Finally, we come to gear. All gear, no matter what it is, adds dice to your roll if you can explain how it's helpful. Weapons add dice to combat encounter, obviously, but you could add their dice to hunting rolls for a lot of them too. Armor also adds dice to your combat encounters. A fishing rod would add to hunting rolls if you're near fishable waters. Geiger counters add to circumventing radiation hazards. And so on.
Here's the gist of gear: you can make it as specific or as general as you like. If you want a hundred thousand different kinds of firearms, you can have them. Assign them different die ratings as you feel is appropriate. If you want to abstract it to pistol, rifle, shotgun, that works too. Since the mechanics are stripped down to a single stat due to the way encounters are handled, adjudicating gear on the fly should be a snap.
There are two important things to know about gear.
First, gear use is always optional. This includes passive stuff like armor. You don't want to use it in this encounter, then it didn't absorb any punishment. Basically this makes armor piecemeal, but you decide whether the blow lands on the armor. If you want the added protection it affords, add its dice to your pool, and you're more likely to knock out an encounter faster, and thus take less damage. Likewise, you can go fishing and choose not to use the fishing rod, but this means you're wading and trying to barehand the fish instead.
Second, every time you use gear, it degrades. Every single piece of gear you have has its own health meter, and it's damaged with every use. Not a lot necessarily, but it happens. Use gear over and over and it'll become less effective, offering less dice, until it becomes useless. So the decision to use what gear when is an important one.
Finally, a word about ammo. Tracking ammo is important for a game about resource management. But since encounters aren't resolved in a blow by blow fashion, tracking each individual shot isn't important. Instead, ammo counts represent how many encounters worth of ammo you have. Each time you use a gun, deduct one ammo from its score. This is the same for a revolver as it is a fully automatic weapon. And again, just like creating the guns themselves, you can be as specific or general as you like when it comes to ammunition. You want all pistol ammo to fit all pistols? Do it. If you're a gun nut who wants hyper-precision in the game, these mechanics allow for that just as easily.
Showing posts with label Another Day. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Another Day. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Another Day: Failed Rolls
If you recall, I said most of the optional actions you can take during your travels didn't have a difficulty number. Thus, you can't really fail at these actions. If you go hunting, you're going to come back with something. If you try repairing your gear, you will restore it. It's a question of how much, not if at all.
Encounters, however, are different. They've all got target numbers, and until you beat them, they stick around. What's a failed roll mean in these cases?
It doesn't mean failure. It just means you haven't completely overcome the encounter yet. The thing is, if you don't wipe an encounter out in one shot, it hits back. See, in this game, the GM rolls no dice. All he does is slap down cards and narrate. Encounters hurt you when they aren't taken out.
For example, you're wandering through a plague ravaged land. The GM slaps down a 7 of hearts for the encounter, but nothing happens until you bed down for the evening inside the ruins of a building. While you checked it for corpses, rats still infest the walls, and their fleas bite you. You realize it quickly, and roll your medic skill to treat yourself. Unfortunately, you're not a very good medic and you have no gear to aid the roll, so you come up with a high score of 4. The encounter loses points equal to your roll, dropping it to a 3, but it sticks around.
This is your shortfall. You failed the roll by 3, and since the encounter is still alive and kicking, it does its rating in damage to you. In this case, you burn with fever and take 3 points against your health. Tomorrow, you can try again, this time against a difficulty of 3.
This does, however, leave you with another decision. Do you deal with this encounter again and let another day go by, or do you press on and deal with the lingering effects of this encounter while running into another. If you're alone, you're gonna stay put, of course. But let's say you're in a party. Food's running low, but the group thinks it can make it to the next safepoint if they press. They want to go on.
That next day, a new encounter card hits the table. It's a Jack 10 Spades encounter. Raiders rush your position, and your party needs to put them down as fast as possible, because their wild hooting is drawing more of their clan to your position by the minute. But you're still sick. You can either roll against the illness, or you can help the party fight the raiders. That's bad for your health though; you'll take another 3 points of health from the fever. Then again, unless the party can come up with a collective 10, everyone will be taking damage from the raider assault. But remember, you only get one action per day.
Choose wisely.
Encounters, however, are different. They've all got target numbers, and until you beat them, they stick around. What's a failed roll mean in these cases?
It doesn't mean failure. It just means you haven't completely overcome the encounter yet. The thing is, if you don't wipe an encounter out in one shot, it hits back. See, in this game, the GM rolls no dice. All he does is slap down cards and narrate. Encounters hurt you when they aren't taken out.
