Progress Continues

As of this afternoon I have 30 really good Talents. I need at least five more. If I could come up with twelve more, I'd be even happier.

I've re-scaled damage. The original damage scale was "one and sometimes two", but the creation of the Combat Token system let that get a bit out of hand. With a tweak to Heavy & Very Heavy weapons, as well as an adjustment to the cost of bonus damage from tokens, I think I now have a very satisfying "one, sometimes two, and very rarely three" scale.

Directly tied to that, I've re-scaled the HP for PCs, NPCs, and monsters. Each character or monster will have fewer HP, but with the damage under control, that should work out just fine.

And directly tied to that, I've also changed both the healing system (just a tiny bit) and the PC Death mechanism. I love having the death of a PC hovering over the game, but I decided that I'd like it better if there were a little less random chance and a little more conscious player investment.

I know there's going to be some pretty serious changes to combat, but I haven't really ironed all those bits out yet. I'm changing a few of the standard combat actions. Getting that bit right will make or break this new version. I'm also toying with the idea of removing the classic Initiative mechanism and replacing it with something that has more room for players to riff off of each other.

That's all for now.

Talents & the Classes

One of the things I've discovered about the Talents between the time I wrote RBH2 and now is that all Talents that are strictly combat-oriented suck. That is, if a Talent has no useful purpose in non-combat situations, I find it boring.

Honestly, that surprised me a little bit. When I was writing up those Talents I thought that a small smattering of combat only powers would be really nice. I was wrong. Which just goes to show what you can learn about yourself when your game design meets self-reflective actual play.

So, added to my list of creative constraints for creating new Talents is "Must be fun for non-combat situations. Gaining an advantage in combat situations is optional." The footnote to that constraint being "Talents that can support or create interesting non-combat situations are double-plus good. (Like Homunculus or Guild Contacts)"

I then went through all the Talents currently in the game and noted which ones I felt were already good, which ones were possibly fixable, and which ones needed to just get dropped. Chalk Door, Rock Music, and Illusions are all (for example) strong enough to stick around. On the other hand, every one of the Warrior's Talents needs to go.

Since Warrior was the only class where I suddenly had to start from scratch, it made sense to me to focus there first. I sat down with one of my trusty notebooks and scribbled "RBH3: Warrior Talents" at the top of the page and just started writing down everything that came to mind. After an afternoon & evening of working on nothing but that I had a single Talent I thought worthy of the game. Which was pretty dissapointing. I'd even tried enlisting Lisa to help again. But we just couldn't get anywhere.

Finally I decided I'd just sit down and let myself come up with any new Talent that would fit my constraints, nevermind if it fit into a particular Class or not. I poured out lots more ideas onto paper, but still only came up with one that I'm sure I'll enjoy using. But I have high hopes for that method. I have high hopes that, given a bit of time and inspiration, I can come up with 35 individual cool Talents.

But can I make them fit into the seven classes I've already come up with? Or do I need them to fit into those seven particular classes? Ah, see, that's where my brain is now. If I come up with those 35 cool Talents, and those Talents help define the world and it's situations, then shouldn't I be able to organize the 35 by theme and assign new classes to them?

Maybe. We'll see.

Inspiration

Inspiration is a funny creature. Sometimes it's a demon that tears at your brain 'till you write a thousand pages and sometimes it's a ghost who won't visit you no matter how much you beg.

This morning I was looking over my printed copy of RBH2 and kind of daydreaming about the session of Supercrew I recently GM'd. BAM! Inspiration. I wrote a fresh outline of what I need to do to make RBH3 happen and then immediately followed that with about five pages of actual mechanism changes.

With a constant flow of inspiration, I may be ready to present RBH3 in just a couple weeks. Keep your fingers crossed that the demon sticks around for a while.

What if I removed Connections?

Hey all, I'm back. I fixed those links there and they lead to the 2nd edition rules and character sheet again. No updates yet.

