechanically it would be because they're cheap, but why can't I say, spend 10 PP to to let my character use them all the time? Wouldn't that be awesome? Well, no, it would not be. At least not after the first few times. It would take both Deathblows and Traits from being this awesome thing you use to turn the tide of combat or advance the plot against all odds to a gimmick. Now I do get that, in practical terms, putting enough points in them basically lets you use them every time you get the chance - but you still don't know if you will need them again later, so you always have to think about when the most effective time to use them would be.
And that's that for our look behind the scenes at 1.6 and its changes. As mentioned above, there are a few things I would like to adjust or expand for 1.7. I don't want to approach the levels of 'equipment porn' some systems indulge in (You know who you are) but I do want to expand the list of fancy equipment with more interesting toys. I have no idea when that one would be coming out, perhaps sometime in April. There is a lot of work to be done!
February 3, 2013
A Tribute to Player Agency, part deux
Last week I went over how Awareness and Willpower came to be, with a little bit on how the three types of Defense and Plot Armor converged into a single substat each. Right now I would like to elaborate a bit on the specific execution to this, and specially the math involved, but that needs a preliminary explanation of how stat values more or less doubled in number.
There were many reasons behind this change, but I would most likely not have bothered if I also hadn't noticed a small problem with the previous Stat + Skill system - Attributes gave you too much of a bang for your buck. Sure, they were more expensive, but higher stats carried a lot of benefits, not the least of which were being one half of your Defense. What is more, there were only three Attributes, which once increased helped you a great deal to all Tests. Skills, on the other hand, were about a dozen and each had very specific applications. It was clear that just giving Skills half the cost of an Attribute increase wasn't really keeping them balanced to each other.
Now I could have looked for a way to make Skills more important, but it just seemed like it would be a lot simpler to make use of my Advantage/Disadvantage system and just admit that Attributes are the buiding blocks of a character. As an aside, I really like Advantages and Disadvantages, they're simple yet tactical, they diminish the element of randomness to tests your character is good at, yet also let you take a risk by sacrificing some of that stability for a potentially much higher result. As an aside to this aside, I am going to integrate that sidebar (the one with rules for the conversion of stacking Advantages and Disadvantages to additional dice/DN) to their regular rules entry. Anyway, moving on, or rather back to, Skills.
I actually wanted to have only two Skill Levels in Adept and Master early on instead of four, and they would work off just like the current ones do. Since each Advantage is, roughly, a +3 bonus it meant that Skills got a lot stronger than they used to be - having five levels and each one of them being a +1. Specializations and PP Costs would not solidify until much later, but this gave me a good working foundation for what I would need to hammer next: The Actual Attribute Numbers.
I was going to have to rewrite what an Attribute score meant fluffwise, and each Nature's starting values with it. The former part was was mostly a copy and paste job with different numbers, but the latter proved trickier. See, characters are meant to start off as above average with one third of their stats, rather bad at others, and par for the course with the last chunk. But if I make the average a 4-5, then that means they succeed automatically at things that the same characters from the previous version of the game would have needed some luck (or Skill!) to overcome. Not only that, but just having Master Level skill at anything gave you a shot at something of the highest Difficulty Number in the game (20) even at an Attribute value of 0, let alone a much more likely 6-7 at it.
Clearly I was going to have to rewrite all the standard Difficulty Numbers to make everything tougher (by 5, or maybe even 10!!!) and oh my God how do I make weaker characters even stand a chance to get anything cool done when I'm trying to make things HARD for them!!11oneone.
I was trying to reconcile opposite ideas.
Now don't get me wrong, I think things being easy by default takes away from your choice of what you want to be good at, but this would be only one half of the rules - the less important half at that. So I made my choice, and it was to make things generally easier for everyone by keeping the same Difficulty Numbers. All PCs are now a little bit better at doing mundane things than before just by default, because as I like to say, games are more fun when things are happening than when they aren't. All Hail Player Agency.
With that issue solved, I made some quick math and wrote in numbers that seemed reasonable for each Nature. Consider, the average starting value for Attributes is 4, that plus a roll of 6 (or 5 and a Tension of 1) beats a DN of 10, the basic DN for things that are more or less difficult. An above average Attribute at 6 can meet a very, very difficult DN of 15 by rolling 9 or higher, a thing that is considerably easier with Advantages from Skill training. Being terribly incompetent at what you are doing (Failing a DN of 5) now requires you to have a low stat and to roll poorly so it happens less often, which takes it away from being frustrating to making it hilarious when it happens instead. Reaching DN of 20 is possible, but never guaranteed, not even if you go all the way and spend 40 points to get your highest starting Attributes to 11 and gain two Advantages - the result averages out at 23, which is more than enough, but you could also get a 19.
