Game of Roles: The Duelist

by dither on May 22, 2013 at 9:55 am
Posted In: Game of Roles, Start in a Tavern

If ever a class deserved the marking mechanic, it would be the Duelist. I mean, come on! Of course, I avoided marking like the plague because, well duh, bookkeeping.

Here’s the Heroic Duelist class:
Download: Essentials Duelist (Fighter) v.1

First thing’s actually the skill list — one of the more interesting fighter skill lists you’ll find. The Duelist has access to Acrobatics, Bluff, Insight, and Perception — that’s largely the influence of the Complete Warrior Swashbuckler class. I had considered Diplomacy and History, but decided against them for the time being.

The class’s main schtick is the Duelist Gambit power. Simultaneously a defender thing and a punishment power, the Duelist uses an immediate interrupt to take a melee hit for an ally and strikes back against the attacker as a free action.

First and foremost, the power is an interrupt so its effect takes place before the enemy’s attack lands, which means that if the effect dazes the Duelist, it’s no biggie.

Second, the power redirects the enemy attack, which could well trigger a fellow defender’s power. Fun times, especially if the fellow defender is another Duelist!

Third, and returning to the fact that the power is an interrupt, it can be used in conjunction with any of the Duelist’s Opportunity Action powers — the standard Opportunity Attack (plus Superiority), Agile Footwork, or Deflecting Parry.

Shifting Defense is a better version of the feat of the same name, permitting the Duelist to shift with Second Wind or Total Defense — and I can tell you that comes in handy when combined with an allied character who recharges your Second Wind.

The Duelist picks up more tricks as they advance through the Heroic tier — when they have Combat Advantage, they can swing against the target’s AC or Reflex, whichever is lower. Compelling Step slides an enemy once per turn when the Duelist shifts.

Redoubled Recovery at 6th level enables the Duelist to spend an extra surge whenever they spend a surge — canny readers will recognize the Dwarven Armor property — making Second Wind more effective overall and allowing the Duelist a dramatic comeback after taking hits from Duelist Gambit throughout the fight.

…
Check it out, and let me know if you try one in a game.

As always, play at your own risk.

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Current Project Development

by dither on May 21, 2013 at 10:37 am
Posted In: Create Expectations

Hi everybody, this is probably the first announcement I’ve made in a while. Most of the time I jabber about stuff I’m working on or interesting things I’ve discovered, but I don’t really make “announcements” about things, short of plans for the future.

I’ve been developing a game for RPG Maker VX for a couple months.

What’s different about this one? Well, this is the game I realized I would have to make before I could make Phosophoros – which you can read about in the site archives. Yesterday I mentioned the ‘things we learn during development that make us want to start over and use what we’ve learned to do better.’ This game is that.

During the development of Phosphoros last year, I realized I still had a lot to learn about the design and pacing of a computer roleplaying game. More specifically, there were things I still had to learn about RPG Maker VX which necessitated a fresh start.

I am much better at creating maps now, and it was important as I “leveled up” my cartography skills, the quality of maps remained consistent throughout the game. I’m more confident in my skills now, and I’ve found a style that I like.

The game I am developing now will focus on exploration. I’m using concepts and ideas culled from the last several projects to find a “sweet spot” where I can get appreciable amounts of exploration, combat, world-building, and character development.

My primary influences for the game are Starflight and Alien Logic.

Currently the plan is to make the game a standalone story that is the first part in a larger narrative about the setting, which is War of the Seven States of Magic. I already have a working title — to be revealed later — and I’m developing the story for the first several games while I work on maps, some of which will become recurring locations.

My intent is to make the game fairly open-ended, permitting the player to explore most of the world at their leisure, but it will not be a sandbox-style game. The mechanics I’ve designed will primarily be used to reinforce the game’s setting and narrative.

I’ll reveal more information about the game in the coming weeks as I have more to show for it. You can rest assured the end result will draw heavily on Greek history and mythology, ’cause that’s kind of my schtick now.

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Twenty-Sided Yes or No

by dither on May 20, 2013 at 12:20 pm
Posted In: Roguelike DnD, Start in a Tavern

Do you get what you’re after?

My die of choice is of the twenty-sided variety, so success requires something more than the average. “Just passing” is in the double-digits, with true success being in the mid-to-upper levels of that. I showed you the d6 chart, here’s my d20 chart:

19-20 – Yes And (10%)
15-18 – Just Yes (20%)
10-14 – Yes But (25%)
05-09 – No But (25%)
02-04 – Just No (15%)
00-01 – No And (5%)

Why are there more “yeses” than “nos?”

This is initially based on my experience with improvisational theater — never say no. Saying no isn’t really so horrible — it’s just that when you do, the onus is on you to come up with alternatives. That can be a real pain on stage.

Too many “nos” and you don’t have a scene — you have an argument. This is intended to make things less taxing on your imagination — you want to tell a story, not fuss with straws. Also, while I’m technically talking about a whole bunch of things at the same time, the focus here is on the Single-Player Roleplaying Game.

There’s other reasons too, these numbers were partly chosen for a certain amount of recognize-ability — you might not easily succeed on the roll of a five to fourteen, but you can certainly tell the milestones from one another:

5-9 means you did “five or better, but less than ten.”

10-14 means you did “double-digits but less than fifteen.”

The result of “one or less” takes some doing, but when you manage it, something goes catastrophically wrong. Maybe you think failure should be more probable — I’d have to disagree. I’ve seen lots of it, and when things start going bad they tend to keep going downhill easily enough without help.

