I’m Baaaaack

It’s been a while. Like, almost half a year. Whoops.

Anyway, I’m back. With the arrival and passing of RWBY Volume 4, I’ve got plenty of new material to work with and inspire me. With the passing of 6 or so months, I’ve got plenty of newly acquired knowledge about tabletop RPGs in general. So, since I’ve let myself sit idle for such a long time, I decided it was about time to get back in the game.

I’ve made a new update thread since the old one was archived. And in that new thread, I list some goals for the future, but don’t list much detail about them – that’s what I’m gonna do here after the break. Stay tuned.

Alrighty, let’s tackle these pending changes one at a time. We’ll start with the following:

Change the way weapon bonuses work. This is my top priority, as I’m not a fan of the small flat bonuses. A weapon should define a character’s fighting style, so I’m looking to implement impactful positives and negatives that naturally scale with character advancement and make fighting without a weapon an unappealing prospect.

Now, my dissatisfaction with the current weapon bonuses isn’t a new development. Even before my hiatus, the small, flat bonuses that don’t scale with the player rubbed me the wrong way. Coming back to the project, I’ve given some quick thought to how I might implement major, impactful bonuses and penalties that will scale naturally, without the need for separate advancement rules for weapons. So far, here’s what I’ve got:

Offensive weapons: 1 action point to double damage dealt and taken until the end of your next turn

Defensive weapons: 1 action point to halve damage dealt and taken until the end of your next turn

Balanced weapons: 1 action point to gain a Momentum die on a roll of 5 or 6 until the end of your next turn

Light weapons: Can spend 1 action point to attack instead of 2, but deal half damage on a successful hit

Each of these weapon features is something major – and they remain something major at all points in the game, ideally. Double or half damage dealt and taken is always going to have impact. Increasing the number of Momentum dice gained is always going to be significant. And each of these is an optional feature; if you don’t choose to use it, you fight with basic rolls and results.

There are already a couple of consequences that are worth thinking about, though:

First of all, Light weapons become a go-to choice for supportive characters, since they deal significantly lower damage than Offensive weapons now but generate more Momentum more frequently. This is in stark contrast to previous versions, where the small flat penalty to Light weapon attacks was hugely offset by getting to attack 4 times in a turn (or 3 times after moving) compared to Offensive weapons getting 2 or 1 attacks.

Second, Balanced weapons have no direct downside to their effect – their damage stays the same, but they have a greater chance to gain Momentum. This is probably not going to result in as significant an increase in Momentum gain as a Light weapon can manage, but it suffers none of the drawbacks to damage dealt or taken that the other three types suffer. It will, however, result in Balanced weapons only getting 1 attack in the turn where they use this ability, and so might be a bit too weak. (I am thinking about increasing AP per turn to 5, which would change this, but we’ll see.)

Now, all of this will probably need lots of fine-tuning. Double/half damage is very significant, so it may need to be toned down. Perhaps I can implement a uses-per-encounter limit on the abilities. Some of the limitations are partially dependent on other changes I might introduce as well. I’ll just have to try it out and see, I suppose.

So, since weapons are out of the way (for now), let’s move on to the next order of business:

On that note, add rules for unarmed combat! It needs to be extremely ineffective, since I already have a path ability that lets you fight normally while unarmed but without weapon bonuses. Perhaps cutting all dice pools in half?

This, to me, should be quite simple. When using no weapon, you obviously don’t get the bonuses that come with your chosen weapon type. On top of that, we’ve seen Ruby – a very competent fighter – completely helpless when caught without her scythe, so there’s obviously no built-in unarmed combat ability that comes with being a Huntress or Huntsman. If you don’t train yourself to fight unarmed, you’re at a serious disadvantage.

So, for now, I’ll run with exactly what I wrote in the quotes text: When you fight unarmed without the proper sub-path ability, you cut your dice pool in half for every Attack and Defense roll. My one, minor hangup here is the Defense penalty – we see plenty of people who don’t rely on their weapon to defend themselves, after all, so what gives? But, I figure that at least as long as you’re wielding a weapon, enemies have to devote some of their energy to defending themselves as well, meaning a disarmed opponent doesn’t have that deterrent helping keep the enemy under control. So I’ll keep the penalty to both rolls, unless playtesting changes my mind.

Now, we’ve addressed the major upcoming changes that I know are going to happen in some fashion. We’re also coming up on 1k words, which is usually my ballpark for a complete blog post. But, this is my first post in 6 months and I’ve still got a lot to talk about, so let’s take a look at the bigger, more nebulous list of “Things I might want to change eventually.”

Change enemies. Again. Enemy tiers need to be more concrete. Guidelines comparing relative power of an enemy to a player need to be established. Differences between enemy types need to exist in a meaningful fashion.

Now, this is nothing new – I’ve been bitching about enemies since this game’s inception. But this can tie in with a couple of more ideas I’ve been toying with, and if it all comes together I might actually be satisfied.

But I doubt it.

