Hey folks,
I’ve decided I need to finally take my loose notes I’ve been taking for the past several years and try to polish them into something that I can playtest and hopefully eventually put in front of other people. To that end, I started by looking at the things I wanted to have on the character sheet and wrote up the first draft of a section explaining the basic mechanics and what each thing on the character sheet does.
I enjoyed ‘steel’ as a principle attribute. Be interested to continue to see this develop. Obviously in 'manual, whatever form that’ll take, I’d be able to reference a visual character sheet while reading down this, I imagine?
Feels a touch swashbuckly, a touch dockside, a touch … cobblestoney? Is that a reasonable way to assess something.
Probably not.
Good luck, L.
Thanks for the comment! One of the bits of feedback I got from a friend was that he didn’t like Steel, but frankly I’m pretty attached to it at this point.
Yes, definitely the idea would be that, if this ever takes the form of a book, the character sheet would be present to refer to as the reader goes through this list.
I’m currently aiming for a bit darker tone than you took away from it, but these things change. Ultimately what I want is a game that I enjoy running and writing for!
Congrats on posting. Hard to get the ball rolling sometimes. Hope you stick with it.
There aren’t too many specifics to comment on yet. Interested to see how the pieces will fit together. Especially combat, injuries, and spellcasting.
I think it’s cool how you raise the stakes from a check to a save by taking away a d20. But I do wonder how much you’re giving up by not having a unified resolution mechanic.
2d20 for a check, 1d20 for a save, 2d6 for combat. It could get confusing for the gm to adjudicate some situations.
“Can I stealthily climb up the balcony and pull the guard over the ledge?”
Which dice do I reach for? That sort of thing…
I thought ‘steel’ was fine for resolve.
‘Prowess’ feels a bit more ambiguous. I feel like ‘mental prowess’ is just as common a word association as ‘physical prowess’. So, maybe consider a word that is more explicitly physical? Up to you!
Good luck!
That’s an interesting point about Prowess. I still like the word but if I get feedback in a similar direction from more people I might consider changing it. It’s definitely a word I associate primarily with physicality, but that’s not the only meaning.
As for the dice thing, I very specifically want to create a different feel when a player picks up the dice to do a certain category of action. I think it’s at least somewhat clearer than D&D, where you might be rolling any of the standard polyhedrals for damage. I’ve thought about using all d6s, but unfortunately there’s a pretty limited space for useful modifiers on a d6 without completely overwhelming the die and I do want to have some form of character advancement in the system. The other solution might be to use a damage lookup chart on a d20 for combat rolls, but I find that slows things down a lot. It was always kind of annoying to use in Godbound when I had to translate the die roll into a different number for total damage.