But I think I just had a really good idea. I'm going to remove "connections" from Arenas. Instead of having a map of circles connected by lines, where the circles indicate arenas and the lines indicate ways of getting from one to the other, one can instead move from any one Arena to any other Arena with a single action.

Say what?

Yeah. Naturally, the move must still be consistant within the fiction. BUT! As we all already know, that fiction is fluid and subject to change by means of a player taking the Move action with their character.

For example: Your character moves from the Courtyard, to the Stairs, to the Balcony, establishing each as Arenas, and further establishing a connection C-S-B. But what if someone wanted to move from the Courtyard to the Balcony in a single move? Simple! You just have to describe how your character manages to bypass the stairs. Does he run up the side of the tower with Bird Feet? Or make the jump in a single leap via their amazing Daring? That's for you to describe and for your fellow players to agree to.

That leads me to another bit of rule that I don't think I've let you in on yet. See, we were just kinda playing around with the thing this past spring and I never really decided how I wanted to impliment it: Requiring a successful Attribute roll to enter an Arena.

In one particular session we decided that a particular arena was "hidden". One had to make a successful Alertness roll (vs. 8 IIRC) before one could enter the arena. There was another Arena, a crumbling aquaduct, that was difficult to scale, and so required a successful Daring roll to enter.

Those two rules solve most of the issues I was having when we played last. I just have one more really important thing to resove with the combat rules, then I can re-tune the Talents to fit the new system, and I'll have a 3rd edition ready for playtest.

The d12

Hi everybody. It's been a while since I've posted. But, except for a few weeks last month where my mind was fully occupied with camping, RBH hasn't been far from my thoughts.

If you're reading this, then you're probably a dedicated fan of this thing. Thank you. You rock.

I thought I'd share with you my thoughts on the use of the d12. I've had lots of folks tell me that they don't like it, or that they thought the system would be better off without it. I understand and respect that opinion, but I don't agree with it.

I love the way the d12 works in this system. Not just the way the math works with the attributes, but also the very fact that you do have to switch between your dice when you're killing and when you're, you know... doing anything besides killing. That's right: I like the fact that you have to switch dice. It feels good. It's a switching-gears feeling that I think is appropriate and fun.

If you use a d10 in place of the d12, you may not be screwing with the math much, but you are certainly going to loose that gear-switching-feeling.

And hey, be honest with me, the reason why you're balking at the d12 is because you don't have as many sitting around you're house, isn't it? I mean, if you had as many d12s as you had d10s, would you feel the same way?

Food for thought.

What not to do?

Been scribbling lots and lots of notes for RBH over the past week or two. And more than once I've found myself stopping, sitting back, and wondering "Is this what I want to do with this game?"

See, I've got all these wonderful options, a bulging sack of idea-lewt if you will, and they don't all work together. Some of it, most of it, has to get thrown away. And it's hard to make the decision about what goes and what stays. Like, I've got these great ideas for how I want the setting to be presented and how the character classes should interact with that material. And those ideas keep pestering me to change up the classes and their powers pretty significantly. But then I look at all those changes and I start wondering if I'll starting to loose my connection to the simplicity that makes the game cool.

I don't know. I'm still working on it. I'll keep you updated.

RBH 3 - Not yet, but soon

The past few weeks, say six of them, I've been kinda low on creative juices. I just haven't felt like designing much. Which is okay and normal for me. When I hit a slump like this I just do a bit of refueling. I read a lot. I watch a lot of film and television. I play a lot of games. Eventually something sparks my imagination again and off I go.

I can't say that I'm off and running yet. Not really. But I did pick up one of my ragged composition notebooks today and started scribbling some notes about RBH. I have some really big ideas about how I want to change it. Not all the changes came to me immediately. I still have lots and lots of work to do.

If you're still following along with this project, then awesome. Thanks for your support. I never really expected to get any. I love it. And I promise that you, the loyal friend of RBH will have something new to look at soon.