Sunday, October 30, 2011

On Schedule, Strength, and Size

Schedule

Well, I have all three methods of character creation prose roughed out and organized. November will bring the final draft and the three character creation examples. Dezember should bring us the final layout of the prose for both the methods and the examples.

Strength

While roughing out the chapter, I found myself musing on character strength and how in a similar manner that damage capacity in the game is conceptualized, so is a character's strength.

In HiBRiD, a character's strength (STR) attribute determines a definite amount of mass the character can maneuver or chuck about with no effort whatsoever. It also determines the maximum amount a character can lift without having to make a task roll.

STR also determines the amount of damage a character can take before he dies, the amount of damage a character can take before having a limb disabled, and the amount of damage a character can take before an appendage is severed completely off. It represents an absolute: it is a concrete abstraction of the amount of force required to disrupt the functioning of a hero. A character may be large or small, but the STR attribute represents a concept beyond a number of newtons of force a character can generate.

Finally, STR partially determines the amount of damage the character inflicts with hand held or thrown weapons in combat. This is a pretty cut and dried use as well.

While all of these represent absolute values, the STR attribute does not define the absolute maximum a character  a character is able ever to generate; that is what heroism, player creativity, and Ite' are all for. A STR vs STR opposed task roll rarely ever occurs, because so many times, a character's will, or some skill rationalized by the player come into play. Even in the most obvious example, an arm wrestling contest, the question of who wins is not so simple as who is stronger. Do the two wrestlers need to save energy until later? Is one of them cheating? Does one of the characters have more experience and know how long to wait before surging for the final push of that opponent's wrist to the table?

Size

In addition to Ite', another unique facet to HiBRiD is the requirement of the player to determine his character's height and weight. This came about after years of players describing their characters typically describing their characters in ways such as "big as an Austrian bodybuilder" but not having any idea of the mass of such a character. This became important, because with the fluid looseness of the rules and the lack of a myriad of modifiers like in so many other games, the mass of a character in kilograms creates an easy-to-grasp-onto concept when quickly trying to determine rough and tumble guidelines on the fly during action scenes, when determining whether ropes break, pressure pads go off, the swing of a dragon's tail slams someone against a wall, et cetera.

Strength and Size

Putting these two things together further exemplifies the HiBRiD philosophy. STR and character mass are related, but not in the way you might think.

In HiBRiD, a character may be of any mass and height and have any strength; there are no limitations and no relationship between the two in this regard. A skinny-as-a-rail, 150-cm-tall lightweight may be as strong as a professional bodybuilder, no problem.

The time when STR and mass are considered important only occurs whenever a character of a given strength wishes to affect a target character of a given mass. The STR attribute quickly lets the player and director instantly know how easy it is to push, unbalance, throw, or fling about a target like a rag doll without requiring a task roll to do so; the task roll is simply used to determine how or where you want the target to land.

Thus, the attribute stays true to the philosophy of HiBRiD...Use stats only when necessary as absolute parameters, but never as absolute boundaries. Ite', after all, has a way of making all things possible....



Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Behind Again!

By the end of September, I had hoped to have been finished with the character creation section of Chapter One.

As I wrote the prose out, however, it prompted me to reorganize the character sheet to make it easier to follow along with the prose of the book. Now that the character sheet is complete, the text and images flow well, and...I am now behind by a month.

Probably the one bright point in this is that I am still solid in my vision, progress is still moving forward, and I have not set it aside or changed anything.

I will fire my rifle three times, turn, and run.

Podcast Complete. Game Complete. Art In Progress. Platform Change once agian.

Well, I finished the podcast. While I got a few listens, the amount of effort required to produce did not equate to either enjoyment or incr...