All in all, the numbers looked pretty nice. So this was a good time, I felt, to tackle the specifics of Defenses and Plot Armor. I added a flat 5 bonus to Defense because it is a number that lets people automatically shrug off some Damage if their Awareness is low and gives them a chance to resist if it is high. It is the equivalent of any Offensive Test having an automatic two Disadvantages to their roll. Then came Plot Armor, which I decided I would actually nerf a bit by taking away one Layer because that fourth Layer (or rather, the first one) never made too much sense anyway.
But wait, last time I said that characters were squishy with just their Willpower as Plot Armor, and that was with four Layers! What changed between now and then? My outlook on things, mostly. Instead of making Pilot combat a back and forth deal like it is with Mecha, I figured I would rather it be quick and brutal for anyone who isn't up to being a fighter at the ground level. I decided I would ditch Consequences because they made it harder to come back from the brink of defeat than they needed to, and instead added Willpower Tests to not be knocked out.
As another aside, this lines up with everything I've been saying since 1.4 about making your choices matter more. You can tank very well for as little as 12 PP (assuming you are not a Coordinator) but you have to make it a thing you want to do, rather than expect it to be the default. You choose where your agency lies, and not being able to fight enemy soldiers on foot doesn't make you any worse at actually piloting, so unlike in other games it is perfectly fine to be a wimp that would pass out from a strong breeze.
The last mathhammering that needed to be done was concering Specializations. It seems obvious in hindsight, but I had no idea what to do with them at the time. Then I figured out I could adopt the 3-5-7-10 Upgrade cost scheme and make them cheaper than the Adept and Master Levels but only a little bit worse, and all was good. While I was at it, I renamed, clarified, or rewrote some Skills, split up a couple into separate ones, there is not much of a story to that.
It gets more interesting in the part where I brew Miracles into this hot mess. So we'll take a look at that next, as well as the various Traits and the last of the six stats in Resources. Plus some discarded mechanics that didn't see the light of day, and maybe some of the new toys I would like to add later.
There were many reasons behind this change, but I would most likely not have bothered if I also hadn't noticed a small problem with the previous Stat + Skill system - Attributes gave you too much of a bang for your buck. Sure, they were more expensive, but higher stats carried a lot of benefits, not the least of which were being one half of your Defense. What is more, there were only three Attributes, which once increased helped you a great deal to all Tests. Skills, on the other hand, were about a dozen and each had very specific applications. It was clear that just giving Skills half the cost of an Attribute increase wasn't really keeping them balanced to each other.
Now I could have looked for a way to make Skills more important, but it just seemed like it would be a lot simpler to make use of my Advantage/Disadvantage system and just admit that Attributes are the buiding blocks of a character. As an aside, I really like Advantages and Disadvantages, they're simple yet tactical, they diminish the element of randomness to tests your character is good at, yet also let you take a risk by sacrificing some of that stability for a potentially much higher result. As an aside to this aside, I am going to integrate that sidebar (the one with rules for the conversion of stacking Advantages and Disadvantages to additional dice/DN) to their regular rules entry. Anyway, moving on, or rather back to, Skills.
I actually wanted to have only two Skill Levels in Adept and Master early on instead of four, and they would work off just like the current ones do. Since each Advantage is, roughly, a +3 bonus it meant that Skills got a lot stronger than they used to be - having five levels and each one of them being a +1. Specializations and PP Costs would not solidify until much later, but this gave me a good working foundation for what I would need to hammer next: The Actual Attribute Numbers.
I was going to have to rewrite what an Attribute score meant fluffwise, and each Nature's starting values with it. The former part was was mostly a copy and paste job with different numbers, but the latter proved trickier. See, characters are meant to start off as above average with one third of their stats, rather bad at others, and par for the course with the last chunk. But if I make the average a 4-5, then that means they succeed automatically at things that the same characters from the previous version of the game would have needed some luck (or Skill!) to overcome. Not only that, but just having Master Level skill at anything gave you a shot at something of the highest Difficulty Number in the game (20) even at an Attribute value of 0, let alone a much more likely 6-7 at it.
Clearly I was going to have to rewrite all the standard Difficulty Numbers to make everything tougher (by 5, or maybe even 10!!!) and oh my God how do I make weaker characters even stand a chance to get anything cool done when I'm trying to make things HARD for them!!11oneone.
I was trying to reconcile opposite ideas.
Now don't get me wrong, I think things being easy by default takes away from your choice of what you want to be good at, but this would be only one half of the rules - the less important half at that. So I made my choice, and it was to make things generally easier for everyone by keeping the same Difficulty Numbers. All PCs are now a little bit better at doing mundane things than before just by default, because as I like to say, games are more fun when things are happening than when they aren't. All Hail Player Agency.
