I’ve been workshopping Moonveil a bit. There are some small changes and some big changes.
Small changes:
Removed +Defense Armors. They all have unique modifiers for Damage Reduction
Defense is now 4+Pocket. That means Defense fluctuates between 4 and 10.
Large Changes:
Reworked weapon damage tables. All weapons are the same base now:
Miss under 5
Weak Hit under Defense for 1 damage
Strong Hit at Defense and up for damage equal to the higher rolled die
E.g. Rolling [3, 5] against Defense 8 is 5 damage
Weapons are differentiated with weapon properties:
Slashing has minimum damage output (3 base)
Piercing has +damage (2 base)
Crushing has bonus damage rolls when the attack roll is high (base d6 exploding at 10+)
The number of properties on a weapon generally equals its power level
Armors are also differentiated with weapon properties:
Damage reduction vs Weak Hits (e.g. Chainmail)
Damage reduction vs Strong Hits (e.g. Padded Armor, Helmets)
Damage reduction vs All Hits (e.g. Heavy Armor)
Damage reduction with Large Pocket (e.g. Shield)
These get mixed and matched as necessary to make “something cool”. Will need to playtest to see tiers of strength
V Large Changes:
MB style Gambits to bet Marks in Strength or Dexterity to get combat buffs
Power - Bet Strength to do bigger damage - bonus single target damage OR multitarget spread
Finesse - Bet Dexterity to control the battle - attack Pocket AND regain a spent Movement from that turn
Combat actions for Arcane (to match Willpower Rally)
Deduce - Mark Arcane to control advantages/disadvantages - debuff enemy OR buff players
Rally - Mark Willpower to regain d6 HP and all other stats
The idea for these changes is to make fighting seem relatively interesting on the level of magic spells. I think this lets me make magic spells be really crazy. I don’t really like the idea of utility magic spells - I want them to be really rare and unbelievable and tide turning. I haven’t gotten to that part of magic, yet, but I imagine it means making spells like really hard to cast in addition to very powerful. Or… just not sure yet.
We playtested the Feats and Gambits with a modified Keep on the Borderlands. Players really liked the multidimensional use for stat pips and the gambling, but the balance needs balancing.
Spells are also still bogus. But. Whatever.
I’m realizing that if I want to have this be OSR adaptable, I might have to do accept the shit D&D does w/ coins. I was thinking it’d be really sleek and elegant 1 coin is enough for resources to solve 1 challenge so it’d buy an abstract “Dungeon Gear”, but that’s not how modules are… so yeah.
Evade and Max Defense
The 4+Pocket has been tweaked into being an Evade stat. And now Defense is Evade+Pocket. This lets me have some armors/spells bump Evade +1 or so. Mathematically that’s an ~11% increase in misses and overall ~25% damage reduction.
Similarly the Max of 10 is now called Max Defense. Your Defense can’t go over it. And when attack rolls hit your Max Defense they can crit. Not many player facing weapons can do it (Crushing/Heavy can), but it’s a good value for “OH FUCK” attacks. It also lets me have some armor bump it +1. It’s not as good as evade, but it does protect against OH FUCK more which is actually really improtant.
Hit Track
Just made a cool thing on the character sheet to track the outcome ranges. Under Evade is a miss, Under Defense is a Weak Hit, Defense and up is a Strong Hit, and when it’s Max Defense it can be a Crit. Realizing number lines are really confusing when your thresholds are aligned w/ your numbers, but yeah… whatever it works for now.
I tried to sum up how I do movement and tactical stuff at my table. I think w/ the Pocket stuff I really need tactical combat… partially because I don’t have much going on outside of combat. I probably should do some world building…
Had an idea to make TTRPGs a bit more deck-buildy. Made a hack for Mork Borg, but it probably can work with any d20 RPGs w/o much effort.
The TLDR is
You have a d6 table full of skill cards
Each turn you roll a number of d6 to draw a hand of skill cards
You play one skill card
The progression loop is fast. Every time you survive a hardship you pick one:
Get a card
Replace a card
Lose a card, increase hand size
Since the skills are both impactful and rare you get to give out powerups pretty frequently. I’m not 100% on the cadence of increasing your hand size, but i’d rather err on giving it out fast so people can play w/ it.
there used to be a whole subgenre of ttrpgs inspired by those kinds of movies (Macho Women With Guns was the most “popular”) but this was back in the 90s so they are mechanically quite dated and could do with a modern take
while I normally roll my eyes at talk of ttrpg mechanics being “dated” since so many of my favorite games are from way back in the day (Call of Cthulhu and Ghostbusters for example) a look on achive dot org reveals that Macho Women With Guns looks like a bastard miniatures wargame imitation of GURPS, and later in a move that I actually will recognize as dated there was a d20 system version.
Yeah when I say dated I mean things like this. I am a big fan of the ghostbusters rpg, call of cthulhu, traveller, etc. Its the games that feel like a mismatch in genre, tone and mechanics that feel dated rather than merely old.
In other words: rifts is dated but torg is just an old game
Call of cthulhu d20 is dated, but regular call of cthulhu is a fine wine
Yeah, like, the best star wars RPG is d6 1e with the one page supplement that makes the damage rules actually work, old games are good. If you released it today without telling anyone what you did it would be an indie darling.
