Order of Battle, Post Skyfall, Magic Use as Debt, Playtesting Resumes

Oct 26, 2009 20:58

It's been a busy pile of days. Getting acclimated to a very early shift at the new job, working on ideas as they come. Sent out another Query Letter in the hunt for a Literary Agent, and thinking about doubling up and sending out another while one is still out there.

Order of Battle

Reworked the last tweaks to be ready for the next Playtest. I still have some printing/papercraft to do before its ready to be seen. Most of the rule changes either are aimed at game simplification or game balance. Also, there was a bit of graphics adjusting to do. Lastly, I've touched base with a local artist about possibly doing some black and white art pieces for the rule book.

Post Skyfall

This is going to be the next RP game for the playtest group to chew on. It's set aproximately 100 years in the future, and will be my transhumanist/cyberpunk/psychics game. I've done about 25 pages of notes for world-building. Also, Phaedrus and Lord Carnifex were helpful enough to lend me their physics-oriented brains to play around with ideas for laser weapons... 'cause it's just not a FUTURE game without some laser weapons.

Magic Use as Debt

Also coming out of the Post Skyfall game development (and more specifically, rules for Psychics in this setting), I've worked up a new idea for the use of "magic points." See, most games with any sort of supernatural "energy" in it that is used to fuel magic, special abilities, or the like use these points in-game as a sort of currency. If you have the points in you, you can spend them and do the special thing. Not all games make use of magic points, but those that do tend to do it this way.

And I've decided to try out a different way.

Let's say you have a character with Focus 10. This means that he can hold a maximum of 10 temporary Focus points. When all 10 are spent, the character can't do Rituals or Special Abilities until he gets his hands on some more temporary Focus. This is the old way.

The new way is that whenever you do something that use to cost you Focus points, now, instead of losing your currency, you gain a form of supernatural "debt." This will take the shape of whatever negative energy the character type wrestles with. For Psychics, it is Strain. For Vampyres, it is Void. For Therans, it is Abandon. For Dreamers, it is Burnout. And for the Gifted, it is Shade.

Regardless of what form the "debt" takes, acquiring it means you are taking greater and greater risks with some sort of supernatural backlash. For every point of "debt," you have about a 1 in 5 chance of taking on a level of "debt" Effect (Shade Effect, Strain Effect, etc). What I really like about this is that it doesn't put a hard cap as to how much debt a character can take on... it opens up the possibility of a character really going for broke, acquirng 15 or 20 points of "debt," and then trying to ride out the cost. At the higher levels of Effect, the character is risking fundamental alterations and even death. Of course, one doesn't *have* to take on all that much "debt." One can play it safe, use powers or rituals only when necessary, and burn off the 5 or 10 points of "debt" without having too much to worry about.

It all comes down to a bit of a switch in my game design philosophy. Instead of defining hard lines of "You can do this, can't do that," I'm leaning more and more to "How badly do you want this?" It makes for more interesting game quandries. Or at least that's the hope.

Playtesting Resumes

Ah yes. The regular Tues night group will start meeting again in November. Looking forward to it.

-a-
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