With that issue solved, I made some quick math and wrote in numbers that seemed reasonable for each Nature. Consider, the average starting value for Attributes is 4, that plus a roll of 6 (or 5 and a Tension of 1) beats a DN of 10, the basic DN for things that are more or less difficult. An above average Attribute at 6 can meet a very, very difficult DN of 15 by rolling 9 or higher, a thing that is considerably easier with Advantages from Skill training. Being terribly incompetent at what you are doing (Failing a DN of 5) now requires you to have a low stat and to roll poorly so it happens less often, which takes it away from being frustrating to making it hilarious when it happens instead. Reaching DN of 20 is possible, but never guaranteed, not even if you go all the way and spend 40 points to get your highest starting Attributes to 11 and gain two Advantages - the result averages out at 23, which is more than enough, but you could also get a 19.
All in all, the numbers looked pretty nice. So this was a good time, I felt, to tackle the specifics of Defenses and Plot Armor. I added a flat 5 bonus to Defense because it is a number that lets people automatically shrug off some Damage if their Awareness is low and gives them a chance to resist if it is high. It is the equivalent of any Offensive Test having an automatic two Disadvantages to their roll. Then came Plot Armor, which I decided I would actually nerf a bit by taking away one Layer because that fourth Layer (or rather, the first one) never made too much sense anyway.
But wait, last time I said that characters were squishy with just their Willpower as Plot Armor, and that was with four Layers! What changed between now and then? My outlook on things, mostly. Instead of making Pilot combat a back and forth deal like it is with Mecha, I figured I would rather it be quick and brutal for anyone who isn't up to being a fighter at the ground level. I decided I would ditch Consequences because they made it harder to come back from the brink of defeat than they needed to, and instead added Willpower Tests to not be knocked out.
As another aside, this lines up with everything I've been saying since 1.4 about making your choices matter more. You can tank very well for as little as 12 PP (assuming you are not a Coordinator) but you have to make it a thing you want to do, rather than expect it to be the default. You choose where your agency lies, and not being able to fight enemy soldiers on foot doesn't make you any worse at actually piloting, so unlike in other games it is perfectly fine to be a wimp that would pass out from a strong breeze.
The last mathhammering that needed to be done was concering Specializations. It seems obvious in hindsight, but I had no idea what to do with them at the time. Then I figured out I could adopt the 3-5-7-10 Upgrade cost scheme and make them cheaper than the Adept and Master Levels but only a little bit worse, and all was good. While I was at it, I renamed, clarified, or rewrote some Skills, split up a couple into separate ones, there is not much of a story to that.
It gets more interesting in the part where I brew Miracles into this hot mess. So we'll take a look at that next, as well as the various Traits and the last of the six stats in Resources. Plus some discarded mechanics that didn't see the light of day, and maybe some of the new toys I would like to add later.
January 27, 2013
A Tribute to Player Agency, part one.
I have no idea when the next update is going to be, or am even sure of what is going to be in it, so might as well talk a bit about how the last one and how its many changes came about, their whys and hows. The most obvious (and probably biggest) one is that to Attributes and, by association, to Skills. But where to begin?
Well, how about at the beginning?
The first thing I knew I wanted to change for pilot rules was to make Awareness a new stat. The old rules for Defenses weren't panning out too well, the math worked in a vacuum but it was easy to powergame and (more importantly) the process of powergaming led you to not take risks and wasn't very fun. Then there's how some of the rules for resisting things weren't quite as gripping as I wanted them to be. A character on the defensive had no input on resisting social combat other than increasing their Genre or Plot Armor, while the character on the offense could actually roll for it and also apply oh-so-many Skills and Traits and Tension to it plus whatever other stuff that could apply.
The main reason the game did not have Awareness at first was because I wanted stats to be a proactive thing, something you go out and use to make things happen instead of a mechanic that would cause the opposite. And Awareness is, for the most part, a stat that doesn't get much done. Sure, there's a few Skills and Miracles here and there, but by and large Awareness is there to contribute to your Defense and to be rolled against other Skills or Defenses.
Awareness as a stat is, therefore, a lot less powerful but paradoxically a lot more necessary to the average character - everyone needs a modicum of Defense. That's why I figured it would have to be cheap, so it would not cost you an arm and a leg in PP to buff it up a little just to be safe. That way it does not get in the way of all the other stuff you want to get for your character.