For example, you're wandering through a plague ravaged land. The GM slaps down a 7 of hearts for the encounter, but nothing happens until you bed down for the evening inside the ruins of a building. While you checked it for corpses, rats still infest the walls, and their fleas bite you. You realize it quickly, and roll your medic skill to treat yourself. Unfortunately, you're not a very good medic and you have no gear to aid the roll, so you come up with a high score of 4. The encounter loses points equal to your roll, dropping it to a 3, but it sticks around.
This is your shortfall. You failed the roll by 3, and since the encounter is still alive and kicking, it does its rating in damage to you. In this case, you burn with fever and take 3 points against your health. Tomorrow, you can try again, this time against a difficulty of 3.
This does, however, leave you with another decision. Do you deal with this encounter again and let another day go by, or do you press on and deal with the lingering effects of this encounter while running into another. If you're alone, you're gonna stay put, of course. But let's say you're in a party. Food's running low, but the group thinks it can make it to the next safepoint if they press. They want to go on.
That next day, a new encounter card hits the table. It's a Jack 10 Spades encounter. Raiders rush your position, and your party needs to put them down as fast as possible, because their wild hooting is drawing more of their clan to your position by the minute. But you're still sick. You can either roll against the illness, or you can help the party fight the raiders. That's bad for your health though; you'll take another 3 points of health from the fever. Then again, unless the party can come up with a collective 10, everyone will be taking damage from the raider assault. But remember, you only get one action per day.
Choose wisely.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Another Day: Them Bones
With all this talk of difficulties and optional actions, it stands that we really need to talk about dice. So let's do that this week .
Another Day is a die pool system. Yes, another. I like them. Sue me.
In this case, it's a pool of d6s. I tried this originally with d10s but didn't like the results as much. Given that target numbers only go above 10 in the rarest of circumstances, it seemed necessary to keep the die to a d6.
Your character has skills. I have a sample, list, and it's pretty specific, but you can go as specific or general as you like. Whenever you attempt to do something, you roll your skill in dice. Look for the single highest die. That's your result.
Now, there's one small wrinkle in this. And that is like dice combine to higher number. Add 1 to the result for every like die. That means if you roll a pair of 5s, your actual result is 6. If you roll four 5s, your actual result is 8. Thus more dice is better. Skills top out at 5 dice, by the way.
And this is where cooperation comes in. Players working together on a problem can merge their results, getting more matching dice and driving that final result higher. They don't even have to be using the same skill, as long as they're working together on the same problem.
And that's all there is to die rolling.
Another Day is a die pool system. Yes, another. I like them. Sue me.
In this case, it's a pool of d6s. I tried this originally with d10s but didn't like the results as much. Given that target numbers only go above 10 in the rarest of circumstances, it seemed necessary to keep the die to a d6.
Your character has skills. I have a sample, list, and it's pretty specific, but you can go as specific or general as you like. Whenever you attempt to do something, you roll your skill in dice. Look for the single highest die. That's your result.
Now, there's one small wrinkle in this. And that is like dice combine to higher number. Add 1 to the result for every like die. That means if you roll a pair of 5s, your actual result is 6. If you roll four 5s, your actual result is 8. Thus more dice is better. Skills top out at 5 dice, by the way.
And this is where cooperation comes in. Players working together on a problem can merge their results, getting more matching dice and driving that final result higher. They don't even have to be using the same skill, as long as they're working together on the same problem.
And that's all there is to die rolling.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Another Day: Other Actions
So now we've got how to generate an encounter, and you're always going to have an encounter to deal with. But I did at one point mention ignoring an encounter. Why would you ever want to do that? Because sometimes you just gotta. If you're really ground down, you might not have the juice required to soldier on. You might be out of ammo, or worse, out of food. Someone might be violently ill, while someone else is nursing a terrible gash in his leg which you just know is going to get infected.
And then, worst of all, all these injuries are going to reduce the party's carrying capacity and you're going to have to start leaving gear behind.
*gasp*
Each day, every player gets one action. Dealing with an encounter is an action. But sometimes fate will smile on you and you'll pull a low number. One or two members of the party can probably handle that. That leaves the rest with a free action to do something else. What could they possibly do?
They can scrounge for gear, hunt for food, tend to the wounded, rest for their own recovery, and even try some field maintenance on their erroding stuff.
