The Mysterious Lever: December 2016

Wednesday, December 28, 2016

New Class: the "Vessel"

When thinking about character classes, I really try to focus on the class's "role" in the party. This forces me to make decisions about what the characters do in the game, what kinds of expertise they need to do it, and how I need to split up these expertise so that you don't have characters stepping on each others' toes. This line of thinking has led me to completely replace one of my classes, the Mechanist, and replace it with another, the Vessel.

Because of Hostargo's cybertech/fantasy setting, I picture the world full of high tech vehicles, airships, drones, robots, and other crazy machines. So, I thought a party might require the skills of someone more mechanically inclined; someone specialized in dealing with machines. Enter the Mechanist. His "role" was supposed to be both a vehicle driver and someone who dealt with fixing/modifying/destroying machines. But, more and more these seemed like specializations that actually just limited the class's overall usefulness.

In practice, the Mechanist seemed to be the least interesting class. I was having trouble coming up with interesting story hooks without always throwing in a giant robot or some malfunctioning machine. Worse, I was having terrible trouble coming up with how some of the callings in the game could be applied to the Mechanist role. Specifically the Biomancer and Animancer magic callings, which deal with basically everything but machines.

The inspiration for the Mechanist is clear: it's based off of both the "Rigger" class in Shadowrun and "The Driver" class in Apocalypse world. The problem with the Rigger class is that to make it interesting, Shadowrun bogs its books down with a crazy amount of detail about controlling your own drones and owning customized vehicles. Then the coolest part of The Driver class is that you get a vehicle to start... but that's about all you've got. Neither of these is really helping me push the Mechanist to be an integral part of the game.

So I took a step back and asked the important questions again. What am I really trying to accomplish with this class? After some backtrack thinking, I realized that the real purpose of a class like this, in a general sens, was helping the party get from point A to point B, no matter how that was achieved. Once I realized this, I was able to cut out the focus on machines, and instead focus on a less explored area of RPGness: party movement.

While on one hand this is actually cutting out part of the class's specialty, but on the other it opened up a whole new realm of thinking. And that's exactly what I was looking for. Now, instead of being too narrow minded about interactions with machines, I can have Leaders call in extraction requests, Biomancers whistle for a small hoard of ride-able beasts, and Animancers open dimensions portals for the party to teleport through.

This new line of thinking has renamed the class Vessel, hopefully appropriately. I'm still potentially searching for a cooler name, but for now it hits the mark. I am once again excited about this class being a part of Hostargo!

Sunday, December 18, 2016

Action Action Action!

I've been away from the Hostargo thought train for a while. In that time though I've had the opportunity to play a handful of other RPGs, and it's been a good re-anchoring for me. I want to make Hostargo the most fun RPG to play, whatever that means.

I've had a lot of fun playing rules-lite games like Dread and All Out of Bubblegum. I've had just as much fun playing crunchier games like D&D. And I've had a blast playing video RPGs, such as good ole Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy (NES original!), among others. So I've taken a good look at each of these game's "action systems" in order to figure out what makes for the most fun per tick.

One key thing that these games have reinforced for me is the thought that turn order is unavoidable. You can make an overly-complicated initiative system, in an effort to make it a mechanic in the game players can interact with (e.g. Shadowrun), but this usually is too heavy for what fun it gains you. You can also completely ignore this type of rule, like Dungeon World. But just because you, the rules creator, chose to ignore it, does not mean the person running the game (GM) can. Someone must organize and select characters to "act" in turn. Yes, games like DW have the concept of the moving spotlight, but that concept falls apart quickly when you try applying it to a slightly heavier, tactical combat game.

And the tactical combat is a big part of Hostargo. So the trick will be to make a turn order system that doesn't get bogged down with mechanics, but isn't too loose as to not work for the combat portion of the game. To make a system like this, we have to first look at our action economy system.

Hostargo used to use a 3-tick system, where a normal action would be 2 ticks, an extended action was 3 ticks, and a reaction was a single tick. This worked, but not well. The problem was that in theory, it was a simple resource spending system, but in practice, it only served to confuse players trying to think about what they could do per-tick. Instead, I have to concede that D&D 5e's action-move-bonus-reaction system is pretty darn solid.

What helped me realize this was actually other games, such as Final Fantasy. In original FF, you either attacked, or cast a spell, and that's it. And while interesting as one of the original video RPGs of it's time, this actually doesn't hold up in the game design space. Attacking, especially with a random chance to miss (e.g. pretty much every tabletop RPG ever), is just not a fun use of a turn. D&D 4e actually realized this, and made all of the classes have special powers so that everyone could feel unique. Of course, an issue people have with 4th edition was that if everyone is special, no one is special.

But, I don't think 4e's design was too far out there. Really, it was a wonderful game and a bunch of people just didn't appreciate the lack of fiddly bits that they could munchkin. My theory is that in reality, they just didn't like the action economy system, because they only got to really do one thing a turn, and that thing was either a basic, special, or super special move. Their basic moves didn't feel special, because they could do them pretty much all of the time.

So with 5e they moved back to a system that included "basic" actions, such as "attack". And a lot of people are much happier with it, myself included. Special actions then generally cost some sort of resources (e.g. spell slot, superiority die), and we're back to having them actually feel special. But, special actions still replace normal actions, such that sometimes, your turn only includes a basic action. And those are the turns that are generally lackluster in 'fun'.

Instead, I propose giving players the power to do both a special and a basic action each turn. And, just like major-minor actions in D&D 3e, the player should have the power to downgrade an action. So, we'll keep our "3 tick" system: one special, one basic, and one re-action. But, you can downgrade a special to a basic, and a basic to a reaction, if you'd like. This gives players the ability to move -> attack, or attack + attack at a minimum. Or, use a "special move", and still act normally, such as following up with an attack, or moving to a better position. Lastly, I love reactions as a concept because it allows players to act directly in response to their allies or their enemies actions.

Circling back to turn order, with this <hopefully> streamlined action system, I can safely grant the ability for everyone to regain all of their ticks after the GM's turn. Then, I will start a "popcorn" initiative, starting with whichever player is in the most immediate, threatening, or just generally most interesting situation. So the GM chooses the first player, and then the players choose who goes next, until all players have gone.

Simple, understandable (more importantly easily explainable), and efficient. This will allow players to take awesome turns, without adding in needless complexity.

*Stretches* - aaaah yeah it's good to get back on this thought train. Cheers y'all!