I didn't completely figure out how Defenses were going to work out until a while later though, but after coming up with the idea for Awareness I thought maybe I could also have a Willpower stat. The way I saw it, it would handle the defensive stuff Awareness wouldn't make sense to roll with, plus let me rework the Plot Armor rules a little bit. Unlike Defenses Plot Armor was thing I wasn't too dissatisfied with, it was just... boring. You had three HP tracks to improve. How fun and exciting. Yippie. Ki. Yay.
So! Awareness worked for noticing things meant to trick or entrap you, while Willpower would be used to resist doing something against your will. Pretty simple. This way convincing a really stubborn but careless person to see things your way is harder than just lying to them, and with a high enough Willpower you can actually resist torture instead of having too much mental HP for them to bother with. Plus, it is a mecha anime game, yelling really loud and being gutsy is kind of A Thing that should be legit cool. It then joined Awareness in being a cheap stat for pretty much the same reasons.
So how did they actually come together into the new rules for Defense and Plot Armor? First I had to figure out whether I wanted to keep separate tracks of Damage or not, and that was the part that took the longest time to figure out. See, I thought it would be cool if you could add up your Fitness to your Awareness for your Physical Defense and Fitness to your Willpower for your Physical Plot Armor. It made sense and seemed like a logical update to the old rules, and for the longest time that was what I ran with... Except it didn't play out too well.
There was no way the numbers worked out in a way that was satisfactory. If stats kept their scale between 1 and 5 ish you were looking at very, very squishy characters. A single result of 10 (Not even a die roll of 10, just a total result) would have dealt 7 Damage to someone of average defenses, which is enough to take out two Plot Armor Layers. This was more manageable with the modern scale for stats, but had the issue of making the characters with higher stats ridiculous. We're talking of Defenses in their 20's coupled up with the corresponding Plot Armor being somewhere of at least 10. Might as well not bother with actual rules and just say 'The character is impervious, don't even bother' at that point.
It was at that point that I started thinking maybe I should honestly drop the separate Defenses and Plot Armor types idea, because all other options were weird as all hell. If the three different types shared the same numbers the distinction would have been pointless, and averaging two stats to get a Defense didn't really fix anything in the long term. In the end, while separate tracks added a little bit more to the gameplay, I figured the simplicity of the ground level rules was a high point of the game and chose to stick with that.
So I kept it to one Defense and a general Plot Armor track. The next thing was making them not suck because boy those numbers could get really low. It was at this point that I got really sold on the idea of an Attribute scale going all the way up to 10 and maybe a bit higher. Why? Well, I would answer in depth but this post is getting pretty long as is and I haven't even started talking about Resources, Skills or Traits yet.
I'm going to be splitting this up into three parts, with the next one focusing on some nuts and bolts of the math involved in the process. Until then, may your defense match your offense.
Well, how about at the beginning?
The first thing I knew I wanted to change for pilot rules was to make Awareness a new stat. The old rules for Defenses weren't panning out too well, the math worked in a vacuum but it was easy to powergame and (more importantly) the process of powergaming led you to not take risks and wasn't very fun. Then there's how some of the rules for resisting things weren't quite as gripping as I wanted them to be. A character on the defensive had no input on resisting social combat other than increasing their Genre or Plot Armor, while the character on the offense could actually roll for it and also apply oh-so-many Skills and Traits and Tension to it plus whatever other stuff that could apply.
The main reason the game did not have Awareness at first was because I wanted stats to be a proactive thing, something you go out and use to make things happen instead of a mechanic that would cause the opposite. And Awareness is, for the most part, a stat that doesn't get much done. Sure, there's a few Skills and Miracles here and there, but by and large Awareness is there to contribute to your Defense and to be rolled against other Skills or Defenses.
Awareness as a stat is, therefore, a lot less powerful but paradoxically a lot more necessary to the average character - everyone needs a modicum of Defense. That's why I figured it would have to be cheap, so it would not cost you an arm and a leg in PP to buff it up a little just to be safe. That way it does not get in the way of all the other stuff you want to get for your character.
I didn't completely figure out how Defenses were going to work out until a while later though, but after coming up with the idea for Awareness I thought maybe I could also have a Willpower stat. The way I saw it, it would handle the defensive stuff Awareness wouldn't make sense to roll with, plus let me rework the Plot Armor rules a little bit. Unlike Defenses Plot Armor was thing I wasn't too dissatisfied with, it was just... boring. You had three HP tracks to improve. How fun and exciting. Yippie. Ki. Yay.
So! Awareness worked for noticing things meant to trick or entrap you, while Willpower would be used to resist doing something against your will. Pretty simple. This way convincing a really stubborn but careless person to see things your way is harder than just lying to them, and with a high enough Willpower you can actually resist torture instead of having too much mental HP for them to bother with. Plus, it is a mecha anime game, yelling really loud and being gutsy is kind of A Thing that should be legit cool. It then joined Awareness in being a cheap stat for pretty much the same reasons.
