In my last post, I provided an overview of my new game project, Square Fireballs RPG, and a brief discussion of the main features I plan to introduce. Today, I will show something less descriptive, but still important: the first draft of the game’s table of contents. This is definitely subject to change, and it’s quite possible that I’m forgetting about critical sections, if not chapters. But it’s what I’m working with, for now. It looks as follows:
1. Introduction
- Character Stats
- Reading Powers
- Turn Sequence
- Character Actions
- Movement
- Attack
- Character Conditions
- Healing
- Maneuvers
- Skills
- Resting
- Rituals (30)
- Overview
- Leveling up
- Races (4)
- Classes (4)
- Themes (12)
- Paragon Paths (20)
- Epic Destinies (8)
- Feats (75)
- Weapons
- Implements
- Armor
- Mundane Gear
- Magic Items (40)
- Game Math
- Skill Checks
- Monsters (75*75)
- Encounter Generation
- Running Encounters
- Rewards
The numbers in parentheses are the number of options of a given type. As you can see, they are fairly low, considering that all character options but races and classes are supposed to be self-contained: I’m playing around with some ideas to make the most of relatively limited sets of options. If this works as expected, it will make the development of the game much more sustainable, and it might even be possible to build characters without need for digital tools. We’ll see how it turns out.
Posts
To be honest, I found Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies to be meaningless bloat. Too many PPs and EDs had lame fluff, but excellent powers, and too often did it make sense to take an otherwise ridiculous multiclass feat just for the purpose of a paragon path or epic destiny. Of course, the real advantage of PPs and EDs is that they're mutually exclusive with one another. You really can't do that with feats effectively.
ReplyDeleteCan't you, really? What if I told you that my design for feats is based on precisely that notion?
ReplyDeleteMy main priorities for PPs and EDs are that a) every one I add to the game feels relevant, and b) they really make Paragon/Epic characters to stand out in the world.
One other thing to consider regarding PPs and EDs: If a PP or ED represents "fluff" in the world, then it creates a strong incentive for anyone who meets that given fluff RP wise to take that path-even if the path doesn't work with their build at all.
DeleteTo that end, I tend to think that PPs and EDs should be effect driven rather than concept driven, if that makes any sense.
Anyway, you mentioned Greater Feats earlier, but even 1/tier would be substantially less mutual exclusivity than PPs and EDs to each other.
Perico,
ReplyDeleteMaybe you could create repository in github or any other free place and there publish your work? This happened with Dungeon World (https://github.com/Sagelt/Dungeon-World) and works great! Keeping source text as bunch of XML files to be able consumed by others AND be able pull requests if necessary is nice thing...
What do you think?
It looks great, I'll check it out. Creating a respository was in my to-do list, but the solutions I'm familiar with require setting up your own server, which is cumbersome as hell. This looks like it could work.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the advice!
I've been using assembla.com (free for open source) that have Subversion and Mercurial repositories. For Git you could use GitHub (I'm using it from time to time).
DeleteWhenever I compose anything, I always use wikidot, just because it's quick access and can utilize wikiwords.
DeleteThis is very exciting and inspirational stuff. The guiding principles of your blog should serve your new game and us players and dungeon masters very well.
ReplyDelete