While prepping the final edit of the character
creation book, I have been forced to realize a number of things which
will deprecate previous posts. The good news is that I am getting close
to the final peer edit and the layout is roughly
80% finished in Scribus! The bad news, is that these realizations have
forced me to reorganize the text before final layout.
Modularity
Originally, as blogged earlier, I had planned to have a basic, and advanced system in order to mirror the classic D&D schema and a 10 step system
for creating characters.
As I progressed through editing and began combining
electronic and physical paper files, however, I realized that over the years, I have used several
different systems for each of the steps of character creation,
depending on the game I was playing and my audience. I used a fully
detailed system for my home game, a modified version that for my GenCon
games, a simplified version for playing with my kids, and an even simpler
version for conventions or impromptu games. As a result, several years ago, I
switched gears and planned on a Black, A White, and a Silver system of books to fit these different levels of complexity.
As I have been racing toward completion, however, I
realized I want to also capture a connection between the level of
complexity and the genre of the game people want to play.
Players who want a gritty game often want realism
and crunch so that they can face threats on many sophisticated levels and have many
tools and well-defined abilities. Heroic storytelling players often want
to gloss over these details and just start playing
as quickly as possible. Kids that play love to tinker with rules but still love to
play freely want just enough detail to manipulate in neat ways.
Similarly, directors often have different intents
when the run games. Some might want to reflect a world from a book, a
movie or a video game world. Some want to create or play a fully-developed, rich game world either published or spun
from whole cloth. At the same time, I felt that regardless of complexity, game directors need to have as few tethers and rules as possible to run the game freely and quickly, regardless of the compleity of the game they are running; they too, often want to reflect a certain level of
simplicity or complexity in the games they run.
To accommodate both players and directors to this end, I have decided on
my final strategy for the format of game books. There will still be
three core game books, but they will be shorter and organized
differently. This organization will allow gaming groups
to swap the level of complexity in and out as they please without
adding rulesets on top of rulesets.
The first book will be called the Character Generation Guidebook. The book will describe the 8 basic steps for character creation and present a default method for each of these 8 steps of a
middle level of complexity.
The second book will be called the Player Spielbook.
It will describe all of the rules for how to play the game and give
players and directors the tools they need to play a game regardless of
the level of omplexity the director chooses. This book will also act as
a resource to reflect the real world in terms of game mechanics
quickly, cleanly, and simply.
Finally, there will be a third book called Director’s Field Manual.
This book that will help game directors create the game they want with
as much or as little complexity and detail as they
want. The Field Manual will have a chapter that reflects a number of
optional methods for each of the 8 steps of character creation, a
chapter that describes how to create a game world rich enough to play
in, and a chapter with how to use the rules to run
a game as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Simplicity
The second major realization was that I still have had too much complexity in the aspect section. I had a number of notes from playtesting where players didn’t like a number of ways the aspects worked and thought they were too complex. Originally, I had ignored them, but as I have playtested with my kids and kept them in mind, I realized that many of the complexities were either unnecessary or could be reflected in other ways. Further, I realized that many of these abilities existed as simply limits imposed by the game system from which they were inspired to help maintain mechanical game balance.
Examples include:
·
Microscopic Vision: I originally had a
graded aspect for microscopic vision. As they increased, the power increased. From a balance standpoint,
it worked. From a player standpoint, who cares
if I can see 25 nanometers or 250 nanometers. Can I see a virus? A
bacteria? A molecule? I settled on a middle of the road cell organelle
size as the limit and changed it to a constant aspect, which simplified
it massively in terms of play. In terms of rules,
however, while it eliminated only a few lines of text for that one
aspect, applying the same logical method to the rest of the aspects enabled me to eliminate another 11 pages of rules!· Mental Blast: Most games have some sort of mental attack. But I had originally based my entire mentalic scheme on a specific game world I had created that featured a race of mentalic humans that could read anyone without any problems at all. To balance this, I needed a level of defense and had to design 4 multmoded aspects around it. After playing at several GenCons, however, I realized this simply did not work. Additionally, a player of mine resented having to spend aspect points just to protect his character. The final fix was to eliminate the whole system, treat mentalics like any other attack, and give it a neat effect based on a feature of neuroanatomy (specifially on a phenomenon called long term potentiation), somewhat novel from a game system point of view. The resulting change eliminated 5 aspects and 1 page of text
· Telekinesis: The original system had two separate aspects for blast and fine control of telekinetic powers. This limited the usefulness of the aspect in terms of heroic storytelling and slowed down play whenever a player had both and had to remember which one was used for what type of action, which one required a task roll, et cetera. By combining these two aspects, I was able to save a column of text, but more importantly, make telekinetic abilities and actions much more accessible and much more able to reflect the types of heroic actions players were wanting to take.
These were not the only changes but among the
biggest. I also combined a number of aspects, cut down their costs to
make them a bit easier to upgrade, and increased the scope of others.
Because the rules are compact and agile enough to
reflect an unlimited number of actions, many of the aspects and their limits were
no longer needed and were shredded. The addition of the Scale System I
presented elsewhere in this blog into the core rules was the final piece
that really aided in cleaning up and simplifying
the aspect system.
The final result of all of these changes, as my second round of editing has closed, has been the elimination over 25 pages of complexity that added nothing but crunch where it was not needed. Additionally, as I read through them, I am kind of excited to realize I have pretty much swept away many of the old aspects and made the standard aspects of the game uniquely my own.
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