So how did they actually come together into the new rules for Defense and Plot Armor? First I had to figure out whether I wanted to keep separate tracks of Damage or not, and that was the part that took the longest time to figure out. See, I thought it would be cool if you could add up your Fitness to your Awareness for your Physical Defense and Fitness to your Willpower for your Physical Plot Armor. It made sense and seemed like a logical update to the old rules, and for the longest time that was what I ran with... Except it didn't play out too well.
There was no way the numbers worked out in a way that was satisfactory. If stats kept their scale between 1 and 5 ish you were looking at very, very squishy characters. A single result of 10 (Not even a die roll of 10, just a total result) would have dealt 7 Damage to someone of average defenses, which is enough to take out two Plot Armor Layers. This was more manageable with the modern scale for stats, but had the issue of making the characters with higher stats ridiculous. We're talking of Defenses in their 20's coupled up with the corresponding Plot Armor being somewhere of at least 10. Might as well not bother with actual rules and just say 'The character is impervious, don't even bother' at that point.
It was at that point that I started thinking maybe I should honestly drop the separate Defenses and Plot Armor types idea, because all other options were weird as all hell. If the three different types shared the same numbers the distinction would have been pointless, and averaging two stats to get a Defense didn't really fix anything in the long term. In the end, while separate tracks added a little bit more to the gameplay, I figured the simplicity of the ground level rules was a high point of the game and chose to stick with that.
So I kept it to one Defense and a general Plot Armor track. The next thing was making them not suck because boy those numbers could get really low. It was at this point that I got really sold on the idea of an Attribute scale going all the way up to 10 and maybe a bit higher. Why? Well, I would answer in depth but this post is getting pretty long as is and I haven't even started talking about Resources, Skills or Traits yet.
I'm going to be splitting this up into three parts, with the next one focusing on some nuts and bolts of the math involved in the process. Until then, may your defense match your offense.
January 13, 2013
Sweet 1.6
It has been roughly one year and about ten updates since the first release, and things have changed a lot since then. But I think things are looking pretty stable from now on. This one's got a good number of small adjustments in addition to the big stuff. The 1.4 rules changes have seen enough action I'm confident in making what I think will be the last batch of those for a while.
Have a link.
General Changes
-More fixes regarding making the early chapters universally readable without knowing what a Gear or Avatar is. Also Dramatic Themes got changed to Genre Themes.
-The return of the Quick Rules Reference sheets.
Character Creation
-Rescaled Attributes and added three new ones.
-Modified how Defenses and Plot Armor Work.
-Modified the way Skills and Traits work.
-Added Miracle Skills representing supernatural talents.
-Added more Traits.
-Rewrote Equipment Rules.
-Determinator now ignores the effects of Maiming for a Round.
-Nerfed Impregnable Defense.
-Changed Imagination is the Limit to Hidden Power
Mecha Construction
-Increased Chassis starting Attributes a little.
-Moved suitable Features to the beginning of this chapter.
-Made Anti-Gravity cheaper.
-Removed the Terrain Adaptabilities that are also Features.
-Nerfed Stealth Field.
-Buffed Alternate Forms a tiny bit.
-Buffed Sidekicks.
-Nerfed Expansion Pack and Assistant slightly.
-Rewrote Combination Upgrades. Again.
-Small nerfs to Armor Breaker and Bombardment.
-Buffed Interference Cloud a little.
Playing the Game
-Added a clarification on how Advantages and Disadvantages work.
-Reworked Disruption and Mixed Tests.
-New type of basic Terrain: Base.
Running the Show
-Adjusted Enemy Generation to new Pilot rules.
-Expanded Grunt and Boss versatility a little.
Good thing I explained the how and why of Pilot changes in broad last week, because that saves me from making this post comparable to a script dump of the average Hideo Kojima title, and I want to touch on the Mecha stuff a little. Base stats went up to further differentiate the four types from one another, since their expected survivability was more or less the same against non-specialized weapons, give or take a Turn.
This was because I did not want defensive builds to be really, really difficult to crack, and because things are more fun when people are affecting each other than when they aren't. Thus the default was that you could increase your defenses to be very tough to take down, but anyone could just mirror your efforts by spending the same points in corresponding offensive buffs and keep you in line.
Where this kinda failed was that nearly every defensive Genre Power was ditched a while ago, so a character who intended to be good defensively had to not just fight offensive stats, but also Tension and nearly every Power under the sun. A starting Evasion of 18 is not very intimidating when your regular-use Weapon has a total Accuracy of +6, has an in-built Advantage under conditions that aren't very tough to reach, and you have dozens of ways to give them another Advantage to roll 2d10 instead of 1d10 and Tension is going to make it harder to dodge every Round.