How's that work? Pretty similarly to rolling against an encounter. You roll the appropriate skill, except in this case there's rarely a difficulty number (occassionally there will be). Your margin of success gives you what you're looking for. Want food? Your roll tells you how many days worth you brought back. Looking to repair something? Your result restores that many points of wear to the thing. Etc.
The thing is, if you're doing that, you're not dealing with the encounter, so make the most of your downtime, because tomorrow you might draw that Jack King 10 encounter.
And then, worst of all, all these injuries are going to reduce the party's carrying capacity and you're going to have to start leaving gear behind.
*gasp*
Each day, every player gets one action. Dealing with an encounter is an action. But sometimes fate will smile on you and you'll pull a low number. One or two members of the party can probably handle that. That leaves the rest with a free action to do something else. What could they possibly do?
They can scrounge for gear, hunt for food, tend to the wounded, rest for their own recovery, and even try some field maintenance on their erroding stuff.
How's that work? Pretty similarly to rolling against an encounter. You roll the appropriate skill, except in this case there's rarely a difficulty number (occassionally there will be). Your margin of success gives you what you're looking for. Want food? Your roll tells you how many days worth you brought back. Looking to repair something? Your result restores that many points of wear to the thing. Etc.
The thing is, if you're doing that, you're not dealing with the encounter, so make the most of your downtime, because tomorrow you might draw that Jack King 10 encounter.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Another Day: Random Encounters
As if there's any other kind!
In this game, encounters are generated on the fly using a standard deck of playing cards, jokers included. Each day, the players deduct from their food/water rations or take starving damage. Then the GM slaps a card down on the table. Everything about the encounter is on that card, mechanically speaking, of course.
The suit of the card tells you what kind of encounter this is:
I know, that doesn't mean much now because you don't know how dice work. That's another post, coming next.
And then there's the face cards. These add certain mechanical twists to the encounter. Grab another card and slap it down in order to get the difficulty, but use the suit of the face card. If you draw another face card, you apply its effects as well and keep going until you get a number card.
In this game, encounters are generated on the fly using a standard deck of playing cards, jokers included. Each day, the players deduct from their food/water rations or take starving damage. Then the GM slaps a card down on the table. Everything about the encounter is on that card, mechanically speaking, of course.
The suit of the card tells you what kind of encounter this is:
- Clubs - nature. This could be a storm, an earthquake, a collapsing building, falling tree, or whatever else tickles your fancy. The one thing it must be though is active. No tree blocking the road or anything like that (though that could be a component, provided there's some other element, like a raging fire behind you). You could even say they've wandered into the middle of a minefield. Not exactly nature, but close enough for me, and I'm writing this game, so if I say it's okay, it's okay. This, like all encounters, must place you in immediate danger.
- Spades - violence. Call them whatever you like, this is a wandering monster encounter.
- Hearts - ancient hazard. The exact nature of this varies according to what ruined your world (no, I'm not talking about the players; be nice). This can be a plague village, spoiled food, parasitic infections, radiation zones, drifting chemical clouds, or anything else that threatens the health of the travellers in a way that doesn't involve cutting, crushing, burning, or shooting them.
- Diamonds - gear. Pull a second card and slap it down on this one. The encounter involves some kind of gear that you might be able to scavange. That doesn't mean it's passive treasure waiting to be harvested. I mean, it could, but what old school GM isn't out to hurt his players in the worst way possible? We're talking Tomb of Horrors here! So instead of putting that fully functioning .50 cal machinegun with pristine ammo in a carrying case and handing it to the party, put it on an automated turret and drop that thing into a plague village. The players trip the automated defenses when the walk in, discover everyone dead from a strange disease, and then face the gun when trying to get out. Apparently someone set the defenses to keep the sick in before everyone died, see. Now, if they can successfully deal with the encounter, they have the added benefit of possibly walking out with the gun too, but it will be shooting them in the meantime....
I know, that doesn't mean much now because you don't know how dice work. That's another post, coming next.
And then there's the face cards. These add certain mechanical twists to the encounter. Grab another card and slap it down in order to get the difficulty, but use the suit of the face card. If you draw another face card, you apply its effects as well and keep going until you get a number card.
- Jack - The difficulty of this encounter keeps mounting. Add one to its difficulty every day you don't completely succeed.
- Queen - These encounters are especially punishing. Partial successes still reduce their difficulty, but they deal damage as if 2 points higher if you haven't overcome them yet. Thus if you reduce a Queen encoutner to 6, it deals 8 points of damage.