If there’s a resemblance to the pass-fail difficulty classes of D&D, that’s a little bit coincidence and a little bit intentional. They’re already recognizable numbers, but they’ve been tweaked ever so slightly to be easier to spot and read, and to modify the probability in the players’ favor. D&D usually manages to get one of these right.

All told, you have a fifty-percent probability that things will take a little more effort than maybe you were expecting — and yet you are slightly more likely to succeed than fail. You have what you were after and then you have to decide what to do next.

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Yes And No But Just No

by dither on May 20, 2013 at 11:33 am
Posted In: Running the Asylum, Start in a Tavern

I’ve been getting a lot of hits on my Roguelike Tabletop posts, which is encouraging. Tabletop Shop Talk linked to my post from the earlier this month, and I think there’s definitely something to the idea of “thinking for two people.”

I wasn’t familiar with Dungeon World, which they described in the post — I’m glancing over it while I write this post — but the post got me thinking back on Arkham Horror, which is a game you could almost play by yourself, that has roleplaying potential.

Back at the end of 2011, I revised and condensed the Arkham Horror location encounters because I was tired of hauling around and shuffling cards.

Arkham Horror Revised Location Encounters (Dec 30, 2011)

I’ve been meaning to update my location encounters almost since the day I finished them. That should come as no surprise, I think. Whenever you work hard on something you make mistakes and learn new things along the way — hardly any project seems to be done the way you want it by the time you finish it.

Now, I did finally find a better avenue for revising the encounters, but I needed something else. I needed to really know what the characters were trying to do.

…Ugh, and here I searched my blog to reference an older post only to eventually discover I never published it. I can’t begin to describe how frustrating it is for me to search my post drafts for something I barely remembered well enough to search of the site for, so here’s the short version which is drawn from another gaming website.

(Edit: Then I found it.)
Movement and Exploration (Mar 27, 2013)

I’m posting it anyway because it’s helpful to have multiple copies.

“You have a scene, in which you have a goal. You roll a six-sided die to determine whether you achieve your goal:”

1) Yes And
2) Just Yes
3) Yes But
4) No But
5) Just No
6) No And

This is a system for determining whether the player characters get what they want from a given scene of roleplaying. It could be a fight, a negotiation, or whatever.

Now, I think this system is just fantastic. Super-fantastic even. What it mostly lacks is what those “ands” and “buts” are supposed to be. Hypothetically speaking you could determine them on a scene-by-scene basis, but you know, that’s always been part of the game master’s job — and you’ve only got yourself, right?

So here’s the thing, in Arkham Horror the player characters are investigators, and they’re trying to unravel a mystery and prevent the awakening of the Ancient One. Was that too fast? Because I couldn’t figure it out for the longest time.

Clues. I don’t know why that was so hard. I had to really think about it — and only recently did it occur to me what it meant and what to do about it. Arkham Horror gives you some Clue tokens in the beginning of the game, largely as incentives to explore.

But not enough to win the game. Those you have to come up with on your own.

So that’s it — that’s the goal of some ninety-plus percent of the encounters (that number’s off the top of my head) but the locations determine the Yes-No success of those encounters on a place-by-place basis. Some locations have so little bearing on the game however, there’s no way they have clues — like the General Store.

There are several next steps to take, which I will try to elaborate on uh, next.

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Research: Ozolian Locris

by dither on May 17, 2013 at 1:53 pm
Posted In: Inspiring Norvendae, Seven States Cosmology

The other day I completed a new region for my map of mythical Greece. The region reflects an area known in Antiquity as “Ozolian Locris,” home of the western Locrians. Legends suggest there was once a larger Locrian state that spanned eastern and western Locris, but they weren’t known for doing a whole lot as a people.

Locris was effectively bisected by the regions of Doris and Phocis in ancient times — but these regions weren’t really known for anything they produced so much as they were known for their cultural significance. There were several important oracles in the string of mountain ranges running through Phocis and Locris.

Now, the significance of my completion of this region is more to do with the fact that it’s one of the intermediate maps between mainland Greece and the Peloponnese. It set off a couple instances of re-mapping for regions I’d already finished — Phocis and Boeotia. The former, a bit more substantial than the latter.

When I started mapping the regions, I began with Boeotia and tried to find a certain minimum number of ancient settlements to frame the area around. This was important for a couple reasons, not the least of which was the research into various locales and customs throughout Greece. I got better with each map, but Phocis was second.

I did a really bad job with my map of Phocis. I tried to research a number of towns and settlements but the biggest deal there seemed to be Delphi, and everything else kind of fell by the wayside. I did what I could, and left the rest to deal with later.

Of course after a year of running adventures in and around Phocis (and Boeotia, and the northern Peloponnese), I finally feel like I might have a better idea of how places connect and interact. So it was time to revise, and revise I did!

The region of Phocis changed a lot — I added a town or two and dropped a couple towns. The landscape changed as I moved a couple mountains over to be in other regions. Boeotia changed a lot less — most of the changes were in the landscape, rather than the settlements. Now I feel ready to tackle some new regions.

Soon I hope to finalize a map that includes Calydon, and another that includes Lamia. I’m slowly working my way northward, toward Mount Olympus. The region just north of Phocis will have the mountain where the Titans camped out during their war with the Olympians. That’s a pretty cool prospect, I must say.

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