So nearly everyone has wildly different survivability rates now against different Enemies, for the most part I increased defenses, but everyone received a small boost to offenses as well just to keep the stonewall uber alles in check, plus a boost to Energy since it can be used either way. Energy costs have been decreased enough for everything in general that Assistant no longer needs to be the crutch to end all crutches, and will be fine giving you points back 50% of the time and double that much another 10%.
The transfer of Features from enemy-and-maybe-PC-material to the mecha section is a stealth buff to Alternate Forms, since they cost 0, you can now get a lot of mileage out of those by only spending the requisite 3/5 UP. It also makes Imagination is the Limit absolutely fucking ridiculous, more than it already was, so now it plays to a different trope and has to declare what it wants to do beforehand.
Lastly there's Combiners, who are in a fierce competition with Transformers to see who gets to have the most changes to their rules, and I admit making those work in a way that makes sense and is elegant has been tough. Combiners should now play better to their Genre conventions while having an unique mechanical role to call their own. God Combination is very distinctive from Unison Combination, as opposed to one of them being better than the other, and Component Unit lets you make those G-Falcons and Laganns with as little fuss as possible.
Next time I hope to bring a lot less balance changes and a lot more prebuilt NPCs and Enemy creation/usage advice.
Have a link.
General Changes
-More fixes regarding making the early chapters universally readable without knowing what a Gear or Avatar is. Also Dramatic Themes got changed to Genre Themes.
-The return of the Quick Rules Reference sheets.
Character Creation
-Rescaled Attributes and added three new ones.
-Modified how Defenses and Plot Armor Work.
-Modified the way Skills and Traits work.
-Added Miracle Skills representing supernatural talents.
-Added more Traits.
-Rewrote Equipment Rules.
-Determinator now ignores the effects of Maiming for a Round.
-Nerfed Impregnable Defense.
-Changed Imagination is the Limit to Hidden Power
Mecha Construction
-Increased Chassis starting Attributes a little.
-Moved suitable Features to the beginning of this chapter.
-Made Anti-Gravity cheaper.
-Removed the Terrain Adaptabilities that are also Features.
-Nerfed Stealth Field.
-Buffed Alternate Forms a tiny bit.
-Buffed Sidekicks.
-Nerfed Expansion Pack and Assistant slightly.
-Rewrote Combination Upgrades. Again.
-Small nerfs to Armor Breaker and Bombardment.
-Buffed Interference Cloud a little.
Playing the Game
-Added a clarification on how Advantages and Disadvantages work.
-Reworked Disruption and Mixed Tests.
-New type of basic Terrain: Base.
Running the Show
-Adjusted Enemy Generation to new Pilot rules.
-Expanded Grunt and Boss versatility a little.
Good thing I explained the how and why of Pilot changes in broad last week, because that saves me from making this post comparable to a script dump of the average Hideo Kojima title, and I want to touch on the Mecha stuff a little. Base stats went up to further differentiate the four types from one another, since their expected survivability was more or less the same against non-specialized weapons, give or take a Turn.
This was because I did not want defensive builds to be really, really difficult to crack, and because things are more fun when people are affecting each other than when they aren't. Thus the default was that you could increase your defenses to be very tough to take down, but anyone could just mirror your efforts by spending the same points in corresponding offensive buffs and keep you in line.
Where this kinda failed was that nearly every defensive Genre Power was ditched a while ago, so a character who intended to be good defensively had to not just fight offensive stats, but also Tension and nearly every Power under the sun. A starting Evasion of 18 is not very intimidating when your regular-use Weapon has a total Accuracy of +6, has an in-built Advantage under conditions that aren't very tough to reach, and you have dozens of ways to give them another Advantage to roll 2d10 instead of 1d10 and Tension is going to make it harder to dodge every Round.
So nearly everyone has wildly different survivability rates now against different Enemies, for the most part I increased defenses, but everyone received a small boost to offenses as well just to keep the stonewall uber alles in check, plus a boost to Energy since it can be used either way. Energy costs have been decreased enough for everything in general that Assistant no longer needs to be the crutch to end all crutches, and will be fine giving you points back 50% of the time and double that much another 10%.
The transfer of Features from enemy-and-maybe-PC-material to the mecha section is a stealth buff to Alternate Forms, since they cost 0, you can now get a lot of mileage out of those by only spending the requisite 3/5 UP. It also makes Imagination is the Limit absolutely fucking ridiculous, more than it already was, so now it plays to a different trope and has to declare what it wants to do beforehand.
