DevLog: Offline 2.0

[Warriormonk]

All right, I managed to avoid adding Tiers to the mix and now players can somewhat freely choose and even come up with Advantages of their own. However if they want to activate any Benefit on those they would activate a Prejudice with it (changed the term Flaws into this).

Benefits: Area, Control, Duration, +Power.
Prejudices: Slow, Fragile, Unstable, Sacrifice, Untrained, Once per day

Also, I realized that with the current GM moves and action economy, players don’t really need to worry about mechanics or balance. They can come up with any skill, power, equipment, feats, etc they want. There isn’t even issues if their skills do more than one thing; as long as the GM identifies when they are doing two things at once and have the player roll for each one separately as the move indicates, everything’s cool. The skills can be broad or as detailed as they want. They can have only “Paladin” on their character sheet or identify several separate skills, spells and equipment for the class to create an unique feeling for their build.

I’ll still make lists of skills/equipment/etc things for different builds, so players can get an idea of the potential of the game or choose themselves one of those.

[DeReel]

This looks like a drift in agenda from Winning to Painting a character or a world. I like that feeling when the mechanics have “matured” enough and simply fall into another sphere of attraction. The player experience might be quite different, it’s important to signal it.
Best !

[Warriormonk]

And the cover is done! I’m re-drawing interior art as well, as my style upgraded a bit through the pandemic

[DeReel]

Indeed! It’s gorgeous!
Did you change tools, too?

[Warriormonk]

No, I just went back to the basics and upgraded my skills a bit here’s the 1.0 cover for comparision

[Rickard]

I honestly liked the 1.0 more because it was easier to “read” the image, and separate the characters because there were more contrast between the characters. Awesome pic anways!

[Warriormonk]

Yep, it’s a matter of using more readable silhouettes for the characters. I’ve got more line control now but that got me overboard with the base construction and then it was too late to go back to the composition. I might end up redoing this piece, it was fun learning so much again!

[Warriormonk]

All right I gave it a second try, it was worth it. At least I’m happier with the result

[Rickard]

That looks really awesome!

[Warriormonk]

Back! All right, after training a bit more and switching drawing apps, here’s the back cover of the game. With this mostly all art is finished and I’ll be making a new editing pass to spell check, trim stuff isf possible and getting rid from things that got forgotten from the first version of the game, like terms I had changed later and such. Still a long way until translating it into english but feels like a nice milestone.

[Rickard]

OK, so I took the time to read through everything. I know you got some interesting ideas, from your card deck that generates situations. Have you reused any of those ideas when making this game?

Also, it’s awesome that you’re a talented artist too, so you can spend sweat instead of cash to finish the game. Here are what I think are your Unique Selling Points:

no prep, worldbuilding + character creation in 20 min /…/ the intent and result is the same, the only thing that changes is the explanation of how … /…/ I was also thinking of a descriptive damage version, where you have 4 slots to fill with Conditions. /…/ And if the 4 slots are filled, that’s it, the character is no longer relevant in the scene. /…/ All the manual now fits tightly in 28 pages /…/ current rules establish the player must roleplay anything related to the Bond listed in that Advantage. /…/ I realized that with the current GM moves and action economy, players don’t really need to worry about mechanics or balance.

This seems like right up my alley, because this is how I design my games as well. If you need someone to give constructive feedback on your writing (most how you explain your procedures) and someone who knows graphic design, give me a call.

@Warriormonk

When the GM frames a scene, she puts things there for players to interact. If it becomes a challenge, a roll is asked for. If it succeeds, you’re back to framing the scene.

Are these challenging scenes the only types of scenes that exist?

[Warriormonk]

The card deck -wow, I had almost forgot about it!- may be something I go back in the future, but it isn’t needed for this game. That is, at least in the current testing the need for this tool hasn’t arised. I did recycled parts of it for crafting traps and some other archetype challenges I think.

The descriptive damage got only partially adopted, as a space for Conditions inflicted, where Conditions in the game stands for anything that doesn’t affect the character’s HP. I only kept HP for the sake of offering the players something familiar, as in my country most players will at least have some video gaming background to rely on.

Also, there’s something not totally intuitive about piling up wounds and other conditions on the same spot until you are left without a place to write them down and have to engage the death mechanic. There’s always a chance social conditions get on the mix and while getting a little wound after being demoralized sounds like a reasonable way of dying, it goes a bit against the power fantasy spirit of the game.

Forcing the players to roleplay bonds to gain back advantage didn’t work neither. Bonds are a must on a character and it’s really cool if players get to roleplay them a bit as they want, but having players do that as a penalty game to get back their sacrificed advantages became a bit of a nuisance on resting scenes. In the final version Bonds got separated from Advantages and now report no mechanical effect to rolls, but are everything to create the world, the adventure, to put things in motion and keep the PCs together.

Thanks for having the patience to read it all

About the scenes, I put that phrase as a way to resume everything. “Things” in that phrase can be replaced with “characters”, “concepts” etc. thus creating vastly different types of scenes. For example, here’s a sample of the pages referring to social archetype encounters:

Sorry it’s in spanish and somewhat unreadable, but as you can see I took ICRPGs model for encounter archetypes and extended to all kind of encounter types I could think of, that can be mixed to generate different types of challenges. If you meant something more like character development scenes or scenes that focus and develop emotional expressions, no, I didn’t made guidelines for those, though the scene framing procedure and the death mechanic may end up going there, if the players don’t do it by themselves. It would be cool though, hadn’t thought of that, but I had my dish somewhat full making guidelines for everything else

And thanks a lot for the offer! English version is still gonna take a while but I’ll definitely give you a shout then if you’re still available.