- King - The difficulty of this encounter isn't reduced by partial successes. You need to clear it all at once or not at all.
- Ace - Draw two cards. Both encounters occur simultaneously. Again, if you draw face cards, keep applying them and draw until you pull a number.
- Joker - There's no cooperation allowed in this encounter. The bandits manage to split the party up and hunt them individually. The fire separates them. Automated defenses in the old tech building seals them in different sections. Whatever the reason, each player is on his own.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Another Day: Wandering the Wastes, Olde School Style
I've already mentioned that play in this game is getting from point A to point B, the assumption being that both points afford safety, and the in between most assuredly does not. Now, travel quests are nothing new, but the way I actually envisioned this was something closer to a dungeon crawl, sans dungeon.
Rather than ask the GM to plot out a map for every session and stock it with a massive number of encounters so that the players will encounter at least some of them, I decided to try abstracting the whole thing. And since old school design received such a hard push in this, I figured what the hell, let's randomize it while we're at it. Old school games loved random elements.
So here's the rundown: at the start of play, you decide how many encounters you'll face before you reach your next safepoint. This could be because the distance is long, but it could also be a short overland trek fraught with extreme danger. Up to you. Also up to you is what "you" means in this case, meaning that the players could request a certain encounter count, everyone could come to a consensus, or GM could just tell the players how many they're facing. He could also not tell them, if he wanted to be like that.
That's so old school.
Then, once you've got the number, everyone plays the journey, day by day, encounter by encounter. Every day you consume some food (or you take starving damage), and you deal with an encounter. That encounter might beat you up, force you to consume some resources, maybe both, and if you don't successfully deal with it that day, nothing says it won't be there tomorrow too. Remember, your journey's only over once you face a certain number of encounters. That could take 3 days; it could take 3 weeks. You've only got enough resources to survive for so long. Now, you can choose to ignore an encounter (and suffer for it) in order to scrounge for food and gear, but that takes time, and time means more food and water consumed.
In essence, the game is one of resource management across multiple spectrums. Health metrics are interlaced, and there's an ever dwindling pool of resources to contend with. Every day is a decision to push forward or break and loot, which comes with no guarantees.
Rather than ask the GM to plot out a map for every session and stock it with a massive number of encounters so that the players will encounter at least some of them, I decided to try abstracting the whole thing. And since old school design received such a hard push in this, I figured what the hell, let's randomize it while we're at it. Old school games loved random elements.
So here's the rundown: at the start of play, you decide how many encounters you'll face before you reach your next safepoint. This could be because the distance is long, but it could also be a short overland trek fraught with extreme danger. Up to you. Also up to you is what "you" means in this case, meaning that the players could request a certain encounter count, everyone could come to a consensus, or GM could just tell the players how many they're facing. He could also not tell them, if he wanted to be like that.
That's so old school.
Then, once you've got the number, everyone plays the journey, day by day, encounter by encounter. Every day you consume some food (or you take starving damage), and you deal with an encounter. That encounter might beat you up, force you to consume some resources, maybe both, and if you don't successfully deal with it that day, nothing says it won't be there tomorrow too. Remember, your journey's only over once you face a certain number of encounters. That could take 3 days; it could take 3 weeks. You've only got enough resources to survive for so long. Now, you can choose to ignore an encounter (and suffer for it) in order to scrounge for food and gear, but that takes time, and time means more food and water consumed.
In essence, the game is one of resource management across multiple spectrums. Health metrics are interlaced, and there's an ever dwindling pool of resources to contend with. Every day is a decision to push forward or break and loot, which comes with no guarantees.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Another Day: Pain is Fun!
When I first started this project, I had the idea that the most robust part of your character should be his capacity to absorb punishment. As I move through this design, I'm all the more convinced of it, because taking damage needs to be somehow interesting too, as that appears to be a big thrust of the game.
And then there's the request that the rules be involved, maybe even a little complicated. Yeah, for real, that was specifically requested.
I'm no fan of making something needlessly complicated, so I'm instead taking that request as permission to go a little more in depth than I might otherwise and not bother sanding it smooth afterward. What's that leave me with?
The damage matrix.
What I've done is create separate health meters for differnet kinds of abuse a survivor might suffer. (Side note: Survivor. I like that as a term for character. I think I'll use that.) So if you're sunburnt and starving, you can't take a beating as well as you normally could. You could represent this from a single damage meter, but that doesn't provide enough detail for a game like this. So instead, you have various metrics of heath: nutrition, health (disease), toughness (physical injury), weathering (exposure), and packing (how much gear you can carry).