Lastly there's Combiners, who are in a fierce competition with Transformers to see who gets to have the most changes to their rules, and I admit making those work in a way that makes sense and is elegant has been tough. Combiners should now play better to their Genre conventions while having an unique mechanical role to call their own. God Combination is very distinctive from Unison Combination, as opposed to one of them being better than the other, and Component Unit lets you make those G-Falcons and Laganns with as little fuss as possible.
Next time I hope to bring a lot less balance changes and a lot more prebuilt NPCs and Enemy creation/usage advice.
January 6, 2013
New Year, New Version... Preview.
Pretty much everything that worried me about the changes to pilots has turned out to be working just fine, so the next update will be coming out soon enough. The main deciding factor for a release next week would be whether I can get Dota 2 to work again getting proper editorial duties in motion to ensure the pdf contains language recognizable by the human brain and not just a misshapen doppelganger of it. In lieu of that, here's a bird's eye view of the changes to pilots and intermissions for your perusal.
Attributes
Attributes are no longer graded roughly from 0 to 5, but from 1 to 10 instead. Where a 1 is absolutely terrible and 10 is the peak of human ability. We still have Fitness, Intellect and Empathy but they've been joined by three secondary stats that are cheaper in Awareness, Willpower, and Resources
The aim with the three new Attributes is to add a bit of depth to characters, allowing more control over things that previously you couldn't have much of a say on. You now get to roll Awareness to spot a trap or catch a lie, instead of just praying it doesn't go through your Defense, for instance. Willpower similarly would be used when you want to resist torture or walk through fire, without leaving it all up to the offensive roll. Resources, meanwhile, streamlines equipment rules a bit and handles things like wealth and contacts without leaving them entirely to the realm of abstraction.
It boils down to "More interaction = More fun." with a bit of extra PC customization on the side. The only thing that might be raising some questions is why the change in scale. That has to do with Skills. Speaking of which...
Skills
Skills are no longer a bonus from 1 to 5, now they're Advantages to their respective Tests. They can give from one to two Advantages to all appropriate Tests, and being untrained simply means not having any Advantages to your Test. Test no longer feels like a word by now. That said, they are more expensive now, which is why Specializations do the same thing but are cheaper, instead of being kinda good and kinda bad.
This cleans up the math a lot. No, it wasn't particularly difficult before the change, but tracking 6 items is easier than a full dozen. For the most part the benefit is that it allows Attributes to be the workhorse for basically everything. I can use Attributes do all sorts of things from a design standpoint, and a PC can Test an Attribute raw without needing to add a Skill bonus on top just to avoid sucking.
Also of note are Miracle Skills, what used to be the old Aberrant Skills, for psychic power shenanigans and assorted juju. They are exactly the same as regular Skills, except that their use always takes off some of your Plot Armor whether you fail or pass. Danger! Excitement! More on Plot Armor later!
Traits
Most of the old Traits came back, after a cost reshuffle and power adjusting where necessary, and they are a lot more like Upgrades now. Most have an unique effect applicable a limited number of times per session. But there is a good number of new Traits too, mostly for those dealing with new Attributes.
It does not stop there though! There's also specific categories for Traits known as Deathblows and Assets. Deathblows are modifiers to an Offensive Test that let you make an attack more accurate, hit multiple enemies at once, or stunning them for a little while. Assets encourage the use of Resources more aggressively, throwing around the weight of bribes or political backing to things you want done now, as long as you are willing to repay the favor later. Both Deathblows and Assets are cheap, ranging from 1 to 5 in PP, since their use is much more limited than that of Skills or other Traits.
Equipment is also listed under Traits, and the only significant changes would be that it is now more streamlined thanks to Resources, and that characters without significant Resources cannot access chemical weapons or suits of power armor.
Defense and Plot Armor
These have been revamped entirely. You have only one Defense and only one type of Plot Armor, and both work off your stats, leaving your Genre alone. Awareness contributes to Defense, while Willpower is much like Mecha Threshold. There's also only three Layers to Plot Armor now, for Damage that lasts Scenes, Episodes, and Arcs. There's also no more Consequences attached to said Damage, so it is simpler to work with.
As amazing as I personally found it to yell at people until they had hilarious meltdowns Phoenix Wright-style, the game is probably better off tracking only physical damage and mental integrity, so that's what Plot Armor shields you from. At least by default, no one is saying there cannot be a Miracle that makes you piss off people so bad they throw their toupee at you screaming bloody vengeance, but that's later.
Overall this boils down to simpler, cleaner interactions with things - or the ability to interact at all. Deathbows make ground-level combat a bit more fun for anyone who actually wants an emphasis on that, and Assets outright solve problems for stalled groups, at a price.
