Homebrew Diary: Letting Things Simmer

I sat on a bunch of this stuff overnight and woke this morning with some new ideas that as usual I would like to share.

Expedition is constantly evolving and a constant learning process. As I discover new ideas, I often find myself having to rewrite whole sections just because the new stuff is so much better, and releasing a “beta” that is already obsoleted by the time I get back feedback is pointless. I think there’s been a fair bit of “departure for departure’s sake” in my designs lately also, and so I went back to the origins of the system, and I thought long and hard about some of these changes.

•Return to Skills Based Characters: While lacking skills made the game somewhat easier in some senses, in the end it also made other things harder to explain to prospective player. For example, certain classes cannot make magical attacks. The reason to do this is archetype preservation, but because there’s no real skills, the game explains this with a rather mean-spirited “The Fighter can’t make magical attacks.” This text is really the only thing preventing the Fighter from making magical attacks. The Fighter had a magical attack table, on the off-chance the ability was ever granted, because it could be granted. This stuff is confusing. Similar questions of permission, with the game merely saying “no, don’t – until allowed” can be avoided by just returning skill training. Skill training makes character generation a bit slower but it saves in actually learning the game, because it avoids these problems of nebulous and confusing character permissions. Now the Fighter doesn’t get the Magic skill. Done. But the character can BUY the magic skill though – and this helps out in all sorts of other ways too.

•Go down to 2d6: Going down to 2d6-based play allows a tighter range of numbers and smaller health and damage values. It’s also rolling one less die which is always pretty good, while maintaining a good bell curve.

•Raise Resources to the hundreds: Wealth, Bonds and Reputation go to 100 and beyond now rather than being stuck in a 1-50. This allows Wealth to track better to coinage, rather than “nebulous measure of purchasing ability.” 1 Wealth is 1 credit, 1 silver dollar, 1 gold, whatever the heck your campaign setting uses as basic money. It also allows Bonds and Reputation to exist on a more varied scale, where you can have characters whose different in Reputation is much more marked. This way, Reputation Advancement and Bond Advancement aren’t a weird separate “Character Advancement” system you feed points into. They’re part of the actual mechanics of HAVING Reputation or Bond points, period.

•Add a measure of advancement: I’m still committed to having Expedition’s “advancement rate” being very tight. I want people to be able to fight nearly any challenge, and be able to succeed if they spend their resources wisely. But at the same time, having mostly static PCs conflicts with a lot of fantasy stuff that even I’m doing right now (with World of Adel). I want there to be some measure of customization and “these guys are better than those guys.” Not much, because “these guys” should lose to “those guys” if “these guys” are unprepared for it. Spending resources to get things done is still the hallmark. But still, I should be able to, within my own game, have a systemic difference between “cherubim who just got her armor” or “mage who just got out of school” and “seraphim who runs the convent” and “archmage who runs the school.” These are things I talk about in World of Adel all the time that just don’t exist in Expedition right now, which is sort of irksome.

•Rethink Boons: The Expedition Beta had, as of this writing, 78 purchasable boons. That is way too many, and I feel like in trying to codify their effects to explicitly say “you can do these things and these things” have resulted in a big bloat of boons, because I felt that if an element was missing, people would think the system doesn’t allow it. I’ve decided instead to include Boons as part of the write-up of each Expedition Point. So boons as a separate item don’t exist. They just mean “at any point in time, you can spend the points to do this.” They are an ability of the Expedition Point itself, rather than a separate system. They will have effects which are a bit freer in form (but still be mechanical benefits in function). So instead of writing 30 individual ritual spells with fluff and effects, I can just list benefits of having purchased Spell Points, and the costs for applying each benefit.

This also allows for some weirdness like the current system of acquiring favors through Reputation, to be directly linked to Reputation Points, as an ability of the points – rather than as a separate system that you feed the points to. Likewise with land ownership/hirelings. The distinction may seem minor but it really makes things easier.