My Actifit Report Card: April 9 2022
More writing today, got a good chunk done on the game that I’m working on. Less progress on editing, but that’s how it goes.
Feeling good still, but I definitely feel like things are moving in the wrong direction so I expect to probably have some pain in the next few days. Still, it’s not terrible and I haven’t had any of the sleep-disrupting stuff recently. That’s enough to be a happy development, even if I’m going to have a little more discomfort during the day.
Working on this game again has been interesting because I get to see how much my philosophy has changed and also stayed the same. velotha’s flock is an incredibly simple game framework, with most of the numbers in the game coming from 6 attributes and d12 rolls, but there’s a lot you can do for that.
The one thing I’m changing is combat, which is much less structured. The way it works now is that a character who fails to defend takes at least one Hit. These Hits add up over time, and after taking damage a character also needs to check for Shock.
Hits impose a passive penalty, and as they add up characters check for Shock more often and at a greater penalty until they’re Incapacitated.
The effects of this, mechanically speaking, are quite simple. There’s a little irritation for very tough characters, because they’re going to test for Shock darn near every time they take damage, but the compensation for that is how rarely they take damage and how much better they do on the test.
Still, anyone can get taken out by a single strike in combat, rare though it may be, which I like in a “combat sucks, don’t get in fights” way.
It also ties in very well with regeneration, which most player characters will have (though there is an option to play exceptional humans).
One consequence of this system is that you can theoretically take an infinite number of Hits, though in practice it’s basically limited to twice your character’s Toughness rating if you’re unrealistically lucky.
It needs to be playtested because it’s a fairly significant change, but I think it’s going to be good and give combat a lot of depth and realism (there are three scalar values for weapons: harder to avoid damage, more Hits inflicted, and more likely Shock tests).
The complexity is relatively high, but it’s worth noting that this is a players-focused game, so only players actually use the full rulesets. Minor characters run by the narrator just take Hits whenever the player characters succeed with their weapons, with an evasion rating that adds to their difficulty when attacking (which can be offset with weapons).
The system is designed around a baseline of relatively unskilled brawling, so if you just get in a fight you don’t need to input any data for weapons, and weapons modify things.
There are limitations to this, obviously, but I don’t think it matters much.
And because the setting is in the 1910s, there isn’t much in the way of armor. There will be rules for beneficial gear, and armor will simply provide a positive modifier for Resilience during defense, though honestly it’s pretty rare and is unlikely to appear often.
This report was published via Actifit app (Android | iOS). Check out the original version here on actifit.io
