Looking for rules for a super simple, accessible crafting/progression system

#21

This was during a short arc (maybe 5-6 sessions) so it’s possible it would have grown on me, or that I could have figured out a better way to make crafting work. I’ll have to go back and re-read the book to be precise, but if I remember correctly:

  • Our GM gave us relatively hard missions so we tended to accumulate lots of wounds and stress; we pretty much had to use all our downtime actions and money to try to counteract these injuries. After the first few missions I rarely had enough downtime actions to do interesting crafting, so either I ignored these moves (and my investment in them) or I had to limp into missions half-healed with a lot of stress. (There’s also a strong mechanical reason to prefer alchemist characters using downtime actions to heal people instead of doing research or crafting.)

  • One of the strengths of BitD (in my opinion at least) is the way that the inventory system allows you to avoid lengthy and complicated pre-heist planning. However, for alchemical characters you suddenly have to do all the same agonizing about which things to study and then build, using precious downtime actions and other resources. God forbid you craft the wrong thing and then end up being useless on the next mission. (My character focused on things like smoke bombs, acids, flares, oil slicks, etc. This might be less of a problem for characters who plan to focus on medicine/healing.)

  • Crafting requires a lot of GM input, so doing it during the session basically makes the rest of the group wait and twiddle their thumbs while the GM and I have a discussion/negotiation, and then I do some rolls, consult some tables, and agonize about how much coin to spend. To me it hits an anti-sweet spot between something very easy and high level (which we could quickly resolve at the table like other moves) and something complex and mechanical (which I’d have to figure out, but which I could largely pursue independently as long as I could “show my work” to the GM).

#22

I actually designed an Alchemist class for 13th age for a third party publisher and trying to nail the feel of a scientist mixing stuff and figuring out cool combinations was incredibly hard. I ended up going the latter route, with the player basically building their own “spells” (via the alchemical concoctions) through a hard ruleset of mixing and matching that they were expected to do between sessions. Trying to go deep at the table like that slows things down so much, and some players love working on this stuff between sessions and then showing off what they made.

It was pretty fun actually. Elements had an “Effect” of what they did in a concoction (like applying damage or negative effects), a Reactivity value, and an Instability value. You could use multiple chunks of the same elements and mix in other ones too. The reactivity value determined whether the attack was an AOE or not - higher reactivity values for the mixed concoction hit more targets (anything below 100 reactivity was single target only). A concoction also couldn’t have a total instability above 12 - that was a law of nature.

This created a mix-and-match system where some elements worked more like metamagic (detonite had no effect but a huge reactivity value) and others provided the effects. Players engaging with the system would figure out cool combos of elements that got to exactly 12 instability while hitting reactivity thresholds for big aoes, or otherwise worked well together (such as using an element with high damage variance with another element that maximized all the concoction’s damage).

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