Yari Master

Recently Antoine related a tale to me of two players taking the Yari Master talent. Apparently these players found that it's particularly useful to perform a Show Off action in conjunction with their attack.

That's a problem.

It's not a problem because it's powerful. I want the talents to be powerful. It's a problem because it's boring. It encourages the Yari Master characters to be islands of efficiency instead of part of a team. That sucks. It also sucks because it lets players make a big-assed attack all by their lonesome on their very first turn. The monsters don't even get a chance to be all scary!

In the next iteration of the rules, that version of Yari Master will be gone. This is what I'm considering replacing it with:

Yari Master
When your character makes an attack with a reach weapon you may immediately make an additional free attack with that same weapon against another target. If your second attack is successful you may make a third attack, and so on. However, you may not attack the same target twice in the same action. Once you miss or are out of targets, you're done.

I'm still scratching my chin over the awesomeness of this version. Will it be cool or will it suck when the yari master character kills off an entire arena's worth of mooks in one turn? Playtesting will tell.

Edit:

Changed my mind!

After a couple hours of contemplation, I decided that the new Yari Master ability sucks. Sucks bad. I can name at least two good reasons why it should be tossed right now. Instead, I offer you yet another version of the same talent.

Yari Master
When you attack with a reach weapon you may make two attacks instead of one.

Very simple and to the point.

Hacking the Hack

There's this interesting thing happening around this game. It seems like everyone who's excited about it wants to change it. Certainly it's not the first time this has happened to a game. But it is a first for me.

On the one hand it's a little dissapointing. I'd be happier if everyone were excited about it the way I wrote it. But, when it comes right down to it, I can take it for the compliment that it is. When I think about the hack-hacking in the right light, it makes me smile. It almost certainly means that I've done something right with this design.

Unfortunately, I can't help with those hack-hacks. I have to keep myself seperated from them so I can finish my version of the game. Getting mixed up in thinking about converting it over to a western, or pulp, or some other flavor of fantasy would only cause me to loose track of what needs work in the heart of the game.