Homebrew Diary: Reassessing Things

It’s both a nice feeling and a bad feeling – when you spin off a mechanic and find you like it so much better than what you spun it out of. On twitter I talked about how I dabbled in writing a bit of a near-future/cyberpunk game called Idyllic Future which may come out sometime, who knows. The system was a modified Expedition alpha with some features of the beta. It was devoid of the charts, and used a roll-over resolution with its own Fates system (called the Aftermath system). Fates/Aftermaths are basically a table where you tally up how many successes you scored, and compare to four possible outcomes of the task set by the GM.

I rather liked what I did there. Though I like the charts, there’s a feeling of rigidity with them. It is easy to look at the chart and see if you succeeded or failed, and the GM doesn’t need to involve him or herself in setting target numbers and whatnot. But it feels like it lost a lot of flexibility when the GM cannot modify task difficulties because the numbers on the players are rolling against will always be the same. The table is simplicity itself, but it already turned off a few folk, and I myself am becoming unhappy with it.

But rather than mope about it I think it’s an important time in the life of the game edition.

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Expedition Beta: The Equipment Section

In Expedition, a lot of the equipment is just rolled into the Expedition Points system. You don’t tally up how much lantern oil and ropes you bought because this isn’t Link: The Faces of Evil. But I wanted to make other types of items more distinct. To that end, I set about expanding some other areas of the equipment section. In the previous version, a Weapon gave you a damage bonus or an attack roll bonus depending on its size and the kind of weapon it was, and it also gave you options during a damaging attack. In the latest version, attack roll bonuses are basically pointless, and I’ve done away with the old model for handling a weapon’s stats.

I did this mostly because the idea of “damaging attack options” confused a lot of people. In fact looking back on it, I was sometimes confused myself as to the timing of these abilities and that’s not good. Let’s do a comparison of what a weapon used to look like in the alpha, and what they will look like in the beta, and talk a bit about it.

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