Tuesday 25 June 2013

CRYPTS: Where do we go from here?

Good Tuesday everyone!

So last night I tried my hand at making a logo for CRYPTS, it's not finished yet, and it needs some work with positioning and font selection etc, but it gets the idea across:


I need to settle on a font choice, and the logo (twin six shooters in a bracket) need to be centralised. Personally I quite like the elements, even if now thanks to Sarah all I can see when I look at the C is PacMan...

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Anyway, yesterday was an interesting day, I had lots of discussion about the direction of this game with many different people, and it was interesting to see the varied opinions. I'm not going to say anyone was right or wrong as at this point I don't think we'll know the out come, hell I don't think we'll know 'who' was right in this discussion until AFTER the game has been out for at least a year, so I'm not about to start calling people liars (ooh burned!)

But in the end I think the majority agreed that my current plan is a good start when it comes to re-working the MaliQuest Loot Deck to work for Crypts:

That plan is simple, I am stripping out mods to make the loot deck the basics, so we're talking Equipment, Weapons, Artefacts and Consumables.

This should take the deck to below 60 cards, so I can bump the deck up to 60 with a greater variety of fun stuff, then once we have that working, we take a look at how it goes and try to work out what it's missing.

Sure there is a possibility that we get that 60 card mod-less deck and everyone goes "yup! This is perfect!" But the chances of that happening are next to nothing.

No, chances are we'll see that it's missing "something". Maybe it's mods, maybe it's the Path Progression System, maybe it's something completely different! But we won't know that until we remove all the 'bumph' and take it down to it's 'foundation'. At least I hope we'll be able to see it then.

So that's my current plan at the moment. Nothing momentous.

If you are wondering where this came about, it was from my acknowledgement that currently there are elements of the game that are far from simple and elegant, and despite how it may appear, I don't actually have a massive ego, and would rather go back to basics and work up 100 times then push out a system that either is inelegant or just... wrong.

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Something else I am also looking at is the character cards now these are currently in a bad state with lots of things that are just there for visual effect but serve no real purpose.

One idea I am thinking is to make the character cards where you write down everything on the loot cards you pick up, a doodle I drew to this effect looks a little like this:



Now this doodle is far from complete, after all it still has mods showing but the idea would be to have your name and stats at the top of the left hand side, under that would be the 4 equipment slots, so Head, Chest, Arms and Legs, then on the right hand side you have your Weapons and Artefacts.

In order to make this work you need to have less inventory space, and something I've noticed from the current version of MaliQuest, people do a lot of hoarding.

What if players could only 'store' one of each type of equipment, ie what they are wearing or can wear, and if they don't want to equip it they have to discard the item (or they equip a new item and have to discard the old) and they are allowed 4 Weapons and 4 Artefacts, two of each are equipped at any time, this allows for someone to have say; two pistols for paired, a 2 handed shotgun and a 2 handed sword, or 2 offensive spells and 2 utility spells.

Of course during the campaign players may be keeping their loot cards with their character cards, but I have a feeling that having key information written on the cards is a better way to go for faster reference.

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What's next on the agenda? I think I'm going to have to take the plunge and work on stat lines, I'm trying to think of what we need and leaving it at that.

Currently I'm thinking:

Movement: how far you can travel with 1AP.
Toughness: how tough are you to be hit.
Mental: a high Mental score can reflect fortitude or intelligence or perhaps psychic abilities.
Hit Points: how much damage can you take before going down

Then you have the Skill Stats:
Magic
Melee
Ranged
All of these start off at 0 and putting points into them effect your dice rolls.

Remember our game mechanic example from the other month?

Player X has paired rusty revolvers meaning he rolls 2d6 to hit. X is trying to hit Imp Y who has a T (Toughness) of 3 meaning you need a 3+ to hit, the Rusty Revolvers (being rusty) give the roll a -2 to hit, meaning X now needs a 5+ to hit, but X has put 2 skill points into his Range Skill, this means he needs a 3+ to hit.

X rolls and gets a 3 and a 4, he has hit, but because this was a single shot, even though both die 'penetrated' X only makes 1 roll on the weapon's damage chart. So X rolls 1d6 and gets a 6! That's critical damage! Looking at the weapon's chart of 1-3:1 4-5:2 6:4 that's 4 damage which removed Imp Y's 4 HP killing him.

With some simple addition and subtraction and 2 rolls (3d6 in total) we have concluded Player X's 1st AP.

Player X then begins to cast Curse of Ice at the Greater Imp behind where the Lesser Imp (Imp Y) stood.

Curse of Ice is a spell that is worked out just like shooting, now the Greater Imp has much tougher skin than the Lesser Imp and has a T of 5 (5+ to penetrate), Curse of Ice has a +1 to Magic, this makes it a 4+, Player X has Magic Gloves, that gives him a +1 to Magic (complete with a -1 to Melee) which means he needs a 3+ to penetrate.

Player X rolls 1d6, gets a 4, so hits and rolls on the damage profile for Curse of Ice, he scores another 6! Another Critical! 6 for Curse of Ice only does 2 Damage, but it also freezes the target!

Greater Imp is now Frozen for a turn and therefore looses all it's AP next go.

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What you think?

I'd love to hear your feedback

Until next time, stay safe and I'll see you Cryptside!

- Your friendly neighbourhood Doctor Loxley

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