Anyway, let’s start with the easiest thing to talk about that tangentially relates to my enemy problem: Players need levels of some kind. Like, not necessarily D&D levels where they gain enough EXP, ding, and get a heap of new abilities all at once. I do still like the incremental, pick-and-choose leveling you can get with our current advancement system (even if I want to change that system itself entirely. Stay tuned.). But there needs to be some solid, concrete number we can use for reference to get a general idea of the character’s strength. Say, for example, a character’s “level” is equal to the sum of their dice pools/2, rounded down. That would mean characters start at “level” 1, and as they grow they can eventually reach 5. I’ll talk more about that in a moment, so let’s talk about enemies now that I’ve got a basic framework:

Enemies will also have a “level” of sorts. I’ve mentioned that idea in the past as well but now I’ve got some more solid ideas:

• Each enemy will have a Threat Level which determines, in some way, the amount of stats they can have – for example, a TL 3 enemy could have 9 points to assign between Attack, Defense, and HP (HP total = points x 10) to get their final stats.
• Threat Levels, along with Tiers, determine how many and what type of special abilities the enemies have access to
• Threat Levels and Tiers can be compared to the party’s average “level” to give a GM a rough idea of how challenging a fight will be

Threat Level would be independent of Tier, of course – a TL 5 fodder or boss enemy would both be deadly to a level 1 character, but a level 5 character would treat the fodder enemy like… well, fodder. The difference between the two would include higher stats for the boss, but that’s not where the real threat would come in – the boss would have more deadly abilities granted to it by its tier.

Of course, I would still need to determine some way to differentiate between humanoid, robot, and Grimm enemies. That much hasn’t changed. But now that Volume 4 has shown us all sorts of new, exciting Grimm, I think I can at least start making them stand out.

So, moving on to the 2nd long-term change:

Change advancement. Maybe an EXP system would be better? I’ve grown to like the concept of experience points as part of a reward cycle that allows a player to watch their progress and know how close they are to a noticeable increase in power.

Yeah, remember a couple paragraphs ago when I told you I was thinking about changing advancement entirely so you should stay tuned? Here we are.

I’ve recently been thinking about something I heard a long time ago from two different sources – one from an early episode of a game design podcast that now seems to be mostly deleted, sadly, and another from an article by The Angry DM. Hosted on a defunct website that might get deleted next year. Shit.

Well, anyway, the gist of that article, for those who don’t feel like reading it (even though you should, because Angry is a goddamn genius), is that milestones suck and EXP is way better. And Angry puts forth a lot of the same reasons as the podcast I can’t find anymore, which is lucky for me. His whole argument boils down to the following:

“Earning experience is a fun, rewarding part of the game that can make the player feel accomplished in ways that arbitrary, GM-decided improvement points don’t. At least, as long as the EXP system doesn’t suck.”

And I’ve come to agree, at least conceptually. I’ve played exactly one game where the GM doled out experience points, rather than assigning arbitrary level-up points, so my frame of reference is rather small. But in every milestone game I play, I tend to take the most direct path to my goal. After all, why explore the entire dungeon when it’s just going to make the final boss a harder fight because I’ve spent all my resources?

Since all of the obstacles in the dungeon exist purely as obstacles, I try to avoid them. If I see those obstacles as sources of sweet, sweet EXP, though, suddenly I’m more interested in exploring. Clearing the whole dungeon may actually make the final boss an easier fight, since I could be stronger once I reach it. Walking into a dangerous encounter is no longer purely a bad thing, as I get a reward for clearing it.

So, I want to replace milestones with some sort of EXP system. I don’t even have rough numbers in mind, but I do know I want to keep the EXP gain fairly small across the board. In high level D&D, for example, you’re gaining thousands of EXP for big lategame boss fights – RWBY D6 probably won’t get much farther than a hundred or so, ideally.

It would work quite simply: Players get EXP for various things – mainly fighting, but perhaps I add in additional rewards for accomplishing personal goals or some such – and each upgrade to a stat, new sub-path ability, weapon enhancement, etc. will cost a certain amount of EXP to upgrade.

And that’s it. It seems quite simple, which was my entire mission statement for making the game in the first place. All I have to do is figure out all of the numbers, but that’s pretty much just busywork that I can do over time.

I think that’ll be it for this particular post. If you’ve read the current update thread, you’ll see I’ve got one more item on the list we haven’t talked about:

Big maybe: Revamp basic stats and how combat works as a result. Core mechanics would stay the same, but I’ve been considering the merits and flaws of separating Attack/Defense into Accuracy/Damage/Defense/Resistance.

Buuuut, I’ve reached 2k words, which is double my normal post length, and this discussion is gonna be a doozy. So for now, I’ll just leave it at this, and we can dedicate an entire post to my thoughts on revamping stats. That one’ll probably come next week.

As always, leave a comment if you have any feedback. You can follow RWBY D6 here as well as this blog, and can contact me from the Contact page as well.