There's also been a few changes to Mecha rules - nothing really big, but still red-text worthy - which I'll talk more about when the Update proper strikes, because that's what everyone cares more about anyway. For the most part we're looking at a few increases to starting stats (mostly on the defensive side of things), revamped, Combinations that should represent the thing they're trying to be in a more clean and faithful fashion, and some Features being added to the Mecha Construction section (replacing Terrain Adaptability where necessary), plus the usual small balance adjustments here and there and oh look I wrote a whole paragraph about it anyway let's cut that short now.
Attributes
Attributes are no longer graded roughly from 0 to 5, but from 1 to 10 instead. Where a 1 is absolutely terrible and 10 is the peak of human ability. We still have Fitness, Intellect and Empathy but they've been joined by three secondary stats that are cheaper in Awareness, Willpower, and Resources
The aim with the three new Attributes is to add a bit of depth to characters, allowing more control over things that previously you couldn't have much of a say on. You now get to roll Awareness to spot a trap or catch a lie, instead of just praying it doesn't go through your Defense, for instance. Willpower similarly would be used when you want to resist torture or walk through fire, without leaving it all up to the offensive roll. Resources, meanwhile, streamlines equipment rules a bit and handles things like wealth and contacts without leaving them entirely to the realm of abstraction.
It boils down to "More interaction = More fun." with a bit of extra PC customization on the side. The only thing that might be raising some questions is why the change in scale. That has to do with Skills. Speaking of which...
Skills
Skills are no longer a bonus from 1 to 5, now they're Advantages to their respective Tests. They can give from one to two Advantages to all appropriate Tests, and being untrained simply means not having any Advantages to your Test. Test no longer feels like a word by now. That said, they are more expensive now, which is why Specializations do the same thing but are cheaper, instead of being kinda good and kinda bad.
This cleans up the math a lot. No, it wasn't particularly difficult before the change, but tracking 6 items is easier than a full dozen. For the most part the benefit is that it allows Attributes to be the workhorse for basically everything. I can use Attributes do all sorts of things from a design standpoint, and a PC can Test an Attribute raw without needing to add a Skill bonus on top just to avoid sucking.
Also of note are Miracle Skills, what used to be the old Aberrant Skills, for psychic power shenanigans and assorted juju. They are exactly the same as regular Skills, except that their use always takes off some of your Plot Armor whether you fail or pass. Danger! Excitement! More on Plot Armor later!
Traits
Most of the old Traits came back, after a cost reshuffle and power adjusting where necessary, and they are a lot more like Upgrades now. Most have an unique effect applicable a limited number of times per session. But there is a good number of new Traits too, mostly for those dealing with new Attributes.
It does not stop there though! There's also specific categories for Traits known as Deathblows and Assets. Deathblows are modifiers to an Offensive Test that let you make an attack more accurate, hit multiple enemies at once, or stunning them for a little while. Assets encourage the use of Resources more aggressively, throwing around the weight of bribes or political backing to things you want done now, as long as you are willing to repay the favor later. Both Deathblows and Assets are cheap, ranging from 1 to 5 in PP, since their use is much more limited than that of Skills or other Traits.
Equipment is also listed under Traits, and the only significant changes would be that it is now more streamlined thanks to Resources, and that characters without significant Resources cannot access chemical weapons or suits of power armor.
Defense and Plot Armor
These have been revamped entirely. You have only one Defense and only one type of Plot Armor, and both work off your stats, leaving your Genre alone. Awareness contributes to Defense, while Willpower is much like Mecha Threshold. There's also only three Layers to Plot Armor now, for Damage that lasts Scenes, Episodes, and Arcs. There's also no more Consequences attached to said Damage, so it is simpler to work with.
As amazing as I personally found it to yell at people until they had hilarious meltdowns Phoenix Wright-style, the game is probably better off tracking only physical damage and mental integrity, so that's what Plot Armor shields you from. At least by default, no one is saying there cannot be a Miracle that makes you piss off people so bad they throw their toupee at you screaming bloody vengeance, but that's later.
Overall this boils down to simpler, cleaner interactions with things - or the ability to interact at all. Deathbows make ground-level combat a bit more fun for anyone who actually wants an emphasis on that, and Assets outright solve problems for stalled groups, at a price.
There's also been a few changes to Mecha rules - nothing really big, but still red-text worthy - which I'll talk more about when the Update proper strikes, because that's what everyone cares more about anyway. For the most part we're looking at a few increases to starting stats (mostly on the defensive side of things), revamped, Combinations that should represent the thing they're trying to be in a more clean and faithful fashion, and some Features being added to the Mecha Construction section (replacing Terrain Adaptability where necessary), plus the usual small balance adjustments here and there and oh look I wrote a whole paragraph about it anyway let's cut that short now.
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