As you encounter different hardships, different health meters get assaulted. Tracking damage is pretty easy, and largely similar to how it works in other games. You have a number of levels, and each level can take a number of points equal to your score. So let's say you have 4 health levels in all scores (because it's looking like that's what I'm going to use). If your Toughness is a 5, you can take 5 points in each of those 4 levels. So far, pretty standard stuff.
Here's where it becomes a matrix. As you drop to a new level, you take wound penalties. You wound penalties don't affect your skills or your actions, but your other health meters. You don't take damage in those other meters, but those scores drop. So say you've also got a 5 in Health, and you take a few gunshots that damage your Toughness to the point that you take wound penalties. This drops your Health to 4. Now, you can only take 4 points of damage per wound level. You don't actually take any Health damage, but you're not as resilient to disease until those gunshots heal.
Now let's say that you already had 5 points of Health damage when this happens. Normally that keeps you in the first level, but when your Health drops to 4, those 5 points can't be contained in a single level. Now 4 points fill the top level, and the last point goes into the next level down, which also inflicts penalties. Damage suddenly cascades.
It's a little tricky to track and to explain, but in the sample I showed someone, he got it as soon as he began to use it. I'm thinking this might make a good app for the iPhone to help in tracking, because I've yet to come up with a good way to visually present the damage matrix that makes it both easy to use and understand.
In a nutshell though, that's the core of the character. Survival and pain and suffering, oh my!
And then there's the request that the rules be involved, maybe even a little complicated. Yeah, for real, that was specifically requested.
I'm no fan of making something needlessly complicated, so I'm instead taking that request as permission to go a little more in depth than I might otherwise and not bother sanding it smooth afterward. What's that leave me with?
The damage matrix.
What I've done is create separate health meters for differnet kinds of abuse a survivor might suffer. (Side note: Survivor. I like that as a term for character. I think I'll use that.) So if you're sunburnt and starving, you can't take a beating as well as you normally could. You could represent this from a single damage meter, but that doesn't provide enough detail for a game like this. So instead, you have various metrics of heath: nutrition, health (disease), toughness (physical injury), weathering (exposure), and packing (how much gear you can carry).
As you encounter different hardships, different health meters get assaulted. Tracking damage is pretty easy, and largely similar to how it works in other games. You have a number of levels, and each level can take a number of points equal to your score. So let's say you have 4 health levels in all scores (because it's looking like that's what I'm going to use). If your Toughness is a 5, you can take 5 points in each of those 4 levels. So far, pretty standard stuff.
Here's where it becomes a matrix. As you drop to a new level, you take wound penalties. You wound penalties don't affect your skills or your actions, but your other health meters. You don't take damage in those other meters, but those scores drop. So say you've also got a 5 in Health, and you take a few gunshots that damage your Toughness to the point that you take wound penalties. This drops your Health to 4. Now, you can only take 4 points of damage per wound level. You don't actually take any Health damage, but you're not as resilient to disease until those gunshots heal.
Now let's say that you already had 5 points of Health damage when this happens. Normally that keeps you in the first level, but when your Health drops to 4, those 5 points can't be contained in a single level. Now 4 points fill the top level, and the last point goes into the next level down, which also inflicts penalties. Damage suddenly cascades.
It's a little tricky to track and to explain, but in the sample I showed someone, he got it as soon as he began to use it. I'm thinking this might make a good app for the iPhone to help in tracking, because I've yet to come up with a good way to visually present the damage matrix that makes it both easy to use and understand.
In a nutshell though, that's the core of the character. Survival and pain and suffering, oh my!
Monday, July 25, 2011
Another Day: Basic Play
I spent a lot of time thinking about "old school" gaming in thinking about how to Another Day should play, and what I came up with was a dungeon. Back in the early days of D&D, play largely consisted of trying to get in and back out of a dungeon without dying. In short, it was more a survival game than anything else. Oh, sure, there was a quest element to it, and you were in theory accomplishing something, but really, especially in the early levels, you were just trying to make it to the end.
So I took that idea for Another Day. This is a post-apocalyptic game, not a fantasy one, so dungeon crawling isn't necessarily appropriate, but if you abstract the dungeon into a series of encounters, you can translate that into just about any setting.