[Rickard]

Mostly giving out ideas in this post. Food for thoughts, rather than full mechanics that I think you should implement. (Forums are so bad for these kind of posts)

@Warriormonk

The descriptive damage got only partially adopted, as a space for Conditions inflicted, where Conditions in the game stands for anything that doesn’t affect the character’s HP. I only kept HP for the sake of offering the players something familiar, as in my country most players will at least have some video gaming background to rely on.

I would honestly just use the existing Advantage mechanic in some way, either by blocking an advantage, making it more difficult to use, raise tension… something along those lines.

@Warriormonk

Forcing the players to roleplay bonds to gain back advantage didn’t work neither. Bonds are a must on a character and it’s really cool if players get to roleplay them a bit as they want, but having players do that as a penalty game to get back their sacrificed advantages became a bit of a nuisance on resting scenes.

Yeah, I’m not a huge fan of resting scenes in whole. Feels too fabricated, instead of something that flows into the game naturally. Unless you make it a thing of it’s own, like The One Ring, that has a adventure phase and a fellowship phase. They are basically a “doing” phase and a “planning” phase, where you play your character in one and do more broad actions in the other. You heal up fully in the latter.

@Warriormonk

In the final version Bonds got separated from Advantages and now report no mechanical effect to rolls,

Do I interpret this correct, if I say that bonds only color how the action is described? Because that’s a much better way of solving these kind of things, rather than giving bonuses.

@Warriormonk

For example, here’s a sample of the pages referring to social archetype encounters:

These scenes are frames as something in particular that happens. Something I really come to love in the later year are scenes that tells how things should be described, rather than what to be described. Like, we’re going to play out a scene between the grand wizard and the characters, but the scene type is “play with your emotions”.

@Warriormonk

but as you can see I took ICRPGs model for encounter archetypes and extended to all kind of encounter types I could think of,

What’s ICRPG?

@Warriormonk

English version is still gonna take a while but I’ll definitely give you a shout then if you’re still available.

Latin have had a huge impact on the European languages, and knowing three languages helps out a lot when it comes to basic understanding, plus any random expressions I learned when watching Hispanic movies. So it’s not big real, really. Google lens is an awesome tool too.

[Warriormonk]

@Rickard

I would honestly just use the existing Advantage mechanic in some way, either by blocking an advantage, making it more difficult to use, raise tension… something along those lines.

Yeah, I tried that at first too, but didn’t work well. The idea then was that whenever PCs soaked damage, they had to shut down one Advantage. Then I changed it for leaving the players to decide if they took the damage to their HP or shut down an advantage. That’s the version where PCs had to roleplay the bond linked to that advantage. So, if your PC broke their father’s sword, they could get it reforged but had to renew their oath to avenge their father, or change the advantage with a new one. Sounded good for character development, but on the table it fell flat as players too often got blank page syndrome on such occasions. On some others, either “breaking” the advantage wasn’t too apliccable or ways of getting it back could derrail a session/adventure designed for 5 encounters/scenes. And since the system shines the best when used for one-session fast adventures, I ended up dropping it.

@Rickard

Do I interpret this correct, if I say that bonds only color how the action is described? Because that’s a much better way of solving these kind of things, rather than giving bonuses.

It’s more like now Bonds are used by the GM to create the adventure and weave character’s motivations right into it, and make sense of their decision to get into trouble. It remains a core thing because otherwise, players tend to go for PvP and the murderhobo fun, as I found in more than one group. Having the players help create the world helps a great deal to get them invested, but without bonds the nature of the exploration of this world tends to become aimless and that’s when those behaviors appear. I’m not against that kind of fun when players know each other and know what they are doing, but being a game oriented to newbie players I preferred to be more responsible with the kind of fun the game is offering.

@Rickard

These scenes are frames as something in particular that happens. Something I really come to love in the later year are scenes that tells how things should be described, rather than what to be described. Like, we’re going to play out a scene between the grand wizard and the characters, but the scene type is “play with your emotions”

Ah, I get it! Yes, that’s amazing of newer games and at some point I though of taking that route and make a game with more depth, but then I would probably need to focuse more on a particular game experience to model it better and don’t let players wondering how should they manage if they started making a world around a more humorous premise, or an action oriented one. So I ended up going for a really simple adventure spirit for the game and just let players relax by hitting things or maybe solving a crime/mistery.

@Rickard

What’s ICRPG?

This

@Rickard

Latin have had a huge impact on the European languages, and knowing three languages helps out a lot when it comes to basic understanding, plus any random expressions I learned when watching Hispanic movies. So it’s not big real, really. Google lens is an awesome tool too.

I’ll definitely have lots of trouble translating game terms, as some make more sense in spanish and for an english version I’d definitely go for more familiar ones to the usual RPG audience. But I’ll let you know once the spanish version is finished so you can try your language skills on it