This means that in Another Day, you're going from one safe point to the next, and need to face down a certain number of encounters in between. The GM probably decides the number of encounters, which could be totally random, and you deal with each of them as they come up. Encounters probably wear you down, forcing you to deal with diminished capacities as you continue, making each subsequent encounter a little more difficult.
Sounds like a death spiral made into a whole game, doesn't it? I guess it kind of is, so the question is how to make that fun? Working on it.
So I took that idea for Another Day. This is a post-apocalyptic game, not a fantasy one, so dungeon crawling isn't necessarily appropriate, but if you abstract the dungeon into a series of encounters, you can translate that into just about any setting.
This means that in Another Day, you're going from one safe point to the next, and need to face down a certain number of encounters in between. The GM probably decides the number of encounters, which could be totally random, and you deal with each of them as they come up. Encounters probably wear you down, forcing you to deal with diminished capacities as you continue, making each subsequent encounter a little more difficult.
Sounds like a death spiral made into a whole game, doesn't it? I guess it kind of is, so the question is how to make that fun? Working on it.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Another Day: The Big 3
As ever these days, I started with the three questions to give myself a little better orientation as to how to tackly this project.
1) What's this game about?
This one was handed to me in the specs, in a fashion. It's about survival, and specifically not about questing. This means that character viability must be a big deal in this game. Generalized hit points, where you go from 100% efficacy to dead is no good here. A survival game needs to have a health system that has all different shades of suffering built into it, so you can, um, enjoy(?) the degree to which your character has progressed towards death.
2) How it is about that?
Many games focus on how it is you accomplish something. I'm thinking that if this game is about survival, it's instead got to focus on how you take various kinds of damage. In fact, right now I'm thinking that your only attributes all deal with how you weather different kinds of hardship and damage. The focus of the character is how he survives, not how he accomplishes actions.
3) What actions does it reward?
That's a good question. Since this game is about living to see the next day and nothing more, you could say survival is its own reward, but that's pretty tepid. So I think what I'm going to do is tap into some of the other specs and, in the spirit of old school mentality, say that teamwork will be rewarded somehow. You'll need to work together to survive. Old D&D was like this, in the beginning anyway, and I think it was always intended to stay that way, even if it really didn't the higher the levels climbed. So Another Day will have something in it that rewards working together.
1) What's this game about?
This one was handed to me in the specs, in a fashion. It's about survival, and specifically not about questing. This means that character viability must be a big deal in this game. Generalized hit points, where you go from 100% efficacy to dead is no good here. A survival game needs to have a health system that has all different shades of suffering built into it, so you can, um, enjoy(?) the degree to which your character has progressed towards death.
2) How it is about that?
Many games focus on how it is you accomplish something. I'm thinking that if this game is about survival, it's instead got to focus on how you take various kinds of damage. In fact, right now I'm thinking that your only attributes all deal with how you weather different kinds of hardship and damage. The focus of the character is how he survives, not how he accomplishes actions.
3) What actions does it reward?
That's a good question. Since this game is about living to see the next day and nothing more, you could say survival is its own reward, but that's pretty tepid. So I think what I'm going to do is tap into some of the other specs and, in the spirit of old school mentality, say that teamwork will be rewarded somehow. You'll need to work together to survive. Old D&D was like this, in the beginning anyway, and I think it was always intended to stay that way, even if it really didn't the higher the levels climbed. So Another Day will have something in it that rewards working together.
Monday, July 18, 2011
Another Day: The Specs
Another Day is another game I started working on by request. It was put out as something of a lark, but given that I've been able to get zero in the way of playtesting for Heroes of Destiny in a while, I figured I'd take the time to put together the rough draft of this. I did promise it, after all, even if the description didn't sound like something I wanted to play.
What I wound up doing was taking that description as a challenge. Take something that sounded tedious and make it fun, as I'd define it, while still meeting all the requested design specifications. What were they? So glad you asked.
What I wound up doing was taking that description as a challenge. Take something that sounded tedious and make it fun, as I'd define it, while still meeting all the requested design specifications. What were they? So glad you asked.
- Old school feel
- Post apocalyptic
- Involved, perhaps even complicated character mechanics
- Simple resolution mechanics
- Make hit location important so you can have piecemeal armor matter
- Gear must degrade
- Make the game about survival, not heroics; you play to see how long you survive, not to see who you can save or what you can accomplish
- Gear must be detail oriented, with ammunition specific to certain firearms
- Fly fishing must be a part of the game
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